Based on her growing up in Warrenton, Virginia, of an elite planter family, Eastman portrays plantation owners and slaves as mutually respectful, kind, and happy beings.

It serves as an antithesis; Eastman's novel deliberately referred to the situation in Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, where plantation owners abuse their repressed, disloyal slaves.

Eastman uses quotations from various sources–including Uncle Tom's Cabin–to explain that slavery is a natural institution, and essential to life.

[1] Like other novels of the genre, it contains much dialogue between masters and slaves, in which she portrays "the essential happiness of slaves in the South as compared to the inevitable sufferings of free blacks and the working classes in the North," as noted by the scholar Stephen Railton in the website Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture.

B. Lippincott & Co.) As a major publishing house, the company released other anti-Tom novels, including Antifanaticism: A Tale of the South by Martha Haines Butt (1853),[5] and Mr. Frank, the Underground Mail-Agent by Vidi (1853).