Throughout the colonial period and after American Revolution, most Americans accepted slavery as a normal and inevitable aspect of their affairs. It became more and more confined, as a working institution, to the southern states. In the North West the pressure for free land was greatest, especially during the downswing of cycles when pressure on the farming community was acute. The South was generally opposed to free land, fearing that it would upset the balance between the number of free and slave states.
Slavery in South America was closely connected to race. Although there were back, mulatto, and American-born slave owners, many whites did not own slaves; chaffel slavery was fundamentally different in the Americas from other parts of the world because of racial dimension.
Southern life was based on agriculture, and the south wished to continue this way of life, which needed slavery to carry it on. As the north became more industrialized, Southerners feared loss of economic power and become more determined than ever to retain slavery (Filler, Louis- The Crusade Against Slavery). In Uncle Tom's Cabin, its author Harriet Beecher Stowe strongly addresses racism, religious and political issues on slavery. The slaves physical suffering in a culture of making money and acquiring wealth. She focuses even more dramatically on the emotional horrors inflicted on slaves, especially on mothers. .
Uncle Tom's Cabin is a replica of it's time. The division of culture and politics of mid-nineteenth-century. An slavery spread, the gasp in the South's social structure widened. At the top of this southern social ladder perched a small but powerful covey of great planters owning gangs of slaves and vast domains of land, the planters ruled the region's economy and virtually monopolized political power. The divergence of legislative and moral imperatives is evidenced in the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act as of 1850, under which the North was no longer a legal haven for runaways and Canada became the closest place of freedom.
