12 years a slave

Summary Review 12 Years a Slave

Solomon and the other slaves on the field

In Peter Travers's the Rolling Stone: 12 years a Slave review he strongly praises Chiwetel Ejofor's performance for being completely raw and exposing the true nature of slavery. He applauds the film for being provocative and shocking, and calls out movies like Django and Gone with the Wind for being a watered down version. Travers's believes it is extremely beneficial that the antagonist, Epps, is portrayed as such as horrifying human being because it shows the main theme he believes saying, "the core of a film that shows how slavery dehumanizes the oppressor as well as the oppressed."

Slave Excerpts

Sexual Abuse in Slavery

A "mixed" family of white and black slaves

I researched into the sexual abuse of slaves and the master-slave relationship on the National Humanities Center: Slaveholder's Sexual Abuse of Slaves page. I was just expecting rape of black females to be the full extent, however, I realized just how truly horrific the full extent of sexual depravity was and how it was fully accepted by society. Not only would white male masters rape their black female slaves, they would then sell the offspring of these relations into trafficking. This caused me to beg the question: Did they not care at all for their children, even though the mother was black? I began to read more about this and realized while some had absolutely no innate parental feelings, others viewed selling the children as caring because it removed them from the targeting of the white wife. This made more sense because I expected all the wives to care, however, some willingly married unbothered by this and viewed the mixed offspring as simply more money. Another thing that greatly surprised me was that slave masters would force two of their strong slaves into marriage so they would produce strong offspring that the masters could sell. It did not matter if either partner was already married or in a relationship, and this happened to girls as young as 12. With all this new knowledge, I still wonder how did white plantation wives stomach their husbands raping other women? Also, I think its important to question if the white plantation wives were more involved with all the slave sexual abuse than we think, and that maybe it was not all just their husbands.

Paraphrase Practice

Paraphrase Practice
"Lincoln lacked social polish but he had great intelligence and knowledge of human nature. The hallmark of the man, performed so powerfully by Daniel Day-Lewis in "Lincoln," is calm self-confidence, patience and a willingness to play politics in a realistic way. The film focuses on the final months of Lincoln's life, including the passage of the 13th Amendment ending slavery, the surrender of the Confederacy and his assassination." Roger Ebert: Lincoln

My paraphrase of this selected passage:
In the movie "Lincoln", the protagonist, Abraham Lincoln, was wonderfully portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis in a strong emotionally evocative performance. Lewis was able to correctly show Lincoln as the epitome of the ideal man and politician, and elicit his true nature. Lincoln was an incredibly smart man, despite his uncouthness,  due to his strong political manipulation skills and his ability to contently wait and fully believe in himself. "Lincoln," the movie,  portrays the end of his life and presidency by showing his struggle to instate the 13th amendment, the aftershocks of its passage, and the eventual yield of the Confederates when they finally accepted their loss.

"Negro" Education During Reconstruction

Freedman's Bureau class in Reconstruction

"Negro" Education of the Reconstruction Era

The education of African American's in the southern reconstruction states was a very popular topic within newspapers of this time period because of how strong their hateful, criticizing opinions were on it. Everyone within the southern states were outraged in an uproar over not only having black infiltrate their schools, but about having to pay taxes that went to "negro" schools. I thought this was very noteworthy because I did not realize solely negro schools existed and did not realize whites were paying taxes to fund them. It was also extremely interesting that while most whites opposed this taxation, a small few were okay with it and wanted to use it as a bargaining tool. Self-servingly, they were interested in these schools because they hoped to compromise with the radical republicans by allowing these schools if the radicals would not force the Civil Rights Bill on them. I was very surprised about the white kids in school at the time because not only were their parents extremely racist, they were too. For example, one white and one black school was doing a procession together in Williamsburg and the whites were set to proceed behind the blacks. Thus, these young white school-age children rebelled and refused to go due to the racist beliefs ingrained into them from birth.

Sources:

Chronicling America: The Weekly Clarion--August 16, 1866

Chronicling America: Memphis Daily Appeal--July 1, 1874

Time Traveling in the 19th century Newspapers

Reflection

The Daily Clarion, April 11, 1868

Going through old newspaper sources was very much different from reading a text book generalization. The newspapers were a lot more interesting and more informative about how exactly the Southern's believed and thought about the blacks and the radical republicans. Whereas, the textbook talks more extensively about events, amendments, and the results of these that were happening in the time period and glosses over how each side actually really felt and believed. Also, the newspapers were incredibly biased which could influence how people reading them felt about the "negro" issue, whereas, the textbook is completely unbiased allowing the reader to have their own opinion. The newspapers were somewhat similar to what I expected because i assumed they would be very offensive towards blacks and very against freeing them. However, I was not expecting the newspapers to be outright offensive towards the white republicans and criticize them so much; I thought it would be more passive aggressively. I found it interesting and noteworthy that the Michigan people were not all willing to let the blacks be voted free because they didn't want twelve hundred slaves gaining the ability to vote. This was somewhat surprising because Michigan was a republican state. Also, I didn't realize the full scale of the amount of slaves being freed and knowing Michigan's twelve hundred slaves was actually a very small slave population compared to southern states was very important.

Why Did the Reconstruction End?

The Reconstruction ended in 1877 because of the Compromise if 1877 where the Republicans compromised if the South would vote Rutherford Hayes into presidency they would withdraw the rest of their troops from the southern states and would let the republican governments that still lasted in the south completely fall.

Sources:
AP US History Notes: The End of Reconstruction  

Library of Congress: The Daily Clarion