Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126

Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127

By admin

Earlier this month, Aidan wrote about the historical inaccuracy of “Django Unchained,” citing that Quentin Tarentino overstated violence and freed blacks’ autonomy in antebellum America. Aidan makes a compelling argument, but we cannot apply his conclusion of factual exaggeration to the film as a whole. Upon discovery of the story of Isaac Franklin, I now believe that Tarentino downplayed the horrific nature of the large-scale slave trade. The violence can be explained by his desire to provide shocking material, comic relief or spectacular visuals; the freedmen’s autonomy advances the narrative. He likely failed to see the value, however, in accurately portraying the sheer volume of slaves moved by the larger traders and the ease with which these men discussed rape and death of slaves.

Calvin Candie, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is characterized as a vicious slave owner, heading the most feared plantation in the South, Candieland. Tarentino shows the audience Candie’s lack of compassion for his slaves in our introduction to him. In this scene, we see Candie in a smoke filled room excitedly watching a brutal mandingo fight, flinching only upon the delivery of the death blow. In comparison to Isaac Franklin, though, Candie is tame. Candie at least flinches. He feels something, though not much, for the brutality of the scene he has witnessed. Franklin, however, makes Candie look tame.

Franklin, a Nashville native, was born into a prominent family in 1789. His four older brothers came to start a business shipping goods down the Mississippi river to New Orleans, bringing the money back through the Natchez Trace. When Isaac came of age, his brothers hired him to travel with the shipment through the uncivilized route; he traveled through dense woodlands and Indian Territory all with easy access to New Orleans, all tremendously fertile land. He knew that if White men had the ability to change these forests into workable plantations, they could stand to make a lot of money. This land, however, required hundreds of men to clear and work, and labor to that extent was unavailable. Franklin set out to fix that.

Franklin partnered with his nephew, John Armfield, and set up a slave-trading operation in Alexandria, Virginia. By 1833, the two were buying at least 1,000 people a year out of the Mid-Atlantic and selling them in New Orleans and Natchez, Mississippi. Typically, Franklin and Armfield sent a regular shipment by boat regardless of whether or not it was full. Once a year, though, Franklin would make the 8-week overland trip with a coffle of 200 slaves shackled together. This dwarfs the depiction of Candie’s coffle shown in the movie. Franklin, moreover, shows his disregard for the lives and emotions of his slaves in a letter to a business associate in which he casually references slaves impending deaths, saying ‘if they do not die before that time.’ What’s more, he brags and pokes fun to his correspondent about rape. He describes young, light-skinned slave women as ‘maids’ and ‘fancy girls’, and he casually chastises his correspondent using the possessive ‘your’ before the description of each slave woman. He then goes on to joke about his disappointment ‘your Charlottesville maid’ was not present in his most recent shipment, hoping that he would have gotten his turn. The casual nature of this correspondence sheds light on the complete dismissal of empathy for black slaves.

The link to the full text about Isaac Franklin is copied below:

http://narrative.ly/unraveling-nashville/forgotten-supervillain-antebellum-tennessee/

The Tarentino comparison was really just to connect it to a past assignment.. interesting read even if my argument wasn’t all that persuasive