ABSTRACT
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851) is a novel of sexual crises. It is also a novel of religious, social, economic and ethical crises galvanized by the overwhelming issue of race, a warning that slavery not only oppressed blacks but degraded whites, endangering the cherished ideal of participatory democracy that both inspired and eluded nineteenth-century Americans. Harriet Beecher Stowe said that the worst of slavery was “its outrage upon the family”(Key 257). For the white family, the outrage lay in slaveholding men committing adultery with their female slaves, available and officially submissive. Slavery made sin easy. For the black family, the outrage was manifested in the torture, humiliation and violation of the slaves’ minds and bodies. Children were separated from their mothers, black men and women were denied sanctified marriage, husbands were sold away from wives, women were kept as concubines or used as breeders.
