In Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and other antislavery writings, Harriet Beecher Stowe widened the concept of moral complicity to include “tolerance complicity,” the failure to obey the natural promptings of one’s conscience in the face of slavery’s harms. Delineating this moral malfunction, Stowe sought to awaken in system bystanders and participants the capacity to feel the system’s implications – its complicities and consequences – and respond conscientiously to that feeling. Crucial to this awakening is individuals’ openness to moral shame. For Stowe, moral shame was more than an inward-looking, self-convicting emotion. It was also a crucial affective resource that illuminated the nature and reach of the implicating slave system. Stowe demanded that white northerners and southerners, women as well as men, remain vigilantly alert to moral shame. Out of such an alertness, more direct and public efforts to move the community and uproot the system would follow.