Slavery - A Respectable Trade?

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Slavery. - A “Respectable” Trade?

A Respectable Trade is quite an ironic title for such an enterprise as slavery. In the 1700s Britain, and France, traded cheap manufactured goods for slaves. 1788 was the beginning of the abolition movement, yet slave trade was still booming. Frances Scott, the protagonist of the movie, was thrust into the horrors of slavery when she decided to marry Josiah Cole. This marriage was an economic contract benefiting Josiah much more than Francis. Francis was a widow, she lived with her uncle, but she didn’t have many choices being a single woman of those times. She could have become a governess, but she wasn’t too good at that as we see at the beginning of the movie when her pupil hits her and runs out. Having a husband gives her economic security, or so she thought because she’d get an annual allowance. In turn, Josiah receives an educated woman, a woman of higher status with connections with the elite, and a schoolteacher for his slaves. Educated slaves in the house serving field are worth more than field slaves because they can speak English, they are supposedly more civilized because they learn the bible and can speak English so it is easier to give them orders.

Frances didn’t really know what she was getting into at all when she accepted Josiah’s proposal. On her wedding night Josiah went to a bar to get drunk and brag of his socially high wife. When he returned home he knelt down next to his bed to pray, yet the only thing he prayed for were his two slave ships, the Rose and the Daisy. He prays to God to let his ships, packed with extremely abused, horrified, mentally tortured, dehumanized people, come back to him in one piece with all these people decent enough to sell. This perhaps illustrates that Josiah thinks that slavery is moral, he has no hesitancy in destroying African people’s lives and selling them so he can buy a bigger house (and hideous blue dragon things). When Frances goes back to Josiah’s house, by the navy yard, it’s like she has entered an entirely different world. She sees that her new husband is severely financially inferior to her uncle. All of his income derives from his two ships going to Africa, capturing slaves and taking them to plantation owners in Jamaica in exchange for rum and sugar.

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