FOURTH OF JULY

When delegates to the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, they created not only the first modern nation but also the first modern national holiday. The first anniversary of independence was widely celebrated. Naval ships fired symbolic thirteen-gun salutes, and troops paraded and drilled. In Philadelphia, delegates to the Congress dined together while a band of captured Hessians provided music. Bonfires and fireworks lit the evening, and patriots illuminated their windows with candles and punished loyalists by breaking their unlit windows.

The Fourth of July provided a rallying point for revolutionary fervor throughout the war, and the holiday spread rapidly. The Continental Army celebrated by firing salutes, distributing extra rum, and pardoning prisoners. Town observances included bell ringing, thirteen-gun salutes, fireworks, military parades, oratory, dinners, and toasting.

John Adams's Prescription for Celebrating Independence

The Second Day of July 1776 will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

John Adams wrote this famous prescription for future celebrations of the American Independence Day upon the Continental Congress's adoption of the resolution for independence on 2 July 1776. Americans instead ended up celebrating the Fourth of July, when Congress approved the Declaration of Independence.

Source: John Adams to Abigail Adams, 3 July 1776, in Adams Family Correspondence, ed. L. H. Butterfield, the Adams Papers, series 2. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1963.

The Early Fourth

Once independence had been won, the purpose of the Fourth changed from renewing revolutionary ardor to constructing American nationalism. By the late eighteenth century, Fourth of July celebrations in towns across the United States contained four components: (1) the oration and the reading of the Declaration of Independence; (2) the military parade and drill; (3) private dinners and toasting; and (4) fireworks and illuminations. The oration was the centerpiece of the celebration and taught Americans the lessons of the Revolution. In America, orators proclaimed, power resided with the people; therefore, Americans must be both virtuous and vigilant to preserve their liberties. Speakers asserted that unity was essential to the nation's continued independence and declaimed on the genius of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in forging that union.

The Battle for the Fourth: 1788 to 1865

The advocates of the Constitution held the dubious honor of being the first to use the symbolic power of the Fourth to legitimize their own cause. Federalists suggested that the Constitution was the fulfillment of the Revolution by holding ratification processions on the Fourth of July in Philadelphia and other cities. The federal processions of 1788 deliberately presented an image of unanimity regarding the Constitution that belied the fierce fights over ratification. In Albany, New York, for example, anti-Federalists countered the Federalist procession with one of their own, which ended with a ritualistic burning of the Constitution and a violent brawl with the Federalists.

Although these fights subsided after ratification, the underlying divisions over the nature of the republic continued to flare up on Independence Day. By the mid-1790s, Federalists and Republicans were holding separate celebrations in Boston, New York, and other cities, with each party proclaiming itself the true heir to the Revolution. After the War of 1812, partisan ferocity declined with the Federalist Party, but politically divisive Fourths reemerged in the 1830s with rising sectionalism.

Other divisions penetrated the Fourth in the antebellum era as well, leading to fragmentation of the holiday. Many Americans did not participate in celebrations at all, either by choice or by exclusion. The public Fourth was preeminently a white male preserve. While men celebrated with oratory, guns, and alcohol, women spent the holiday visiting female friends and relatives. Urban workers often had to work on the Fourth, as did farmers, since the holiday fell during haying season in much of the nation. Urban Fourths became dominated by the carnivalesque celebrations of the working poor, which featured noise, indulgence, mayhem, and spectacle, all fueled by alcohol and gunpowder. Vendors sold food and alcohol, and gangs of rowdy youths drank, shot guns, brawled, and threw firecrackers at the respectable sorts who ventured out on city streets. In response, the urban middle class increasingly withdrew from public celebrations entirely in favor of private picnics.

African Americans were not particularly welcome at public celebrations, and faced harassment and even attack from whites on the Fourth. Some refused to observe the day at all in protest of its hypocrisy, while others organized separate exercises, at which they celebrated the progress already made toward abolition and worked for national emancipation. Black New Yorkers, for instance, annually celebrated their emancipation on the Fifth of July.

In the antebellum era a variety of reformers inaugurated celebrations of the Fourth to promote their own visions of the American nation. Newly formed journeymen's unions sponsored parades and dinners, at which they articulated an artisan republicanism that placed skilled workers at the heart of the nation. Radical workers and reformers rewrote the Declaration of Independence on the Fourth to justify their own struggles for liberation. Church groups, Sunday schools, temperance advocates, and abolitionists all linked their causes to the Revolution. Temperance advocates, for instance, called for freedom from the slavery of the bottle and claimed that the founding fathers had been teetotalers.

Frederick Douglass's 1852 Oration in Rochester, N.Y.

I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common . . . . This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.

This eloquent expression of African Americans' ambivalence toward the Fourth of July is excerpted from Frederick Douglass's Fourth of July address to the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society in 1852.

Source: Douglass, Frederick. "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" Oration, 4 July 1852, Rochester, New York; reprinted in Black Scholar 7 (July-August 1976): 33–34. (Emphasis in original.)

