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A Source For Stowe's Ideas On Race In "Uncle Tom's Cabin", Josephine Donovan

English Faculty Scholarship

Harriet Beecher Stowe's treatment of race in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and the colonization scheme with which she ends the novel have long been its most controversial features. Colonization was a term then in use for returning African Americans to Africa as a solution to the race/slavery problem. Stowe concludes Uncle Tom's Cabin by sending most of the surviving black characters—George, Eliza, their children, George's sister Emily, and Eliza's mother, Cassy to Africa where George dreams of founding a Christian republic. In a lengthy letter George explains his colonizationist ambitions: "On the shores of Africa I see a republic." "I …