# Uncle Tom’s Cabin — Character guide

> Key figures in Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

- [Uncle Tom](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/uncle_tom.md): 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—ev
- [Eliza Harris](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/eliza_harris.md): 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 
- [Eva St. Clare](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/eva_st_clare.md): 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 
- [Augustine St. Clare](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/augustine_st_clare.md): 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 bu
- [Simon Legree](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/simon_legree.md): 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 n
- [Miss Ophelia St. Clare](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/miss_ophelia.md): 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 sou
- [George Harris](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/george_harris.md): 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 
- [Cassy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/cassy.md): 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 
- [Topsy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/topsy.md): 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 
- [Aunt Chloe](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/aunt_chloe.md): 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 o
- [George Shelby](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/george_shelby.md): 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 fina
- [Haley](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/haley.md): 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 precise
- [Marie St. Clare](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/marie_st_clare.md): 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 daughte
- [Emmeline](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/emmeline.md): 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 sh
- [Tom Loker](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/tom_loker.md): 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 en
- [Mr. Shelby](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/mr_shelby.md): 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 choi
- [Mrs. Shelby](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/mrs_shelby.md): 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 pro
- [Harry](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/harry.md): 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 
- [Sam](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/black_sam.md): 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](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/phineas_fletcher.md): 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 
- [Simeon Halliday](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/simeon_halliday.md): 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, Simeo
- [Rachel Halliday](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/rachel_halliday.md): 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 sta
- [Adolph](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/adolph.md): Augustine St. Clare's vain, pampered enslaved valet.
- [Sambo](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/sambo.md): A cruel overseer on Legree's plantation.
- [Quimbo](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/quimbo.md): A brutal overseer on Legree's plantation who later shows remorse.
- [Andy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/andy.md): A young enslaved boy on the Shelby plantation who helps Sam.
- [Mammy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/mammy.md): An elderly enslaved woman on the Shelby plantation.
- [Mr. Wilson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/mr_wilson.md): A kind factory owner who helps George Harris escape.
- [Madame de Thoux](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/madame_de_thoux.md): A wealthy woman who turns out to be George Harris's sister.
- [John Van Trompe](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/john_van_trompe.md): A former slaveholder turned abolitionist who shelters Eliza.
- [Senator Bird](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/senator_bird.md): An Ohio senator who helps Eliza despite his pro-slavery politics.
- [Mrs. Bird](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/mrs_bird.md): Senator Bird's compassionate wife who aids Eliza.
- [Prue](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/prue.md): A miserable enslaved woman in New Orleans who dies tragically.
- [Cudjoe](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/cudjoe.md): An elderly enslaved man on the Shelby plantation.
- [Lucy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/lucy.md): An enslaved woman whose baby is sold away by Haley.
- [Samuel Morris](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/samuel_morris.md): A Quaker who helps George Harris escape.
- [Mose](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/mose.md): An enslaved boy on the Shelby plantation.
- [Jesus Christ](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters/jesus_christ.md): Central figure of Christian faith, frequently invoked by characters.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/uncle_tom_s_cabin_se/characters