Harriet Beecher Stowe

 

Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American author and abolitionist who actively supported the Underground Railroad and wrote the best selling anti slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.

My name is Harriet Beecher Stowe. I am a minister's daughter, a minister's wife,

and the mother of seven children. I have been called a meddler, a fanatic,

and a disturber of the public peace.

I will answer to all of it.

For eighteen years I lived in Cincinnati, on the north bank of the Ohio River. Across that water lay Kentucky. Across that water lay slavery. I could stand on the shore and look at a country where a man is sold at auction, where a woman is made to bear children for another man's profit, and where the law calls it property.

[Pause.]

In 1849 the cholera came through our city, and it took my Charley. He was eighteen months old. I held him while he died. And I have said since, and I say to you now — "It was at his dying bed and at his grave that I learned what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her."

I learned it in my own body. I have never been able to unlearn it.

Then came the year 1850, and the Congress of the United States passed the Fugitive Slave Act. Understand what that law did. It did not merely permit slavery in the South — it conscripted the North. It commanded free men in free states to hunt the desperate and hand them back into bondage. My own sister-in-law wrote to me: "if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that will make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is."

And I answered her, and I said: "I feel now that the time has come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak."

So I wrote what I saw. And when men asked me how I dared, I told them: "I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation." Now they tell me, madam, do not agitate. Do not disturb the Union.

And do not imagine the guilt is Southern only. I made Simon Legree a New England man on purpose. "The people of the free States have defended, encouraged, and participated; and are more guilty for it, before God, than the South." Northern mills spun the cotton. Northern banks financed the crop. Northern churches kept their silence. We are all stained.

So what can one person do? I will tell you what I have told every reader who ever asked me. "There is one thing that every individual can do — they can see to it that they feel right."

But feeling is only the beginning, for pity is cheap and costs nothing. Having felt, you must act — refuse the law, shelter the fugitive, vote as if the Judgment were watching. Because it is. "A day of grace is yet held out to us."

There is no compromise with this evil. There is no gentle fifty-year descent from a sin like this. There is only the day you decide, and the day you do not.

Let it be buried. — and let no generation after ours ever be asked to defend it.

AI DISCLOSURE: I used AI for this assignment. I did my research on Harriet Beecher Stowe and put some of my research notes into AI. I asked AI to form a script talking as if I were Harriet Beecher Stowe about her life and how she is an abolitionist.

Mock Trial Presentations

Mock Trial About John Mann and State V. Mann.

Last week during class we did a mock trial and stepped into the presence of a courtroom. The case we were tackling was State V. Mann, a real case that came before the Supreme Court of North Carolina in the 1830s. This forced the class to sit down and listen to the case thoroughly to form our own opinions.

The Facts of the Case

The case centers on John Mann, a white slaveowner, and a woman named Lydia, whom he held in bondage. According to the facts we worked from, Lydia had grown desperate enough to try to run from Mann. In response, he shot her in the back. She survived, and Mann was charged with assault, but the punishment handed down was startlingly light: a fine of just five dollars.

Mann didn't accept even that modest penalty. He appealed the ruling, arguing that the fine itself was unjust and that the state had no business punishing him at all for how he treated a person he legally "owned."

The State's Argument

Prosecuting the case, the state leaned heavily on the cultural and religious climate of the 1830s. Their argument wasn't just legal — it was moral. They pointed to the era as a time of genuine moral awakening, when religion played an outsized role in shaping how people understood right and wrong. That spiritual energy, they argued, was the very fuel behind the growing abolitionist movement. Churches and town hall meetings became spaces for self-reflection and moral courage, places where people started to publicly reckon with the ethics of slavery. On top of the moral case, the state also made a practical one: slavery, they argued, was dragging down the broader economy, holding back real development.

The Defense's Argument

Mann's lawyers took the opposite approach, and it's the part of the case that's hardest to read. Their defense rested on the legal classification of enslaved people as property, plain and simple. If Lydia was property under the law, they argued, then she couldn't be harmed the way a person could — property, they claimed, doesn't feel pain, and property doesn't hold human rights. Under that logic, Mann wasn't answerable for how he disciplined something he owned.

