In the following excerpt, Joswick addresses Stowe's message about the problem of being moral and just within a corrupt social system of slavery.

The moral conclusion of Uncle Tom's Cabin

is as uncontestable as it is everywhere obvious in the novel: the evils of slavery demand that it be abolished. We need to heed, however, the manner in which the argument is presented. At first glance it seems as if Stowe wishes to keep the injustice of slavery separate from the moral characters of those participating in it, for repeated in the novel is an assertion, rendered explicit in the Introduction to the 1881 edition, "that the evils of slavery were the inherent evils of a bad system and not always the fault of those who had become involved in it and were its actual administrators." As St. Clare says at one point, "The thing itself is the...