A day to mark emancipation

Last week, Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone and Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman jointly announced the Long Island Semiquincentennial Commission, marking 250 years since the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, that crystallized the American Revolution. The commission is overseeing what the local observance of these world-shaping events will reflect. County officials and local historians set the tone by convening the commission at Sagtikos Manor — now a museum in West Bay Shore — which British troops occupied as the colonies rebelled.

There’s plenty of local lore and many facts to note. Native Americans from the nations of the first peoples here fought on both sides, some with rebellious patriots and others with loyalists. Long Island was a hotbed of intrigue under that occupation; the Culper Spy Ring surreptitiously helped Gen. George Washington’ forces.

But first, on Monday, the newest national holiday, known as Juneteenth, honors a very different kind of liberation. Many adults outside Black communities didn’t know until the holiday was declared two years ago the significance of June 19, 1865 — the day slaves in Galveston, Texas, a western outpost of the Confederacy, got their freedom. That day came more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation declared all enslaved people in the Confederate States legally free and two months after the Civil War ended.

Long Island was, as always, its own cross-section of the American landscape, during a period now considered the second American Revolution. Relevant to Juneteenth, the cold economic calculus of the slave trade had a fleeting place on our region’s shores.

One sample: A ship called Wanderer was built in a Setauket shipyard in 1857 as a pleasure craft for Col. John Johnson, a wealthy sugar planter from New Orleans with a home in the Islips, according to the Three Village Historical Society. Johnson sold the famously fast vessel down South to one William Corrie who, the story goes, brought it back up to Port Jefferson where it was outfitted with water tanks for the slave trade. Suspicious Union officials stopped the ship but soon let it go.

On a voyage from Africa, Wanderer carried an estimated 600 chained people in horrific conditions, many of whom died along the way. By late 1858, the survivors were auctioned in Georgia, although the importation of slaves had been banned by an act of Congress 50 years earlier.

So the season's quick one-two of federal holidays, 15 days apart, provide important historical snapshots, both focusing on stories of war and freedom. The best way to appreciate the Spirit of 1776 and the Emancipation of 1865 in tandem is to see them as distinct and pivotal points on the American story line still unfolding after a quarter of a millennium.