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...Class was one key component of this strife. As W. Caleb McDaniel has pointed out, American elites frowned upon noisy, often drunken, working class celebrations of the Fourth, which exacerbated their fears that the nation's experiment in democracy was doomed to failure as a result of its enfranchisement of what the upper classes saw as the lowest common denominator in American society. Upper-class Americans preferred to celebrate the holiday with speeches and dinners, which highlighted their sense of themselves as part of a decorous republican tradition dating back to Rome. (1)
Slavery, of course, was another key element in the controversy over Independence Day. As slavery itself became the subject of increasingly heated debate over the course of the decades leading up to the Civil War, the Fourth of July came to be seen by abolitionists as a day ideally suited to pointing out the nation's failure to live up to its promise of liberty for all. By the 1850s, fiery anti-slavery speeches had become a Fourth of July tradition. In 1854, in what can be seen as the culmination of abolitionists' rhetorical uses of the Fourth of July, William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution in Framingham, MA at an Independence Day celebration organized to protest the return of Anthony Burns, an escaped slave, to his southern master. At this same rally, Henry David Thoreau gave the speech known as "Slavery in Massachusetts." (2) Meanwhile, some northern African-American communities, incensed by the hypocrisy of the holiday, refused to celebrate it at all, preferring instead to celebrate other anniversaries, such as New York state emancipation on July 5, Crispus Attucks's death on March 5, the abolition of the slave trade on July 14, or West Indian emancipation on August 1 (McDaniel 137).
It is in the context of these debates about the Fourth--which are also attempts to harness the emotional power of the nation's anniversary to promote particular political agendas--that we can best understand Frederick Douglass's 1852 Fourth of July oration and Herman Melville's Israel Potter, originally subtitled A Fourth of July Story when it was first published, as a serial, in Putnam's Magazine in 1854. (3) Both texts are part of a larger Fourth of July conversation, and both use the holiday to expose the ways in which the nation fell short of the promises made at its founding. Douglass's focus, obviously, is the injustice suffered by slaves held in bondage in the South, those "bleeding children of sorrow" whose "chains ... are ... rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them" on the Fourth. In Israel Potter, Melville suggests that the ideals of the Revolution have also failed to improve the lot of the white working class. As Carolyn Karcher suggests, the novel's eponymous hero, who undergoes a series of unfortunate experiences that include incarceration, forced labor, dire poverty, and a lifetime of exile, "stands for America's slaves, both black and white." (4)
There are illuminating similarities between Douglass's Fourth of July speech and Melville's eighth book, as I will show momentarily. Ultimately, however, the differences between their responses to the Revolution and to the Fourth of July offer the more penetrating insights into each writer and his work. For while Douglass employs his self-described "scorching irony" to indict the hypocrisy of the United States and to help bring an end to slavery, Melville's irony poses philosophical questions. His "Fourth of July Story" asks whether an accurate record of history is possible and whether individuals have the power to shape their own lives when confronted by larger historical forces. As an occasion for political speeches, the Fourth of July in the nineteenth century was every bit as much a tribute to the power of rhetoric as it was a commemoration of the Declaration of Independence. Both Douglass and Melville engage the assumptions about rhetoric that underpin the holiday, but they do so in very different ways. Beneath the verbal fireworks of "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" lies the premise that language can change people's hearts and minds and thus change the course of history. On the other hand, beneath Melville's narrative of an ex-soldier in the war for independence lies a fear that language obscures the truth rather than provides access to it and that the Industrial Revolution negates America's political revolution.
To be sure, Douglass and Melville employ similar strategies to humanize their subjects and to link them to the fate of the nation as a whole. Animal imagery is everywhere in Israel Potter, especially when Israel is on the run in England and using his wits to escape imprisonment. Israel is "a hunted fox" followed by soldiers who are like "bloodhounds," and he describes himself to John Paul Jones as having been "hunted like a dog" (NN IP 32, 92). While Israel is held captive in an inn, the narrator observes that the locals "seemed to think that Yankees were a sort of wild creatures, a species of 'possum or kangaroo" (15). Such epithets do not apply only to Israel, however. Two rustic English farm workers, whom Israel addresses as "gentlemen" (much to the bewilderment of the two men), are described as "human steers" (18). For the most part, these animal metaphors are designed to emphasize Britain's dehumanizing treatment of its colonists as well as its own peasant class. In the larger context of Melville's narrative, however, such metaphors imply a difference that fails to materialize. The Revolution in which Israel is participating does not, in fact, lead to a more fully human life for our hero, one in which he would have the power to shape his own destiny or to speak to and...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
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