And such a saint as Uncle Tom was, too!  One would have thought his master, with the opinion he had of his religious qualifications, would have kept him until he died, and then have sold him bone after bone to the Roman Catholics.  Why, every tooth in his head would have brought its price.  St. Paul was nothing but a common man compared with him, for St. Paul had been wicked once; and even after his miraculous conversion, he felt that sin was still impelling him to do what he would not.  But not so with Uncle Tom!  He was the very perfection of a saint.  Well might St. Clare have proposed using him for a family chaplain, or suggested to himself the idea of ascending to heaven by Tom’s skirts.  Mrs. Stowe should have carried out one of her ideas in his history, and have made him Bishop of Carthage.  I have never heard or read of so perfect a character.  All the saints and martyrs that ever came to unnatural deaths, could not show such an amount of excellence.  I only wonder he managed to stay so long in this world of sin.

When, after fiery trials and persecutions, he is finally purchased by a Mr. Legree, Mrs. Stowe speaks of the horrors of the scene.  She says though, “it can’t be helped.”  Did it ever occur to her, that Northerners might go South, and buy a great many of these slaves, and manumit them?  They do go South and buy them, but they keep them, and work them as slaves too.  A great deal of this misery might be helped.

Tom arrives at Legree’s plantation.  How does he fare?  Sleeps on a little foul, dirty straw, jammed in with a lot of others; has every night toward midnight enough corn to stay the stomach of one small chicken; and is thrown into a most dreadful state of society—­men degraded, and women degraded.  We will pass over scenes that a woman’s pen should never describe, and observe the saint-like perfection of Tom.  He was, or considered himself, a missionary to the negroes, evidently liked his sufferings, and died, by choice, a martyr’s death.  He made the most astonishing number of conversions in a short time, and of characters worse than history records.  So low, so degraded, so lost were the men and women whose wicked hearts he subdued, that their conversion amounted to nothing less than miracles.  No matter how low, how ignorant, how depraved, the very sight of Tom turned them into advanced, intelligent Christians.

Tom’s lines were indeed cast in a sad place.  I have always believed that the Creator was everywhere; but we are told of Legree’s plantation “The Lord never visits these parts.”  This might account for the desperate wickedness of most of the characters, but how Tom could retain his holiness under the circumstances is a marvel to me.  His religion, then, depended on himself.  Assuredly he was more than a man!