Not too long ago, I was told that I would really like the film “Twelve Years A Slave” by a friend of mine who is also the head coach of the volleyball team I help out with. Within the last week or so, my roommates went to watch this same movie as well, and so since I had a little bit of time today and was in a cinematic mood, I watched the film myself, finding it to be a serious and thoughtful take on the issue of slavery from a point of view that is not often considered, and that is the point of view of those blacks who lived in freedom in the North but who were subject to kidnapping and enslavement based on the untrustworthy word of those who wished to claim them as property, once they were lured into slave states or territories where the law was on the side of kidnappers and not on the side of those defending their rightful claims to freedom.

The whole subject of the internal slave trade is one that is not often well-understood among many readers of the American Civil War and its preliminary troubles [1]. Given the fact that the external slave trade had been banned in 1808, almost at the moment when it was constitutionally possible to do so, there were only two sources of slaves that were possible for new areas of the country that were being sought after for the expansion of slavery. The first option was to have the population of slaves increase naturally as births outweighed death. The other way was to find slaves from areas where slavery was vanishing or declining but where the infrastructure of slave markets was still around. Areas like Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, Delaware, and Washington DC had a slaveowning mentality, an elite that aligned at least modestly with Southern elements, and places where slaves were routinely sent downriver.

“Twelve Years A Slave” reminds us that this fate was not limited to slaves owned by indebted slaveowners, but also to free blacks who were kidnapped or lured from free territory and then sold into slavery themselves. It is particularly ironic that Southern slaveowners, who were jealous about their ‘rights’ to own and exploit others, were particularly insensitive to the rights of free blacks in the North (as well as the South) to their own freedom. The slaveowners in this particular movie are shown as being concerned in preaching Christianity to their slaves, lessons of love and obedience from the Gospels, but are shown in many ways to be very weak, whether it was in showing a susceptibility to flattery, a prickly ego that was too easily damaged by capable blacks (like Solomon Northrup, the main character), or weaknesses like greed and lust that the slaves were easily prey to.

The amount of degradation in this film is hard to take, and also grimly realistic. Whether it is whippings that bear a strong reminder to “The Passion Of The Christ,” which was also difficult to take, or whether it is the furtive sex between slaves or between masters and their privileged slave mistresses, or whether it is the constant nudity and brutality the slaves had to face, the total lack of privacy or dignity, it is clear that slavery was oppressive not only to the slave but to the masters and overseers as well. When slaveowners felt free to think of their slaves as cattle but also free to sate their lust without recognizing how that degraded themselves as well, no matter how often they obsessed over the supposed sins of their “heathen” slaves, even as they brutally beat them and exploited their labor for their own wealth, and took advantage of the wisdom of their slaves for their own profit when it served their interests, as long as the slaves weren’t too uppity.

Solomon Northrup, as a free-born black man who was literate, who had some engineering knowledge from his work on canals, did not make promising slave material. Worse, despite his restraint, his obvious expansiveness and keeping hold of freedom in his heart despite his circumstances was evident to other slaves and the whites who tried, unsuccessfully, to break his spirit even as he struggled to rise above mere existence and regain his freedom. Despite some false starts and the betrayal of others, he eventually succeeded through the help of a kindly and idealistic Canadian. The tension attached to his attempts to gain freedom reminds us that even whites who wished to disagree with the system of slavery and oppression in the South were not entirely free to speak their mind or to defend the freedom of blacks. Where freedom is insecure for some, it is insecure for all. Where some are degraded, all are in danger of degradation. Let us praise those who show dignity in extremity.

Let us also note that the experiences of this film are not so remote as we would like to believe. The sort of tension between praising employees who can help increase the bottom line of a company and treating employees as property to be controlled through work standards (the endless accounts of how many pounds of cotton the workers have picked each day, to be beaten if results have dropped or are not high enough), is the sort of tension that many people have to face here and now, in at least analogous form. So to is there an analogy between the sort of inappropriate flirtation and sexual harassment of employees from managers who consider their employees to be available to their advances and the assumption that slave women were sexually available to their masters, as well as the analogy between the demands of contemporary employers on the free time of employees and the demands of slaveowners on the time of their slaves. We are not so far removed from that state as we would like to think ourselves, something that ought to give us considerable pause.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/slaveowner-guilt-and-the-internal-slave-trade/