Edward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe developed accounts of participatory sin and moral complicity that wed the moral critique of the slave system to the religious and moral assessment of individuals occupying diverse roles in the system. In different ways, the siblings insisted that personal sin and responsibility must be rethought from a system perspective. The first half of the chapter examines Beecher’s controversial notion of organic sin and how it staked a middle ground between antislavery conservatives and radicals. The second half of the chapter discusses how Stowe, like her brother, battled rigid moral individualists who dismissed system thinking as methodologically and morally misguided. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), broadening moral realism to include system analysis, figures the slave system as a moral object that demands examination and critique. Moving beyond the capacities of the sermon and debate essay, the literary allowed Stowe to perform this exposure and critique.