Uncle Tom's Cabin

A light-skinned “mulatto” woman, Eliza Harris is the personal servant of Mrs. Shelby, who attempted to bring her up in accordance with respectable Christian values. Eliza is beautiful and nurturing; she will do anything for her son, Harry. Eliza is married to George Harris, and because of her masters’ indulgent nature, she and George are allowed to see each other frequently. However, when George’s cruel master recalls him from the factory job that allowed him to flourish, there is little chance of the two seeing each other again.

Eliza runs away from the Shelbys when she learns that Mr. Shelby has sold her son to the trader, Mr. Haley. After a fearful pursuit, Eliza crosses the frozen Ohio river with Harry and finds refuge among sympathetic white people, including Senator Bird. Eliza makes her way to a Quaker colony where she is reunited with George, who ran away from his master. The family plans to make their way to Canada.

Eliza and the Quakers manage to quell George’s atheistic doubts before they set out. They are pursued by a company of vigilantes, headed by Tom Loker. Loker is shot, and they manage to escape. Sometime later, Eliza disguises herself as a young man and disguises Harry as a girl in order to cross a ferry into Canada. Though she has few possessions, she has her son and husband, safe from bondage in a country where slavery is outlawed.

Through sheer coincidence, Eliza is reunited with her mother, Cassy, a former slave of Simon Legree. Cassy and Eliza bond over Eliza’s daughter, who looks just like Eliza as a child. 

Husband of Eliza Harris and father of Harry, George Harris is a morally upright, intelligent, and handsome “mulatto” slave. George is noted for his quick mind and love for education and self-improvement. While working at a factory for his master, he invented a lucrative method for processing hemp. This made him a favorite of the owner of the factory but incurred the jealousy of and wrath of his master. His master, Mr. Harris, decides to separate him from Eliza and to break his spirit. Because of this, George decides to run away to Canada. When he finds his freedom, George takes great pride in providing for his little family through honest labor. He is reunited with his sister, Emily de Thoux, when she escapes to Canada.

Eva St. Clare is the daughter of Augustine and one of the largest focuses of the novel’s sentimentalism. Eva is pure and pious, friendly and loving to all. She has light hair and wide eyes that seem to see beyond the pale of ordinary life. Eva represents a common trope of 19th century American literature: that of the saintly child whose purity is pitted against an otherwise corrupt world. Eva’s capacities for love and compassion are contrasted with both the cruelty of slavery and the prejudices of many abolitionists, like Ophelia, who advocate for the liberation of slaves but cannot love or even stand to touch black people.

Eva takes a special liking to Uncle Tom on the riverboat where Haley has stowed him as cargo. After Tom rescues Eva when she falls in the river, Eva convinces Augustine to buy him. The two share a special bond, enhanced by Eva’s childlike purity and Tom’s pious simplicity.

Eva sees good in all of the family’s servants, including Topsy. Eva’s loving influence causes Topsy to reform her “wicked” behavior, something that all of Ophelia’s strict, Northern upbringing failed to do. In her innocent way, Eva likes the Southern system because it gives her more people to love. However, hearing of the systemic cruelty inherent to slavery begins to turn her mind. The story of Prue, in particular, hurts her. As her health declines, Eva’s consciousness of the widescale suffering of black people expands.

The death of Eva St. Clare is one of the most iconic moments in sentimental literature. She gradually wastes away due to tuberculosis, and as she progresses toward death, Eva becomes even more angelic. She speaks of Heaven often and reads bible verses with Uncle Tom, who becomes more devoted to her than ever. On her deathbed, she asks Ophelia to cut locks of her hair to distribute among the servants as a reminder of her love and to always be pious and good so that they will meet in heaven.

Her death is drawn out and painful. It is an enormous blow to Augustine: though he seemed to live a lazy, dissipated life: everything he did was wrapped up in making Eva happy. To Tom, Eva in death becomes an angelic, quasi-religious figure. This is all but confirmed when, after Augustine dies and Tom is sold, Legree finds Tom’s lock of Eva’s hair. The hair seems to wrap around his fingers, reminding him of his own neglected, pious mother. The hair of the saintly little girl is an intolerable reminder of damnation for the evil man.

A brutal, Southern plantation owner, Simon Legree is one of the novel’s most memorable characters, noted for his excessive cruelty and proclivity for physical violence. Legree prides himself on his ability to “break” his slaves, especially using his huge fists. He is described as a large, stout man with a bullet-shaped head.

