Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was the defining piece of the time in which it was written. The book opened eyes in both the North and South to the cruelties that occurred in all forms of slavery, and held back nothing in exposing the complicity of non-slaveholders in the upholding of America's peculiar institution. Then-president Abraham Lincoln himself attributed Stowe's narrative to being a cause of the American Civil War. In such an influential tale that so powerfully points out the necessity of emancipation, one would hardly expect to find racialism that would indicate a discomfort with the people in bondage. However, Stowe shows no apprehension in typifying her characters according to their various races. While this at times serves a distinctly polemical purpose, the author often employs racialism in places where it appears to be wholly unnecessary. On the whole, Stowe seems to be all too comfortable with promoting stereotypes unfitting of a polemic piece......
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