Uncle Tom's Cabin

Weeks pass. Augustine ignores his basic instincts that would push him toward God. He begins the formal process of emancipating Tom, just as he promised Eva. Augustine is surprised at Tom’s enthusiasm for freedom. However, Tom does not want to leave until Augustine becomes a Christian. To Tom, one does work for God when one does work for God’s creations.

Marie uses Eva’s loss for attention, becoming even more of a plague upon her attendants. Mammy, in particular, suffers; bereft of her own children, she found comfort in Eva. Ophelia is saddened, but she is also bolstered in her own faith by the saintly example Eva set. Topsy now strives to be good, a desire that is “irregular, interrupted, suspended oft, but yet renewed again” (443).

Augustine gave Topsy to Ophelia, but never did it formally. Ophelia asks him to do so, immediately. Augustine is surprised, but he draws a deed of gift. She wants to be sure of Topsy’s safety in the event that something happens to Augustine. She asks if he has made a provision in his will to protect his servants in the event of his death; he has not.

Augustine finds Tom struggling to read his Bible and offers to read to him. Augustine reads until he comes to a verse condemning people who failed to help strangers in need. Augustine is struck with the comparison between these damned souls who lived well but did not help their brethren and himself. He is distracted for the rest of the afternoon.

Augustine sings and plays Mozart’s “Requiem” on the piano. The song was a particular favorite of his mother. He is struck by the idea of the Last Judgement, in which all of the wrongs of the ages are righted. He discusses the biblical passage he read to Tom with Ophelia. She suggests a man who has done no harm but no good either should repent as soon as possible.

Augustine thinks that to truly be Christian, one must utterly denounce and throw their weight against the system of slavery. He vows to help uplift the lowly, beginning with his own servants. He and Ophelia discuss the problems of emancipation on a nationwide scale.

Augustine declares that he has the strange feeling that his mother is near him. He goes for a walk, declining Tom’s offer to accompany him. Tom thinks of freedom and prays for Augustine. He muses by the fountain until he drifts off to sleep.  

Tom is woken by loud knocking and many voices outside the gate. Augustine has been stabbed after trying to break up a brawl that broke out at a café. His unconscious body is brought into the house. The servants are worked up into a frenzy of despair. Tom and Ophelia remain levelheaded, and Ophelia administers first aid until the doctor arrives.

Augustine weakly entreats Tom to pray for him. Augustine incoherently recites lines from a hymn in Latin. He says that he is coming home at last. Just before he takes his last breath, he “opened his eyes, with a sudden light, as of joy and recognition, and said ‘Mother!’ and then he was gone!” (456).

Augustine’s servants are now in an unpredictable situation, subject to the whims of Marie, who goes from one hysterical fainting fit to the next. On Augustine’s person, they find a locket containing a portrait and lock of hair of the woman to whom he was first engaged.

Marie becomes a tyrannical mistress to her servants. Though Augustine spared the slaves from whippings, Marie never agreed with him. Consequently, she is not long in sending Rosa to be flogged at the local whipping establishment. Ophelia attempts to intercede on Rosa’s behalf, but it is to no avail.

Adolph breaks the news to Tom that they are all to be sold. It is a hard blow to Tom; his heart was set on freedom. Ophelia again intercedes and fails; mentioning Eva’s wish to free Tom only sends Marie into hysterics. Ophelia does the only thing she can for him and writes a letter to Mrs. Shelby “stating his troubles and urging them to send to his relief” (466). Tom, Adolph, and several others are taken to a slave warehouse.

Slaves kept in the warehouse are well cared for and kept fed and clean in order to fetch higher prices. Tom, Adolph, and the others are “turned over to the loving kindness of Mr. Skeggs, the keeper of a depot” to await auction the next day (468). Skeggs, like other slave dealers, keeps his human property in a state of mirth and whimsy “as a means of drowning reflection, and rendering them insensible to their condition” (468). Tom and Adolph are given a hard time by Sambo, a slave whose job is to entertain the newcomers to the warehouse. Adolph nearly gets in a fight with him, but Skeggs breaks it up.

Meanwhile, in the women’s side of the warehouse, Susan and Emmeline, a mother and daughter, wait anxiously, hoping against hope that they will not be separated. Like Tom, they had been slaves to a kindly master, and like Tom, their owner died, leaving them to be sold by the family lawyer. They spend a final night together, full of fear and weeping.

Tom, Adolph, Susan, Emmeline, and the others are presented at the auction block the next morning, where they are inspected by potential buyers. One particularly brutish man, whose first appearance excites “an immediate and revolting horror” in Tom, takes a great interest in Tom and Emmeline.

The auction begins. Adolph is sold to a man who previously expressed interest in breaking him down. Susan is sold to a man who would like to buy Emmeline but cannot. Tom and Emmeline are bought by the brutish man, Simon Legree, who owns a cotton plantation.

Tom is chained and stowed away as cargo on a riverboat heading to Simon Legree’s plantation up the Red River. Legree takes Tom’s few possessions, leaving him only his dilapidated work clothes; one pair of clothes will have to last him a year on Legree’s plantation. Finding Tom’s prayer book, Legree vows to work the religion out of him.

Legree tells Emmeline to keep up her spirits. He becomes furious when she will not look him in the eye. He warns them that his fists have become hard from knocking down slaves and tells them that he shows no mercy.

Legree goes up to the bar and strikes up a conversation with a gentleman. He explains his recent acquisitions and his slave-driving methods. Heedless of safety, he works slaves to death within two to seven years, because he does not believe it is worth the cost to maintain any sort of quality in their lives. The gentleman turns away and debates the morality of slavery with a young man next to him. 

Legree makes his captives sing for them as they ride through the desolate pine barrens toward his plantation, which he had bought for a bargain and let go to decay. The attention he pays to Emmeline makes “her soul sick, and her flesh creep” (490).

They are greeted by Sambo and Quimbo, the two principal hands of the plantation, whom “Legree had trained […] in savageness and brutality as systematically as he had his bull-dogs” (492). Legree runs his plantation by making all of his servants hate each other; however, Sambo and Quimbo have “a kind of coarse familiarity with him” (493). The two men are “an apt illustration of the fact that brutal men are lower even than animals” (493).

Legree gives Lucy, a “mulatto” (a racist term for someone who has one white and one black parent) woman he purchased along with Tom to Sambo as a mistress and takes Emmeline as his own. As they enter the plantation house, a woman is briefly seen at the window; her voice is heard reprimanding Legree, who tells her to hold her tongue.

Tom follows Sambo to the dismal slave quarters, where the only furnishing is “a heap of straw, foul with dirt” on which Tom is expected to sleep (494). The rest of the slaves, ragged and exhausted, return from picking cotton late in the evening.

The slaves are given a small allotment of corn that they must grind and bake into cakes themselves as their only source of nourishment. Tom waits a while for a chance to make his meal, reading his Bible by the dim firelight; one of the women nearby is interested—she has never heard of it. Tom tells her of God, but the woman refuses to believe and goes off to sleep.

Disheartened, Tom goes off to bed. He dreams of Eva reading the Bible to him.