Legree buys Tom from the New Orleans slave market after Augustine St. Clare’s death, along with Emmeline. Legree intends to make Tom his head overseer and Emeline his new mistress but fails on both accounts due to Tom’s refusal to do anything against his Christian beliefs and Emeline’s piety and scheming with Cassy. Legree grows to hate Tom. Tom’s moral behavior reminds Legree of damnation; Tom’s goodness excites Legree’s evil.

Legree is haunted by the memory of his pious, good mother, whom Legree abandoned and ignored, opting instead for a life of sin. Following the fake escape of Emmeline and Cassy, he vents his rage by finally having Tom beaten to death. When George Shelby comes looking for Tom during the final moments of Tom’s life, Legree is petulant and unhelpful. He understands only violence, to the extent that when George knocks him to the ground in one punch, he actually respects the young man more.

Following Tom’s death, Emmeline and Cassy play upon Legree’s superstitions, feigning a haunting in his house. His repressed fear of damnation gets the better of him, and he begins drinking heavily.

Mrs. Shelby is wife to Arthur Shelby and mother to George Shelby. Eliza Harris is her personal attendant; Mrs. Shelby raised her according to Christian principles, ensuring that she grows up kind and pious. Mrs. Shelby has an abhorrence for many aspects of the slave trade, especially the fact that loving families are often broken up with no regard for the feelings of parent and child; she views this as a sin. She is horrified when Mr. Shelby does just this, separating Harry from Eliza and Tom from Aunt Chloe and their children because of his own poor financial decisions.

When Eliza and Harry run away, Mrs. Shelby is relieved; she does everything in her power to hinder Haley from getting a good start on pursuing them. In addition, Mrs. Shelby vows to redeem Tom. She allows Aunt Chloe to work in a confectioner’s shop for four dollars a week to help save up money to buy him. She never forgets this vow: when her husband dies, she puts their affairs in order and raises the funds to buy Tom back. When George returns from Legree’s plantation with the news that Tom is dead, Mrs. Shelby does her best to comfort Aunt Chloe.

Mrs. Shelby is problematic because though she is a “kind,” pious master, she does not free her own slaves, even upon her husband’s death.

Topsy is a young slave girl bought by Augustine St. Clare for his cousin Ophelia to experiment on. He wishes to use Topsy to test Ophelia’s ideas about proper education uplifting the black race. Topsy is frequently described as goblin-like and wicked. She comes from an excessively cruel master who would whip and beat her at any opportunity. Because of this, Topsy believes she is wicked and makes no attempt to be good.

Ophelia quickly becomes exasperated with Topsy. Much of Topsy’s behavior is due to the fact that she has nobody to love her. Ophelia’s prejudice against black people prevents her from even touching Topsy. It is not until Eva tells Topsy that she loves her that Topsy’s behavior changes. Touched that someone like Eva could love her, Topsy vows to try her hardest to be good.

When Eva dies, Topsy is distraught. Like the other St. Clare servants, she receives a lock of Eva’s hair. Topsy continues to strive to be good, and, using Eva as an example, Ophelia vows that she will learn to love Topsy.

After Augustine’s death, Topsy is the only slave that is not sold off: due to Ophelia’s foresight, Augustine gifted Topsy to her. Topsy accompanies Ophelia back to the North, where she eventually endears herself to all around her. She becomes a pious, dedicated young woman, and eventually becomes a Christian missionary to Africa.

Topsy is problematic because her character implies that slavery can be good for slaves under very certain circumstances, and that black people must be “tamed” by whites to achieve moral goodness. However, she also is emblematic of the reality that once slavery ends, undoing the grave social and psychological harm that has been done to a large percentage of the American population will not be easily fixed.

Arthur Shelby is Uncle Tom’s owner at the beginning of the novel, but he sells Tom and Harry in order to pay off debts due to his irresponsible management of his properties. Shelby grew up with Tom; Tom reflects holding the infant Shelby as a very young boy himself. Tom is devoted to Shelby and will not hear of anyone speaking ill of him, even after he knows he has sold him down the river.

Shelby represents the hypocrisy of supposedly kind slave owners. Though Shelby is a gentle and indulgent master, he still sees fit to separate Tom from his wife and children and Harry from Eliza. He does not do this without reservations; however, his willingness to do so emphasizes a major flaw in the myth of the kind master.

Mr. Shelby does not trust his wife with his finances, despite his own ineptitude. Mrs. Shelby plays on his conscience; she believes it was a sin to separate their servants from their families. When Tom is sold to Haley, Shelby is conspicuously absent on the day the slave trader takes him away; this reveals his guilty conscience. Though he promises his wife that they will try their best to redeem Tom, he never takes any effort to do so, merely taking comfort in the fact that Tom found a new, kind master in Augustine St. Clare. Shelby dies, leaving his slaves and property to his wife and son, George.

