Contesting Commemoration

The 1876 Centennial, Independence Day, and the Reconstruction-Era South

Jack D. Noe

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780807176177
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

In Contesting Commemoration: The 1876 Centennial, Independence Day, and the Reconstruction-Era South, Jack Noe examines identity and nationalism in the post–Civil War South through the lens of commemorative activity, namely Independence Day celebrations and the Centennial of 1876. Both events presented opportunities for whites, Blacks, northerners, and southerners to reflect on their identity as Americans. The often colorful and engaging discourse surrounding these observances provides a fascinating portrait of this fractured moment in the development of American nationalism.

1

Antebellum and Wartime Fourths of July

“The Yankees have robbed us of too much already. We have no idea of giving up the national anniversary—not a bit of it. The Fourth of July is ours . . . Long live the Confederacy and huzza for the old Fourth of July.”1 This was the response of a Louisiana newspaper to the news that units of the Confederate army, in the first summer of the Civil War, intended to celebrate the “glorious old Fourth of July.”2 Independence Day marked the creation of the nation that these southerners were breaking away from yet would remain a highly politicized and contested commemoration. Indeed, the Fourth of July had provided a mirror for sectional, racial, and partisan divisions almost from the beginning.3 Independence Day was generally perceived as celebrating American nationalism, but that concept was understood differently from place to place, and in the words of historian Len Travers, “Nationalism may have seemed little more than localism writ large.”4 Any post-Revolutionary sense of unity in the new United States was short-lived: between the inaugurations of Washington and Jefferson, Americans developed two parallel imagined communities—two national identities—existing side by side, each denying the legitimacy of the other.5 The Jefferson-led Democratic-Republicans were, broadly, more democratic, pro-French, and anti-British, while the Federalists were pro-British, anti-French, and more hierarchical and traditional. By 1800, these two parties were holding separate Fourth of July commemorations in most towns and villages across the country, and these opposing rituals served as vehicles for creating partisan “bubbles.” Participants in alternative celebrations were decried as foreigners, “outside the circle of true Americanism,” delegitimizing them as opposition and as Americans.6 As Federalists conflated Republicans with the French and Republicans tied the Federalists with the British, the Fourth of July was turned into a day of “rancour, hatred and unfriendly contention.”7

There was a commonly adhered to routine for Independence Day rituals, and interestingly, there does not seem to be much evidence of regional or party-based variation in the form of the celebration. Most observances began with a parade or procession, which would lead to a church, courthouse, town square, or other locale, where the ceremonies would take place. This would involve prayers, orations, patriotic songs, and reading of the Declaration of Independence, followed by food and drink and, with the drinks, toasts. These could be numerous—one celebration in Georgia included the raising of eighty-seven toasts. The variation came in the content of the speeches and toasts, which served as summations of the political stance of the faction holding the celebration. An 1801 Republican gathering in Massachusetts saw toasts to the memory of George Washington politicized by criticism of Federalist proposals to erect an ostentatious tomb for the late president: “The memory of Washington—More durably embalmed in the affections of Republicans than in the most costly Mausoleum. Three cheers!”8 A Washington militia group responded with twelve cheers to this toast in 1814: “The Principles of Federalism: the political creed of the best and wisest men in our country—the safety and existence of the nation depend on their prevalence.”9

The political specificity of these events is further evidenced by notices such as this one from 1812: “The Republicans of the town of Windsor . . . will celebrate the anniversary of American Independence on the 4th of July ensuing at the meeting house in the West Parish . . . Refreshments will be provided by Rufus Root, Esq.”10 Meanwhile, toasts offered at this Federalist Fourth, characterizing the Jefferson and Madison administrations as “bad nurses,” highlight the partisan rhetoric employed at these celebrations: “To the United States: While rocked in the cradle of constitutional liberty, their infancy was healthy and vigorous and their early decrepitude is owing to bad nurses and physicians, not to original defect in the natural constitution.”11

