Legree

Definition and stakes

Portrait of Martha Foote Crow Martha Foote Crow,  Harriet Beecher Stowe: a biography for girls (1913)

“ Almost incredible [Pg 202] as it may seem, the Legree plantation was, therefore, a scene taken directly from life. In another letter Charles Beecher told how from the deck of a steamer on which he was traveling he had seen a slave mother seek death by springing into the river with her child clasped to her bosom. She preferred death for herself and her child rather than to allow her little girl to enter the life into which she knew she would be sold.
Still other ways of seeing the under side of the movement that was going on were being afforded the quiet little woman in the Cincinnati suburb.
”
Source: Gutenberg

Jr. Thomas Dixon,  The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden…

“ I have just come from the West where a desperate strike was in progress in one of Legree’s mines. Our men were toiling in the depth of the earth in midnight darkness, never seeing the light of day, for just enough to keep body and soul together. They tried to wring one little concession from their absent master, who had never condescended to honour them with his presence. What did he do? Shut down his mines, and brought up from the South a herd of negroes who came crowding to the mines to push our men back into hell. We begged them to go home and let us alone. ”
Source: Gutenberg

Portrait of Harriet Beecher Stowe Harriet Beecher Stowe,  Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)

“ Legree had had the slumbering moral elements in him roused by his encounters with Tom,—roused, only to be resisted by the determinate force of evil; but still there was a thrill and commotion of the dark, inner world, produced by every word, or prayer, or hymn, that reacted in superstitious dread. ”
Source: Gutenberg

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