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Stowe was related to many accomplished academics and religious activists; unlike many women in her time, she was educated, and her sisters and female relatives were also active members of the abolition and suffrage movements. Her family was even connected to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Like Thoreau, the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act prompted her to make her voice heard. However, unlike Thoreau, her work was less an outright cry for action and more an eye-opening and previously unheard perspective.

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Tableaux is a series of drawings or pictures that depict a story, although in this case the application is literary, not literal. Stowe's tableaux (descriptive imagery) of Uncle Tom and his family working on the farm and having religious faith and love helped humanize black people and allowed readers to connect with the characters, which strengthened the abolition movement overall.

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Written in response to the Fugitive Slave Act, Stowe wrote her novel in order to bring a slave's perspective to the wider conversation at the time. It was perhaps her focus on religion that allowed her to connect with a wider audience. Uncle Tom's Christian tolerance and forgiveness portrayed slaves not just as victims, but as people. It was this understanding that became the final nail in the coffin for the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln himself cited the book as the catalyst for Fort Sumter.

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Thoreau confronts the nature of politics at the time, too focused on compromise, and accuses it of hindering progress. Politicians and writers and influencers bend themselves to appeal to the masses, but in doing so, lose sight of the goal: making change.

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"But I object not so much to what they have omitted as to what they have inserted. Even the Liberator called it "a misguided, wild, and apparently insane-effort." As for the herd of newspapers and magazines, I do not chance to know an editor in the country who will deliberately print anything which he knows will ultimately and permanently reduce the number of his subscribers. They do not believe that it would be expedient. How then can they print truth? If we do not say pleasant things, they argue, nobody will attend to us. And so they do like some travelling auctioneers, who sing an obscene song, in order to draw a crowd around them. Republican editors, obliged to get their sentences ready for the morning edition, and accustomed to look at everything by the twilight of politics, express no admiration, nor true sorrow even, but call these men "deluded fanatics"- "mistaken men"- "insane," or "crazed." It suggests what a sane set of editors we are blessed with, not "mistaken men"; who know very well on which side their bread is buttered, at least."

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“If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth--certainly the machine will wear out… but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”

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Thoreau's essays, "A Plea for Captain John Brown" and "The Last Days of John Brown" (1859-1860), offered incendiary commentary on the actions of John Brown, the man who led a failed raid on Harper's Ferry. While many fellow abolitionists condemned John Brown's actions, Thoreau defended them as necessary for the greater good.

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Thoreau's civil disobedience philosophy resurfaced with the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law. "Slavery in Massachusetts"

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Another notable distinction is how Melville portrays black violence not as a result of their "animalistic nature", but borne of the conditions the slaves were forced into, which contradicted the philosophy (felt by many Southerners) that black people were somehow less than human.

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In 1846, a tax collector demanded that Thoreau pay his poll tax. Thoreau refused, because his money would go to support the Mexican-American War, which he saw as an attempt to extend the American reach of slavery. Three years later, he penned an essay, "Resistance to Civil Government" (eventually "Civil Disobedience"), that argued against abiding by laws with moral fault.

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When Melville says "world's fairest hope", he may either be referring to America or American democracy. By expressing that the "tempest" (war) came as a result of "man's foulest crime" (slavery), Melville describes how slavery has marred America's role as a pioneer of democracy.

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Throughout "Misgivings", Melville likens the imminent war to a hurricane:
"ocean-clouds", "tempest", "torrents", "storms are formed behind the storm we feel"

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When ocean-clouds over inland hills

Sweep storming in late autumn brown,

And horror the sodden valley fills,

And the spire falls crashing in the town,

I muse upon my country’s ills—

The tempest bursting from the waste of Time

On the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime.

Nature’s dark side is heeded now—

(Ah! optimist-cheer disheartened flown)—

A child may read the moody brow

Of yon black mountain lone.

With shouts the torrents down the gorges go,

And storms are formed behind the storm we feel:

The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel.

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Benito Cereno is a fictional novella by Herman Melville that accounts a slave revolt on a Spanish slave ship captained by Don Benito Cereno. Although it was about Spain, it contained a lot of underlying commentary about American slavery, the morality of which was in heated debate at the time.

Melville links the slow decline of the Spanish Empire with their proliferous reliance on slavery, implying a similar fate for America if slavery weren't abolished.

He cites the reason for this slow decline to be instability from slave revolts, for an oppressed group in brutal conditions will never be content to continue being so.

Through his story, Melville highlights potential for social and political collapse in America as a result of slavery.