Independence Daze

**This segment comes from a previously aired episode. There may be some minor differences between audio and transcript.**

PETER: This is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts. I’m Peter Onuf, here with my friends Ed and Brian.

ED: Hi, Peter.

BRIAN: Hey, Peter.

PETER: And I want to read a little something to you all. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are–

ED: Now, as I’m sure a few of you have realized, Peter is reading from the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. And although it’s the paragraph we all remember, it wouldn’t have made headlines in 1776.

PAULINE MAIER: The most important part of the document was the last paragraph. That’s the part that– (SINGING) da da da da da da da– declared independence.

BRIAN: Today on BackStory, Independence Day. If the Declaration of Independence was adopted in June, how come we celebrate the 4th of July, anyway?

MALE SPEAKER: They took the Declaration to a local printer named John Dunlap. July 4, that’s the date he received it, the date he printed it.

PETER: Happy birthday, America. It’s the 4th of July. Today on BackStory. Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. A version of this episode was originally broadcast in 2008.

MALE SPEAKER: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory, with the American Backstory hosts.

BRIAN: Hey there. I’m Brian Balogh, 20th Century Guy, and I’m here with Ed Ayers–

ED: The 19th Century Guy.

BRIAN: –and Peter Onuf.

PETER: The 18th Century Guy.

BRIAN: And Peter, you’ve promised us the most riveting hour of public radio we have ever produced here at BackStory.

PETER: OK guys. Hold on to your horses. I am going to read the entire Declaration of Independence. No. It’s a long document. There’s a lot of great– No. I’m just joking. I wouldn’t do that.

ED: That sounds, actually, kind of interesting, now that you mention it.

PETER: Well, there is a lot of interesting stuff in the Declaration if you get past the early bits about all men are created equal.

BRIAN: What a second, that’s the only part I know, Peter.

PETER: Well, yeah. Where are you coming from? You know, you’ve got to read that right.

BRIAN: The 20th Century.

PETER: 20th Century. You’ve got to read it backwards.

BRIAN: You mean like Hebrew?

PETER: Yeah. Or Arabic. Let’s be open and universal.

BRIAN: Or like The White Album by the Beatles.

PETER: Yes. Put it on backwards. Seriously, are you ready to be serious?

BRIAN: I am. OK. Yes.

PETER: There is great stuff in the body of the Declaration about all the things that are getting Americans upset, about all the ways in which they’ve been betrayed, all their grievances against George. He dissolves and prorogues assemblies so that we can’t govern ourselves. Our provincial liberties are being destroyed. He moves capitals from here to there, shuts down courts. It’s George III, supposed to be our father. That’s what a sovereign is. He’s supposed to protect us. How do you feel protected when you’ve got your dad out there sending mercenaries to Boston to kill your countrymen?

BRIAN: OK. OK. Slow down, Peter. Mercenaries? Boston? Why don’t you give some of us who live in the 21st century a little more context. Set the scene for us.

PETER: Well, the theater of the war has shifted from Boston, where it all began at Lexington and Concord, and it’s 15 months later. It’s summer, 1776. The British are in New York, and they’re trying to stomp out this rebellion. Meanwhile, representatives from the different colonies, including Thomas Jefferson from Virginia, have gathered in Philadelphia. They have a Congress. They have to work something out because this war has been going on for 15 months. How are we going to win it?

BRIAN: Now, what was it that you were going on about a minute ago? Something about the Declaration, the sections of the Declaration that really mattered?

PETER: Well, Brian, I could try and explain, but better yet, I figured I’d let my friend Pauline Maier do the honors. She’s an historian up at MIT who published a wonderful book some years back called American Scripture, Making the Declaration of Independence. But when I sat down with her recently, she told me that that book came this close to never being written at all.

**This segment comes from a previously aired episode. There may be some minor differences between audio and transcript.**

PETER: Well, Brian, I could try and explain, but better yet, I figured I’d let my friend Pauline Maier do the honors. She’s an historian up at MIT who published a wonderful book some years back called American Scripture, Making the Declaration of Independence. But when I sat down with her recently, she told me that that book came this close to never being written at all.

PAULINE MAIER: When I was first asked to write a quote “modern history of the Declaration of Independence,” I turned it down. I said, that document is hyped out of all proportion to its real significance. I mean, obviously the Declaration of Independence was important, but what was its importance? We all think of it as important for the first couple phrases of the second paragraph, but that’s part of a later life of the document.

The most important part of the document in the summer of 1776 was the last paragraph. And people say, that last paragraph? That’s the part that– (SINGING) da da da da da da da– declared independence. And that was what was new. The statements of Enlightenment principles in the second paragraph that we all remember were not at all unique to the document. It appeared other places, most notably in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which had been drafted by George Mason and was adopted in June.

PETER: So the important parts of the Declaration at the time were all those grievances and complaints culminating in the Declaration, with the fanfare that you indicated. The first parts that we remember most are boilerplate potted social contract theory.

PAULINE MAIER: I think that’s pretty much the way it looked initially. The question is how attention turned from the last paragraph to the second paragraph. And that takes about 20 years. And I think the process of change starts in the 1790s, after we have the Constitution and we have what we remember as the Bill of Rights.

What is clear is that there is nothing in either the Constitution or the first 10 Amendments that repeats those assertions that are in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. There’s no statement about equality. There’s nothing about natural rights that God gave all men.

Now, as the children of Englishman, and we hadn’t quite stopped being the children of Englishmen in the 1790s, people felt the need of a document to cite to ground those beliefs. And the declaration was made to serve that function because it was the only national document that performed that function.

PETER: Pauline, one of the things I love about your book is that you ask us to think about the Declaration as a people’s declaration. The people identified with these principles, of course, they read them in different ways, and they explained them away in some cases. Is it still a people’s document in the same way it was during those decades of early American history when abolitionists and women at Seneca Falls in 1948–

PAULINE MAIER: –used it. Yeah. I think it is still a people’s document, in that people often justify whatever cause they’re defending, however flaky, in terms of the Declaration of Independence. I mean, people send me clippings all the time. I remember there was somebody off the coast of Maine who was having great trouble. He used to dig clams at a neighboring beach, and the town decided to make their beach residents only. And he argued he had the Constitution on his side because it said he had a right to pursue happiness. And his happiness was digging clams on the neighboring beach.

PETER: Happy as a clam. Right.

[LAUGHING]

PAULINE MAIER: Well, the problem is, of course, among other things, it wasn’t the Constitution. It wasn’t the Declaration of Independence, and it wasn’t at all clear that it referred to digging clams.

PETER: There seems to me a fundamental contradiction or tension. If you think about the Declaration in its own context, it makes a kind of a federal state that’s recognized by other powers of the Earth. That’s the whole point of the Declaration, is to get recognition. But as you were just saying about your clam digger, the Declaration really has a libertarian clause now, and a document that made the state is an anti-statist text.

PAULINE MAIER: That’s a point. That’s a good point.

PETER: So it suggests in a way that these founding texts or documents are subject to multiple infinite interpretations– of course, the Constitution is– and that every generation finds its own equilibrium, ways to read those text together.

PAULINE MAIER: You know, if it wasn’t true, they’d be dead. I mean, this is what Lincoln said when Stephen Douglas, let’s say, the Declaration was meant to declare independence. Historically, of course, Stephen Douglas was right. Morally, Abraham Lincoln was right. It is a protector of personal liberty, he said. If it wasn’t that, if it just declared independence, it’s history, in the bad sense. That is, it’s buried in the past. And he had that wonderful phrase, it’s like bandages left on the battlefield after the battle is over.

I mean, it’s really buried in the past. You had to find new meaning in it that was relevant to your life, to his life, to the lives of people of a later time, or it was just sort of some archival piece of for leftover junk from the past.

PETER: Well, thank you so much, Pauline, for helping us understand better the Declaration of Independence. It’s been great talking to you.

PAULINE MAIER: Thank you Peter. This was fun.

PETER: Pauline Maier is a professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She’s the author of, among many other things, American Scripture, Making the Declaration of Independence.

**This segment comes from a previously aired episode. There may be some minor differences between audio and transcript.**

ED: What’s so interesting is the way that history just refuses to stay still, that it meant, very clearly, one thing at that time, and today, it means almost exactly the opposite. It’s almost like we should have a radio show about this that would help figure these things out.

BRIAN: OK. But Peter, there’s something I still don’t understand. How did this become a national holiday? How do we go from this piece of paper to this celebration of great nationhood?

PETER: OK. There are a lot of reasons for this.

ED: There’s always a lot of reasons.

PETER: Just be patient, young man.

ED: Just Give us the reason. This is radio.

PETER: OK. I’ll tell you, the 4th of July became a really big deal in the 1790s when, believe it or not, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and other so-called Republicans were mobilizing against the Federalist administration of George Washington. Guess what. The Jeffersonian Republicans styled themselves the party of the people.

And this is where it all comes together. You know, the great holiday in the first years of American independence–

ED: The 4th of July–

PETER: No, no. Hold on to your pants or shoes or shorts–

ED: Pantaloons?

PETER: –your pantaloons and your britches. The great holiday is George Washington’s birthday. And George, as you might– think about it. There’s a really strange coincidence here. George III, he was the king. George Washington, first President, father of his country. Kings are fathers. Father Washington, happily, had no children of his own. We’re all his children, aren’t we?

But that’s the principal of patriarchy, monarchy, and Republicans like Jefferson say, no, no, no. What’s great about this country of ours is that we’re all equal. We’re all equal.

ED: Just like I wrote in the Declaration of Independence!

PETER: Yeah, I said that! And so when the Republicans say, down with Washington, up with Jefferson. But it’s not Jefferson, because Jefferson was channeling the American people in the Declaration of Independence.

