for him. No master would be brutish enough to sell the
man who had nursed him and his children, who loved him like a son, _even
for urgent debt_, had he another article of property in the wide world. But
Mr. Shelby does so, according to Mrs. Stowe, though he has a great many
other servants, besides houses and lands, &c. Preposterous!

And such a saint as Uncle Tom was, too! One would have thought his master,
with the opinion he had of his religious qualifications, would have kept
him until he died, and then have sold him bone after bone to the Roman
Catholics. Why, every tooth in his head would have brought its price. St.
Paul was nothing but a common man compared with him, for St. Paul had been
wicked once; and even after his miraculous conversion, he felt that sin was
still impelling him to do what he would not. But not so with Uncle Tom! He
was the very perfection of a saint. Well might St. Clare have proposed
using him for a family chaplain, or suggested to himself the idea of
ascending to heaven by Tom's skirts. Mrs. Stowe should have carried out one
of her ideas in his history, and have made him Bishop of Carthage. I have
never heard or read of so perfect a character. All the saints and martyrs
that ever came to unnatural deaths, could not show such an amount of
excellence. I only wonder he managed to stay so long in this world of sin.

When, after fiery trials and persecutions, he is finally purchased by a Mr.
Legree, Mrs. Stowe speaks of the horrors of the scene. She says though, "it
can't be helped." Did it ever occur to her, that Northerners might go
South, and buy a great many of these slaves, and manumit them? They do go
South and buy them, but they keep them, and work them as slaves too. A
great deal of this misery _might_ be helped.

Tom arrives at Legree's plantation. How does he fare? Sleeps on a little
foul, dirty straw, jammed in with a lot of others; has every night toward
midnight enough corn to stay the stomach of one small chicken; and is
thrown into a most dreadful state of society--men degraded, and women
degraded. We will pass over scenes that a woman's pen should never
describe, and observe the saint-like perfection of Tom. He was, or
considered himself, a missionary to the negroes, evidently liked his
sufferings, and died, by choice, a martyr's death. He made the most
astonishing number of conversions in a short time, and of characters worse
than history records. So low, so degraded, so lost w