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Slavery In The Amistad

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Hollywood is certainly known for many of its historical movies about slavery. Amistad, one of tens of movies, documentaries, and miniseries based on slavery, gives us a partially historically accurate insight of the abolitionists and slave experience at the time, making it a somewhat worthy historical secondary source. Director Steven Spielberg utilizes the movies semi-high budget as an attempt to portray both the periods and events. He does this by using reputable actors such as Morgan Freeman and Matthew Mcconaughey to represent the characters of Theodore Joadson and Roger Sherman Baldwin, respectively. Spielberg portrays the events by using a courtroom, a ship (one that is made to look like the Amistad), and a place to contain the slaves …show more content…

The early 1800’s is usually described as a black and white society that has a mixture of both slaves and abolitionists. Director Spielberg portrays slavery and the slave trade in a very accurate and vivid manner throughout the experiences of Cinque, the leader of the Africans that were captured, on the Amistad and in the United States. In the actual slave trade, slaves were underfed and illnesses were not properly treated, resulting in a high death rate on the ship (http://www.whitneyplantation.com/the-atlantic-slave-trade.html). Similarly, in Amistad, the slaves on the ship were underfed, and many died as a result of disease. On the contrary, the film did have quite a few historical inaccuracies. Since the slaves were set free, they were technically always free citizens in the United States. Therefore, the United States couldn’t send them back to Africa; which was the opposite in Amistad. In Amistad, the Africans were freed and sent back to Africa; in the actual events, fundraisers were brought up in order to raise money for the ship and amenities for the trip to Africa (http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/326.html). Another historical inaccuracy was the talk of the Civil War, which was more than 25 years from the court case (Eric Foner). If these historical inaccuracies didn’t find their way into the film, the result of the court case in the film would have definitely been

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