Uncle Tom's Cabin

When a Kentucky farmer's debts force him to sell two of his slaves to a trader, two lives turn down opposite roads. Eliza, learning her little boy is among those sold, flees in the night and crosses the half-frozen Ohio River leaping from ice-floe to ice-floe with the child in her arms. Uncle Tom, faithful and devout, submits to being sold away from his wife and children and is carried ever deeper into the South — to the gentle child Eva and her irresolute father, and at last to the Louisiana plantation of the brutal Simon Legree.

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin to make the readers of the free states feel what slavery was, and her book did so on a scale almost without precedent. Serialized in an antislavery paper and published in 1852, it sold hundreds of thousands of copies, hardened Northern opinion in the decade before the Civil War, and became the best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century.

It is also a book the years have made it necessary to read with open eyes. The very faithfulness Stowe meant as Tom's glory later hardened into the “Uncle Tom” epithet, and writers from James Baldwin onward have questioned the novel's sentimentality and its portrayal of race. To read it now is to hold both truths together: a work that helped move a nation against slavery, and one whose imagination of the people it defended remains a subject of argument.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1852 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader, with an editor's foreword on the book's history, force, and contested legacy, a biographical note on Harriet Beecher Stowe, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.