Uncle Tom's Cabin Guided Questions
Instructions: Each answer should consist of 4-5 complete sentences. You must read Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin to answer these guided questions. Each answer is worth ten points. Your responses will count as the long essay portion of your Final Exam AND as your final book assignment grade. Formatting: Type your responses in a Word Document. Times New Roman, Font Size 12,
1. What is the setting of the book? Who was the author?
2. What is the book's message? Is it still relevant today?
3. Stowe's book elicited many different reactions. The following excerpt comes from the Southern Literary Messenger in December 1852:
"Every fact is distorted, every incident discolored, in order to awaken rancorous hatred and malignant jealousies between the citizens of the same republic, the fellow countrymen whose interests and happiness are linked with the perpetuity of a common union, and with the prosperity of a common government." Which parts of the book would southerners have opposed and why? (Use one or two examples from the book.)
4. A Bostonian reviewed the book for The Morning Post in May 1852. He wrote, "It paints both slaveholder and slave, and none can doubt the intention of the author to deal justly with both, nothing extenuating and setting down naught in malice."
Does Stowe fairly portray both the slaveholder and the slave?
5. African American female poet Frances E.W. Harper wrote a poem entitled To Mrs. Harriet
Beecher Stowe in January 1854. Below is an excerpt:
"I thank thee for thy pleading
For the helpless of our race;
Long as our hearts are beating
In them thou hast a place."
Why did Mrs. Harper write this poem thanking Mrs. Stowe?
6. Stowe explains in the book why she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. List a two or three of her reasons.