A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin Author:Harriet Beecher Stowe Subtitle: Presenting the Original Facts and Documents Upon Which the Story Is Founded. Together With Corroborative Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1853 Original Publisher: T. Bosworth Subjects: Slavery Slaves Uncle Tom (Fictitious character) Antislavery movem... more »ents Fiction / Literary Fiction / Political History / United States / General Literary Criticism / General Literary Criticism / American / General Social Science / Slavery Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER III. MR. AND MRS. SHELBY. It was the design of the writer, in delineating the domestic arrangements of Mr. and Mrs. Shelby, to show a picture of the fairest side of slave-life, where easy indulgence and good-natured forbearance are tempered by just dicipline and religious instruction, skilfully and judiciously imparted. The writer did not come to her task without reading much upon both sides of the question, and making a particular effort to collect all the most favourable representations of slavery which she could obtain. And, as the reader may have a curiosity to examine some of the documents, the writer will present them quite at large. There is no kind of danger to the world in letting the very fairest side of slavery be seen; in fact, the horrors and barbarities which are necessarily inherent in it are so terrible, that one stands absolutely in need of all the comfort which can be gained from incidents 'like the subjoined, to save them from utter despair of human nature. The first account is from Mr. J. K. Paulding's Letters on Slavery; and is a letter from a Virginia planter, whom we should judge, from his style, to be a very amiable, agreeable man,...« less