The Gap (between the rich and the poor)

The “Oppressor and the Oppressed” in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin provides a critique of slavery that is not only moral, but one that challenges capitalist conventions which supported slavery. An example of this is the arguments between Miss Ophelia and St.Clare and their progression from morality based to economic. Through St.Clare, Stowe presents a rhetorical argument centred on the injustice of the widening gap between the rich and the poor, the exploitation of peoples in various forms in the name of profit. St Clare sets up his argument by identifying the widening chasm between classes that has been creating by industrialization, “there can be no high civilization without the enslavement of the masses, either nominal or real. There must, he says, be a lower class, given up to physical toil and confined to an animal nature” (Stowe 262). Although St.Clare resides comfortably on the upper echelon of class within his society, his comments mirror that of Karl Marx. In the Communist Manifesto Karl Marx and Frederick Engels states;

The History of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, baron and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in one word, oppressor and oppressed, standing in constant opposition to each other… (Marx 127).

St. Clare argues that the slave system of the American South and the capitalist exploitation in England at the time, are one in the same, “the slave-owner can whip his refractory slave to death, – the capitalist can starve him to death” (Stowe 262). He further argues that the “capitalist and aristocrat of England cannot feel as we do, because they do not mingle with the class that they degrade as we do” (Stowe 265). Stowe’s argument is clear; the degradation of a people has its roots in capitalism, which without the promise of profit, the exploitation of another would not happen. Stowe is providing a critique not only of slavery but the system that makes slavery possible, “with slavery functioning as a powerful symbol of the materialistic values that which capitalism is based” (White 100). Although St.Clare’s argument for slavery is questionable, there is no way to justify the brutality of chattel slavery, Stowe illustrates through this argument the root of the problem lies in capitalism.