ED: And so Peter, what you’re saying is the reason this holiday is built around this piece of paper is we were trying to replace King worship. So when I think about the symbolism of patriotism, when I think about nationalism, it’s something that today is associated with the right. But you’re saying that actually, the origins of the 4th of July, this great patriotic moment, comes from the Jeffersonian Republicans. And in today’s terms, these where the men of the people. These were people that we would say are on the left. Is that–

PETER: Yeah. It’s an oppositional impulse. It’s a self-consciously democratic impulse, with a small “d,” that is on behalf of the people against elites.

ED: The left had the flag. It had the symbols of nationalism back in Jefferson’s time.

BRIAN: And the big mistake the left of the 20th century made, started burning the flag, right?

ED: That’s right.

BRIAN: Those are the things that people still remember and still infuriates them.

ED: I could see a show, since we already filled the part of one just by talking about it.

PETER: Well, let’s celebrate. How about a parade?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BRIAN: We have to take a quick break. Grab a hot dog, parade around the room. Get yourself in the mood, because when we come back, we’re going to hear what you, the listeners, have to say about our nation’s birthday.

PETER: We’ll be back in a minute.

**This segment comes from a previously aired episode. There may be some minor differences between audio and transcript.**

PETER: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: And I’m Brain Balogh. So Peter, before the break, you were talking about how Jefferson and his fellow Republicans basically invented the 4th of July in 1790s. You were saying it was an alternative to the kind of king worship that took place on Washington’s birthday. Can you go a little farther? I mean, what happens down the road? What happens after Jefferson dies?

PETER: You know what I think is interesting is that the 4th of July becomes an opportunity for a peace-loving people to be militaristic.

ED: And yet I thought it was just like fireworks and hot dogs and mattress sales.

PETER: Fireworks, fireworks, fireworks. What does that suggest to you?

ED: Explosions?

PETER: Yeah. Where most people likely to encounter explosions?

ED: 4th of July?

[LAUGHTER]

Battles?

PETER: We just forget this. It’s in battles. Exactly right. It’s the experience that a lot of Americans had. One of the things that the 4th of July has always done is to provide an opportunity for veterans to put on the old tattered uniform and to be the center of attention for a day.

ED: And for the rest of us, it provides an opportunity to blow things up.

[EXPLOSIONS]

Fireworks have been a part of the 4th of July since the very beginning, and it’s safe to say that in general, the rule has been the bigger the better. That was especially true out West where there’s all kinds of space and you could make as big explosions as you wanted– at least that’s what James Heintze says. He’s the author the 4th of July Encyclopedia. Peter and I caught up with him just in time for the big day.

JAMES HEINTZE: There began, in 1876, explosions and rockets launched on tops of mountains.

PETER: On purpose.

JAMES HEINTZE: On purpose. They were planned. And in 1901, they had the largest explosion in the history of the 4th of July celebration up to that date occurring on top of Pike’s Peak when they built a giant fire up there and let loose at least 18 large barrels of oil and gasoline into the fire, which caused sparks and flame to go up hundreds of feet in the air.

PETER: So you could see that from miles around?

JAMES HEINTZE: Exactly. They could see it from Denver. Out West, the fireworks of choice, if they didn’t actually have fireworks, was dynamite.

ED: And we would just like to pause here and tell any young people who may be listening to the show we are not recommending exploding dynamite to celebrate our nation’s birth.

PETER: So tell us about the parade. Did somebody figure out– some brilliant genius figure out if you just go all the drunks to move in one direction and called it a parade and gave them some flags that it would maintain some order?

JAMES HEINTZE: No. Actually, the first parades were actually very well organized. The military, the militia, as well as the citizens would typically meet at a designated location, and they would march to the place where the ceremony was going to be held. The first, largest parade in the history of the country occurred in Philadelphia in 1788. That parade was more than a mile long, and the idea there was to get the people organized so they would ratify the Constitution.

ED: Now, you were talking about this being celebrated out West. How about down South after the Civil War was over, or even before the Civil War? Has the 4th of July been a southern tradition?

JAMES HEINTZE: It was an extremely southern tradition. In fact, Charleston, South Carolina had some of the most interesting 4th of July celebrations. The Civil War all but put an end to the 4th of July celebration in the South for many years to follow.

ED: So when did that change?

JAMES HEINTZE: That began to change at the Centennial. Richmond, for example– that was the capital of the Confederacy– in 1876, that was the first time they flew the American flag over the courthouse there. Yet the South was not totally healed until the Spanish American War, when the boys of the South and the North fought once again together on a battlefield.

ED: That’s interesting. It took the South almost 40 years to begin celebrating that holiday again.

JAMES HEINTZE: Exactly.

ED: Wow. So once again, the theme of the military and patriotism being sort of the engine that drives the 4th of July.

PETER: Jim, it’s been wonderful talking with you. Happy 4th of July to you.

JAMES HEINTZE: And thank you very much, and happy 4th to you. ED: James Heintze is the author of the brand new 4th of July Encyclopedia.

**This segment comes from a previously aired episode. There may be some minor differences between audio and transcript.**
Here are a few other authorities on the holiday. But these folks are a little closer to the action.

MALE SPEAKER: My name’s [INAUDIBLE]. I’m a real estate broker here in town. I’ve been involved in the 4th of July fireworks here for 15 years or so. We’re in Charlottesville, so of course it’s all about the Revolutionary War and Thomas Jefferson. And there’s a lot of history in this town, but it all points to that moment when it gets dark and stuff starts blowing up.

SUSAN CHRISTIAN (ON PHONE): I’m Susan Christian. I’m Director of the Mayor’s office of Special Events here in Houston, Texas, and I also co-produce our annual celebration for July 4th. It’s called “Chevy’s Freedom over Texas” with fireworks presented by Shell. And we have tanks and aircrafts, and all of the branches of the military are represented. We top off the evening with the nation’s largest land-based fireworks show. When we celebrate, we do that in a really big way here in Houston.

STEVE: I’m Steve. I work for the Corner Store garden center. And we sell fireworks during the 4th of July. I reckon the children would be the ones that like them. It’s almost Christmas to them. I reckon they just like to see the bright colors.

BRIAN: We’re going to go to the phones now, because we want to know what some of you think about the 4th of July.

PETER: We got a call from out there in dynamite country. It’s Kelly in Missoula, Montana. Kelly?

KELLY (ON PHONE): Hi.

PETER: Hey. Welcome to the show.

KELLY (ON PHONE): Thank you. Well, I’m working on a book about Laura Ingalls Wilder. And actually, the 4th of July figures importantly in her books, mostly in a later book, Little Town on the Prairie that takes place in De Smet, South Dakota. And it seemed like the focus was more on– they read the Declaration of Independence. They sang “My Country Tis of Thee.” And it was all about farmers being free and independent. And I was wondering if it meant that maybe the 4th of July meant something different to farmers in the West.

PETER: Tell us first of all what it meant for Laura Ingalls Wilder. What was it like in South Dakota?

KELLY (ON PHONE): Well, they’d just gotten out there, and it was basically a brand new town. And they had just kind of erected the false town fronts, and they had a dusty Main Street. And this was the first celebration that they’d had. This was the first gathering as a town, so they put something together. And it consisted of drinking a cup of lemonade and watching pony races and a couple of fireworks.

PETER: Ah, no, no. It’s the lemonade that rings untrue here.

BRIAN: Peter, tell us about the 4th of July in the early part–

PETER: This is in the 1870s?

KELLY (ON PHONE): Yes.

PETER: Oh, good guess. I think the nature of celebrations did change significantly over the previous 50 or 75 years or 100 years. And that business about drinking and lemonade might have sounded silly, but there was much more alcohol consumption earlier on. By the 1870s, you’ve got a lot of teetotallers, a lot of opposition to strong drink. The temperance movement is very powerful.

ED: Especially among women, and especially in the West.

PETER: Right

ED: What you’re seeing there is, in some ways, a 4th of July suitable for young women. But I’m getting behind some of those false storefronts, they were celebrating the country in another way.

PETER: You’d also get this notion of a civic celebration that you’re describing in which everybody’s doing the right thing. It’s not boisterous. It’s not partisan. People are not beating up on each other. And earlier 4th of July celebrations tended to be very contentious.

KELLY (ON PHONE): Oh, really?

PETER: Yeah. The idea of the Declaration and of Jefferson as its author was a partisan thing in the 1790s and early 1800s. That is, it was Jefferson against the Federalists, that is, the administration. And then later in the party system that emerged in the 1830s and ’40s, there were a lot of counter demonstrations of Democrats and Whigs having alternative celebrations, trying to win over popular favor and so forth.

ED: I’m guessing the 1970s was a time that people were looking, in the wake of this horrific Civil War and this just debilitating reconstruction and horrible depression, any symbol of national unity and pride was surely welcome.

BRIAN: And one of the questions I want to ask you guys is– we know that by the end of the 19th century, the nation is knit together more through railroads and the telegraph, and there is more of a sense of nation. So to what extent, in the early 19th century, was the 4th of July the only time that people thought about the entire country? How often did people out in the West or in small towns in the South, let’s say in the 1830s, 1840s, how often did they even think about the nation?

PETER: I think maybe more than you might think, Brian. I think the symbols of nationhood spread– eagle, the flag, and then patriotic holidays like the 4th or Washington’s birthday– that they would be important. Even if there’s no real nation there– I think that’s your point– nobody’s directing this thing. Nobody has a central directorate for propaganda.

BRIAN: Kelly, can you help us out on this question? You’ve described a scene that’s very local. I understand they’re celebrating the 4th of July. To what extent do you see any indication that they’re even aware of being part of a larger nation except through some of these symbols?

KELLY (ON PHONE): It’s kind of interesting, because with Laura Ingalls Wilder, she wrote the books, but her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, heavily edited and helped out. She was actually a more famous author in her day than Laura Ingalls Wilder. And she was a staunch freewheeling libertarian, and she got really radical in her later days. She lived in Danbury, Connecticut, but she would farm all her own vegetables. She didn’t have to spend any money in the economy and pay taxes. And she actually declined work earning a certain amount of money so she didn’t have to pay taxes.

