Independence Day dilemmas in the American South, 1848-1865.

ALONG WITH THE FOURTH OF JULY IN 1861 CAME A DILEMMA FOR THE members of the '76 Association in Charleston, South Carolina. Formed almost thirty years earlier with the purpose of organizing Independence Day celebrations, the association had faithfully marked every anniversary since then with parades, speeches, and dinners. But in 1861 circumstances were different. The United States were dissolved. South Carolina was part of the newly formed Confederacy. And so the dilemma: should ex-Americans be celebrating American Independence Day at all?

The problem required extensive deliberation. A five-member committee chosen for that task recommended that "the usual celebration of the day ... by public procession, solemn oration, and political banquet ought to be omitted on the present occasion." The Fourth was too closely associated with the now-defunct Union. And besides, at a time when soldiers from South Carolina and the other southern states had already begun to face off against their northern the, it did not seem appropriate to hold the customary public revelry. The association as a whole concurred with the committee's recommendation and resolved to bypass the usual festivities, holding only a brief business meeting on the evening of the Fourth. (1)

There was more, however, to the committee's report. Even though South Carolinians should not celebrate the Fourth in the traditional fashion, it went on, they should not go so far as to relinquish all claims to the day. After all, as the report's authors saw it, the Fourth of July acquired its significance from its association with those very principles--state sovereignty and the right of self-government by consent--for which South Carolinians were now fighting against the North. To be sure, celebration of the Fourth was rendered problematic by the fact that it had become "the symbol of [the Union's] continuance and the commemoration of its blessings and its power." South Carolinians should clearly leave this dimension of the holiday behind. Yet the committee remained adamant that they not also abandon their claim "to whatever of historical interest may attach to the day, or any portion of the fame which may belong to it for the constitutional principles there announced." The ideals of the holiday ought to be clung to even as its institutional associations were left behind. (2)

The Charlestonians' ambivalence toward the Fourth of July carried with it a set of difficult problems. Would it be possible to detach the ideals of the Fourth from their association with the United States? Could white southerners celebrate the intellectual pillars of American independence without also celebrating its political fruits, or mark the cultural traditions of American nationalism without the institutions of the United States? How did the central role of slavery in the dissolution of the Union and the formation of the Confederacy complicate matters? Was there a place for the Fourth of July in the Civil War-era South?

While students of the Fourth of July have paid some attention to the Civil War-era South, there has been little effort to use the holiday to shed light on the problem of how white southerners navigated the tension between their southernness and their Americanness. (3) Historians have done more to address the broader subject of white southerners' efforts to retain aspects of American nationalism, especially the memory of the American Revolution. Yet scholars have generally been unsure what to make of these efforts. Some have interpreted them as evidence of the essential flimsiness of southern nationalism before and during the Civil War. "It is indicative of the weakness of secessionist ideology in particular, and southern national identity in general," concludes Brian Holden Reid, "that [southerners] were forced to seize the national symbols of the nation-state from which they were seceding." (4) Others have taken these appropriations more seriously, as indications of white southerners' belief in the essential continuity of their Americanness and their southernness. Thus Drew Gilpin Faust has observed that to southerners themselves, "Secession represented continuity, not discontinuity; the Confederacy was the consummation, not the dissolution, of the American dream." More recently, Anne Sarah Rubin has documented a similar argument--"Rather than representing a challenge to the ideals of the Founding Fathers, the Confederacy would be the perfection of their vision"--with a wealth of examples of Confederates' use of Revolutionary memory and symbols. The white South, according to these historians, presented itself as the rightful heir of the Revolutionary legacy, the bearer of the genuine spirit of American nationalism. (5)

This interpretation has much to recommend it. But, as Charleston's '76 Association's apprehension about the Fourth of July 1861 makes clear, continuity was not the whole story. White southerners approached the Fourth of July--and therefore the memory of the American Revolution, and therefore American nationalism in general--not with unqualified approval but with pensive ambivalence. After all, they were in the process of rejecting the Union, the institutional embodiment of the Revolutionary generation. And their separatism was driven by a commitment to inequality at a time when, as we shall see, the memory of the American Revolution and especially the Declaration of Independence was coming to be defined in terms of the principle of equality. Both of these facts encourage a rethinking of Rubin's argument that the "Confederates" present revolution was legitimated by the past; they had no doubts the Founders would be with them." (6) Such a rethinking is supported by a rich body of scholarship on collective memory in various times and places, much of which sees commemoration as an often tentative and contested means of forming national and other group identities. (7)

Focusing on the white South's ambivalent encounter with the Fourth of July provides new perspectives on a problem that has long bedeviled historians and other students of the region: How American is (and was) the American South, and how southern? Responses to this question are often limited by two assumptions: first, that the categories of American and southern are mutually exclusive and, second, that the meaning of each category has been fixed through time. Thanks in no small part to northern victory in the Civil War, the South, and especially the Civil War-era South, has been defined as a region outside the American mainstream. As the historian Carl N. Degler has explained, because the North's version of American nationalism triumphed in the Civil War and became the reality, the North and the nation came to be conflated, with the South relegated to the periphery. (8) Such perceptions only increased during the civil rights era. White southern resistance to desegregation, displayed in searing images of brutality on the nation's television screens, reinforced the conviction that the South and America, past and present, were polar opposites.