"Uncle Tom's Cabin"

I have finally finished my first book of the year - "Uncle Tom's Cabin", by Harriet Beecher Stowe. It was completely not what I anticipated, for a few reasons.

First, it was much more interesting than I thought it would be. Considering it was published in 1852, I thought that old language and general idea of the whole book might make it a huge task to complete. Not at all - there was a story, there were interesting viewpoints, and it was at least a "B" on the writing scale.

Secondly, it was SO focused on Christianity and what Christianity truly means, that I almost lost sight of the slavery issues at some points. It really just shocked me how openly christian her viewpoints were as she wrote in 1852 to the whole nation; not just to a local women's group, or to "Christian" people. I feel like I learned that the acceptance of Christian spirituality has truly gone a huge change over the past 150 years.

Thirdly, she described slavery in the worst of terms, and also the best. I thought the whole book would be tragic and terrible examples of the inhumanness of slavery; but, instead, she included both negative and "as positive as could be" examples of slaves and slaveholders. I applaud her for this, because the assumption that every Southern person, and especially every Southern slave owner, in the 1800's was a hateful person is absurd. I do think there were people that owned slaves that did not agree with slavery....but money, society, history, families, all kinds of things were part of their decision to own slaves.

This book was actually written before the Civil War was "thought" of (by the public), and it was a plea for emancipation, as a Christian duty, written DIRECTLY to the South. She literally says that in her concluding remarks. It was a great read for me, being a history lover and a Civil War re-enactor. I would recommend it to anyone as an essential piece of their classic literature library.