It’s been said in this particular passage where Laura suddenly steps aside and has these internal musings where she talked about being free and independent, Americans are free, and baking, that that was where Rose Wilder Lane slipped in her libertarian rhetoric a little bit.

PETER: Independence was important to her, that it was her own independence. And that happens throughout American history, that Americans confuse their independence with the nation’s independence.

ED: It’s interesting that she had to move back East to become free, kind of a violation of the American story, isn’t it?

PETER: We want to thank you for calling, Kelly.

ED: Thank you, Kelly.

KELLY (ON PHONE): Yeah. Thank you.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

PETER: We got Greg from Charleston, West Virginia on the line. Greg, welcome.

GREG (ON PHONE): Hello there. How are y’all?

PETER: Welcome to BackStory.

GREG (ON PHONE): My question would be, what happened to the actual revolutionary spirit in America, and was there a real American Revolution?

PETER: I love that question. You know what John Adams said? He said– that would be the second President of the United States– he said one third of all Americans during the Revolution were patriots, one third were Loyalists, and the other third were fencesitters– or, as Tom Paine called them, sunshine patriots. Now, historians quarrel with those fractions. I’m inclined to think that the fence-sitters were even larger in number, and that dependent on which way the wind was blowing, otherwise known as the British army, people were inclined to take oaths of allegiance to whichever power was on the ground.

BRIAN: So Peter, what happened to those fence-sitters as the Revolution went on?

PETER: You guys could tell us about other wars, but everybody has a good war in retrospect. They’ve got good stories to tell. They’re not going to talk about how they ran home as soon as they can. Desertion, of course, was at very high rates. But there really was a forgiveness policy. Anybody who could make believe that he or she was a good patriot, you’re cool. And actually, people who were Loyalists were welcomed back into the fold.

BRIAN: And was celebrating Independence Day one of the ways they proved their loyalty, their citizenships?

PETER: Since they didn’t put their bodies on the line during the war itself, they put their bodies on the line walking down the street.

ED: So what you’re saying is that they invented revolutionary spirit after the fact?

PETER: Absolutely right, Ed. There was spirit, OK, but the myth was that everybody had it.

ED: Got it.

PETER: And lots of people had it for a few months early in the war. It’s a lot of fun thinking about killing people. Ah, that sounds terrible, but it’s sustaining it over the long haul that’s the tough thing.

BRIAN: Greg, I feel we’ve stifled your spirit.

GREG (ON PHONE): Not at all.

BRIAN: What does revolutionary spirit mean to you?

GREG (ON PHONE): The thing that surprises me is the fact that one group of capitalist overlords simply replaced another. And a lot of people don’t want to look at it that way. They don’t want to feel that that is the answer to an American Revolution. But in many ways, the British oligarchy was simply shunted aside, and a new oligarchy was established.

PETER: Greg, you know the only thing wrong with that proposition is in fact, it was the old provincial ruling elite who maintained power afterwards. So it’s not really a new displacing an old.

ED: So why was there a Revolution then, Peter?

PETER: There’s a great question, Ed. The answer simply is that you had a bunch of provincial elites, and they wanted to remake the empire in their own image.

ED: So there’s a lot to what Greg was saying.

BRIAN: That’s what Greg was saying.

PETER: Yeah. You know the “all men are created equal” that’s in the Declaration of Independence? What patriot leaders meant was that all Englishmen are created equal, particularly elite Englishman, and they didn’t like the second class treatment they were getting.

BRIAN: So Peter, how did they get at least a third of the people to support that vigorously?

PETER: Well, the word that you 20th century historians have for this is propaganda.

BRIAN: No. It’s actually false consciousness.

PETER: False consciousness. You name it.

BRIAN: But that’s too big a word to use on this show.

PETER: I think that’s a silly and dismissive way to put it.

ED: So take it back, Brian.

BRIAN: Yeah. I do take it back.

PETER: Well, I’m going to take back what I said, too. Can we take back this whole phone call?

BRIAN: Greg, you want to withdraw anything?

PETER: No. I would say this. It’s one of the hallmarks of the modern world that large numbers of people who don’t know each other can imagine themselves as being members of a common community.

BRIAN: Ah. And Peter, does the 4th of July reinforce that? Is that maybe what the 4th of July is all about?

PETER: Oh, I think civic rituals are very important to remind us that whether we like it or love it, and whether we quarrel with the founders or we celebrate their achievement, they’re all we got.

GREG (ON PHONE): Well, they’re an interesting group of people that developed an idea that was new enough to create an entire economic paradigm in the United States–

PETER: No question about it, Greg.

GREG (ON PHONE): –that there was not there originally. Now, that paradigm is what I consider not a revolutionary paradigm. It was a new, and in many ways, very modern concept. You steal land from Indians, and you pay off your veterans. It was a great process, and it went on for 40 years.

PETER: Well Greg, welcome to American politics. And I’ve got to say, I don’t think there is such a thing as a real revolutionary spirit. There never has been a real revolution, or the ones that are real are ones that lead to massive destruction of life and property. One of the great things about the American Revolution is that so few people were slaughtered compared to the French Revolution.

But this is supposed to be a happy discussion about–

ED: Hey, that’s pretty happy. So we got America cheap, is what you’re saying.

PETER: It doesn’t cost that much.

ED: And then we bought other big parts of it.

PETER: It’s a big country, and we love it. So Greg, thank you for being so provocative.

GREG (ON PHONE): Well, thanks a lot. I appreciate talking to you.

[MUSIC – “MY COUNTRY TIS OF THEE”]

BRIAN: It’s time to take another break. When we get back, we’ll hear more of your thoughts about the 4th of July. We’re also going to travel back in time to the 1850s and listen to one of the most eloquent speeches about independence since, well, independence.

ED: So give us a call and tell us what the 4th of July means to you. Our number is 888-257-8851. And if you prefer email, the address is BackStory@Virginia.edu.

[MUSIC – “MY COUNTRY TIS OF THEE”]

**This segment comes from a previously aired episode. There may be some minor differences between audio and transcript.**

PETER: We’ll be right back. Don’t even think about going away.

This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh. Today, we’re bringing you a special Independence Day episode of our show. Peter, do we have another caller?

PETER: We sure do, Brian. Now, I know this is supposed to be all about the US of A, but there is a foreigner in our midst. Her name is Pam, and she’s calling us from Saskatoon, Canada. Hello?

PAM (ON PHONE): Well actually, I live in Saskatoon. I’m a history professor at the University of Saskatchewan. But I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio.

PETER: So you’re one of us.

PAM (ON PHONE): Yeah, so I’m one of you.

BRIAN: That explains that accent, then.

PAM (ON PHONE): I’m an American citizen, and I’m a Canadian citizen. So I have a dual personality.

PETER: So 4th of July, do you celebrate the 4th of July until noon?

PAM (ON PHONE): Yeah, right. Exactly. And then we celebrate Canada Day, which is on July 1.

BRIAN: How do they celebrate the first?

PAM (ON PHONE): Well, it’s the same way, actually.

PETER: No.

BRIAN: Fireworks? Fireworks?

PAM (ON PHONE): And I don’t want to say they’re copying, because that’s a really bad–

BRIAN: Oh, that would be the wrong thing to say in Canada.

ED: And plus, it’s three days earlier, so they can’t be copying.

[LAUGHTER]

PAM (ON PHONE): No. It’s in honor of Canada Day and when Canada became a confederation in 1867 when we became a country.

PETER: Who’s the “we?” I’m sorry.

PAM (ON PHONE): Pardon me?

PETER: We? Oh, us.

PAM (ON PHONE): We. The US.

PETER: Right. OK.

PAM (ON PHONE): So they celebrate it with fireworks as well. And I’m not sure if they play the 1812 Overture.

ED: They eat hot dogs?

PAM (ON PHONE): They eat hot dogs and burgers.

BRIAN: So I have a question, guys. When did the 1812 Overture become the tradition for the 4th of July?

PAM (ON PHONE): Yeah. I was interested in that too, because I teach Russian history, and I thought, isn’t that interesting?

PETER: We’re going to ask you.

BRIAN: I think you’ve totally stumped the American Backstory hosts. So maybe the Canadian history gal can tell us.

PAM (ON PHONE): No. I really don’t know. And I tried to look into it a little bit online, and I couldn’t find that out. I mean, I know that it’s often connected with the Boston Pops as the first orchestra that started to play regularly, but I don’t know why they–

BRIAN: Oh, I know. My parents used to play in the National Symphony Orchestra, and they’d do this on the barge, and they’d have real cannons, and–

ED: Brian, how many times are you going to play this “my parents were in the National Symphony Orchestra” thing? I’m so tired.

BRIAN: We are hoping that some of our listeners will contact our website, backstoryradio.org, and answer this question for all four of us historians.

PETER: Well Pam, I hope you enjoyed your July 4.

PAM (ON PHONE): Thank you very much. Thanks for having me on. Take care. Bye bye.

ED: All right, music aficionados. This is your big chance to show us up. Drop in at backstoryradio.org and tell us when the 1812 Overture became the soundtrack to the 4th of July. The 76th correct answer will win you a very special limited addition recording, Brian Balough Sings the Greatest Hits of the National Symphony Orchestra.

BRIAN: Peter, you got another call for us?

PETER: I sure do, Brian. It’s Tim from Hicksville, New York. Welcome to BackStory, Tim.

TIM (ON PHONE): Thank you.

PETER: Tim, the 4th of July, what does it mean to you?

TIM (ON PHONE): Oh, it’s a bit of a conflict for me, actually. I’m a pastor in Hicksville, and I have a mainline denominational church there. And I struggle every 4th of July because there’s some people who really want to celebrate it as a Christian holiday and turn over the Sunday morning worship service to it. And it’s something makes me awful uncomfortable sometimes.

ED: So this is a problem for you because you feel like it excludes so many people, Tim?

