What a load of CRAP! Uncle Tom's Cabin was written with the melodrama calculated to get people up in arms. If you believe Uncle Tom's Cabin was the truth, then I have a bridge to sell you. If one looks at the situation logically, it wouldn't make any sense for someone to beat and injure the very people they are depending upon to bring in the crops or tend the household. Now there may have been few isloated incidents of abject cruelty, but normally the plantation slaves were treated with a degree of respect and affection. If that were not the case, then why did so many blacks choose to stay with their former masters after emancipation?
Go peddle your Yankee PC revisionist crap elsewhere, we ain't buying it here.
Good points. We just visited an old plantation now open to the public as part of the National Trust. The resident historian pointed out that if the slaves had been badly treated by the master, all they had to do to get even was set fire to one of the out buildings. If the master didn't get the message, then set another fire closer to the house. If that still didn't work, slip the master something in his tea.
It was in the master's best interest to treat slaves well.
After the War a Reign of Terror was unleashed upon the slaves by the DemocRATS in the South which resulted in the killing of thousands of blacks. It's aim was to break the political will of the newly freed slaves and allow the RATS to regain political and economic control of them. It got so bad that Congress had to pass anti-lynching legislation to protect the ex-slaves from their loving and kindly masters. Just because you refuse facts and prefer myths doesn't make them true.
That "respect and affection" by the Slavers was combined with a strict police control over the slaves complete with the hiring of scumbags to retrieve runaways. Chains, the Lash and the Whip were there to make sure that "affection" for Massa stayed strong. Slavery was a regime of Terror. Slaves lived in terror over what might come of them or their families and Masters lived in terror over what their property might do to them.
Uncles Tom's Cabin was fiction but sometimes fiction is truer than true because its art can lay bare the humanity behind events. Nor does it claim that all or even most slavers treated their property badly but that is what they were for far too many mere property. This was a retrograd socio-economic structure with no Good to outweigh the massive Evil which it supported.
There is nothing PC about the truth in fact the former prevents the latter from being stated.
Uncle Tom's Cabin brought home nothing but a pantsload of cheap, emotive propaganda. Stowe was committing propaganda, she wasn't trying to write a reasoned description of slavery.
If she relied on Frederick Douglass, by the way, for her descriptions of slave life, she'd have done herself and her readers a disservice, inasmuch as Douglass admitted, later in his life, to having amped up his earlier descriptions of the injustices of slave life.
The real problem with slavery as an institution was that its intimate identification with property rights made it very difficult to take up as a policy matter without exciting the reasonable fear that an attack on all property rights was on offer, as well as a sectional political attack.
This was a reasonable apprehension, given the Whigs' and Federalists' demonstrated enthusiasm for the politics of "tax tax, spend spend"; and it was the Republican Party that introduced the first income tax. This was in addition to the punitive property taxes they enacted specifically for the purpose of expropriating Confederates' homes and farms.