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Uncle Tom’s Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe carefully planned her novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, to change the mindset of her readers that would in turn change culture. She accomplished this feat by capturing the reader's sympathy toward the characters, both black and white, and evoking compassion with the dramatic story line. The readers become witnesses to the suffering in the novel and they feel the emotions that the characters feel. One of the ways Stowe uses to win the compassion of the reader is by getting them to relate to the characters. Back in the day the novel was written, many people thought of blacks as a commodity, with no more feelings than a bale of hay. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, there is a representative mixture of characters that held that opinion, and those that had mercy on them and thought of them as equals. In a few parts of the book, she writes of cruel whites who own good compliant slaves, and the reader cannot help but side with the blacks. This happens with the St. Clare family. After Eva and Augustine die, there is nobody left except Marie to care for the household and the slaves. The fact that she treats the slaves as people who are less than human, and doesn't care about selling and splitting up families makes the readers see the pain they go through.
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