Yes, it contains scenes of unspeakably savage murders, and of naked men, women and children in chains being thrown into the sea.
Yes, it contains long passages of actual words, some of them devoted to less-than-hip subjects such as the constitutionally enshrined rights of man and 19th Century maritime law.
But please, please, as a favor to this nation and civilization, to yourselves and your children, take them to see Steven Spielberg’s film “Amistad” over the holidays.
I make this plea on a simple premise: No opportunity of any kind to confront young people with even the slightest smattering of history should ever be passed up.
We live in an age in which we are daily assaulted by a blizzard of information, yet our young people have little grasp of what went on in the world prior to Snoop Doggy Dogg.
My son attends a public high school of such excellence it ranks in the top percentile nationally in SAT scores and would fill all the freshman seats at the state-run University of Virginia if scholastic merit were the only criteria for acceptance.
Yet when I went to speak to a really first-rate social studies class there on George Washington, and asked how many of the students had seen the quite fascinating public broadcasting TV series “Liberty” on the American Revolution, only three hands were raised. Interestingly, they were all girls’.
Yet, without the movie and television screen, I wonder that children should learn any history at all.
My son is fascinated by American Indian culture and appalled and dismayed by the fact of American slavery. Yet the mere suggestion of perhaps opening a book or two on these subjects would produce a zombie-like state. It took the films “The Last of the Mohicans,” “The Black Robe,” “Glory” and “Gettysburg” to break through the trance produced by the printed word.
With “Amistad,” the story of a violent 1839 slave ship uprising in whose aftermath a group of enslaved Africans won their freedom through due process and a decision of a largely Southern-dominated Supreme Court, we have yet another chance.
It is not only as magnificent a movie as Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List,” it illuminates surpassingly the question of how a revolutionary nation such as ours, founded on principles of liberty and equality, could have been one of the last holdouts on slavery in the civilized world.
The amateur historian in me quarrels with some of Spielberg’s history. John Quincy Adams, brilliantly portrayed by Sir Anthony Hopkins, is less well served by the script, which depicts him initially as an aged, dozing laggard utterly bored by the Amistad issue.
This elderly congressman and former president daily and rigorously defied for eight years a Southern-imposed “gag rule” ban on anti-slavery debate in Congress until he got it overturned. He died at age 81 from his second stroke while at his desk on the House floor.
President Martin Van Buren was a weak, craven, manipulative sneak even more unsavory than Spielberg presents him (he had readied a U.S. warship to kidnap the Amistad slaves and return them to their Spanish masters even before the courts had rendered their decision).
But it wasn’t Amistad that cost him his re-election bid, any more than it was his refusal to back the Canadian Sons of Liberty trying to throw off British rule in their country. It was a terrible depression brought on by his lunatic predecessor’s fiscal policies and his own image as an effeminate, luxury-loving fop.
The Supreme Court justices were moved far more by Adams’ eloquence than constitutional principle. Rather than setting a domestic precedent, the Amistad case was followed in 1857 by the Dred Scott decision that declared slavery constitutional throughout the U.S.
And, as a little nicety, Spielberg might have noted in the epilogue that slave uprising hero Cinque, he of “We want free!” eloquence, took up slave trading himself after being returned to Africa (see Samuel Eliot Morison’s “Oxford History of the American People, Volume II, Page 276).
But Spielberg shows us in “Amistad” that Africans did in fact keep slaves, and sell them abroad. Slavery was a universal practice of primitive societies–Greeks, Romans and Vikings (who kept Irish slaves) among them.
But by the 19th Century, the civilized world had advanced beyond that primitive state–except in the backward American South. Where Spielberg’s “Amistad” succeeds most dramatically is illustrating the baseness of the vile lie upon which Southern slavery and later segregation and prejudice were based: that race has anything at all to do with superiority and inferiority.
Neither John Quincy Adams’ nor Anthony Hopkins’ eloquence could have prevented that bloody clash, but, like the film “Glory,” Spielberg’s “Amistad” should make vividly clear to our high schoolers why that war was so desperately and enduringly waged. In some respects, unto this day.
