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Updated: May 31, 2025
Had the word lost its power, or could the failing eye and weary sense no longer answer to the touch of that mighty inspiration? Heavily sighing, he put it in his pocket. A coarse laugh roused him; he looked up, Legree was standing opposite to him. "Well, old boy," he said, "you find your religion don't work, it seems! I thought I should get that through your wool, at last!"
He looked him all over, pulled his mouth open and looked at his teeth, pinched his arms, made him walk and jump, and indeed treated him as he would a horse or cow he had wished to buy. Tom knew from the way this man looked and spoke, that he must be bad and cruel. He prayed in his heart that this might not be his new master. But it was. His name was Legree.
"Nothing, it is only this infernal humph!" Presently another expletive. "I'll tell you what it is, Fry, if somebody doesn't knock this thundering Legree on the head, I'll put the book on the fire." "Well, but if it isn't true, sir?" "But it is true, every word of it, while you are reading it, ye fool. What heathens there are in the world! First they sell a child out of his mother's arms.
But I will no longer arraign your good sense. It was not, take my word for it, as Mrs. Stowe describes it, some poor negro "tied to a tree, with a slow fire lit under him." Tom tells Legree "he'd as soon die as not." Indeed, he proposes whipping, starving, burning; saying, "it will only send him sooner where he wants to go."
"Feeling better, aren't you?" "I feel so well," she returned, "that if this doctor of mine weren't such a Simon Legree, I could play you eighteen holes of golf for a box of gloves against a box of cigars." "Gambler!" he scoffed. "And if I should win, I suppose I'd have to smoke the cigars." "Certainly," she countered, easily, "if I should have to wear the gloves." He sank back in the big chair.
He sat doggedly down in his chair, and began sullenly sipping his tumbler of punch. Cassy prepared herself for going out, unobserved by him; and slipped away to minister to poor Tom, as we have already related. And what was the matter with Legree? and what was there in a simple curl of fair hair to appall that brutal man, familiar with every form of cruelty?
Legree now turned to Tom's trunk, which, previous to this, he had been ransacking, and, taking from it a pair of old pantaloons and dilapidated coat, which Tom had been wont to put on about his stable-work, he said, liberating Tom's hands from the handcuffs, and pointing to a recess in among the boxes, "You go there, and put these on." Tom obeyed, and in a few moments returned.
Having died insolvent, it had been purchased, at a bargain, by Legree, who used it, as he did everything else, merely as an implement for money-making. The place had that ragged, forlorn appearance, which is always produced by the evidence that the care of the former owner has been left to go to utter decay.
Legree took silent note, and rating him as a first-class hand, made up his mind that Tom must be hardened; he had bought him with a view to making him a sort of overseer, so one night he told him to flog one of the women. Tom begged him not to set him at that. He could not do it, "no way possible." Legree struck him repeatedly with a cowhide.
But the brave, true heart was firm on the Eternal Rock. Like his Master, he knew that, if he saved others, himself he could not save; nor could utmost extremity wring from him words, save of prayers and holy trust. "He's most gone, Mas'r," said Sambo, touched, in spite of himself, by the patience of his victim. "Pay away, till he gives up! Give it to him! give it to him!" shouted Legree.
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