Why This Case Still Matters

Sitting through this mock trial made clear just how much the law of that era was shaped — and warped — by treating human beings as objects. The prosecution's case shows a society in the middle of a moral reckoning, with religion and public discourse pushing people toward abolition. The defense's case shows exactly what that reckoning was up against: a legal system built on the premise that enslaved people had no standing as people at all.

Running this as a mock trial rather than just reading about it in a textbook made the stakes feel real in a way that reading alone doesn't always achieve. Arguing both sides — even the ones you find morally repugnant — is uncomfortable, but that discomfort is exactly the point. It's a reminder of how recently our legal system enshrined ideas we now recognize as indefensible, and how much of that change came from ordinary people insisting things had to be different.

AI DISCLOSURE: I took notes from the mock trial presentations during class. Then I used Claude AI and put pictures of my notes into AI and asked it to form my notes into a blogpost form. I was the one that verified and added in the links throughout the blogpost.

Eight Values of Free Expression

 

Individual Self-Fulfillment is the act of expressing personal thoughts, beliefs, and ideas which is essential for human growth.

Why Individual Self-Fulfillment is the Most Important

I believe Individual Self-Fulfillment is the most important value out of the total eight values. Individual Self-Fulfillment is about working hard to achieve your own goals and desires. This is important because from self-fulfillment people gain a sense of self-actualization and self-realization. You learn a deeper understanding of yourself and what you value as a person. Freedom of speech is also an aspect of Individual Self-Fulfillment. I believe, freedom of Speech is extremely important in America and helps everyone gain a sense of self to state their opinions and what they believe in. 

The action of Freedom of Speech promotes individual self-fulfillment by providing people the right to discover, share, express, and develop their own identity and potential. Speaking in public, writing, or creating art allows people share their inner thoughts and emotions revealing to themselves and others who they are. 

How It Resonates With Me

The value of Individual Self-Fulfillment resonates with me the most because whenever I share my thoughts or opinions in public I feel a sense of self and I learn more about myself and why I have opinions on certain things. I feel it is more personal towards me because so many of the other values, like duty, loyalty, or achievement, only really work when a person already has a sense of who they are. You can't be loyal to something meaningful if you don't know what matters to you. You can't serve a purpose you haven't examined. For me, gaining individual self-fulfillment has helped me to figure out what I believe in and has made me confident to state out loud my opinions and beliefs when it it necessary. From gaining self-fulfillment it helped me make my own choices and not just follow along what everyone else is doing. I started to realize that your own self comes before anyone else's expectations on yourself.

Self-fulfillment is the foundation that every other value gets built on.

Where I See It Today

The value of individual self-fulfillment is shown everywhere in the world in many different situations. 

Individual Self-Fulfillment is shown throughout work and school. For example, people are showing self-fulfillment by leaving high paying jobs because it's not making them happy or it's just too stressful. They quit because they want a happy-work life balance. We even see a lot of self-fulfillment on social media platforms. You can see people using it to build lives around what genuinely interests them like, art, niche hobbies, or even music. 

Even in education, there's been a slow shift toward encouraging students to explore rather than just perform. Colleges push for students to actually find what they love and by doing that colleges remind students that it's okay to change your majors. This is a pure example of Individual Self-Fulfillment being built throughout the world.

Overall, Self-fulfillment isn't about ignoring the world around you. It's about making sure the life you build actually belongs to you and that your happy with who you are.  Out of all eight values, this is the one that makes the others possible. It's really hard to live a good life without having self-fulfillment. You can't really live out purpose, courage, or connection if you haven't first figured out who you are and what you actually want. 

The Novel: Uncle Tom's Cabin EOTO

 

The Novel: Uncle Tom's Cabin 

The Book That "Started" a War

In 1852, a Connecticut housewife wrote a novel that shook the country to its foundations. Her name was Harriet Beecher Stowe. The book was Uncle Tom's Cabin. It sold 300,000 copies in its first year alone. In an era with no internet, no television, and a much smaller reading public, that's staggering. By some counts, it was the best-selling book of the 19th century, second only to the Bible.

But the numbers only tell part of the story.

