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50 free Uncle Tom's Cabin trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Uncle Tom's Cabin trivia quiz covers the 1852 anti-slavery novel that outsold every 19th-century American book except the Bible and, in the legend at least, started the Civil War. The easy questions cover the author, the character the book is named for, the villain whose name became a byword for cruelty and the escape across the frozen Ohio. From there the quiz walks through the plot and the people: the Shelbys, Eliza and George Harris, Little Eva and Augustine St. Clare, Miss Ophelia and Topsy, Cassy and Emmeline, and the Quakers who shelter the fugitives. The hard end covers the sources Stowe drew on, from Josiah Henson's narrative to American Slavery As It Is; the serial in The National Era; the print runs and the pirated British editions; the Anti-Tom novels of the South; the severed ear in the post; the Tom shows that ran for 75 years; the silent films and the MGM project the NAACP stopped; and the modern debate over the stereotypes the book helped spread. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries on the novel and its author before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our American literature and Civil War quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin?
Harriet Beecher Stowe
She was a Connecticut-born teacher from the famous Beecher family of preachers and reformers.
Q 02In which year was Uncle Tom's Cabin published in book form?
1852
It appeared in two volumes on 20 March and sold 3,000 copies that day alone.
Q 03What is the novel's subtitle?
Life Among the Lowly
Stowe wrote it in response to a federal law passed in 1850 that forced Northerners to help return escaped slaves.
Q 04The passage of which law in 1850 prompted Stowe to write the novel?
The Fugitive Slave Act
Much of the book was written at her home in Brunswick, Maine, where her husband taught at Bowdoin College.
Q 05In which abolitionist periodical was the novel first serialised over 40 weeks?
The National Era
Readers protested to the office when she missed an issue; the final instalment ran on 1 April the following year.
Q 06How many copies of the book sold in the United States in its first year?
300,000
Eight printing presses running constantly could barely keep up.
Q 07In the 19th-century United States, Uncle Tom's Cabin was the second best-selling book after which title?
The Bible
It was the century's best-selling novel outright, and is generally called the first best-selling novel.
Q 08Which president, in a likely apocryphal story, greeted Stowe as 'the little lady who started this great war'?
Abraham Lincoln
Stowe's own letter to her husband written hours after the 1862 meeting makes no mention of the remark.
Q 09Whose slave narrative, published in 1849, partly inspired the character of Uncle Tom?
Josiah Henson
He had escaped from a Maryland plantation across the northern border in 1830 and helped other fugitives settle there.
Q 10What was the title of the 1853 non-fiction book in which Stowe documented her sources for the novel?
A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin
It cited 'real life equivalents' for the major characters and mounted a more aggressive attack on slavery.
Q 11In which state does the novel open, on the farm of Arthur Shelby?
Kentucky
Facing debts, Shelby sells Tom and the boy Harry to a coarse slave trader.
Q 12What is the name of the coarse slave trader who buys Tom and Harry from the Shelbys?
Mr. Haley
He then takes Tom down the Mississippi by riverboat toward a slave market.
Q 13Which river does Eliza cross on the ice to escape her pursuers?
Ohio
The scene was inspired by a real 1838 escape by a woman named Eliza Harris that John Rankin described to Stowe's husband.
How old is Harry, the son Eliza flees with?
Q 21What is the name of the young slave girl whom St. Clare buys for his cousin to educate?
Topsy
Eva convinces the dour girl that she deserves love, and Topsy vows to better herself after Eva's death.
Q 22What does Eva give to each of the slaves before she dies?
A lock of her hair
She tells them they must become Christians so that they can meet again in Heaven.
Q 23How does Augustine St. Clare die before he can free Tom?
He is stabbed outside a tavern
He was trying to stop a brawl between two drunken men, one of the novel's understated temperance lessons.
Five
He is her only surviving child; the novel says she had already miscarried two others.
Q 15What is the name of Eliza's husband, who has already run away when she flees?
George Harris
He shoots the slave hunter Tom Loker in the side, then agrees to take him to Quakers for treatment.
Q 16To which country do Eliza, George and Harry escape, crossing from Lake Erie?
Canada
They eventually travel on to France and then to Liberia, the African nation founded for former American slaves.
Q 17How does Tom first meet the little girl Eva?
He rescues her from drowning
She falls from the riverboat into the Mississippi and Tom dives in; her grateful father then buys him.
Q 18What is Eva's full first name?
Evangeline
The year the book came out, 300 baby girls in Boston alone were named Eva after the character.
Q 19In which city does Tom live with the St. Clare family?
New Orleans
He becomes head coachman there and spends most of his time with Eva.
Q 20Who is St. Clare's Northern cousin, opposed to slavery yet prejudiced against black people?
Ophelia
To challenge her views, St. Clare buys a young slave girl and asks her to educate the child.
Q 24Who buys Tom at auction after St. Clare's death?
Simon Legree
He is a Northerner by birth and one of literature's most notorious villains.
Q 25In which state is Legree's plantation?
Louisiana
Reports in the late 1800s claimed Stowe had a Red River planter named Meredith Calhoun in mind.
Q 26What order from Legree does Tom refuse, earning the planter's hatred?
To whip a fellow slave
Legree resolves to crush Tom's faith, but Tom keeps reading his Bible and comforting the others.
Q 27Which enslaved woman on Legree's plantation turns out to be Eliza's long-lost mother?
Cassy
She escapes with Emmeline and later meets Eliza's husband's sister, Madame de Thoux, on the boat north.
Q 28Why does Legree finally order Tom killed?
Tom refuses to say where two escaped women have gone
As he dies, Tom forgives the overseers who beat him, and both men become Christians.
Q 29Who arrives to buy Tom's freedom just before he dies?
George Shelby
He returns to the family farm, frees all his slaves and tells them to remember Tom whenever they see his cabin.
Q 30What did Tom's name eventually come to mean as an insult?
An excessively subservient person
Stowe intended him as a noble hero who refuses to betray friends or abandon his beliefs.