Ministers can’t help the evil, perhaps,—can’t cure it, any more than we can,—but defend it!—it always went against my common sense.
Stowe utilizes character Mrs. Shelby to portray the recognizing towards organized Christianity in which it often defends slavery rather than eliminate it, exposing the hypocrisy and confessional complacency of not reforming and continue to partake in slave ownership.
If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that were going to be torn from you by a brutal trader, tomorrow morning,—if you had seen the man, and heard that the papers were signed and delivered, and you had only from twelve o’clock till morning to make good your escape,—how fast could you walk?
Another example of Stowe’s literary tactic in breaking the fourth wall to connect and persuade her audience.
Well, since you must know all, it is so. I have agreed to sell Tom and Harry both; and I don’t know why I am to be rated, as if I were a monster, for doing what every one does every day.”
Stowe demonstrates through dialogue how the the character Mr. Shelby self-justifies his decision to Mrs. Shelby through social principle rather than an internal morality thus deviating from Christianity indoctrination and leaning on social customs.
At this table was seated Uncle Tom, Mr. Shelby’s best hand, who, as he is to be the hero of our story, we must daguerreotype for our readers
Stowe breaks the fourth wall to forewarn of the central character giving immediate proclamation of his heroism rather than waiting for readers to later discover as one of literary tactics.
The Yankees are noted for making the most cruel overseers.
This stigma may come as a shock since Yankee Republican leaders of the Union were the majority for the abolition of slavery. Demographics may not have been categorical radar on the treatment of slaves as the inner morality amplitude of each individual varies no matter the geographical location.
So I was not only hunting for my liberty, but also hunting for a name
Becoming free would be one obstacle completed, but what to do with it is another, and Wells Brown was predetermined to gain his own identity and not just to survive to freedom.
He was from one of the Free States; but a more inveterate hater of the negro, I do not believe ever walked on God’s green earth.
Another example of juxtaposing demographics of Free States to the moral amplitude of the individual despite location and culture of the majority, alluding to Christian faith and the “spiritual” world in which one walks in.
Though the field was some distance from the house, I could hear every crack of the whip, and every groan and cry of my poor mother.
William Wells Brown mentions the heightened auditory sensory or focused perception to sounds as a child, to press to his readers the magnitude of chronic alertness and fear to any dangerous threat.
Even a name by which to be known among men, slavery had denied me. You bestowed upon me your own.
The enslaved did not have stable identities. William Wells Brown begins his narrative with a dedicating gratitude letter-like preface salutation to Wells Brown, a white abolitionist who gave William refuge upon escaping, also humanizing him by sharing his last name.