Uncle Tom's Cabin

Eliza reaches the middle of the frozen Ohio when the ice gives way beneath her, and she leaps from cracking slab to cracking slab, her son held tight against her chest, because the alternative is watching him sold south alone. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote that flight, and then wrote its answer: Tom, sold three times down the river, beaten to death on Simon Legree's plantation for refusing to betray two women who trusted him with their escape. This is not a novel that flinches from what one person, backed by law, could do to another. It names the auction block, the whip, the child priced like livestock, and asks a Christian country to look at its own ledger. Stowe wrote it in fury, and the fury is still live on the page: in its first year it sold more copies in America than any book but the Bible, because readers recognized, in Tom's death and Eliza's ice, exactly what their country had built and called ordinary.