Hollywood villain? No, our great grandfather was the very model of moral

Aoxomoxoa said:
But as has been pointed out many times, to interpret events in history you have to immerse yourself in those times and refrain from judging using modern values and social mores. It was also a legal practice in those times which often seems to be forgotten. As the article states slaves were valuable commodities and as such it didn't make commercial sense to mistreat them.
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And yet, many of the slave owners knew it was morally wrong, struggled with the idea of owning slaves, knew the tide was turning, but didn't free their slaves and whipped them so as not to look weak to their fellow slave owners.
 
Sardonic said:
And yet, many of the slave owners knew it was morally wrong, struggled with the idea of owning slaves, knew the tide was turning, but didn't free their slaves and whipped them so as not to look weak to their fellow slave owners.
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So who said that any of that is not true? I am reading Southern Honor Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, the book recommended by Taft, it is a fascinating read.

This is from the article which you plainly did not read. Notice where it says that Ford paid $1000 for Northup, that must be nearer $100,000 today, that is a huge amount of money to pay for someone who you then abuse.

The respectable southern gentleman with a balding head, straggling white beard and a well-filled but slightly shabby suit hardly looks like the whip-wielding monster of plantation legend. Yet this is William Prince Ford, the Louisiana slave master at the heart of 12 Years A Slave, the blockbuster movie currently packing cinemas in Britain and America.

The film, based on the remarkable autobiography of free black American Solomon Northup, who was kidnapped in 1841 and sold into slavery in the Deep South, has been acclaimed as one of the most compelling accounts of the brutal slave era ever made.

The issue remains so politically toxic in the US that it took a British director, Steve McQueen, and a British star, Chiwetel Ejiofor, to bring the project to the screen. In the wake of great critical acclaim, both have been nominated for Oscars as part of an extraordinary total of nine nominations.

However, the film also has its critics, who say it ignores the kindness that Ford is known to have displayed towards his slaves and claim that the film-makers are promoting a distorted and simplified version of the truth. Ford is played in the film by a frock-coated Benedict Cumberbatch. The Baptist minister and cotton-grower is portrayed as a pompous hypocrite; a weak-willed man unable to protect Northup and his fellow slaves from sadistic overseers in the cotton fields.

In the movie, Ford’s Christian sermonising is overlaid with the agonising screams of a female slave grieving for her stolen children, an effect aimed at underlining the minister’s double standards. But Northup had little but praise for the clergyman who bought him for $1,000 at a New Orleans slave market and put him on a horrific path of servitude in which terrible injury and death were never far away.

In his memoir, published in 1853, Northup, who had been a prosperous married farmer and talented violinist in upstate New York before his kidnap, insisted: ‘There never was a more kind, noble, candid Christian man than William Ford.’ The faded photograph, the only known picture of Ford, shows him on his estate in Cheneyville, a village in dusty central Louisiana, and has been kept by members of his family. They venerate him as one of the most generous and principled of slave owners in a terrible period in American history when a series of bloody slave rebellions had thrown the pre-Civil War South into turmoil.
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Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-hit-film-12-Years-A-Slave.html#ixzz2rj7xwl4L
 
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I love this thread and I'm not really ready for it to sink into second page oblivion...

Tom really doesn't know that lefties are laughing their asses off. He thinks this upsets us, or befuddles us because we're "faced with facts" (LMAO). Yes, he really is that stupid - a real dunce to coin a phrase!

In fact, it's Tom's little "reasonable" buddies, who are negatively affected, certainly not moi.

After all, even the best blokes can slap the bitches around once in a while, almost by accident, hey no harm meant! Tom's still a good guy and everyone just jumps on him too much darnit! It's just the bitches, slapping them is like fun for the whole family! Doesn't make a guy a bad guy...

But defending slavery. Oh, eh, oh, oh, eh, tch, huh, oh, eh, ugh, can't he get that off of there?

How mortifying...

Oh...

Where's Helen Mirren with a good "well we've all kept slaves, is it right? of course not, but what are you going to do call the police, how tacky" story when you need her?

Oh...
 
Darla said:
Well, so far I've received two anonymous suggestions for the contest "Name Tom's Book & Win a Plantation Tour".

One of them suggested a, what I really believe is a physically impossible act and definitely an unpublishable one, be performed upon said author. I scolded the writer and sent them packing. The second anonymous suggestion was:

Slavery HUH!
What was it good for!
Absolutely Somethin!

So, that's all we have now. Will keep updating as new contestants send their entries.
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wow... why are you so mean to Tom, why do you always berate him, why are you so evil to him?
 
Ghost of Watermark said:
except making them property.
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I wonder why Hollywood prefers to ignore this aspect of history? You only have to look at films and TV today to see that mulatto is favoured over black skin in the media.

The majority of black slave owners were members of the mulatto class, and in some cases were the sons and daughters of white slave masters. Many of the mulatto slave owners separated themselves from the masses of black people and attempted to establish a caste system based on color, wealth, and free status. According to Martin Delany, the colored community of Charleston City clung to the assumptions of the superiority of white blood and brown skin complexion.

These mulattoes of the old free Black elite did not attend church with the dark-skinned blacks of Charleston City. They not only formed congregations which excluded freedmen of dark complexion, but they only married among other mulattoes to “keep the color in the family.”Large numbers of free Blacks owned black slaves in numbers disproportionate to their representation in society. According to the federal census of 1830, free blacks owned more than 10,000 slaves in Louisiana, Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia. The majority of black slave-owners lived in Louisiana and planted sugar cane.Slave holding among the mulatto class in South Carolina was widespread according to the first census of 1790, which revealed that 36 out of 102, or 35.2 percent of the free Black heads of family held slaves in Charleston City. By 1800 one out of every three free black recorded owning slave property. Between 1820 and 1840 the percentage of slaveholding heads of family ranged from 72.1 to 77.7 percent, however, by 1850 the percentage felt to 42.3 percent.According to the U.S. Census report in 1860 only a small minority of whites owned slaves. Out of a population of 27 million whites only eight million lived in the South, and out of this population fewer than 385,000 owned slaves. In short, the total white population own about 1.4, while the southern white population own about 4.8 enslaved Africans.

On the other hand the black population in 1860 was 4.5 million, with about 500,000 living in the South. Of the blacks residing in the South, 261,988 were not slaves. Of this number, 10,689 lived in New Orleans. In New Orleans over 3,000 free blacks owned slaves, about 28 percent of the free Black population in the city.
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Read more: http://slaverebellion.org/index.php?page=the-black-slave-owners
 
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