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Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin as a response to the fact that Christian and humane northeners has voted for the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. As the daughter, sister, and wife of Christian ministers, she used this antislavery novel as a device to present the evils of slavery in the light of Christianity. Uncle Tom's Cabin is primarily a Christian novel. It includes many Bible texts and Christian characters, as well as comments and discussions on Christianity. The book has often been criticized as "a strange hybrid of polemic and sentimental melodrama," but I think this criticism rather favorable St. Clare's long discussion of slavery and Christianity represents the author's position on her contemporary social issue. St. Clare condemns the southern clergymen for bending the Bible to please planters, but he also aims criticism at northem Christians for their lack of true love for black people. Another characteristic of this novel is sentimentalism, with such scenes of Little Eva's death, Uncle Tom's passion, and Eliza's crossing the river appealing to the reader's sentiment. Eva, with vague longings to do something for the slaves, embodies egalitarian Christian love through her dying. Tom is Stowe's martyr. Although terribly whipped, he nobly rejects the offer of exemption from further punishment for the salvation of his soul in heaven. Stowe beseeches Christian mothers to pity Eliza and slave mothers who are constantly made childless by the American slave-trade. She argues that an ideal American Victorian woman must be a Christian mother, whose duty to her children is bringing them up in a Christian way. As a 19th Century American woman, she suggests a Christian homelife as a way to reform the evils of slavery. However limited her novel might have been from modern feminism and post-colonialism, it became a best seller and greatly influenced emancipation.