TIM (ON PHONE): Yeah. And it’s also a theological problem for me because we have a couple of songs in our hymnal like America the Beautiful which are really praising America, not praising God.

PETER: Right. But that actually goes back in a big way to the 19th century, I think, to the time of the Second Great Awakening, the rise of Methodists, Baptists, and evangelicals throughout the country, and that is the idea that good Americans were Christians became pretty normal. The unusual generation is the founding generation, because those folks were not particularly religious in our sense of the word.

BRIAN: But Peter, I am confused, because we think about the 20th century as secularizing many holidays that in fact are Christian holidays or religious holidays.

PETER: Yeah, that’s a good point.

BRIAN: It’s just odd that it would become more Christian as time goes on.

PETER: That’s a great point, Brian, because the early celebration of the 4th of July was really associated with celebrating Thomas Jefferson’s role in channeling the American people in the Declaration. That’s the great sacred scripture of the day, and that’s not Christian.

BRIAN: So what kind of pressures do you face as a minister to incorporate this into the church service?

TIM (ON PHONE): Well, some of it is nostalgia, the way we always used to do it.

BRIAN: And how is that way? What stories do people tell? What do they tell you they used to do?

TIM (ON PHONE): Oh, well, I hear stories about to Sunday school, mostly, when people who are maybe raised in the Depression and World War II era remember celebrating Flag Day and 4th of July and all sorts of other holidays that just encouraged their sense of group awareness and gave them a sense that they were pretty safe and life was going to be OK in spite of the trouble that they were in.

BRIAN: But there’s not a religious element in that.

TIM (ON PHONE): But especially in the rural areas, it was kind of like you went to the one building in town that could hold a lot of people to do some of your civil religion.

BRIAN: And that was the church.

TIM (ON PHONE): Yeah. That was often the church.

BRIAN: Yeah. That’s a great point.

PETER: But it is possible to talk about a broad and inclusive patriotism that is not pro-war or anti-war.

TIM (ON PHONE): Well sure, and we have a couple of songs that sing things like “my country’s skies are bluer than the ocean, but other lands have beautiful places, too.” Unfortunately, those are not as popular as the real–

PETER: Well, there’s your mission, Tim.

BRIAN: Yeah. I’ve never actually invited a sermon before, but do you have a particular Independence Day sermon?

TIM (ON PHONE): No, because I always do sermons from scripture, and there’s nothing in scripture about America, and very little about patriotism.

PETER: Well, here’s a radical suggestion from a lapsed Christian. Wouldn’t the very notion of love, which is central to the Christian gospel, be a way to deal with this?

TIM (ON PHONE): Sure.

PETER: OK. Let’s work out this sermon, shall we?

[LAUGHTER]

TIM (ON PHONE): All right. I’ll expect it in the mail by–

PETER: All right. OK, Tim. It’s been great talking with you. And I know we haven’t solved your crisis at all, but it’s, I think, a moment, the 4th of July, for people to be thoughtful about what it means to be an American. And that’s something you can certainly ask them to do from the pulpit.

TIM (ON PHONE): Well, certainly we can.

BRIAN: Thanks so much. Thank you, Tim.

TIM (ON PHONE): Bye.

ED: Well, if you guys really are looking for a 4th of July sermon, I think I’ve got something here that fits the bill. It’s not, strictly speaking, a sermon, but rather a speech given on the occasion of the Fourth by Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and former slave, back in 1852. He delivered it up in Rochester, New York, where he lived at the time.

BRIAN: 1852. So that’s almost a decade before the beginning of the Civil War.

ED: Yeah, but tensions were already running high all over the country. The Fugitive Slave Act had just passed, which decreed that Northerners had to help return runaway slaves and could be drafted by local constables to be part of policies. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written as a result of that. So all over the country, people were really thinking about slavery, abolitionism, and the tensions in the United States.

PETER: So Ed, are you just going to talk about this speech all day, or can we actually hear a little of it?

ED: I thought you’d never ask, Peter. We’re going to do a little time travel now, and we have a special guide for the trip– David Blight, a historian up at Yale who’s written a whole book on the Douglass speech. And David is going to take us straight to the source, Rochester’s Corinthian Hall, July 5, 1852.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Friends of freedom, on this magnificent morning, the women of the Rochester Ladies anti-Slavery Society welcome you here to commemorate the glorious Declaration of 1776.

DAVID BLIGHT: Douglass gave this speech on the 5th of July, which had actually become a tradition in the state of New York, in particular, in the African American community– a kind of subtle protest against the 4th of July at the same time black communities had been embracing it for years.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Frederick Douglass.

[APPLAUSE]

DAVID BLIGHT: The hall held nearly 600 people. It was full. It was a speech that Douglass himself said he worked as hard on as any speech he ever crafted, and it certainly shows.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation from which I escaped is considerable, and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former are by no means slight.

DAVID BLIGHT: The structure is brilliant. It’s, in many ways, an oratorical symphony in three movements. The first movement, in a way, is the first, oh, several pages of the speech where he welcomes the audience, he honors the founding fathers, he calls the 4th of July the American Passover. He directly quotes from the Declaration of Independence. He calls the Declaration of Independence the ring bolt and the sheet anchor of American liberty. He honors the founding.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: The signers of the Declaration of Independence where brave men. They were great men, too– great enough to give frame to a great age.

DAVID BLIGHT: And it’s as though he’s putting his audience pleasantly at ease with the celebration of American independence. And then, about a third of the way into the speech, the hammer comes down.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: Fellow citizens, pardon me. Allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I or those I represent to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom–

DAVID BLIGHT: Becomes yours, not mine. And he begins to rain the pronoun “you,” “you,” “you” down onto his audience.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. This 4th of July is yours, not mine. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, wherein human mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, fellow citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today?

DAVID BLIGHT: It’s as though he has suddenly strapped his audience in their seats and won’t let them move. And he rains down this litany of American hypocrisy about slavery.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: I do not hesitate to declare with all my soul that America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future! Therefore, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible, which I disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question, and to denounce with all the emphasis I can command everything that serves to perpetuate slavery, the great sin and shame of America!

DAVID BLIGHT: That spring of ’52, early summer, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published to enormous readership. At the time Douglass gives this speech in Rochester, it’s possible that half that audience already had a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. So this is an audience conditioned to some extent for this kind of critique of American hypocrisy. But I would also suggest that that audience, Douglass’ own neighbors and friends, came to that speech that day not quite probably expecting how the hail was gonna rain down on them.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer a day that reveals to him more than all of the days in the year the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration’s a sham.

DAVID BLIGHT: But it’s his point. They even invited black people here to sing for you, but we’re not going to sing for you. We’re going to make you hurt.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: Your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery. Your prayers, hymns, sermons, and thanksgivings are to him mere bombastic fraud and hypocrisy, a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

DAVID BLIGHT: Imagine being on the other end of that and thinking you were on his side when you walked in. But then, about 2/3 of the way through the speech, this portion comes to an end with a horrible image. It’s right out of Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan sermons of the 18th century.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: Be warned! A horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation’s bosom. The venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic. For the love of God, tear away and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of 20 millions crush and destroy it forever!

DAVID BLIGHT: And after that image, there’s a transition. Probably he paused, and this hailstorm of humiliation stops.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: Notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of this nation, I do not despair of this country.

DAVID BLIGHT: It’s as though he picks them up and kind of wipes their brows off, and he says the principles of the Declaration of Independence are still there. They’re like precious ore. They’re forever. They’re natural rights.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: I’m drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence and the great principles it contains.

DAVID BLIGHT: And he says it’s still not too late. America is young. It’s youthful. It’s malleable. It is still possible to save the country from itself. And then he ends with a poem that actually, I think, became a hymn. It was written by William Lloyd Garrison called “God Speed the Year of Jubilee.”

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: “God speed the year of Jubilee, the wide world o’er. God speed the day when human blood shall cease to flow. God speed the hour, the glorious hour when none on Earth shall exercise a lordly power.

DAVID BLIGHT: So he ends on this note of the hopeful coming day of emancipation somehow, someday. But what that audience had experienced over probably an hour and a half is Douglass as an ironist at his best– Douglass the kind of Jeremiahatic prophet at his best. It’s a speech that I think, frankly, is the rhetorical masterpiece of American abolitionism. And no one, frankly, used, appropriated the principles of the Declaration of Independence quite so forcefully as did abolitionists, particularly black abolitionists. The natural rights tradition, liberty, equality, the right of revolution, without those principles– and I think this is implicitly what Douglass is actually arguing in the 4th of July speech– without those principles at the founding, where would blacks have ever looked for a future in America? They’d have had no future in America.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ED: That was David Blight in what I’d have to say is a pretty remarkable construction by our producers. David directs the Gilder-Lehrman’s Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, and he’s the author of Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, Keeping Faith in Jubilee. The speech was read by Fred Morsell. You can listen to it all on our website, backstoryradio.org.

**This segment comes from a previously aired episode. There may be some minor differences between audio and transcript.**
BRIAN: You know, I got to say, guys, David talking about the way this speech was used to give new meaning to the Declaration of Independence just blew me away.

PETER: It’s very, very powerful.

ED: What’s interesting is Frederick Douglass was not the last African American to ring those themes. Matter of fact, from the very first moments in which the Union Army went into the South in the Civil War and they met African Americans, even people without the education and exposure to the world that Frederick Douglass had enjoyed, knew how to speak that American vernacular. They would often turn to the words of the Declaration of Independence and the Founding Fathers for their claim on what it meant to be Americans. And some of the most beautiful documents I’ve ever read are the petitions from the freed people of the South to the Union parties and to the Republican Parties and to the United States Army saying, all we ask is for our share of our patrimony to be full Americans.

[MUSIC – “AMERICA, THE BEAUTIFUL”]

ED: That’s all the time we have for this episode of BackStory, but we hope you’ll continue the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and our website, backstoryradio.org.