Before Stowe's novel, slavery was mostly debated in abstract terms. Economics. States' rights. Political theory. Stowe changed this. She told the story of Uncle Tom, an enslaved man of deep faith, sold away from his family and ultimately killed for refusing to betray other enslaved people. She told the story of Eliza, a mother who escapes across a frozen river, her child in her arms, rather than watch him get sold.

These weren't statistics. These were people.

And readers, especially in the North, couldn't look away.

This book ultimately divided the Nation. The reaction was immediate and intense. In the South, the book was banned in many places. Writers rushed to publish "anti-Tom" novels defending slavery. The backlash was fierce, because the novel struck a nerve. In the North, it did the opposite. It turned undecided readers into abolitionists. It gave the anti-slavery movement a story people couldn't forget, and couldn't ignore.

There's a famous story, maybe true, maybe legend, that when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe years later, he said: "So this is the little lady who made this big war." Historians debate whether he actually said it. But the fact that people believed he might have says everything about how powerful this book was seen to be. 

Here's the part that often gets left out.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was radical for 1852. It humanized enslaved people at a time when much of white America refused to, but it was still written by a white woman, shaped by the limits of her own perspective and era. Some of its characters lean on stereotypes. Its tone can feel paternalistic to modern readers.

In fact, the phrase "Uncle Tom" eventually became an insult, used to describe someone seen as too submissive to authority. That's actually a pretty unfair read of the character in the book, who quietly resists and sacrifices everything rather than betray others.

It is a complicated legacy. It is a genuine impact. Both things are true at once.

Why It Still Matters

Uncle Tom's Cabin is a case study in something bigger than 19th-century politics. It's proof that stories move people in ways that arguments alone can't. This novel helped push a divided country toward a war that would end slavery. Not a speech. Not a law. A story about people. That is worth remembering.

AI DISCLOSURE: AI was used in a limited way in this assignment. I researched about the novel and wrote basic facts about what the novel was about and how it is important today. I then used Claud AI and provided my facts and notes from my research and asked it to help me shape it into the form of a blog post. I then added in links, added images, and captions. 

Bible Team Challenge

 

From Slavery to Freedom

The bible supports slavery in different ways throughout the different texts. In the Old Testament, there is some talk about slavery. Certain laws explicitly allow Israelites to own slaves. The Bible contains passages that regulate, permit, or assume the existence of slavery rather than explicitly abolishing it. Those passages have historically been used by some people to defend slavery. For example, Leviticus 25:44-46 permits Israelites to acquire male and female slaves from surrounding nations and describes them as inheritable property. These verses are the strongest textual arguments that the Bible regulates slavery rather than prohibiting it. In the bible, instead of ultimately banning slavery, some passages just provide regulations for slavery. Another example, Exodus 21:20-21 addresses punishment when a slave is beaten, while still treating slaves as part of a master's household or property.

Several texts in the New Testament state how slaves should obey their masters. 1 Peter 2:18 tells servants to submit even to harsh masters. Some pro-slavery advocates frequently quoted these verses to argue that slavery was compatible with Christianity. Ultimately, The bible does show being in favor of slavery throughout several biblical passages representing pro-slavery arguments. 

Through its pages the Bible returns again and again in talking about freedom.

This is the theme that has brought up centuries worth of moral arguments against slavery. 

Freedom is not a passing idea in scripture; it is written into the narrative from the beginning. God’s liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt stands as a central story of The Old Testament, this represents the entire arc of Exodus around deliverance from bondage. 

The framing continues throughout the Bible. 

Exodus frames God as the liberator - one who actively frees oppressed peoples rather than standing by and doing nothing. 

The prophet Isaiah picks up the same; Isaiah 16:1 directly speaks on freedom for captives and echos the same liberating concern that is found in Exodus. 

All together this is a constant concern, freedom suggests something deeper, that slavery runs contrary to God’s ideals for His people.

Abolitionists didn't just point to isolated verses, they built their case on a border principle, the equal worth of all people. Using stories from the bible abolitionists are able to achieve better conclusion on anti-slavery. 

If slaves and masters share the same status before God, then treating one human being as the property of another directly goes against morality. Along with these passages, the Bible calls for justice and care for the oppressed which is a reinforcement of the same belief from another angle.