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• Simon Legree
  Simon Legree

  noun

  the brutal plantation owner in the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin who abuses and murders several enslaved people.
• Legree, Simon
  Legree, Simon

  The cruel overseer and owner of slaves in Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Though the book describes conditions in the slaveholding states of the South, Legree, the most vicious character in it, is from New England.

Simon Legree

American  

[li-gree] / lɪˈgri /

noun

1. the brutal plantation owner in the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin who abuses and murders several enslaved people.

2. any harsh, merciless master.

   Our math teacher is a Simon Legree.

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Legree, Simon Cultural  

1. The cruel overseer and owner of slaves in Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Though the book describes conditions in the slaveholding states of the South, Legree, the most vicious character in it, is from New England.

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Example Sentences

Samuel Pinchard, the plantation owner, is a literary descendant of Simon Legree, but Jeffers has drawn him in the full height of psychological complexity.

From Washington Post • Aug. 23, 2021

I’ll detail how Wiencek arrives at his bizarre proof of a Jefferson who suddenly becomes Simon Legree, but I should say up front that this book fails as a work of scholarship.

From Slate • Oct. 19, 2012

Simon Legree then had his turn as actor-manager; he scored a smash and won little Eva back from the mortician.

From Time Magazine Archive

Not every labor leader is a paragon of justice, any more than every employer is a Simon Legree.

From Time Magazine Archive

Men and women read it, talked about it, cried over the death of Little Eva and of Uncle Tom, shuddered at the cruelty of Simon Legree.

From "Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad" by Ann Petry