BRIAN: Today’s episode of BackStory was produced by Tony Field, Rachel Quimby, and Catherine Moore.

PETER: Jamal Millner is our Technical Director. BackStory’s Executive Producer is Andrew Wyndham.

BRIAN: Major support for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. Additional funding is provided by Weinstein Properties, by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment, and by History Channel, history made every day.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Peter Onuf is professor of history emeritus at UVA, and senior research fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is President and professor of history at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

[MUSIC – “AMERICA, THE BEAUTIFUL”]

**This transcript comes from a previously aired episode. There may be some minor differences between audio and transcript.**

PETER: This is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts. I’m Peter Onuf, here with my friends Ed and Brian.

ED: Hi, Peter.

BRIAN: Hey, Peter.

PETER: And I want to read a little something to you all. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are–

ED: Now, as I’m sure a few of you have realized, Peter is reading from the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. And although it’s the paragraph we all remember, it wouldn’t have made headlines in 1776.

PAULINE MAIER: The most important part of the document was the last paragraph. That’s the part that– (SINGING) da da da da da da da– declared independence.

BRIAN: Today on BackStory, Independence Day. If the Declaration of Independence was adopted in June, how come we celebrate the 4th of July, anyway?

MALE SPEAKER: They took the Declaration to a local printer named John Dunlap. July 4, that’s the date he received it, the date he printed it.

PETER: Happy birthday, America. It’s the 4th of July. Today on BackStory. Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. A version of this episode was originally broadcast in 2008.

MALE SPEAKER: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory, with the American Backstory hosts.

BRIAN: Hey there. I’m Brian Balogh, 20th Century Guy, and I’m here with Ed Ayers–

ED: The 19th Century Guy.

BRIAN: –and Peter Onuf.

PETER: The 18th Century Guy.

BRIAN: And Peter, you’ve promised us the most riveting hour of public radio we have ever produced here at BackStory.

PETER: OK guys. Hold on to your horses. I am going to read the entire Declaration of Independence. No. It’s a long document. There’s a lot of great– No. I’m just joking. I wouldn’t do that.

ED: That sounds, actually, kind of interesting, now that you mention it.

PETER: Well, there is a lot of interesting stuff in the Declaration if you get past the early bits about all men are created equal.

BRIAN: What a second, that’s the only part I know, Peter.

PETER: Well, yeah. Where are you coming from? You know, you’ve got to read that right.

BRIAN: The 20th Century.

PETER: 20th Century. You’ve got to read it backwards.

BRIAN: You mean like Hebrew?

PETER: Yeah. Or Arabic. Let’s be open and universal.

BRIAN: Or like The White Album by the Beatles.

PETER: Yes. Put it on backwards. Seriously, are you ready to be serious?

BRIAN: I am. OK. Yes.

PETER: There is great stuff in the body of the Declaration about all the things that are getting Americans upset, about all the ways in which they’ve been betrayed, all their grievances against George. He dissolves and prorogues assemblies so that we can’t govern ourselves. Our provincial liberties are being destroyed. He moves capitals from here to there, shuts down courts. It’s George III, supposed to be our father. That’s what a sovereign is. He’s supposed to protect us. How do you feel protected when you’ve got your dad out there sending mercenaries to Boston to kill your countrymen?

BRIAN: OK. OK. Slow down, Peter. Mercenaries? Boston? Why don’t you give some of us who live in the 21st century a little more context. Set the scene for us.

PETER: Well, the theater of the war has shifted from Boston, where it all began at Lexington and Concord, and it’s 15 months later. It’s summer, 1776. The British are in New York, and they’re trying to stomp out this rebellion. Meanwhile, representatives from the different colonies, including Thomas Jefferson from Virginia, have gathered in Philadelphia. They have a Congress. They have to work something out because this war has been going on for 15 months. How are we going to win it?

BRIAN: Now, what was it that you were going on about a minute ago? Something about the Declaration, the sections of the Declaration that really mattered?

PETER: Well, Brian, I could try and explain, but better yet, I figured I’d let my friend Pauline Maier do the honors. She’s an historian up at MIT who published a wonderful book some years back called American Scripture, Making the Declaration of Independence. But when I sat down with her recently, she told me that that book came this close to never being written at all.

PAULINE MAIER: When I was first asked to write a quote “modern history of the Declaration of Independence,” I turned it down. I said, that document is hyped out of all proportion to its real significance. I mean, obviously the Declaration of Independence was important, but what was its importance? We all think of it as important for the first couple phrases of the second paragraph, but that’s part of a later life of the document.

The most important part of the document in the summer of 1776 was the last paragraph. And people say, that last paragraph? That’s the part that– (SINGING) da da da da da da da– declared independence. And that was what was new. The statements of Enlightenment principles in the second paragraph that we all remember were not at all unique to the document. It appeared other places, most notably in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which had been drafted by George Mason and was adopted in June.

PETER: So the important parts of the Declaration at the time were all those grievances and complaints culminating in the Declaration, with the fanfare that you indicated. The first parts that we remember most are boilerplate potted social contract theory.

PAULINE MAIER: I think that’s pretty much the way it looked initially. The question is how attention turned from the last paragraph to the second paragraph. And that takes about 20 years. And I think the process of change starts in the 1790s, after we have the Constitution and we have what we remember as the Bill of Rights.

What is clear is that there is nothing in either the Constitution or the first 10 Amendments that repeats those assertions that are in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. There’s no statement about equality. There’s nothing about natural rights that God gave all men.

Now, as the children of Englishman, and we hadn’t quite stopped being the children of Englishmen in the 1790s, people felt the need of a document to cite to ground those beliefs. And the declaration was made to serve that function because it was the only national document that performed that function.

PETER: Pauline, one of the things I love about your book is that you ask us to think about the Declaration as a people’s declaration. The people identified with these principles, of course, they read them in different ways, and they explained them away in some cases. Is it still a people’s document in the same way it was during those decades of early American history when abolitionists and women at Seneca Falls in 1948–

PAULINE MAIER: –used it. Yeah. I think it is still a people’s document, in that people often justify whatever cause they’re defending, however flaky, in terms of the Declaration of Independence. I mean, people send me clippings all the time. I remember there was somebody off the coast of Maine who was having great trouble. He used to dig clams at a neighboring beach, and the town decided to make their beach residents only. And he argued he had the Constitution on his side because it said he had a right to pursue happiness. And his happiness was digging clams on the neighboring beach.

PETER: Happy as a clam. Right.

[LAUGHING]

PAULINE MAIER: Well, the problem is, of course, among other things, it wasn’t the Constitution. It wasn’t the Declaration of Independence, and it wasn’t at all clear that it referred to digging clams.

PETER: There seems to me a fundamental contradiction or tension. If you think about the Declaration in its own context, it makes a kind of a federal state that’s recognized by other powers of the Earth. That’s the whole point of the Declaration, is to get recognition. But as you were just saying about your clam digger, the Declaration really has a libertarian clause now, and a document that made the state is an anti-statist text.

PAULINE MAIER: That’s a point. That’s a good point.

PETER: So it suggests in a way that these founding texts or documents are subject to multiple infinite interpretations– of course, the Constitution is– and that every generation finds its own equilibrium, ways to read those text together.

PAULINE MAIER: You know, if it wasn’t true, they’d be dead. I mean, this is what Lincoln said when Stephen Douglas, let’s say, the Declaration was meant to declare independence. Historically, of course, Stephen Douglas was right. Morally, Abraham Lincoln was right. It is a protector of personal liberty, he said. If it wasn’t that, if it just declared independence, it’s history, in the bad sense. That is, it’s buried in the past. And he had that wonderful phrase, it’s like bandages left on the battlefield after the battle is over.

I mean, it’s really buried in the past. You had to find new meaning in it that was relevant to your life, to his life, to the lives of people of a later time, or it was just sort of some archival piece of for leftover junk from the past.

PETER: Well, thank you so much, Pauline, for helping us understand better the Declaration of Independence. It’s been great talking to you.

PAULINE MAIER: Thank you Peter. This was fun.

PETER: Pauline Maier is a professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She’s the author of, among many other things, American Scripture, Making the Declaration of Independence.

ED: What’s so interesting is the way that history just refuses to stay still, that it meant, very clearly, one thing at that time, and today, it means almost exactly the opposite. It’s almost like we should have a radio show about this that would help figure these things out.

BRIAN: OK. But Peter, there’s something I still don’t understand. How did this become a national holiday? How do we go from this piece of paper to this celebration of great nationhood?

PETER: OK. There are a lot of reasons for this.

ED: There’s always a lot of reasons.

PETER: Just be patient, young man.

ED: Just Give us the reason. This is radio.

PETER: OK. I’ll tell you, the 4th of July became a really big deal in the 1790s when, believe it or not, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and other so-called Republicans were mobilizing against the Federalist administration of George Washington. Guess what. The Jeffersonian Republicans styled themselves the party of the people.

And this is where it all comes together. You know, the great holiday in the first years of American independence–

ED: The 4th of July–

PETER: No, no. Hold on to your pants or shoes or shorts–

ED: Pantaloons?

PETER: –your pantaloons and your britches. The great holiday is George Washington’s birthday. And George, as you might– think about it. There’s a really strange coincidence here. George III, he was the king. George Washington, first President, father of his country. Kings are fathers. Father Washington, happily, had no children of his own. We’re all his children, aren’t we?

But that’s the principal of patriarchy, monarchy, and Republicans like Jefferson say, no, no, no. What’s great about this country of ours is that we’re all equal. We’re all equal.

ED: Just like I wrote in the Declaration of Independence!

PETER: Yeah, I said that! And so when the Republicans say, down with Washington, up with Jefferson. But it’s not Jefferson, because Jefferson was channeling the American people in the Declaration of Independence.

