David Waldstreicher: The Invention of the Fourth of July

David Waldstreicher, for Historynow.org (6-18-05):

[Mr. Waldstreicher is a Professor of History at Temple University]

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...

...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.