Uncle Tom's Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe

"I s'pose I's to be sent for a 'xample."

This novel weaves together the stories of the noble slave Uncle Tom, who is sold down the river to a cruel master, Simon Legree, and the mother Eliza, who makes a daring escape across the frozen Ohio River to save her son. It exposes the brutal reality of slavery: the separation of families, the physical abuse, and the moral degradation of the slaveholders.

Stowe's novel was a political bombshell that helped galvanize the abolitionist movement leading up to the Civil War. It is a sentimental but powerful moral indictment of slavery as an institution incompatible with Christian values.