[It’s impossible to think about our ongoing 250th anniversary without engaging with the frustratingly Trumptastic American250 Commission, and I’ll write about such current events in my weekend post. But at the same time, I refuse to let that nonsense overshadow the complex and crucial histories themselves, so this week I’ll first AmericanStudy a handful of them!]
On why a shift in commemorated dates matters, and moreover what it helps us better remember.
As part of a July 2022 blog series on 4th of July contexts, I dedicated a post to the letters between John and Abigail Adams (a wonderful historic source and a very teachable text to boot, and one largely digitized by my good friends at the Massachusetts Historical Society). As I trace at length in that post, John had a vision of future independence celebrations that was both strikingly accurate (right down to the fireworks) and yet off by two days, as he argued that “the Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epoch, in the History of America.” Check out the rest of that first hyperlinked post above for more, and then come on back for further thoughts on this shift in dates.
Welcome back! Adams nominated July 2nd for the future commemorations because that was the date when the Second Continental Congress delegates voted to approve the Declaration of Independence; but the document was both published/printed and read aloud for the first time on July 4th, and obviously that has become the date on which we celebrate Independence Day. In some ways this might seem like a false or at least unnecessary dichotomy, and I am always interested in adding to our collective memories rather than seeing them as competitive. But I would also argue that there’s an important reason why it’s right for the 4th to be the main focus: the events of the 2nd reflect the role of the 56 individual delegates who signed the Declaration, while those of the 4th embody the document’s more collective and communal sides. As I’ve noted elsewhere in this week’s series, those 56 signers were genuinely risking their lives and freedom, and I’m not trying to downplay their individual choices and efforts in any way; but the Declaration was and is a fully communal document, and the 4th is the moment when it became so.
Or rather, it was the start of a multi-day such moment. While the Declaration was indeed first read aloud on July 4th, that was a singular and apparently off-the-cuff event in Philadelphia; the first formal public readings were a trio scheduled for noon on July 8th (another in Philly, one in Easton, PA, and one in Trenton, NJ). The following day, July 9th, George Washington had it read aloud to his Continental Army troops in New York City, leading to the famous tearing down of a King George statue in the city on that same day. There would be many more such public readings around the country and across the globe over the next days and weeks and months, and I would argue that it was this body of public readings that truly gave the Declaration its identity as well as its effects. That is, compared to the U.S. Constitution which is entirely a written document, the Declaration was at least a mixture, a text written not only to be read on paper (although certainly that) but also to be read aloud, to be performed and heard. While it wasn’t and isn’t a speech like Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?,” I think it can be put in conversation with such oratorical texts, and July 4th offers a historical window into those performed and public layers of the Declaration.
Last 250th anniversary post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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