|
|
 |
 |
|
The Invention of the Fourth of July
by David Waldstreicher
Professor of History, Temple University
|
|
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
| The Phoenix and the Rose Engaged by the Enemy's Fire Ships on the 16th August, 1776 (GLC 03008) |
Declaration of Independence. Broadside. Charleston, S.C., 1776 (GLC 00959) |
|
The Fourth of July, or Independence Day, as it has come
to be known, is perhaps the most and the least American
of holidays. It is the most American because it marks
the beginning of the nation, because it rapidly became
an occasion for expressing what America is all about,
and because it is locally and voluntarily observed. It
is the least American because it was created mostly out
of English material.
Beginning in the sixteenth century, at times of great
controversy over matters of church and state, people in
the British Isles began to use official and unofficial
anniversaries in order to make political statements. Celebrating
– or refusing to celebrate – the monarch could
be controversial when questions of dynastic succession
or royal or parliamentary policy were at stake. Protestants
attacked traditional Roman Catholic saints’ days;
kings and archbishops of the Church of England invented
new holidays like the King’s Birthday to cement
the alliance between the monarchy and the Church of England
and in the process helped create an English, and later
a British, identity. “Red- letter days,” as
they were known because they appeared in red ink in printed
almanacs, served as a flexible calendar for what historians
call popular politics – the political expressions
and practices of ordinary people, sometimes mobilized
by officials and organized dissenters. Whether bells were
rung, songs sung, sermons given, or the king toasted --
and how these actions were carried out -- could make a
great deal of difference to people who were listening
for political meanings. From fasts to feasts and from
birthdays to funerals, all kinds of life events were marked
by this popular, celebratory politics.
British colonizers of North America brought the celebrations,
and the politics, with them. By the eighteenth century
they began to participate fully in these traditions. In
doing so they expressed their very real membership in
the British Empire, and, often at the same time, they
fought more local battles. By the mid-1760s, when the
controversies over the regulation of the empire began
to heat up, festivals served as the perfect way to peacefully
protest while also spreading the word beyond colonial
seaports. Reports of parades and dinners for the repeal
of the Stamp Act, for example, were reprinted in newspapers,
spreading the modes and the logic of loyal resistance.
The greater the numbers turning out for such celebrations,
the more the protest movement could claim to represent
the people, not just the merchants and tradesmen who would
feel the new taxes first. These sometimes daring protests
seemed less so when they used traditional rituals, a move
that reinforced the patriots’ argument that the
protesters were only claiming the traditional rights of
Englishmen.
In July 1776, American rebels staged celebrations of independence
that were at once spontaneous and at the same time --
and in a strikingly modern sense -- media events. Independence
had already been in the air for at least a year, and the
Continental Congress had already declared two national
fast days, July 20, 1775, and May 17, 1776. Yet on forwarding
the printed Declaration of Independence to the states,
Congress did not recommend fasting, mourning, bell ringing,
or any other observance. Congress would not order the
nation to celebrate its own birth. The new nation could
not actually exist until the people had celebrated its
existence and the proof had appeared in print, but in
fact many colonists did devise celebrations to mark the
event.
The Declaration had thrust all blame onto the king, and
its public proclamation set off a public, symbolic murder,
and funeral, for the king – an inversion of a King’s
Birthday celebration. People in New York City tore down
the equestrian statue of George III and hacked it to pieces.
(It is said that metal bits of it were later used to make
bullets.) In other places the monarch’s picture
and royal arms were ceremoniously burned. In Huntington,
Long Island, people took down the old liberty pole and
used the material to fashion an effigy. This mock king
sported a wooden broadsword and was described in a newspaper
as having a blackened face “like Dunmore’s
Virginia regiment” (the slaves who had been invited
by the governor of Virginia to help put down the rebellion)
and feathers, “like Carleton and Johnson’s
savages” (the king’s Iroquois allies in New
York). Fully identified with his African and Indian allies,
wrapped in the Union Jack, the king was hung, exploded,
and burnt. In Savannah, George III was “interred
before the Court House.” The press descriptions
made sure to mention the ringing of bells and the bonfires
– the two most important aspects of traditional
King’s Birthday celebrations. These printed descriptions
inspired new celebrations and stressed the loud and visible
support of the people for the end of monarchy and the
beginning of American independence under new forms of
government. The celebrations and descriptions they inspired
made it seem possible that the thirteen North American
colonies, which until that time had had more connections
with England than with one another, might unite to form
a new nation.
During the difficult years of the Revolutionary War, patriots
began to celebrate the anniversary of American independence
on July 4th and also marked battle victories, and their
anniversaries, in similar fashion. These patriots focused
on what unified them and on a glorious national future
that would follow from their victories, rather than on
the British past that they had once actively remembered
at such occasions but which they had now left behind.
The need of the revolutionary movement to simultaneously
practice politics and create national unity only raised
the stakes of celebrating national holidays. The trend
in the early republic would be for July Fourth, and other
celebrations modeled on the Fourth, to spread nationalism
and at the same time, to provide venues for divisive political
expression. In this way, Americans learned to be American
and to practice partisanship without any sense of contradiction.
Just as they blamed the British while claiming and using
British traditions, they used the Fourth of July to praise
and criticize their governments and each other, in the
process struggling over who, and what, was truly American.
In 1787 and 1788, proponents of the new federal Constitution
staged “spontaneous” celebrations of ratification
in the various states, not only to express their relief,
but also to attack their opponents and to try to convince
doubters that the acceptance of the new national charter
by all the states was inevitable. During the 1790s, when
disputes over foreign affairs and the role of public opinion
between elections led Federalists and Democratic Republicans
began to coalesce into informal national political parties,
these partisans began to hold separate Fourth of July
celebrations in larger towns. They also used the Fourth
and its now more fully developed repertoire of parades,
sermons, toasts, and newspaper reportage, as a model for
new celebrations with explicit political meanings. Federalists
began to celebrate Washington’s Birthday in order
to support Washington’s policies and confirm their
claims to embody the nation. For a time Democratic Republicans
marked anniversaries of the French Revolution, which they
felt expressed the more democratic version of politics
they sought to turn into American tradition. After 1800
they also celebrated March 4th, the anniversary of Thomas
Jefferson’s election to the presidency, as an alternative
to what they called the “monarchical” tradition
of President Washington’s Birthday. Such celebrations
helped Americans put into practice a two-party system,
which few justified on its own terms but which, along
with the newspapers that were increasingly subsidized
by parties, provided an orderly meeting ground for an
unwieldy federal electoral politics and a tradition of
popular rituals.
July Fourth and its alternatives enabled Americans to
preserve a paradox: a revolutionary tradition. While these
nationalist political celebrations naturally came to have
a conservative basis after the Revolutionary Era, there
were others, such as abolitionists, who used the celebration
to criticize American policy. Shut out of the two-party
system by politicians who refused to address the issue
of slavery on a national level, abolitionists, too, invented
alternative festivals, like celebrations of the end of
the slave trade. When Frederick Douglass asked, “What
to the Slave to the Fourth of July?” and answered,
“The Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may
rejoice, I must mourn,” he did so at an alternative
Fifth of July celebration held in Rochester, New York,
in 1852. Douglass continued the American penchant for
not only celebrating but also inventing new holidays when
the political possibilities of the old ones seemed insufficient.
| For more information
about the celebrations of significant events
in early American history, visit our Additional
Resources Page |
|
|
|
|
|
