jamesflintmcgrawhamilton:

Alright so I have seen the post you are referencing – obviously its creator is perfectly able to create whatever gifsets they want, however this argument is one that I disagree with, and I’m going to take this chance to explain why. I do think that you have missed the point of that gifset – which appears to be ‘Max says the plantation is a good place’ = ‘the plantation is a good place’ = ‘the prisoners in the plantation are not slaves’. 

The first point you have addressed, and I agree with you that if Max does indeed think that it is a good place – and later in this post i’m going to discuss why i think there is some doubt about whether she thinks that or not – then it does not necessarily follow that it is in fact a good place. As you say, Max and Anne have never been there. And even if the men there were not deliberately mistreated, sugar plantations of that period were notoriously dangerous places for the men who worked in them. Furthermore, the guards at the plantation all appear to carry cudgels – hardly something one would expect from a ‘good place’. Then there’s Oglethorpe’s horrible speech from the beginning of 4×10:

Here, they must cease to be.

You can argue that for James this could be considered a mercy – I might even agree with you – but what about Thomas? What about the rest of the men at the plantation?

Now to the point of Max thinking it was a ‘good place’ – did she though? I would argue that she saw it as an acceptable alternative to death for a man she did not like, and was not close to. A man she viewed as one of her ‘enemies’. Furthermore, back in s3 she said:

The things it took to make that room possible, they were awful things.

In my view, it’s more than likely that she viewed sending Silver to the plantation as one of these ‘awful things’. I also think it’s quite telling that she describes sending him to the plantation as:

A return to civility

Especially given that that is almost word for word how Peter Ashe describes himself sending Thomas to the plantation:

A hard choice, made under great duress, but with the intent to achieve the least awful outcome. You wish to return to civilisation, that is what civilisation is.

Another interesting parallel is in Max describing the men at Oglethorpe’s plantation as ‘labourers’ – the exact same euphemism that Madam Guthrie’s man uses in 4×07 when speaking about slaves.

Finally, to the point about Max not viewing the plantation in the same way as she does slavery – I must admit, I don’t quite understand this line of argument. Yes, Max tells Madam Guthrie that she refuses to own slaves, but throughout the show she demonstrates a willingness to work with people who do own slaves. Eleanor, Jack, Mr Underhill, even Madam Guthrie herself. Just because Max considers the plantation an acceptable place to send Silver (and, one assumes, James) does not mean that the prisoners on Oglethorpe’s plantation are not slaves?

So far, the only argument that I’ve seen against it is that the men there don’t appear to be treated badly, but the show itself goes out of its way to remind us that however they are treated, a slave is still a slave? From Charles Vane’s speech in 3×01 to Madi reminding Eleanor Guthrie in 4×06 that her father had always mistrusted her despite Eleanor saying to him in 1×07:

You know I’ve never seen you that way [as a slave].

There is no such thing as benevolent slavery. The men at Oglethorpe’s plantation may have been ‘convicts he solicits from prisons in England, where their treatment is far less humane’, but that does not change the fact that he essentially bought them, transported them across the ocean, and forced them to work on his sugar plantation for no wages, and with no prospect of release. It doesn’t matter that Max was willing to send people there. It doesn’t matter that Oglethorpe claims to treat them well. Just as it didn’t matter that Eleanor trusted and relied on Mr Scott.