Tom is sold and falls into the hands of a monster. The name of the new master is Legree. On Legree's cotton plantation Uncle Tom becomes a field-hand, and suffers all the misery and torture of Southern bondage. Tom's virtuousness and religious principles make him submissive to the worst of masters so long as exploitation and bad treatment concern him alone. But when Legree wants him to become an overseer and an instrument of cruelty for Tom's fellow-slaves, he refuses to obey. In contrast to Tom's noble at-titude the author portrays two Negro overseers, Sambo and Quimbo, who were wild and cruel. An American proverb says: "The worst of overseers is the former slave." Legree had trained them in savageness and brutality. Beecher-Stowe does not conceal that the institution of slavery gradually deprives human beings of elementary hu-manitarian feelings, by developing the worse inhuman nature: “Legree... governed his plantation by a sort of resolution of forces. Sambo and Quimbo cordially hated each other; the plantation hands, one and all, cordially hated them; and by playing off one against another he was pretsure, through one or the other of the three parties, to get informed of whatever was on foot in the place."

Sambo and Quimbo hate Tom fearing he might take their privileges on the plantation and they become beastly cruel to him. Gassy, a quadroon slave on the plantation, whom Legree had bought to be his mistress, warns Tom: "Here you are on a lone plantation, ten miles from any other, in the swamps; not a white person here who could testify if you were burned alive — if you were scalded, cut in inch pieces, set up for the dogs to tear, or hung up and whipped to death."

Legree hates Tom. Uncle Tom's fortitude makes him morally superior to his master. From the first Legree had felt a secret dislike for Tom: "...the native antipathy of bad to good".

When the passionate and rebellious Gassy proposes to kill the master and run away with her friend, the Negro girl Emmeline, Tom refuses to do it. He prefers to die a slave rather than to use violence; but he helps Gassy and Emmeline to hide from their master. Legree, who had been searching for the two fugitives, suspects Tom of knowing how they managed to escape his dogs and pursuers, and heiwants to break Tom's fortitude. Uncle Tom confronting his master says: fl can't tell anything, but I can die." And Tom dies a martyr.

This was exactly like Beecher-Stowe, she did all she could at that period to keep the slaves from insurrection. She thought that the only way to freedom was |b earn it Jay Christian meekness; in the meantime the abolitionists would by agitation make the slave-holders liberate their slaves themselves.

Notwithstanding her religious idealism Beecher-Stowe as a writer chose to be a realist- honest Tem-dies, while freedom is gained by those characters in the novel who struggle for it. These characters are Gassy and Emmeline, and also George and Eliza who belonged to Tom's first master Shelby. Shelby had wanted to sell Eliza's little son, but the mother made a desperate and successful attempt to escape and saved herself and her child.

After the novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" appeared, it was said by many that the facts represented in the book were exaggerated. Then Harriet Beecher-Stowe collected the facts that had served as material for the novel (newspaper reports, the legal codes of the slave states, and stateby witnesses at trials) and published them under the title" A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin".