From The Chicago Sun-Times…
Slaves denied even the chance to celebrate Fourth of July
By Anne Pastore
In America today, both black and white citizens gather to celebrate the Fourth of July, but that has not always been the case. Blacks in the antebellum North were sometimes pressured to stay away from celebrations, while in the South no one thought to include them. In his book Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic, Len Travers reports that in the overwhelmingly black South “no one was about to allow crowds of blacks to march anywhere.”
In the plantation country surrounding Charleston, S.C., in 1800, for example, the African-American population was 84 percent. As a minority, the whites never allowed slaves to celebrate the Fourth of July, Travers says, and they themselves “celebrated, as it were, while glancing over their shoulders. White Charlestonians could never quite dispel their fears of what their enslaved servants might do while their masters celebrated liberty.”
They had reason to be wary. Charleston suffered a devastating bout of fires, often at the homes of slaveholders, not a few of which occurred while the owners were out observing the Fourth. As fears spread, laws were passed forbidding gatherings of more than seven blacks. The use of fireworks, cigars and anything capable of starting a fire was outlawed.
Edward Hooker, a white visitor to South Carolina, found the Fourth of July experience unsettling: “The tables were served by negro slaves under the superintendence of the managers. What an incongruity! An Independence dinner for freedmen and slaves to wait on them. I couldn’t keep the thought out my mind, the whole time I was there feasting.” This “incongruity,” however, was not apparent to the party-goers, or to most white southerners.
As Travers writes, “Independence Day was for Americans only, and as far as white Charlestonians were concerned, blacks simply did not qualify.”
In northern cities, blacks were allowed to gather on the Fourth, Travers says, but when a hostile group of black youths took to the streets of Philadelphia on that day in 1804, whites retaliated the next year by forcing them out of the town square.
In his book Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840, Gary B. Nash says that in the years following this incident the exclusion of blacks from Independence Day celebrations became customary. “Black citizens could enter the public space in front of Independence Hall only at their peril.”
As a result of their exclusion from Independence Day celebrations, African Americans in the North began to create their own holidays. In The Roots of African-American Identity: Memory and History in Antebellum Free Communities, Elizabeth Rauh Bethel says one of the first opportunities for a celebration came on Jan. 1, 1808, when the United States formally abolished the slave trade. This was also the day in 1804 when Toussaint L’Ouverture declared Haitian Independence, a date that would be commemorated by American blacks well into the 1820s.
On March 5, 1858—one year to the day after the Dred Scott decision—Boston’s African-American community began the Commemorative Festival, which marked the anniversary of the death of Crispus Attucks in the Boston Massacre as well as the Supreme Court ruling.
In the years before the Civil War, African Americans’ attitudes toward Independence Day were perhaps best expressed by Frederick Douglass in his 1852 speech named after its most famous line, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
Douglass asked the crowd why they had invited him, a black man, to speak on this occasion celebrating freedom in a country where his people were not free.
“Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us,” he said. “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”
Anne Pastore is a writer for History News Network.
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