Juneteenth !!! - what ?? - Amistad - Djongo unchained, Beeckestijn

Today is 19^th day of June  -  170^th  day of the year (171st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 195 days remain until the end of the year.  Today is Juneteenth !!!  - what ??

கருணையுள்ள கானிங்பிரபு!  சரித்திர புத்தகத்தில் படித்தது.  மனிதர்களை அடிமைப்படுத்தி அவர்களை விலங்குகளைவிட மோசமாக நடத்தி – அவர்களை வியாபாரம் பண்ணினவர்கள், மனிதகுலத்தில் எப்படி நல்லவர்களாக கருதமுடியும் ?  ஜேம்ஸ் ஆண்ட்ரூ பிரௌன்-ராம்சே என்ற இயற்பெயர் கொண்ட ‘டல்ஹவுசி’ பிரபுக்குப் பின்னர் ஆங்கிலேயர்களுக்கு கீழேஇருந்த இந்தியாவின் இந்தியத் தலைமை ஆளுநராக பதவி வகித்தவர் – சார்லஸ் ஜான் கானிங்.  இந்திய முதல் சுதந்திர போரை முறியடித்து,  பங்குகொண்ட பல்லாயிரக்கணக்கான போர்வீரர்கள் மீது கடுமையான தண்டனைகளை வழங்கியவர் இந்த கருணையுள்ளம் கொண்டவர் என நாம் புத்தகத்தில் படித்த பிரபு   !! 

‘Slavery’ – keeping humans chained and treating them worser than animals and trading them – ‘slavery’ would remain one of the worst cruelties of mankind  yet its perpetrators stood glorified as ‘merciful’ mainly because History was written from their side.    

Juneteenth is a federal holiday in the United States. It is celebrated annually on June 19 to commemorate the ending of slavery in the United States. The holiday's name, first used in the 1890s, is a portmanteau of the words "June" and "nineteenth", referring to June 19, 1865, the day when Major General Gordon Granger ordered the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas at the end of the American Civil War. 

                    In the Civil War period, slavery came to an end in various areas of the United States at different times. Many enslaved Southerners escaped, demanded wages, stopped work, or took up arms against the Confederacy of slave states. In January 1865, Congress finally proposed the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution for the national abolition of slavery. By June 1865, almost all enslaved persons had been freed by the victorious Union Army or by state abolition laws. When the national abolition amendment was ratified in December, the remaining enslaved people in Delaware and in Kentucky were freed. 

On September 22, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln announced that the Emancipation Proclamation would go into effect on January 1, 1863, promising freedom to enslaved people in all of the rebellious parts of Southern states of the Confederacy including Texas.  The enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation had been slow and inconsistent there prior to Granger's order.  In the United States before 1865, a slave state was a state in which slavery and the internal or domestic slave trade were legal, while a free state was one in which they were prohibited. Between 1812 and 1850, it was considered by the slave states to be politically imperative that the number of free states not exceed the number of slave states, so new states were admitted in slave–free pairs.  

Slavery was a divisive issue in the United States. It was a major issue during the writing of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, the subject of political crises in the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850, and it was the primary cause of the American Civil War in 1861.   

As a social institution, chattel slavery classes slaves as chattels (personal property) owned by the enslaver; like livestock, they can be bought and sold at will. Chattel slavery was historically the normal form of slavery and was practiced in places such as the Roman Empire and classical Greece, where it was considered a keystone of society. Other places where it was extensively practiced include Medieval Egypt,  Subsaharan Africa,  Brazil, the Antebellum United States, and parts of the Caribbean such as Cuba and Haiti.  Chattel slavery survived longest in the Middle East. After the trans-Atlantic slave trade had been suppressed, the ancient trans-Saharan slave trade, the Indian Ocean slave trade and the Red Sea slave trade continued to traffic slaves from the African continent to the Middle East.  The last country to abolish slavery, Mauritania, did so in 1981. While slavery had technically been banned by colonial France in French West Africa (including Mauritania) already in 1905.

 

There have been some movies, some real-life stories highlighting the evils of slavery.  To me ‘Amistad’ was very moving ..    Amistad, ran full houses in 1997 ~ a  historical drama film directed by Steven Spielberg based on the true story of an uprising in 1839 by newly captured African slaves that took place aboard the ship La Amistad off the coast of Cuba, the subsequent voyage to the Northeastern United States, and the legal battle that followed their capture by a U.S. revenue cutter. It shows how, even though the case was won at the federal district court level, it was appealed by President Martin Van Buren to the Supreme Court, and how former President John Quincy Adams took part in the proceedings. The film begins in the depths of the schooner La Amistad, a slave-ship carrying captured West Africans into slavery and is a touching story of the travails of the humans who were traded as slaves those days.

 

In early 1858 Texas, brothers Ace and Dicky Speck drive a group of shackled black slaves on foot. Among them is Django, sold off and separated from his wife Broomhilda von Shaft, a house slave who speaks German and English. They are stopped by Dr. King Schultz, a German dentist-turned-bounty hunter seeking to buy Django for his knowledge of the three outlaw Brittle brothers.  Schultz offers Django his freedom and $75 in exchange for help tracking down the Brittles.   Django Unchained  is a 2012 American revisionist Western  film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, starring Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington, and Samuel L. Jackson, with Walton Goggins, Dennis Christopher, James Remar, Michael Parks, and Don Johnson in supporting roles. 

Moving away from movies to reality, the Beeckestijn transported about 4,600 slaves from the African west coast to the Dutch colonies of Suriname and St Eustatius over seven voyages to South America and the Caribbean between 1722 and 1736. At least 1,000 slaves died on board. Records show that the mortality rate for the enslaved men, women and children transported on the Beeckestijn was as high as a third during some of the ship’s long and arduous transatlantic voyages.  The print of the Beeckestijn in the Prins Hendrikkade docks, drawn by the draftsman Hendrik de Leth, is well-known and is part of a number of collections. But the fact that the Beeckestijn was a slave ship had not been recognised until the recent discovery of the vessel’s records by historian Mark Ponte, who is curating the archive’s exhibition. The Dutch West India Company had a monopoly on trade in the Dutch West Indies and was also given jurisdiction over the Atlantic slave trade by the then Republic of the Seven United Netherlands.

 

Sad remnants of the past where humans treated fellow humans so badly but these countries wrote history books for others on humanity and culture.

 

With regards – S. Sampathkumar
19.6.2025