ED: And so Peter, what you’re saying is the reason this holiday is built around this piece of paper is we were trying to replace King worship. So when I think about the symbolism of patriotism, when I think about nationalism, it’s something that today is associated with the right. But you’re saying that actually, the origins of the 4th of July, this great patriotic moment, comes from the Jeffersonian Republicans. And in today’s terms, these where the men of the people. These were people that we would say are on the left. Is that–

PETER: Yeah. It’s an oppositional impulse. It’s a self-consciously democratic impulse, with a small “d,” that is on behalf of the people against elites.

ED: The left had the flag. It had the symbols of nationalism back in Jefferson’s time.

BRIAN: And the big mistake the left of the 20th century made, started burning the flag, right?

ED: That’s right.

BRIAN: Those are the things that people still remember and still infuriates them.

ED: I could see a show, since we already filled the part of one just by talking about it.

PETER: Well, let’s celebrate. How about a parade?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

BRIAN: We have to take a quick break. Grab a hot dog, parade around the room. Get yourself in the mood, because when we come back, we’re going to hear what you, the listeners, have to say about our nation’s birthday.

PETER: We’ll be back in a minute.

PETER: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: And I’m Brain Balogh. So Peter, before the break, you were talking about how Jefferson and his fellow Republicans basically invented the 4th of July in 1790s. You were saying it was an alternative to the kind of king worship that took place on Washington’s birthday. Can you go a little farther? I mean, what happens down the road? What happens after Jefferson dies?

PETER: You know what I think is interesting is that the 4th of July becomes an opportunity for a peace-loving people to be militaristic.

ED: And yet I thought it was just like fireworks and hot dogs and mattress sales.

PETER: Fireworks, fireworks, fireworks. What does that suggest to you?

ED: Explosions?

PETER: Yeah. Where most people likely to encounter explosions?

ED: 4th of July?

[LAUGHTER]

Battles?

PETER: We just forget this. It’s in battles. Exactly right. It’s the experience that a lot of Americans had. One of the things that the 4th of July has always done is to provide an opportunity for veterans to put on the old tattered uniform and to be the center of attention for a day.

ED: And for the rest of us, it provides an opportunity to blow things up.

[EXPLOSIONS]

Fireworks have been a part of the 4th of July since the very beginning, and it’s safe to say that in general, the rule has been the bigger the better. That was especially true out West where there’s all kinds of space and you could make as big explosions as you wanted– at least that’s what James Heintze says. He’s the author the 4th of July Encyclopedia. Peter and I caught up with him just in time for the big day.

JAMES HEINTZE: There began, in 1876, explosions and rockets launched on tops of mountains.

PETER: On purpose.

JAMES HEINTZE: On purpose. They were planned. And in 1901, they had the largest explosion in the history of the 4th of July celebration up to that date occurring on top of Pike’s Peak when they built a giant fire up there and let loose at least 18 large barrels of oil and gasoline into the fire, which caused sparks and flame to go up hundreds of feet in the air.

PETER: So you could see that from miles around?

JAMES HEINTZE: Exactly. They could see it from Denver. Out West, the fireworks of choice, if they didn’t actually have fireworks, was dynamite.

ED: And we would just like to pause here and tell any young people who may be listening to the show we are not recommending exploding dynamite to celebrate our nation’s birth.

PETER: So tell us about the parade. Did somebody figure out– some brilliant genius figure out if you just go all the drunks to move in one direction and called it a parade and gave them some flags that it would maintain some order?

JAMES HEINTZE: No. Actually, the first parades were actually very well organized. The military, the militia, as well as the citizens would typically meet at a designated location, and they would march to the place where the ceremony was going to be held. The first, largest parade in the history of the country occurred in Philadelphia in 1788. That parade was more than a mile long, and the idea there was to get the people organized so they would ratify the Constitution.

ED: Now, you were talking about this being celebrated out West. How about down South after the Civil War was over, or even before the Civil War? Has the 4th of July been a southern tradition?

JAMES HEINTZE: It was an extremely southern tradition. In fact, Charleston, South Carolina had some of the most interesting 4th of July celebrations. The Civil War all but put an end to the 4th of July celebration in the South for many years to follow.

ED: So when did that change?

JAMES HEINTZE: That began to change at the Centennial. Richmond, for example– that was the capital of the Confederacy– in 1876, that was the first time they flew the American flag over the courthouse there. Yet the South was not totally healed until the Spanish American War, when the boys of the South and the North fought once again together on a battlefield.

ED: That’s interesting. It took the South almost 40 years to begin celebrating that holiday again.

JAMES HEINTZE: Exactly.

ED: Wow. So once again, the theme of the military and patriotism being sort of the engine that drives the 4th of July.

PETER: Jim, it’s been wonderful talking with you. Happy 4th of July to you.

JAMES HEINTZE: And thank you very much, and happy 4th to you. ED: James Heintze is the author of the brand new 4th of July Encyclopedia. Here are a few other authorities on the holiday. But these folks are a little closer to the action.

MALE SPEAKER: My name’s [INAUDIBLE]. I’m a real estate broker here in town. I’ve been involved in the 4th of July fireworks here for 15 years or so. We’re in Charlottesville, so of course it’s all about the Revolutionary War and Thomas Jefferson. And there’s a lot of history in this town, but it all points to that moment when it gets dark and stuff starts blowing up.

SUSAN CHRISTIAN (ON PHONE): I’m Susan Christian. I’m Director of the Mayor’s office of Special Events here in Houston, Texas, and I also co-produce our annual celebration for July 4th. It’s called “Chevy’s Freedom over Texas” with fireworks presented by Shell. And we have tanks and aircrafts, and all of the branches of the military are represented. We top off the evening with the nation’s largest land-based fireworks show. When we celebrate, we do that in a really big way here in Houston.

STEVE: I’m Steve. I work for the Corner Store garden center. And we sell fireworks during the 4th of July. I reckon the children would be the ones that like them. It’s almost Christmas to them. I reckon they just like to see the bright colors.

BRIAN: We’re going to go to the phones now, because we want to know what some of you think about the 4th of July.

PETER: We got a call from out there in dynamite country. It’s Kelly in Missoula, Montana. Kelly?

KELLY (ON PHONE): Hi.

PETER: Hey. Welcome to the show.

KELLY (ON PHONE): Thank you. Well, I’m working on a book about Laura Ingalls Wilder. And actually, the 4th of July figures importantly in her books, mostly in a later book, Little Town on the Prairie that takes place in De Smet, South Dakota. And it seemed like the focus was more on– they read the Declaration of Independence. They sang “My Country Tis of Thee.” And it was all about farmers being free and independent. And I was wondering if it meant that maybe the 4th of July meant something different to farmers in the West.

PETER: Tell us first of all what it meant for Laura Ingalls Wilder. What was it like in South Dakota?

KELLY (ON PHONE): Well, they’d just gotten out there, and it was basically a brand new town. And they had just kind of erected the false town fronts, and they had a dusty Main Street. And this was the first celebration that they’d had. This was the first gathering as a town, so they put something together. And it consisted of drinking a cup of lemonade and watching pony races and a couple of fireworks.

PETER: Ah, no, no. It’s the lemonade that rings untrue here.

BRIAN: Peter, tell us about the 4th of July in the early part–

PETER: This is in the 1870s?

KELLY (ON PHONE): Yes.

PETER: Oh, good guess. I think the nature of celebrations did change significantly over the previous 50 or 75 years or 100 years. And that business about drinking and lemonade might have sounded silly, but there was much more alcohol consumption earlier on. By the 1870s, you’ve got a lot of teetotallers, a lot of opposition to strong drink. The temperance movement is very powerful.

ED: Especially among women, and especially in the West.

PETER: Right

ED: What you’re seeing there is, in some ways, a 4th of July suitable for young women. But I’m getting behind some of those false storefronts, they were celebrating the country in another way.

PETER: You’d also get this notion of a civic celebration that you’re describing in which everybody’s doing the right thing. It’s not boisterous. It’s not partisan. People are not beating up on each other. And earlier 4th of July celebrations tended to be very contentious.

KELLY (ON PHONE): Oh, really?

PETER: Yeah. The idea of the Declaration and of Jefferson as its author was a partisan thing in the 1790s and early 1800s. That is, it was Jefferson against the Federalists, that is, the administration. And then later in the party system that emerged in the 1830s and ’40s, there were a lot of counter demonstrations of Democrats and Whigs having alternative celebrations, trying to win over popular favor and so forth.

ED: I’m guessing the 1970s was a time that people were looking, in the wake of this horrific Civil War and this just debilitating reconstruction and horrible depression, any symbol of national unity and pride was surely welcome.

BRIAN: And one of the questions I want to ask you guys is– we know that by the end of the 19th century, the nation is knit together more through railroads and the telegraph, and there is more of a sense of nation. So to what extent, in the early 19th century, was the 4th of July the only time that people thought about the entire country? How often did people out in the West or in small towns in the South, let’s say in the 1830s, 1840s, how often did they even think about the nation?

PETER: I think maybe more than you might think, Brian. I think the symbols of nationhood spread– eagle, the flag, and then patriotic holidays like the 4th or Washington’s birthday– that they would be important. Even if there’s no real nation there– I think that’s your point– nobody’s directing this thing. Nobody has a central directorate for propaganda.

BRIAN: Kelly, can you help us out on this question? You’ve described a scene that’s very local. I understand they’re celebrating the 4th of July. To what extent do you see any indication that they’re even aware of being part of a larger nation except through some of these symbols?

KELLY (ON PHONE): It’s kind of interesting, because with Laura Ingalls Wilder, she wrote the books, but her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, heavily edited and helped out. She was actually a more famous author in her day than Laura Ingalls Wilder. And she was a staunch freewheeling libertarian, and she got really radical in her later days. She lived in Danbury, Connecticut, but she would farm all her own vegetables. She didn’t have to spend any money in the economy and pay taxes. And she actually declined work earning a certain amount of money so she didn’t have to pay taxes.

It’s been said in this particular passage where Laura suddenly steps aside and has these internal musings where she talked about being free and independent, Americans are free, and baking, that that was where Rose Wilder Lane slipped in her libertarian rhetoric a little bit.

