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

The 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