Character guide

Uncle Tom

major

Also known as Tom, Thomas Flint, poor Tom, Father Tom

Tom is a trusted hand on the Shelby farm in Kentucky, valued for his piety and the quiet authority he holds among the other enslaved people. When financial ruin forces his sale, his refusal to let bitterness take root—even as he is torn from his wife and children—becomes the novel's central test of whether goodness can survive an institution built to crush it. His story anchors the book's argument that the system's greatest crime is what it does to the souls of the enslaved and the enslavers alike.

Eliza Harris

major

Also known as Eliza, Mother Eliza, Lizzy, Liza, Little Elise

Eliza is a maid in the Shelby household, married to a clever enslaved man named George Harris on a neighboring plantation, and she has already lost two children to slavery's casual cruelties. When she overhears that her young son Harry is to be sold, she does not wait for rescue—she runs, carrying him, and her flight becomes one of the book's most famous images of maternal courage. Her determination to keep her family intact sets her on a path that will test her faith, her wits, and her hope.

Eva St. Clare

major

Also known as Eva, Miss Eva, beloved Eva, Little Eva, Evangeline St. Clare

Eva is the only daughter of Augustine St. Clare, a delicate girl whose mother's self-absorption has left her largely in the care of servants and her father's indulgent affection. She befriends Tom on the riverboat south and claims him with a child's uncomplicated certainty, and her tenderness toward the enslaved people around her exposes the moral contradictions her father cannot resolve. Her presence in the New Orleans household forces everyone—her father, her cousin Ophelia, the enslaved people themselves—to reckon with what it means to love someone the law calls property.

Augustine St. Clare

major

Also known as St. Clare, Augustine, Mr. St. Clare

St. Clare is the son of a saintly mother and a wealthy Louisiana family, and he has inherited both a genuine kindness and a fatal habit of letting others—his wife, his overseers, the system itself—do the ugly work. He buys Tom on a whim and treats him well, but his charm and self-awareness never translate into the decisive act of manumission that would free the people he claims to love. His household becomes the novel's laboratory for the question of whether good intentions without courage can ever be enough.

Simon Legree

major

Also known as Mr. Legree, Legree, Simon

Legree is a Yankee by birth who has come south to make his fortune in cotton, and he runs his Red River plantation on fear, whiskey, and the absolute power the law gives him over the bodies of the people he owns. He is not a hypocrite like St. Clare or a gentleman like Shelby—he is the system stripped of its genteel excuses, a man whose only interest in his slaves is what they can produce before they break. His arrival in Tom's life marks the point at which the novel stops asking whether slavery can be humane and starts showing what it looks like when it is not.

Miss Ophelia St. Clare

supporting

Also known as Ophelia St. Clare, Ophelia, Cousin Ophelia

Ophelia is Augustine's cousin from Vermont, a woman of rigid order and genuine moral seriousness who agrees to run his chaotic New Orleans home and raise his motherless daughter. She arrives believing herself free of southern prejudice, yet finds that her horror of slavery coexists with a visceral discomfort at actually touching, teaching, or loving the enslaved child placed in her care. Her slow, reluctant education in what it means to treat a person as a person—rather than a cause—makes her one of the novel's most honest portraits of how prejudice hides inside good intentions.

George Harris

supporting

Also known as George, One George Harris, Harris

George Harris is Eliza's husband, a man whose intelligence and mechanical genius make his bondage under a crude master especially galling. Separated from his family and hired out to brutal work, he burns with a sense of his own worth that slavery cannot contain, and his decision to escape sets the novel's flight narrative in motion. His fierce self-respect and hunger for knowledge make him the story's most defiant counter-argument to the idea that enslaved people are content.

Cassy

supporting

Also known as Misse Cassy, Poor Cassy

Cassy is an enslaved woman on Simon Legree's plantation, where her intelligence and bitter experience give her a strange power over the household and a corrosive hold on Legree himself. She has suffered losses that have hardened her into something between a ghost and a strategist, and her protective ferocity toward the young woman Emmeline reveals a heart not entirely calcified. Her knowledge of the plantation's secrets and her willingness to act make her a pivotal figure in the novel's darkest chapters.

Topsy

supporting

Also known as Topsy, Poor Topsy

Topsy is a young enslaved girl given to Miss Ophelia as a kind of moral experiment, a child so neglected she claims she was never born and has no family at all. Her pranks and defiance are armor against a world that has taught her she is worthless, and her gradual response to genuine affection exposes the difference between instruction and love. She matters because her transformation tests the conscience of the Northern characters and dramatizes the novel's argument that no child is beyond reach.

Aunt Chloe

supporting

Also known as Chloe, Poor Aunt Chloe, old Chloe, Aunte Chloe

Aunt Chloe is Uncle Tom's wife and the Shelby kitchen's undisputed artist, a woman whose competence and temper are both formidable. When Tom is sold away, her grief and her determination to earn his freedom through her own labor give the novel one of its most human portraits of a family divided by slavery. Her practical ambition and her unshakable devotion to Tom make the abstract crime of slavery feel intimate and specific.

