Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic

3. The Popular Politics of Independence Day

The Popular Politics of Independence Day BY THE DAWN OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY the annual commcmoration of George Washington's birthdayhad become a leading celebration in the early national festive calendar, but it was the Fourth of July that had developed into the nation's principal commemorative festival.1 The size, number, and popularity of annual celebrations of the anniversary of independence all soared during the decade following Washington's inauguration , and throughout the country Americans took part in grand and spirited celebrationsin which "Cannons were thundering, bells ringing in all quarters of the City, the shops generallyshut, [and] the streets alive with military parades & citizens driving to and fro."2 However, these displays of patriotic ardor and civic festivity could not conceal the fact that independence clay celebrations had been as politically divisive and as bitterly contested as commemoration of Washington and his birthday. During the earliest years of Washington's presidency the friends and supporters of his administrationhad attempted to fashion the Fourth into a patriotic civic rite of national unity under the enlightened administration of Cincinnatus. The Federalists felt quite justified in employing the Fourth in this manner: they reasoned that Washington'sgovernment had been duly elected under the new frame of government and was working in the best interests of the nation as a whole, and they expected "the People at large [to] have the Wisdom to support andsustain it."3 Many of the white male citizens who were increasingly dissatisfied with the policies of Washington's government began to see in these Independence Day festivals a disingenuous use of patriotism for partisan purposes . They reacted by contesting celebrations of the Fourth: sometimes opponents of the Federalists employed oppositional language, rites, and symbols on the margins of ostensibly pro-Federalist celebrations of the 3 Map 2. Communities that celebrated Independence Day, 1789-1801. Popular Politics of Independence Day 85 Fourth; on other occasions they held completely separate, alternativeIndependence Day rites; elsewhere they struggled against supporters of Washington and Adams for control of civic feasts and festivals in their communities .4 (See Map 2.) Ritual celebration of the anniversary ofAmerican independence played an important role in the construction of the Democratic Republican party, for it was part of the process by which the elite leaders of the nascent Democratic Republican party allied themselves with white farmers and urban craftsmen and workers, and formed the coalition that won control of the national government in the election of 1800. It was in their carefully constructed July Fourth festivals that these men proclaimed and promoted their alliance, and in a very real sense created some facets of the national Democratic Republican party. Throughout the 17905 they molded Independence Day into a thoroughly partisan event populated by the supporters of Jefferson, thereby transforming the Fourth into a kind of festive annual meeting of the Democratic Republican party. So complete was their victory that by the early nineteenth century many Federalists refused to participate in these festive rites, either staying at home or creating their own small-scale alternative celebrations. The conquest of the Fourth by the Democratic Republicans is not altogether surprising, given their commitment to the Declaration of Independence 's exalted rhetoric of liberty and equality. These were men who extolled the revolutionary overthrow of traditional conceptions of the relationship between king and subject, and who remained vehement in their defense of the rights of the citizen. But their victorious assertion of equality was predicated on the continuance of inequality within the discourse of domestic relations, and thus the republican assertion of the rights of white men was premised upon their continued rule over white women and black Americans. All this found expression in their Independence Day celebrations, for while the Fourth of July acclaimedthe revolution in white male rights and privileges, a corresponding celebration by or of female and African Americanwas seldom justified nor countenanced by the white men who created and populated these events. Among Democratic Republicans celebrations of Independence Day became festive occasions on which white women could do little more than applaud the pomp of their fathers, brothers, and sons, and from which free and enslaved black Americanswere generally excluded. The festive culture of the Fourth was vital in the development of early national political parties , with rites and rhetoric imbued with the Painite and Jeffersonian re- 86 Chapter 3 publicanism of 1776, but it reveals much of the exclusionary nature of an American...