PETER: Independence was important to her, that it was her own independence. And that happens throughout American history, that Americans confuse their independence with the nation’s independence.

ED: It’s interesting that she had to move back East to become free, kind of a violation of the American story, isn’t it?

PETER: We want to thank you for calling, Kelly.

ED: Thank you, Kelly.

KELLY (ON PHONE): Yeah. Thank you.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

PETER: We got Greg from Charleston, West Virginia on the line. Greg, welcome.

GREG (ON PHONE): Hello there. How are y’all?

PETER: Welcome to BackStory.

GREG (ON PHONE): My question would be, what happened to the actual revolutionary spirit in America, and was there a real American Revolution?

PETER: I love that question. You know what John Adams said? He said– that would be the second President of the United States– he said one third of all Americans during the Revolution were patriots, one third were Loyalists, and the other third were fencesitters– or, as Tom Paine called them, sunshine patriots. Now, historians quarrel with those fractions. I’m inclined to think that the fence-sitters were even larger in number, and that dependent on which way the wind was blowing, otherwise known as the British army, people were inclined to take oaths of allegiance to whichever power was on the ground.

BRIAN: So Peter, what happened to those fence-sitters as the Revolution went on?

PETER: You guys could tell us about other wars, but everybody has a good war in retrospect. They’ve got good stories to tell. They’re not going to talk about how they ran home as soon as they can. Desertion, of course, was at very high rates. But there really was a forgiveness policy. Anybody who could make believe that he or she was a good patriot, you’re cool. And actually, people who were Loyalists were welcomed back into the fold.

BRIAN: And was celebrating Independence Day one of the ways they proved their loyalty, their citizenships?

PETER: Since they didn’t put their bodies on the line during the war itself, they put their bodies on the line walking down the street.

ED: So what you’re saying is that they invented revolutionary spirit after the fact?

PETER: Absolutely right, Ed. There was spirit, OK, but the myth was that everybody had it.

ED: Got it.

PETER: And lots of people had it for a few months early in the war. It’s a lot of fun thinking about killing people. Ah, that sounds terrible, but it’s sustaining it over the long haul that’s the tough thing.

BRIAN: Greg, I feel we’ve stifled your spirit.

GREG (ON PHONE): Not at all.

BRIAN: What does revolutionary spirit mean to you?

GREG (ON PHONE): The thing that surprises me is the fact that one group of capitalist overlords simply replaced another. And a lot of people don’t want to look at it that way. They don’t want to feel that that is the answer to an American Revolution. But in many ways, the British oligarchy was simply shunted aside, and a new oligarchy was established.

PETER: Greg, you know the only thing wrong with that proposition is in fact, it was the old provincial ruling elite who maintained power afterwards. So it’s not really a new displacing an old.

ED: So why was there a Revolution then, Peter?

PETER: There’s a great question, Ed. The answer simply is that you had a bunch of provincial elites, and they wanted to remake the empire in their own image.

ED: So there’s a lot to what Greg was saying.

BRIAN: That’s what Greg was saying.

PETER: Yeah. You know the “all men are created equal” that’s in the Declaration of Independence? What patriot leaders meant was that all Englishmen are created equal, particularly elite Englishman, and they didn’t like the second class treatment they were getting.

BRIAN: So Peter, how did they get at least a third of the people to support that vigorously?

PETER: Well, the word that you 20th century historians have for this is propaganda.

BRIAN: No. It’s actually false consciousness.

PETER: False consciousness. You name it.

BRIAN: But that’s too big a word to use on this show.

PETER: I think that’s a silly and dismissive way to put it.

ED: So take it back, Brian.

BRIAN: Yeah. I do take it back.

PETER: Well, I’m going to take back what I said, too. Can we take back this whole phone call?

BRIAN: Greg, you want to withdraw anything?

PETER: No. I would say this. It’s one of the hallmarks of the modern world that large numbers of people who don’t know each other can imagine themselves as being members of a common community.

BRIAN: Ah. And Peter, does the 4th of July reinforce that? Is that maybe what the 4th of July is all about?

PETER: Oh, I think civic rituals are very important to remind us that whether we like it or love it, and whether we quarrel with the founders or we celebrate their achievement, they’re all we got.

GREG (ON PHONE): Well, they’re an interesting group of people that developed an idea that was new enough to create an entire economic paradigm in the United States–

PETER: No question about it, Greg.

GREG (ON PHONE): –that there was not there originally. Now, that paradigm is what I consider not a revolutionary paradigm. It was a new, and in many ways, very modern concept. You steal land from Indians, and you pay off your veterans. It was a great process, and it went on for 40 years.

PETER: Well Greg, welcome to American politics. And I’ve got to say, I don’t think there is such a thing as a real revolutionary spirit. There never has been a real revolution, or the ones that are real are ones that lead to massive destruction of life and property. One of the great things about the American Revolution is that so few people were slaughtered compared to the French Revolution.

But this is supposed to be a happy discussion about–

ED: Hey, that’s pretty happy. So we got America cheap, is what you’re saying.

PETER: It doesn’t cost that much.

ED: And then we bought other big parts of it.

PETER: It’s a big country, and we love it. So Greg, thank you for being so provocative.

GREG (ON PHONE): Well, thanks a lot. I appreciate talking to you.

[MUSIC – “MY COUNTRY TIS OF THEE”]

BRIAN: It’s time to take another break. When we get back, we’ll hear more of your thoughts about the 4th of July. We’re also going to travel back in time to the 1850s and listen to one of the most eloquent speeches about independence since, well, independence.

ED: So give us a call and tell us what the 4th of July means to you. Our number is 888-257-8851. And if you prefer email, the address is BackStory@Virginia.edu.

[MUSIC – “MY COUNTRY TIS OF THEE”]

PETER: We’ll be right back. Don’t even think about going away.

This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh. Today, we’re bringing you a special Independence Day episode of our show. Peter, do we have another caller?

PETER: We sure do, Brian. Now, I know this is supposed to be all about the US of A, but there is a foreigner in our midst. Her name is Pam, and she’s calling us from Saskatoon, Canada. Hello?

PAM (ON PHONE): Well actually, I live in Saskatoon. I’m a history professor at the University of Saskatchewan. But I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio.

PETER: So you’re one of us.

PAM (ON PHONE): Yeah, so I’m one of you.

BRIAN: That explains that accent, then.

PAM (ON PHONE): I’m an American citizen, and I’m a Canadian citizen. So I have a dual personality.

PETER: So 4th of July, do you celebrate the 4th of July until noon?

PAM (ON PHONE): Yeah, right. Exactly. And then we celebrate Canada Day, which is on July 1.

BRIAN: How do they celebrate the first?

PAM (ON PHONE): Well, it’s the same way, actually.

PETER: No.

BRIAN: Fireworks? Fireworks?

PAM (ON PHONE): And I don’t want to say they’re copying, because that’s a really bad–

BRIAN: Oh, that would be the wrong thing to say in Canada.

ED: And plus, it’s three days earlier, so they can’t be copying.

[LAUGHTER]

PAM (ON PHONE): No. It’s in honor of Canada Day and when Canada became a confederation in 1867 when we became a country.

PETER: Who’s the “we?” I’m sorry.

PAM (ON PHONE): Pardon me?

PETER: We? Oh, us.

PAM (ON PHONE): We. The US.

PETER: Right. OK.

PAM (ON PHONE): So they celebrate it with fireworks as well. And I’m not sure if they play the 1812 Overture.

ED: They eat hot dogs?

PAM (ON PHONE): They eat hot dogs and burgers.

BRIAN: So I have a question, guys. When did the 1812 Overture become the tradition for the 4th of July?

PAM (ON PHONE): Yeah. I was interested in that too, because I teach Russian history, and I thought, isn’t that interesting?

PETER: We’re going to ask you.

BRIAN: I think you’ve totally stumped the American Backstory hosts. So maybe the Canadian history gal can tell us.

PAM (ON PHONE): No. I really don’t know. And I tried to look into it a little bit online, and I couldn’t find that out. I mean, I know that it’s often connected with the Boston Pops as the first orchestra that started to play regularly, but I don’t know why they–

BRIAN: Oh, I know. My parents used to play in the National Symphony Orchestra, and they’d do this on the barge, and they’d have real cannons, and–

ED: Brian, how many times are you going to play this “my parents were in the National Symphony Orchestra” thing? I’m so tired.

BRIAN: We are hoping that some of our listeners will contact our website, backstoryradio.org, and answer this question for all four of us historians.

PETER: Well Pam, I hope you enjoyed your July 4.

PAM (ON PHONE): Thank you very much. Thanks for having me on. Take care. Bye bye.

ED: All right, music aficionados. This is your big chance to show us up. Drop in at backstoryradio.org and tell us when the 1812 Overture became the soundtrack to the 4th of July. The 76th correct answer will win you a very special limited addition recording, Brian Balough Sings the Greatest Hits of the National Symphony Orchestra.

BRIAN: Peter, you got another call for us?

PETER: I sure do, Brian. It’s Tim from Hicksville, New York. Welcome to BackStory, Tim.

TIM (ON PHONE): Thank you.

PETER: Tim, the 4th of July, what does it mean to you?

TIM (ON PHONE): Oh, it’s a bit of a conflict for me, actually. I’m a pastor in Hicksville, and I have a mainline denominational church there. And I struggle every 4th of July because there’s some people who really want to celebrate it as a Christian holiday and turn over the Sunday morning worship service to it. And it’s something makes me awful uncomfortable sometimes.

ED: So this is a problem for you because you feel like it excludes so many people, Tim?

TIM (ON PHONE): Yeah. And it’s also a theological problem for me because we have a couple of songs in our hymnal like America the Beautiful which are really praising America, not praising God.

