What to Israel Potter is the Fourth of July?: Melville, Douglass, and the Agency of Words

What to Israel Potter is the Fourth of July? Melville, Douglass, and the Agency of Words ANNE BAKER North Carolina State University T he Fourth of July was problematic for many Americans from the moment it became the United States’s national holiday. It provoked rancorous debate over how the nation’s founding should be celebrated, over what exactly was being celebrated, and even over whether celebration was merited at all. Class was one key component of this strife. As W. Caleb McDaniel has pointed out, American elites frowned upon noisy, often drunken, working class celebrations of the Fourth, which exacerbated their fears that the nation’s experiment in democracy was doomed to failure as a result of its enfranchisement of what the upper classes saw as the lowest common denominator in American society. Upper-class Americans preferred to celebrate the holiday with speeches and dinners, which highlighted their sense of themselves as part of a decorous republican tradition dating back to Rome.1 Slavery, of course, was another key element in the controversy over Independence Day. As slavery itself became the subject of increasingly heated debate over the course of the decades leading up to the Civil War, the Fourth of July came to be seen by abolitionists as a day ideally suited to pointing out the nation’s failure to live up to its promise of liberty for all. By the 1850s, fiery anti-slavery speeches had become a Fourth of July tradition. In 1854, in what can be seen as the culmination of abolitionists’ rhetorical uses of the Fourth of July, William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution in Framingham, MA at an Independence Day celebration organized to protest the return of Anthony Burns, an escaped slave, to his southern master. At this same rally, Henry David Thoreau gave the speech known as “Slavery in C
2008 The Authors Journal compilation C
2008 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 W. Caleb McDaniel “The Fourth and the First: Abolitionist Holidays, Respectability, and Radical Interracial Reform,” American Quarterly 57 (March 2005): 129–51. Additional studies of the Fourth of July are Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997) and David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 9 A N N E B A K E R Massachusetts.”2 Meanwhile, some northern African-American communities, incensed by the hypocrisy of the holiday, refused to celebrate it at all, preferring instead to celebrate other anniversaries, such as New York state emancipation on July 5, Crispus Attucks’s death on March 5, the abolition of the slave trade on July 14, or West Indian emancipation on August 1 (McDaniel 137). It is in the context of these debates about the Fourth—which are also attempts to harness the emotional power of the nation’s anniversary to promote particular political agendas—that we can best understand Frederick Douglass’s 1852 Fourth of July oration and Herman Melville’s Israel Potter, originally subtitled A Fourth of July Story when it was first published, as a serial, in Putnam’s Magazine in 1854.3 Both texts are part of a larger Fourth of July conversation, and both use the holiday to expose the ways in which the nation fell short of the promises made at its founding. Douglass’s focus, obviously, is the injustice suffered by slaves held in bondage in the South, those “bleeding children of sorrow” whose “chains . . . are . . . rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them” on the Fourth. In Israel Potter, Melville suggests that the ideals of the Revolution have also failed to improve the lot of the white working class. As Carolyn Karcher suggests, the novel’s eponymous hero, who undergoes a series of unfortunate experiences that include incarceration, forced labor, dire poverty, and a lifetime of exile, “stands...