So – in thinking about it, I really truly do not get where this idea of pacifist!Thomas is coming from.
I mean – I get it in theory. I get where the idea comes from, I suppose, but I don’t agree, because the Thomas that I saw wasn’t a pacifist so much as he was a proponent of mercy for people who had been pushed to criminal acts by an unforgiving and autocratic society. Thomas, as Flint notes, wanted to change England and he wanted to do so by taking the people that it had deemed undesirable and giving them a second chance. He was attempting to demonstrate that the poor were not, by nature, criminals or destined to become criminals but people who had been treated unfairly by their government and by the upper classes – Thomas’ own class. I don’t know that that necessarily translates into being a pacifist so much as it indicates an ability to see people as people regardless of their class. Furthermore, his attitude toward Israel Hands and the other pirates who killed the Governor’s family and something he says to his father indicates to me that Thomas Hamilton is not a pacifist. He believes in forgiveness, yes – for those who would seek it. Those who, on the other hand, are dedicated to chaos and violence when offered an alternative and do not want anything else, he was not proposing to pardon.
As to what he would think of James and his war – I like to think he would understand that it was not about chaos. It was not about violence. It was about trying to change the world in the only way that had been left to him. James had demonstrated willingness to turn away from that war several times. He had tried to end it in a peaceful fashion, and every time he was turned on by the same civilization he attempted to make terms with. By the time Rogers offered him a pardon, he had, as he himself noted, come to the end of his willingness to trust in civilization, and who could blame him? I think it’s important to note that the war he was fighting wasn’t just for himself, either – it was for millions of people like him that were going to continue to be savaged by that civilization. That’s something that I don’t think Thomas would have wanted him to ignore – he hated injustice, and slavery and England’s treatment of queer people was very definitely that. Also – Thomas at the end of canon had had eleven years of being tortured and enslaved. He had seen the results of trying to change things peacefully – do we really think that he wouldn’t be both angry at the people and the system that had done that to him and his loved ones and ready to try more drastic methods?
The thing that always kind of gets me about Thomas-the-pacifist is that Thomas, the wealthy titled son and heir of the Earl of Ashbourne, has the space to pursue his ends in a way that uses the system instead of overthrowing it. The resources available to him include politics and the law and money and contacts. He can pull together the 3+ ships and carpenters and farmers and ministers to populate Nassau. He uses every resource at his disposal to see to a) making nassau stable and profitable and b) making sure that people like him and his family can’t fuck it up the way they have the old world. Thomas the ex-prisoner does not have the same set of resources. James McGraw/Flint never had them. Miranda didn’t have them. The thing we see consistently across all characters on all sides of the war is the attempt to utilize the resources available to them to change the world in whatever way they see fit.
So Flint wages war because his ability to wage war is the tool at his disposal to accomplish his aims. Miranda uses soft contacts. Eleanor uses trade. Max uses secrets and money. Silver uses people’s emotions. Woodes Rogers uses money/politics/influence/war. I keep feeling like the questions to ask about post-series Thomas are 1) what does he want and 2) what are the resources available to him to get it?
Whatever the answer to number 1 is, the answer to number 2 is he has his own mind and he has James.
So do I think he’d be pro The War? If I’m being honest? Probably, but only if he’d satisfied himself that there was no other way to achieve their aims. Do I think he’d retire to the interior and become a farmer? No. Do i think he’s a pacifist? Not…entirely. I think he is a person who would recognize that the peaceful achievement of change is a luxury and that not everyone has that as an option. And I think he would recognize that peace and security and comfort is a tool wielded by the powers that be to discourage a disruption of the status quo. Ultimately I guess it depends on what his relationship to the status quo is and how pissed off he is about it.
i think this last response is my favourite take on the matter.
black sails is so much a show abt making do, abt grappling by necessity with whatever is at hand, and thinking on one’s feet bc the world is ever-shifting under the characters’ feet.
i’m also happy to not have a perfectly clear answer, tbh. we can argue till the cows come home, but i enjoy all sorts of fan takes. give me thomas being angry and having a hard time w who james has become. give me the soft immediate acceptance of james the man while struggling w his past and his deeds. give me all the difficult, messy spaces inbetween.
just find a way to make me believe your version for as long as i’m reading your fic tbh.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
@flintsredhair, it’s like you read my mind. This is what I have been saying for weeks.
