July 4, 1865---The second first Fourth of July

JULY 4, 1865:             

The first postbellum Fourth of July:

The time-honored observance of July 4^th in 1865 served to help reunite a nation torn apart by bereavement and exhausted by violence and four years’ talk of revolution.

Ironically, although the holiday served to unite, it also highlighted the stark contrasts existing between North and South and underscored just how far the United States had to go to be “One Nation” (“under God” or not).

For America’s history had divided in 1861 into two different and mutually antagonistic streams, and it had taken a dam of flesh and blood to redirect the two streams back into a single course.

The North (and Southern Unionists) saw the day as a vindication of all it had done to save the Union and perpetuate it:

Iowan William Loughridge wrote of this Fourth of July, “Eighty nine years ago to-day, our fathers severed the bonds that bound them to the throne of England, and declared to the world those great principles of liberty and equality.”

 

The Daily North Carolina Advertiser remarked in Unionist terms that “at this point in time the Fourth of July ha[s] a peculiar value, not only in our eyes, but in the eyes of the entire people of the South who for the last four years have, in part, given up their heritage in the glorious legacy.”

 

The Macon Daily Telegraph wrote, “The memory of the illustrious men and deeds of those times, over which nearly a century has rolled its waves, receives a new revival in our hearts.”

The Reverend James Lynch of Augusta, Georgia,  described this July 4^th as “Beginning a new epoch in the world’s history.”

What drew the United States together on July 4, 1865 was the nascent idea of American Exceptionalism, an idea which had been ironically strengthened, not weakened, by the Civil War. For, had not a polyglot army of men speaking English, German, Spanish, French, Polish, Hungarian, and a score of other tongues come together not only to preserve the idea of “Government of the People” but to liberate an enslaved race foreign (in 19^th Century terms) to most of them?  Had not this army defeated a self-proclaimed aristocracy and oligarchy that would have preferred to promote itself as the national leadership?  And had it not, despite the ocean of blood spilt between them, extended the idea of egalitarianism even to the average men of the South who had bled and died?  

To be sure, Southerners believed in this idea as much as did Northerners: “Under a free government, after even deadly feud originating in antagonistic theories, a frank dignified, and graceful yielding of the contest should be satisfactory,” said the former Confederate Georgia Supreme Court Justice Charles Jenkins.

Despite the high-sounding words, the United States on July 4, 1865 was already falling into a morass of confusion. For though many Southerners (and Northerners) believed in the idea of American Exceptionalism, the practice of American Exceptionalism galled them, and would continue to gall them for a full century at least. The common language expressed in the ringing phrases of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution meant different things to those who heard them, North and South, black and white, yellow and red, male and female, immigrant and native-born.

On July 4, 1865, the nation already had Jim Crow laws in place. The virtual extinction of the Native American peoples and cultures was going on apace. The Chinese faced discriminatory legislation in California. Women had virtually no rights at all. The mythologies of the Founding Fathers were shared north and south, but diverged, with the South adulating Robert E. Lee and the North honoring Abraham Lincoln. While there was no groundswell to stop immigration as of yet, the first rumblings against “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” predated the Civil War. America, in short, was a nation where all men might be created equal but where they were treated with gross inequity. 

The tensions of this July 4^th were perhaps too profound, for the great national festival (which was the only permanent “national holiday” at the time, and had been a national holiday in the Confederacy as well) was not celebrated with such intensity again for many years. Excepting the Centennial eleven years away, the Fourth of July became a day of individual, not civic, celebration well into the 1880s. It was not until the great wave of immigration in the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries, and largely because of the efforts of “new” Americans, that the Fourth of July resumed its place as the keystone of the American year.

July 4, 1865 was a day which all Americans celebrated, but on which many mourned. After four years of war there were far too many empty chairs in too many homes. To give meaning (or recognizing the meaning) of all this loss, most Americans cast the Civil War as a “Second American Revolution” on this day, a day when the victors could rejoice at the sight of the new world they had created, but upon which the defeated could honorably reflect on the old world they had tried so hard to preserve.  

So it was in Richmond, Virginia that The Republic urged: “Let the inspiration of this day teach the men of the North and of the South to be Americans.”