Abolitionists turned the holiday into a pointed attack on America's fall from the promise of 1776. Orators pointed out the incongruity of slavery in the land of liberty. In his famous Fourth of July address before the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society in 1852, Frederick Douglass denounced Independence Day as a cruel joke to African Americans and asserted that they could not celebrate it until they were free. On another Fourth, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison dramatically burned a copy of the Constitution to protest its acceptance of slavery.

As the most radical abolitionists rejected it, white southerners embraced the Constitution on the Fourth to defend their "peculiar institution." After secession, however, they returned to the Declaration of Independence to support their own revolution. Northerners in turn used the wartime Fourths to proclaim the necessity of unity and loyalty to the republic and its Constitution.

Reforming the Fourth

After the Civil War, the antebellum fragmentation returned, broken by occasional displays of unity such as those for the widely celebrated centennial. Philadelphia staged a huge civic procession on the eve of the holiday, and its exercises included the reading of an original manuscript of the Declaration of Independence by Virginian Richard Henry Lee, grandson and namesake of the author of the original resolution for independence. In Boston, a descendant of John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, addressed the centennial audience.

The centennial unity proved fleeting, however, and Americans continued to celebrate in groups so that they could shape American nationalism to their own purposes. Immigrants combined ethnic and American nationalism on the Fourth, asserting that the two were not incompatible. Similarly, Native Americans turned the holiday, which the government had imposed as an assimilative force, into a vehicle of cultural survival by performing prohibited dances and rituals. African Americans celebrated their freedom by recounting their contributions to American independence. They were elated when black boxer Jack Johnson defeated Jim Jeffries on 4 July 1910, but glee turned to terror as angry white mobs rampaged against them.

Urban workers, meanwhile, continued to celebrate independence in the pursuit of recreation and amusement, preferring to spend their rare holiday in pleasure rather than listening to oratory. The Fourth found them on steamboat and rail excursions and at minstrel shows, picnics, fireworks displays, circuses, baseball games, regattas, bicycle races, and rodeos.

One constant of the Fourth was fireworks. Americans had long proclaimed their patriotism noisily by expending massive amounts of gunpowder and shooting off firecrackers. In the early twentieth century a coalition of reformers, doctors, journalists, women's clubs, and educators, alarmed at the threat to persons and property, organized the Safe and Sane Fourth of July movement. Newspapers and the American Medical Association publicized the problem by publishing holiday casualty lists, and Sane Fourth Associations sought legislation restricting the sale of guns and fireworks. By 1911, dozens of cities had adopted such legislation. Reformers also created alternative celebrations, including pageants, sporting competitions, folk festivals, and processions, drawing heavily on immigrant cultural traditions. In 1914, Cleveland's Sane Fourth Committee organized a reception for the city's new citizens, and the next year more than a hundred towns celebrated the Fourth as National Americanization Day, with citizenship receptions, patriotic oratory, and pageantry.

In response to the pressure to demonstrate their patriotism during World War I, immigrant leaders, in conjunction with the Committee on Public Information, made the Fourth of July 1918 a massive demonstration of loyalty. A uniform national program of exercises included raising and saluting the flag, reading President Woodrow Wilson's holiday address and the Declaration of Independence, listening to patriotic oratory, welcoming new citizens, and singing "America."

The Contemporary Fourth

Naturalization ceremonies remain a common feature of the contemporary Fourth, with the most symbolic at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. The battle between reformers and noise enthusiasts still reverberates as well, as thousands of Americans cross state lines each June to purchase forbidden fireworks. Modern-day Americans celebrate the Fourth in a variety of ways. Most towns held bicentennial celebrations in 1976, and many still stage annual parades or festivals. Picnics, family reunions, and sporting events are popular holiday pastimes. Because of the significance of its date, the Fourth escaped the holiday exodus to Mondays, but it has become a popular time for summer vacations. At least one factor has remained constant. Fireworks still constitute the most universal and popular aspect of the Fourth, from elaborate municipal displays to the kids with sparklers and firecrackers.

See also: Frolics, Labor Day, Memorial Day, Parades, Patriotism and Leisure

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Appelbaum, Diana Karter. The Glorious Fourth: An American Holiday, an American History. New York: Facts On File, 1989.

Dennis, Matthew. Red, White, and Blue Letter Days: An American Calendar. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002.

Newman, Simon P. Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.

Smilor, Raymond W. "Creating a National Festival: The Campaign for a Safe and Sane Fourth, 1903–1916." Journal of American Culture 2 (Winter 1980): 611–622.

Sweet, Leonard I. "The Fourth of July and Black Americans in the Nineteenth Century: Northern Leadership Opinion within the Context of Black Experience." Journal of Negro History 61 (July 1976): 256–275.

Travers, Len. Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.

Waldstreicher, David. In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1997.

Ellen M. Litwicki