I do have one slight disagreement with @sidewaystime, though, which is that I think it is only partly about the means at your disposal. I think another way to read the show, and how I read it, is that there is a limit to how much you can accomplish with law/politics/connections/debate and that, at a certain point, to change things, you do need violence. I’m obviously drawing on what I know of the history of social justice here, but every single movement towards civil rights involved disrupting the status quo in violent ways. Because, as so many people have pointed out, it’s really easy to ignore protest when it is peaceful or “only” words – it’s a lot harder to ignore it when it’s literally disrupting your life.
So James tried the means at Thomas’ disposal: they tried to get the pardons passed in the House of Lords with Peter Ashe’s help, they tried to bring peace to Nassau the ‘civilized’ way by going to Peter Ashe with Abigail – and they were betrayed each time. By the time Woodes Rogers offered Flint the pardons, seeimngly saying “I’m giving you what Thomas Hamilton wanted, here is the peace you wanted,” Flint has realized that not only is it not, but that these pardons and the English rule Woodes brings are the farthest thing from changing things for the better that it is possible to have. (I mean, Rogers is a dick, but in a way that reveals that if you try to achieve peace in the seemingly ‘peaceful’ ways that Thomas wanted you end up with kangaroo courts and, well, slavery).
The means at Thomas’ disposal, even with all his power and wealth and status – and he had them, he apparently held salons where the best thinkers and men of science and men of letters came to express their ideas, and yet having these people in his house, people who had the power to change how England thinks, and having a power of eloquence that Miranda described as practically supernatural – wasn’t enough. So it’s not even that the peaceful achievement of change is a luxury – it’s literally an impossibility, and James’ character arc is the realization of that fact.
Which brings us to what Thomas would think of the war, and honestly, it comes down to this: would Thomas have come to this same realization, over the past ten years, that you can’t change things peacefully? And I absolutely think that, as smart as he is, and given how much he’s suffered at the hands of ‘civilization,’ that he would have. With all his power and wealth, he tried to change things peacefully and was imprisoned and tortured by his own father. His closest friend decided that his own interests were more important than those of thousands of people. He was basically enslaved for years – and his plans for Nassau were always about the pirates, but now that he’s had that experience, I tend to think that slavery is yet another thing he’d like to change (although he was probably already opposed to slavery to begin with, but now it becomes real to him).
so, given all that, do we really think Thomas would continue to believe it’s possible to change things peacefully? My answer is a clear and resounding no, because Thomas Hamilton is a smart man.
Granted, there are things James did that were not strictly necessary for the war (uh, Charlestown) and some things he did which were probably still not the best way to achieve what he wanted (uh, killing Gates) – oh, and there’s the thing where he killed Thomas’ father. Thomas might take issue with that, and have trouble forgiving them, but the war itself? No, I don’t think Thomas would disagree with its necessity, or feel the need to “forgive” the deaths it caused. I mean, hell, Woodes Rogers caused more death in that war in the razing of Nassau than James did, probably, so if James is unforgivable for the war, then so is “civilization” itself. And Thomas would realize that.
Thank you – that’s exactly what I’ve been thinking. As for James killing Thomas’ father – Thomas is a merciful man but not a saint, and I have to think he’d understand and possibly even feel some satisfaction at Alfred’s death. Again – the man had Thomas stolen from his family and friends, imprisoned, tortured, and then enslaved. Every man has a limit as to how much personal harm he’s willing to forgive before it becomes frankly unhealthy to do so and speaking as someone who had a shitty father and forgave him, if he had done half the shit to me that Alfred did to Thomas, I guarantee you I would not be on speaking terms with him today.
Meg's Mumbles 