“So, Eliza, my girl,” said the husband, mournfully, “bear up, now; and good-by, for I’m going.” “Going, George! Going where?” “To Canada,” said he, straightening himself up; “and when I’m there, I’ll buy you that’s all the hope that’s left us. You have a kind master, that won’t refuse to see you. I’ll buy you and the boy; God helping me, I will!”
This Quote is from the book called Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It is about story of George who is slave in Kentucky and trying to escape to freedom in Canada so he can unite his family by purchasing his wife from her master. The author, whose name is Harriet Beecher Stowe is a white women who witnessed the harsh realities of slavery while living in Cincinnati, Ohio, just across the Ohio River from the slave state of Kentucky. Because of these experiences, she became an active abolitionist. Abolitionists were people who worked to end slavery. They worked in different ways. some were violent, most wrote about slavery, and some helped slaves escape in the underground railway.
Ms. Stowe believed slave owners were able to do this because they did not understand what they were defending.
While in church one day in 1851, after she had moved to Brunswick, Maine, she was overcome with a vision of a slave being beaten to death. Sobbing, she ran home and began writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Harriet B, her book depicts the life of a long suffering enslaved person, and the slaveholders and fellow enslaved people in his life. Before the Civil War, many Northerners believed slavery was a constitutionally guaranteed right, and that opposition to it endangered the Union. Even those who agreed with Stowe considered it dangerous to oppose slavery openly and assisted slaveholders in recovering fugitives. Generally this book talks about one man whose name is George, his wife Eliza sold to different slaveholders, but have been allowed to visit each other when not working. George had been hired out to a factory, where he was treated well and had invented a work saving machine. But when the slaveholder saw George’s pride in his accomplishment, he moved George back to the plantation and gave him mindless physical work in order to restore his humility. -American Vision Textbook-
Harriet B. Stowe shows how strong one woman and her book can be. The book changed the history of slavery in America. I really can not imagine this country with a slavery system in this present time. Just because the color of skin is different we can’t treat each other as slave and master. It would be so unfair to be living as a slave because I am born in Africa and my skin is black. This unfairness in our history still echoes today but we are forming “a more perfect union” over time.