Women did not offer toasts or make speeches but were nonetheless an integral part of these celebrations. One celebrant in South Carolina remarked in 1793 that “the fair were not excluded from our pleasure, but their firmness, their resolution, their patriotism were again an embellishment to their charm.”12 Len Travers makes the interesting point that to some extent the performative aspects of these commemorations were for women—that female presence at Fourth celebrations provided an affirmation both of the commemoration itself and the men’s performances.13 The announcement of a Mississippi Fourth celebration in 1838 corroborates that argument. Trumpeting “liberal and efficient measures to celebrate our National Birthday in a becoming manner,” a local newspaper made the point that festivities would “occur in the cool of the morning, and at an hour when the ladies would choose to appear.”14

The second decade of the nineteenth century found the Federalist Party in eclipse and the Democratic Republican Party in ascendance, resulting in a relatively tranquil “Era of Good Feelings” capped off by James Monroe’s unopposed election as president in 1820. This tranquility was reflected in Independence Day commemorations. In 1817, New Englander Isaiah Thomas noted in his diary that Federalists and Republicans celebrated the Fourth together in Worcester, Massachusetts, and that “every thing was done to the satisfaction of both parties: neither the oration or the Toasts gave the least offense.”15 Travers sees, at the same time, a diminishing of the Fourth’s relevance, with the day “losing its immediacy and power to persuade Americans of their homogeneity in the face of rapid geographic expansion, new national concerns, and budding sectional issues . . . the nationalist message of July 4 became increasingly diffused.”16 This decline in significance was slowed by one event: the nearly simultaneous deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on 4 July 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of independence. The impact of this double departure was considerable. But as a regional bias in memorial orations—favoring either Adams or Jefferson depending on the location of the eulogizer—hinted, commemorative unanimity did not outlive the Era of Good Feelings.17 Americans were gradually being driven apart over the issue of human slavery, and uses of the Fourth over the following three decades reflected that.

As white southerners used the Fourth to celebrate the slaveholding republic that they felt was intended by the founders, abolitionists and Black Americans saw the same day as an opportunity to promulgate a philosophy that undermined the bedrock of southern life and to demand liberation. Indeed, Frederick Douglass’s refusal to commemorate the Fourth was as powerful a statement as the affirmative parades, speeches, and picnics that were going on around him. In repudiating the Fourth, Douglass still marked it and used it: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity . . . There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.”18 Free Black Americans, as indicated by these remarks, tended to shun celebrations of Independence Day in the antebellum decades.19 Black groups often held alternative meetings on 5 July—as did an 1832 Ohio gathering, whose members were told: “We have met on this 5th of July, not under the mock pretense of celebrating the 4th of July, for that would betray us in a want of sound understanding . . . this day causes millions of our race to groan under the galling yoke of bondage.”20 In 1827, free Blacks in Fredericksburg, Virginia, did gather on the Fourth to commemorate the abolition of slavery in New York, which went into effect that day. On this occasion, the Declaration of Independence was read, toasts to liberty and equality were offered, and the account furnished to Freedom’s Journal encouraged Black engagement with the day: “The Fourth of July 1827 is a memorable epoch and ought ever to be dear to the minds of the present and succeeding descendants of the African race. Its return should be annually celebrated.”21 In 1848, Frederick Douglass’s Rochester, New York, paper reported on the “anniversary of American hypocrisy.” Commenting on the enthusiastic celebrations in that city, the paper noted that “theirs is a white liberty.”22 A few years later, the same paper used the Fourth to point out the shortfalls in American liberty by reporting that “they celebrated the Fourth of July at Columbus, Ga. by the sale of one hundred slaves! What a land of liberty this is!”23 Still, in their avoidance of the day, these dissenters testified to the power that commemorative rites exercised over people’s sense of identity and belonging, something that would be seen again in white southern reaction to the Centennial celebrations of 1876.

Rather than the Fourth, then, the antebellum period saw widespread Black celebration of Freedom Days that commemorated British emancipation of West Indian slaves on 1 August 1834. These African American celebrants, in Mitch Kachun’s words, “hoped to establish a commemorative tradition, to articulate their historical consciousness to the American public, and to leave a legacy for c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Antebellum and Wartime Fourths of July
• 2. Contesting the Southern Fourth of July
• 3. Humbug or Opportunity: Debating the Centennial
• 4. The Centennial and the Politics of Representation
• 5. White Southerners and African Americans at the 1876 Centennial
• 6. July Fourth 1876 in the South
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index