During the Early Republic, Fourth-of-July festivities reflected to a great extent the work of private associations.

How American Universities 

Assassinated the Fourth of July

Posted by: Robert Paquette

Congress passed legislation making Independence Day a federal holiday in 1870. Annual commemorations in towns and municipalities across the country began, however, long before. During the Early Republic, Fourth-of-July festivities reflected to a great extent the work of private associations. Bells pealed from the churches; cannons discharged from forts and ships; militiamen escorted honored guests; clergy prepared special prayers; inhabitants gathered in the public square to hear stirring oratory. Participants had a sense of themselves as a special people, blessed by divine providence with a first-of-its-kind government in which prospering freemen under the law governed themselves. Anyone who has studied the long train of toasts published in newspapers in the aftermath of these ceremonies could not fail to notice the frequency with which the idea of “liberty” dropped from the lips before the glass was hoisted. By the standard of the world in 1776, as the founding generation fully understood, citizens of the great experiment in republican government stood in proud contrast to the abject servility of the subjects who populated monarchies, empires, and despotisms everywhere else.

“American exceptionalism” would not become the whipping-bench of the professoriate until the last decades of the twentieth century, yet Americans from the first Independence Day onward, without the term in their lexicon, had a sense, somewhat mystical, but nonetheless deeply ingrained, of what might be called an orthodoxy, that their system of government exemplified by design a standard of moral rectitude that would not only bring peace and prosperity to themselves but serve as a liberating beacon light for oppressed people around the world. In Federalist #1, Alexander Hamilton tapped out in condensed form perhaps better than anyone else a message of destiny: “It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.” By “accident,” Hamilton meant monarchy, the accident of genealogy in the rule of monarchs; by “force,” he meant Caesarism, the triumph of the strong man on the white horse who achieves concentrated power by promising to remedy the people’s miseries if only they will surrender to him their liberty.

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