Uncle Tom's Cabin

Summary

The novel follows the enslaved Tom, sold away from his family and subjected to escalating cruelty, alongside Eliza, who flees across the frozen Ohio River to save her son from being sold. Stowe combines melodrama and moral argument to dramatize the human cost of slavery for a wide popular audience, drawing on accounts from formerly enslaved people and abolitionist writing. The book's emotional force helped turn Northern public opinion against slavery in the years before the Civil War.