George Shelby

supporting

Also known as young Master George, Master George, George Shelby, Mas'r George

George Shelby is the son of Tom's Kentucky owners, a boy who loves Tom like a second father and promises to bring him home again. His education in the novel is moral: as he witnesses the consequences of his family's financial decisions, he becomes determined to act justly rather than merely feel kindly. His journey from affectionate boy to responsible man gives the novel one of its few hopeful arcs and embodies the possibility of a changed South.

Haley

supporting

Also known as Mr. Haley, Mas'r Haley

Haley is the trader who purchases Tom and Harry from Mr. Shelby, a man who discusses human beings with the same casual calculation he applies to livestock. His callousness is not exceptional but routine, which is precisely the point: he represents the everyday commerce that makes slavery profitable and respectable. His brief, vivid presence in the novel's opening chapters establishes the moral stakes of the entire story.

Marie St. Clare

supporting

Also known as Marie, Miss Marie, old Missis

Marie St. Clare presides over a New Orleans household where her sick-headaches and imagined ailments dictate everyone's schedule but her own. Once a blooming belle, she now resents her husband's devotion to their daughter Eva and treats the enslaved people around her with casual cruelty. Her bottomless demand for sympathy exposes how slavery corrupts even the women it supposedly protects, setting the moral stage for the St. Clare chapters.

Emmeline

supporting

Emmeline is purchased by Simon Legree and fettered beside a mulatto woman on the road to his remote Louisiana place. Trading histories of lost husbands and children, she reveals a life already shattered by sale before she has even arrived. Her quiet exchange on that dreary journey makes the traffic in human beings intimate and specific, deepening the novel's descent into its darkest territory.

Tom Loker

supporting

Also known as Loker

Loker works the roads and rivers for men like Haley, tracking fugitives for cash and treating the enslaved as cargo. Coarse, profane, and quick with his fists, he embodies the enforcement arm of the slave economy. His encounters with the escaping Harrises and the Quakers who tend him push the novel to ask whether even a hardened hunter can be changed by mercy.

Mr. Shelby

supporting

Also known as Shelby, Mas'r Shelby

Shelby runs a comfortable Kentucky farm where he has promised Tom freedom and treated his people with easy familiarity. When a mortgage falls due, he signs away Tom and little Harry to a trader and insists he had no choice. His self-excusing pragmatism shows how ordinary, likable men sustain the slave system without ever swinging a whip.

Mrs. Shelby

supporting

Also known as Mrs. Shelby, Polly

Mrs. Shelby manages the household at the Shelbys' Kentucky farm with genuine affection for the people she owns, instructing them in faith and family duty. When her husband's debts force the sale of Tom and Harry, her protests expose the hypocrisy of a Christianity that blesses the very trade it condemns. Her helpless outrage sets the moral terms of the opening chapters and fuels Eliza's flight.

Harry

supporting

Also known as little Harry

Harry is Eliza and George Harris's only child, a lively child whose charm makes him valuable to traders and beloved by the Shelby household. When Mr. Shelby agrees to sell him alongside Tom, his fate becomes the novel's first urgent question. His peril drives Eliza's desperate crossing of the Ohio and turns a domestic story into a chase with life-or-death stakes.

Sam

supporting

Also known as Black Sam

A quick-witted, comic enslaved man on the Shelby place whose flair for mischief and mimicry makes him an unlikely, unforgettable ally in Eliza's flight.

Phineas Fletcher

supporting

Also known as Phineas, Friend Phineas

Phineas is the practical arm of the Quaker network that shelters Eliza, George, and little Harry, a man who sleeps with one ear open and knows every back road the pursuers don't. His blunt courage collides with Simeon's pacifist caution when George reaches for pistols, forcing the group to weigh faith against force. He matters because he turns quiet Quaker hospitality into an active escape route, proving that resistance can be organized, deliberate, and still deeply principled.

Simeon Halliday

supporting

Also known as old Simeon Halliday, Simeon

Simeon presides over the Halliday farm, a station on the underground road where fugitives are fed, hidden, and counseled as friends rather than cases. When Phineas brings word that armed men are tracking the party, Simeon's quiet 'I pray it come not to that' reveals the tension between his peace testimony and the violence shadowing his guests. His steadying presence anchors the novel's vision of Christian conscience in action, a counterweight to the legalized cruelty closing around Eliza and George.

Rachel Halliday

supporting

Also known as Rachel

Rachel Halliday runs the domestic heart of the Quaker station, feeding and comforting Eliza, George, and Harry as if they were family rather than fugitives. When Phineas bursts in with news of the pursuing party, she stands with hands still floury from biscuit dough, her face stricken, embodying the cost of harboring the hunted. Her motherly steadiness gives the escape narrative its moral center, showing that ordinary household kindness can be a form of quiet rebellion.

