There is a geographical shift that takes place in chapter
37 and the setting is now the Midwest. The reader has followed the fugitive slave hunter
Tom Loker as he has been trying to apprehend Eliza and her family. Since Tom is injured
in the previous chapter, he finds himself being taken care of by a Quaker woman, Dorcas,
in the midwest. He realizes that the fugitives could have left him injured, but instead
chose to help. This fact seems to spark a sort of conversion in Loker, who is generally
an unlikable character. He becomes introspective and advises the Harris family how to
evade the captors. Toward the end, the reader follows Eliza, her husband and child as
they flee toward Canada while Eliza is disguised as a man and little Harry as a girl.
Here Liberty functions in terms of freedom. The text deliberates on the new found
freedom of Eliza, George, and Harry:
Who can speak the blessedness of that first day
of freedom? Is it not the sense of liberty a higher and a finer one than any of the
five? To move, speak, and breathe,-go out and come in unwatched, and free from
danger!
Lastly, though, the
theme of liberty emerges throughout the book and Stowe, the abolitionist, argues that a
country is not truly free until all of its citizens are free.
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