Augustine is Uncle Tom’s second master, and his purpose in the novel is to flesh out the dangers that even a kind, indulgent slave owner poses to his human possessions. Augustine is a kind and generous man, marked by a greatly sensitive character and a sarcastic, joking attitude. He is devoted, above all else, to his daughter, Evangeline. Augustine is not a practicing Christian man, and he harbors doubts about God, frequently seeing the hypocrisy of the use of Christianity to defend slavery. However, he holds an almost religious reverence of his mother, whom he believes was the embodiment of the perfect Christian.

While he does not believe in the system of slavery, he takes the pessimistic view that it is so ingrained into the Southern psyche that it would be impossible to get rid of it. When his father died, he and his twin brother inherit the family plantation. Augustine does not have the stomach for disciplining and whipping slaves, so he gives his share of the plantation to his brother and takes the family home in New Orleans.

Augustine’s life is defined by a disappointment in love. He was engaged to a principled Northern woman, but her family contrived to break off the marriage. They withheld her letters, so Augustine thought she no longer loved him. Augustine spiraled from idealism into materialism, quickly making the acquaintance of the rich but vapid Marie in fashionable New Orleans social circles. The two were quickly engaged and married; however, on their honeymoon, Augustine received a letter from his first love, explaining what her parents had done. Augustine, now a married man, is obliged to break off this relationship. The disappointment haunts him until the end of his life; he carries a locket with a picture of her and a curl of her hair until he dies.

Augustine struggles with the knowledge that slavery is wrong and the fact that he is too lazy to do anything about it. He is chided by his cousin, Ophelia, and his beloved daughter, Eva. When Eva dies of consumption, Augustine’s heart is broken. Through Eva’s example, he comes to realize that failure to help those in need is just as much of a sin as actively harming them. He resolves to set his slaves free, starting with Uncle Tom. Unfortunately, he is stabbed while helping to break up a fight. On his deathbed, he seems to make a last-minute conversion, confronted with a vision of his angelic mother at the very last. His death emphasizes the uncertainty of slaves to a “kind” master. All of his servants are sold by Marie, and all are far worse off than before. Tom, in particular, goes to Simon Legree, a violent and wicked man.

Augustine’s cousin from Vermont, Ophelia is a strict, severe woman who hates inefficiency more than anything. Ophelia is enlisted to help bring order to the St. Clare household, and during the course of doing so, she comes into contact with the system of slavery, which her Northern, Christian ideology opposes. Ophelia frequently debates the morality of the system with Augustine. He gives Ophelia a slave girl named Topsy, who, with difficulty, Ophelia learns to love and helps educate. When Eva falls ill, Ophelia is an intrepid nurse. Following Eva’s death, Ophelia urges Augustine to write a provision in his will caring for his servants. When he dies, Topsy is the only servant who is safe due to Ophelia’s forward thinking. She takes Topsy back to Vermont, where she frees her and welcomes her into the family.

Ophelia is one of very few characters in the novel who see that it doesn’t matter whether a master is kind or cruel—that the evil in slavery is the capriciousness of one’s life being subject to the whim of another, as evidenced many times in the novel by the random breaking up of slave families on “kind” plantations when an owner suddenly dies. Her character also reminds readers that simply to believe in freedom as an idea is not enough. One must see the humanity in those who were formerly enslaved and see them as equals. Indeed, there will be much work to do during and after Reconstruction, through and beyond the Civil Rights movement to the present day, to heal the wounds slavery caused in the United States.

A traveling slave trader, Dan Haley comes into possession of certain debts of Mr. Shelby. Consequently, Shelby is obliged to sell Tom and Harry to pay him back. Haley has the perverse idea that he is a humane human trafficker; he claims to treat his captives well and assures Mrs. Shelby that Tom and Harry will go to good masters.

When Eliza escapes with Harry, other of the Shelby slaves do their best to delay Haley as much as possible. When Eliza makes it across the river, Haley engages the services of Tom Loker, a runaway slave headhunter, to track Harry down. Haley returns for Uncle Tom and takes him downriver. Because of Tom’s piety and good nature, Haley trusts him to be unchained on the riverboat.

Despite his claims of being humane, he sells a young woman’s only child. She commits suicide in the night, jumping off the deck of the riverboat. Haley is disappointed in the financial loss. Haley sells Tom to Augustine St. Clare after discussing the value of a pious, intelligent servant.