Adolph

minor

Also known as Mr. Adolph

Augustine St. Clare's vain, pampered enslaved valet.

Sambo

minor

A cruel overseer on Legree's plantation.

Quimbo

minor

A brutal overseer on Legree's plantation who later shows remorse.

Andy

minor

A young enslaved boy on the Shelby plantation who helps Sam.

Mammy

minor

Also known as Dear Mammy, Poor old Mammy

An elderly enslaved woman on the Shelby plantation.

Mr. Wilson

minor

A kind factory owner who helps George Harris escape.

Madame de Thoux

minor

Also known as Madame de

A wealthy woman who turns out to be George Harris's sister.

John Van Trompe

minor

Also known as Van Trompe, John, honest John

A former slaveholder turned abolitionist who shelters Eliza.

Senator Bird

minor

An Ohio senator who helps Eliza despite his pro-slavery politics.

Mrs. Bird

minor

Also known as gentle little Mrs. Bird

Senator Bird's compassionate wife who aids Eliza.

Prue

minor

Also known as cross old Prue, poor Prue, poor old Prue

A miserable enslaved woman in New Orleans who dies tragically.

Cudjoe

minor

Also known as old Cudjoe

An elderly enslaved man on the Shelby plantation.

Lucy

minor

An enslaved woman whose baby is sold away by Haley.

Samuel Morris

minor

Also known as Sam

A Quaker who helps George Harris escape.

Mose

minor

An enslaved boy on the Shelby plantation.

Jesus Christ

minor

Also known as Jesus, Christ, Lord Jesus

Central figure of Christian faith, frequently invoked by characters.

Marks

minor

Also known as Much Marks

A shifty, comic lawyer and accomplice to Tom Loker.

Rosa

minor

Also known as Miss Rosa, little Rosa

A pretty enslaved maid in the St. Clare household.

Dinah

minor

Also known as Old Dinah, old Aunt Dinah, Aunt Dinah

The chaotic, self-willed cook in the St. Clare kitchen.

Henrique

minor

Also known as dear Henrique, Cousin Henrique

Augustine St. Clare's hot-tempered young nephew.

Alfred St. Clare

minor

Also known as Alfred, St. Clare

Augustine's brother, a stern plantation owner from the deep South.

Ruth Stedman

minor

Also known as Ruth, little bustling Ruth, little Ruth

A cheerful Quaker woman who helps fugitive slaves.

Dodo

minor

Also known as poor Dodo

A mistreated enslaved boy on Legree's plantation.

Jane

minor

Also known as Miss Jane, Eliza Jane

A maid in the St. Clare household.

Mina

minor

Also known as Miss Mary, Mary

A young woman in the St. Clare household.

Jim

minor

Also known as Jimmy, Jim Selden

An enslaved boy on the Shelby plantation.

Emily

minor

Also known as Em

A young woman mentioned in the Shelby household.

John Fosdick

minor

Also known as John

A Quaker who assists fugitive slaves.

Mike

minor

Also known as Michael Cross, Michael

A Quaker who assists fugitive slaves.

Dolph

minor

An enslaved man on the Shelby plantation.

Peter Stebbins

minor

Also known as Peter, Pete

A Quaker who helps fugitive slaves.

Aunt Dorcas

minor

Also known as Dorcas

A Quaker woman who helps fugitive slaves.

Sally

minor

Also known as Aunt Sally

A Quaker woman who helps fugitive slaves.

Hagar

minor

Also known as Aunt Hagar

An elderly enslaved woman on the Shelby plantation.

Susan

minor

Also known as Old Aunt Sue

An elderly enslaved woman on the Shelby plantation.

Jake

minor

Also known as little black Jake, little Jake

An enslaved boy on the Shelby plantation.

Jerry

minor

An enslaved man on the Shelby plantation.

Mandy

minor

An enslaved woman on the Shelby plantation.

Nathan

minor

An enslaved man on the Shelby plantation.

Old Peter

minor

Also known as Pete, Den Uncle Peter, Old Uncle Peter

An elderly enslaved man on the Shelby plantation.

Quashy

minor

An enslaved man on the Shelby plantation.

Jinny

minor

An enslaved woman on the Shelby plantation.

Carlo

minor

A dog on the Shelby plantation.

Bruno

minor

Also known as old Bruno

A dog on the Shelby plantation.

Mr. Skeggs

minor

Also known as the worthy Mr. Skeggs

A keeper at the slave warehouse in New Orleans.

Dan Haley

minor

Also known as Daniel

A slave trader and relative of Mr. Haley.

Stubbs

minor

A sailor on the boat carrying Tom south.

Butler

minor

A slave trader who buys Tom from Haley.

Henry Butter

minor

Also known as Henry

A slave trader who buys Tom from Haley.

Tom Lincon

minor

Also known as Tom

A slave trader who buys Tom from Haley.

John Bunyan

minor

Also known as John, Bunyan

Author of Pilgrim's Progress, referenced by characters.