PETER: Right. But that actually goes back in a big way to the 19th century, I think, to the time of the Second Great Awakening, the rise of Methodists, Baptists, and evangelicals throughout the country, and that is the idea that good Americans were Christians became pretty normal. The unusual generation is the founding generation, because those folks were not particularly religious in our sense of the word.

BRIAN: But Peter, I am confused, because we think about the 20th century as secularizing many holidays that in fact are Christian holidays or religious holidays.

PETER: Yeah, that’s a good point.

BRIAN: It’s just odd that it would become more Christian as time goes on.

PETER: That’s a great point, Brian, because the early celebration of the 4th of July was really associated with celebrating Thomas Jefferson’s role in channeling the American people in the Declaration. That’s the great sacred scripture of the day, and that’s not Christian.

BRIAN: So what kind of pressures do you face as a minister to incorporate this into the church service?

TIM (ON PHONE): Well, some of it is nostalgia, the way we always used to do it.

BRIAN: And how is that way? What stories do people tell? What do they tell you they used to do?

TIM (ON PHONE): Oh, well, I hear stories about to Sunday school, mostly, when people who are maybe raised in the Depression and World War II era remember celebrating Flag Day and 4th of July and all sorts of other holidays that just encouraged their sense of group awareness and gave them a sense that they were pretty safe and life was going to be OK in spite of the trouble that they were in.

BRIAN: But there’s not a religious element in that.

TIM (ON PHONE): But especially in the rural areas, it was kind of like you went to the one building in town that could hold a lot of people to do some of your civil religion.

BRIAN: And that was the church.

TIM (ON PHONE): Yeah. That was often the church.

BRIAN: Yeah. That’s a great point.

PETER: But it is possible to talk about a broad and inclusive patriotism that is not pro-war or anti-war.

TIM (ON PHONE): Well sure, and we have a couple of songs that sing things like “my country’s skies are bluer than the ocean, but other lands have beautiful places, too.” Unfortunately, those are not as popular as the real–

PETER: Well, there’s your mission, Tim.

BRIAN: Yeah. I’ve never actually invited a sermon before, but do you have a particular Independence Day sermon?

TIM (ON PHONE): No, because I always do sermons from scripture, and there’s nothing in scripture about America, and very little about patriotism.

PETER: Well, here’s a radical suggestion from a lapsed Christian. Wouldn’t the very notion of love, which is central to the Christian gospel, be a way to deal with this?

TIM (ON PHONE): Sure.

PETER: OK. Let’s work out this sermon, shall we?

[LAUGHTER]

TIM (ON PHONE): All right. I’ll expect it in the mail by–

PETER: All right. OK, Tim. It’s been great talking with you. And I know we haven’t solved your crisis at all, but it’s, I think, a moment, the 4th of July, for people to be thoughtful about what it means to be an American. And that’s something you can certainly ask them to do from the pulpit.

TIM (ON PHONE): Well, certainly we can.

BRIAN: Thanks so much. Thank you, Tim.

TIM (ON PHONE): Bye.

ED: Well, if you guys really are looking for a 4th of July sermon, I think I’ve got something here that fits the bill. It’s not, strictly speaking, a sermon, but rather a speech given on the occasion of the Fourth by Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and former slave, back in 1852. He delivered it up in Rochester, New York, where he lived at the time.

BRIAN: 1852. So that’s almost a decade before the beginning of the Civil War.

ED: Yeah, but tensions were already running high all over the country. The Fugitive Slave Act had just passed, which decreed that Northerners had to help return runaway slaves and could be drafted by local constables to be part of policies. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written as a result of that. So all over the country, people were really thinking about slavery, abolitionism, and the tensions in the United States.

PETER: So Ed, are you just going to talk about this speech all day, or can we actually hear a little of it?

ED: I thought you’d never ask, Peter. We’re going to do a little time travel now, and we have a special guide for the trip– David Blight, a historian up at Yale who’s written a whole book on the Douglass speech. And David is going to take us straight to the source, Rochester’s Corinthian Hall, July 5, 1852.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Friends of freedom, on this magnificent morning, the women of the Rochester Ladies anti-Slavery Society welcome you here to commemorate the glorious Declaration of 1776.

DAVID BLIGHT: Douglass gave this speech on the 5th of July, which had actually become a tradition in the state of New York, in particular, in the African American community– a kind of subtle protest against the 4th of July at the same time black communities had been embracing it for years.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Frederick Douglass.

[APPLAUSE]

DAVID BLIGHT: The hall held nearly 600 people. It was full. It was a speech that Douglass himself said he worked as hard on as any speech he ever crafted, and it certainly shows.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation from which I escaped is considerable, and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former are by no means slight.

DAVID BLIGHT: The structure is brilliant. It’s, in many ways, an oratorical symphony in three movements. The first movement, in a way, is the first, oh, several pages of the speech where he welcomes the audience, he honors the founding fathers, he calls the 4th of July the American Passover. He directly quotes from the Declaration of Independence. He calls the Declaration of Independence the ring bolt and the sheet anchor of American liberty. He honors the founding.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: The signers of the Declaration of Independence where brave men. They were great men, too– great enough to give frame to a great age.

DAVID BLIGHT: And it’s as though he’s putting his audience pleasantly at ease with the celebration of American independence. And then, about a third of the way into the speech, the hammer comes down.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: Fellow citizens, pardon me. Allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I or those I represent to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom–

DAVID BLIGHT: Becomes yours, not mine. And he begins to rain the pronoun “you,” “you,” “you” down onto his audience.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. This 4th of July is yours, not mine. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, wherein human mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, fellow citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today?

DAVID BLIGHT: It’s as though he has suddenly strapped his audience in their seats and won’t let them move. And he rains down this litany of American hypocrisy about slavery.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: I do not hesitate to declare with all my soul that America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future! Therefore, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible, which I disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question, and to denounce with all the emphasis I can command everything that serves to perpetuate slavery, the great sin and shame of America!

DAVID BLIGHT: That spring of ’52, early summer, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published to enormous readership. At the time Douglass gives this speech in Rochester, it’s possible that half that audience already had a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. So this is an audience conditioned to some extent for this kind of critique of American hypocrisy. But I would also suggest that that audience, Douglass’ own neighbors and friends, came to that speech that day not quite probably expecting how the hail was gonna rain down on them.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer a day that reveals to him more than all of the days in the year the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration’s a sham.

DAVID BLIGHT: But it’s his point. They even invited black people here to sing for you, but we’re not going to sing for you. We’re going to make you hurt.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: Your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery. Your prayers, hymns, sermons, and thanksgivings are to him mere bombastic fraud and hypocrisy, a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

DAVID BLIGHT: Imagine being on the other end of that and thinking you were on his side when you walked in. But then, about 2/3 of the way through the speech, this portion comes to an end with a horrible image. It’s right out of Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan sermons of the 18th century.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: Be warned! A horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation’s bosom. The venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic. For the love of God, tear away and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of 20 millions crush and destroy it forever!

DAVID BLIGHT: And after that image, there’s a transition. Probably he paused, and this hailstorm of humiliation stops.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: Notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of this nation, I do not despair of this country.

DAVID BLIGHT: It’s as though he picks them up and kind of wipes their brows off, and he says the principles of the Declaration of Independence are still there. They’re like precious ore. They’re forever. They’re natural rights.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: I’m drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence and the great principles it contains.

DAVID BLIGHT: And he says it’s still not too late. America is young. It’s youthful. It’s malleable. It is still possible to save the country from itself. And then he ends with a poem that actually, I think, became a hymn. It was written by William Lloyd Garrison called “God Speed the Year of Jubilee.”

FREDERICK DOUGLASS: “God speed the year of Jubilee, the wide world o’er. God speed the day when human blood shall cease to flow. God speed the hour, the glorious hour when none on Earth shall exercise a lordly power.

DAVID BLIGHT: So he ends on this note of the hopeful coming day of emancipation somehow, someday. But what that audience had experienced over probably an hour and a half is Douglass as an ironist at his best– Douglass the kind of Jeremiahatic prophet at his best. It’s a speech that I think, frankly, is the rhetorical masterpiece of American abolitionism. And no one, frankly, used, appropriated the principles of the Declaration of Independence quite so forcefully as did abolitionists, particularly black abolitionists. The natural rights tradition, liberty, equality, the right of revolution, without those principles– and I think this is implicitly what Douglass is actually arguing in the 4th of July speech– without those principles at the founding, where would blacks have ever looked for a future in America? They’d have had no future in America.

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ED: That was David Blight in what I’d have to say is a pretty remarkable construction by our producers. David directs the Gilder-Lehrman’s Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, and he’s the author of Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, Keeping Faith in Jubilee. The speech was read by Fred Morsell. You can listen to it all on our website, backstoryradio.org.

BRIAN: You know, I got to say, guys, David talking about the way this speech was used to give new meaning to the Declaration of Independence just blew me away.

PETER: It’s very, very powerful.

ED: What’s interesting is Frederick Douglass was not the last African American to ring those themes. Matter of fact, from the very first moments in which the Union Army went into the South in the Civil War and they met African Americans, even people without the education and exposure to the world that Frederick Douglass had enjoyed, knew how to speak that American vernacular. They would often turn to the words of the Declaration of Independence and the Founding Fathers for their claim on what it meant to be Americans. And some of the most beautiful documents I’ve ever read are the petitions from the freed people of the South to the Union parties and to the Republican Parties and to the United States Army saying, all we ask is for our share of our patrimony to be full Americans.

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ED: That’s all the time we have for this episode of BackStory, but we hope you’ll continue the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and our website, backstoryradio.org.

BRIAN: Today’s episode of BackStory was produced by Tony Field, Rachel Quimby, and Catherine Moore.

PETER: Jamal Millner is our Technical Director. BackStory’s Executive Producer is Andrew Wyndham.

BRIAN: Major support for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. Additional funding is provided by Weinstein Properties, by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment, and by History Channel, history made every day.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Peter Onuf is professor of history emeritus at UVA, and senior research fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is President and professor of history at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

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