"What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?"

In the spring of 1775, representatives from the 13 American colonies gathered at the first Continental Congress in Philadelphia. After much debate about severing ties with Britain, the representatives approved the Declaration of Independence, which was to take effect one year later on July 4, 1776. Massachusetts Representative John Adams, in a letter to his wife Abigail, wrote that the day “ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”

Slavery, however, remained the law of the land despite the Declaration's pronouncement that all men are created equal. George Washington continued to enslave people, as did Thomas Jefferson and as would ten other presidents. John Adams was the exception, with no enslaved workers in his household. His wife, Abigail, was even more anti-slavery than he. In 1774, she wrote to her husband: “It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me—to fight for ourselves what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”

As the new nation grew over the next several decades, so did the institution of slavery. David Walker, a free Black native of Wilmington, urged white Americans to recognize the continued hypocrisy of the Declaration's pronouncements on freedom and equality. He exclaimed in his 1828 antislavery pamphlet, "Walker's Appeal".

See your Declaration Americans!!! Do you understand your own language? Hear your language, proclaimed to the world, July 4th, 1776—“We hold these truths to be self evident--that ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL!! that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!!” Compare your own language above, extracted from your Declaration of Independence, with your cruelties and murders inflicted by your cruel and unmerciful fathers and yourselves on our fathers and on us--men who have never given your fathers or you the least provocation!!!!!! . . . Now, Americans! I ask you candidly, was your sufferings under Great Britain, one hundredth part as cruel and tyranical as you have rendered ours under you?

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As the Northern anti-slavery movement gained momentum in the 1830s, many of its supporters questioned traditional Independence Day celebrations. Leading abolitionists organized events on the Fourth of July, or the Fifth, to reflect and remind people that, for African Americans, the Revolution’s promise of liberty had not been fulfilled.​ Black communities in the North also began celebrating other dates of significance to the abolitionist cause, such as August 1, 1834, when Great Britain abolished slavery in the British West Indies.

However, anti-slavery Northerners were not necessarily pro-abolition. Northern trade could profit from Southern production. Many were content to let Southerners continue to hold slaves, a right they believed was upheld by the Constitution. Often those in the North did not want slavery to spread to new territories for economic reasons besides any moral feeling. Historian Len Travers says that a prejudice prevailed among the white population and that one thought was that, “the irreparable degradation caused by slavery rendered Blacks incapable of becoming responsible, republican citizens."

Nothing could have been further from the truth. Consider the brilliance of a young Black child in Maryland who learned to read and write in secret and escaped from slavery in 1838. He was Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), a passionate leader of the abolitionist movement and an incisive writer and orator.

Poster advertising July 4th event hosted by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1854; courtesy of Massachusetts Historical Society. Event speakers included leading abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and Henry David Thoreau.

At the invitation of the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society, he spoke before a crowd of some 600 people at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, NY. In his fiery remarks, he questions the crowd as to why they have asked him, a Black man, to speak on this occasion celebrating freedom in a country where his people are not free, his oration demands acknowledgement of slavery, “the great sin and shame of America.”​

Portrait of Frederick Douglass, circa 1860; courtesy of the New York Historical Society.

Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.

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As civil war loomed, with the issue of slavery at the forefront of the conflict, attitudes toward Fourth of July celebrations began to shift. Many white southerners, slaveholders and secessionists especially, felt that they were once again living under tyranny and stopped celebrating the holiday. ​​

​Entries from the diary of Rufus Bunnell, Bellamy House assistant architect, reflect the holiday mood in Wilmington just prior to the war:

1859 - Monday, July 4th: Came after a very hot time followed by a very heavy N.E. thunder storm. As the stores were all closed, the city seemed partly deserted. There was occasionally the firing of a gun heard and a few firecrackers were let off; it was hardly noticed. The United States as a Nation of all the states, is far from being so in reality in the Southern States.

I had been told that a “scorcher of a day” was generally on hand for the Fourth, but as that particular one wore on, an ocean gale whistled and groaned from off the great Atlantic, making it quite necessary to add to one’s clothing. During the forenoon a Negro band did play a little, but it was a patriotism soon drowned out and then the poor husky fellows “toted home” their drums and brazen instruments. In the evening there was a small procession of some Germans along Market St. [That night]...a stray rocket could now and then be seen shooting heavenward; and thus ended this “Glorious Fourth” in my life.​​​

Rufus Bunnell writing in his diary. He fought for the Union in the Civil War.

And a year later...

​1860 - Wednesday, July 4th: Oppressive weather, but a light breeze at times somewhat tempered the great heat. Was awakened early on the morning of the Fourth by the booming of cannon and the shouting of the Negro boys in the streets. The National feeling for the “glorious Fourth” was growing cold at the South with so much of slavery agitation and the slowly increasing spirit of Disunion. (Looking back, Bunnell recalled: Little did we know that this was to be the last Fourth of July celebrated by the entire Union of States, for four long and bloody years of Civil War!)

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During the war, the promise of freedom and equality for all celebrated on Independence Day remained an unfulfilled promise. In the Lower Cape Fear, this reality was made evident on July 4th 1862, when Confederate Colonel William Lamb took charge of Fort Fisher. The fort was one of several erected along the mouth of the river to protect the critical port of Wilmington.

​The fort was begun in 1861, but when Lamb assumed command, he found the gun emplacements and disconnected sand walls too weak, writing, “one of the Federal frigates could have cleaned it out with a few broadsides.”

He set about building a mile-long coastal defense with 30-foot sandhill traverses, a 9-foot fence, buried munition chambers, almost 50 major artillery pieces covering land and sea, and as many as 2000 defenders by 1865. As the largest Confederate fort built, it would become known as the 'Gibraltar of the South'. To do this, Lamb used Confederate troops, coopted native Americans, and as many as 500 enslaved workers from the many nearby plantations. ​​

John Bellamy Jr., in his memoir Diary of an Octogenarian, said ​"When it became necessary to throw up the embankments at Fort Fisher, my father and other large slave owners furnished hundreds of slaves to assist in strengthening the fortification around Fort Fisher and Fort Caswell, making no charge to the Confederate Government. They thought it a patriotic duty they owed to their country and would not accept any compensation."

This photo is one of many taken by Timothy H. O'Sullivan after the fall of Fort Fisher in 1865. No photos of the fort during wartime are known to exist. Photo courtesy of Wilmington StarNews.

The Confederacy used enslaved workers to build a defense intended to maintain slavery in the South - and the most concerted efforts began on a 4th of July under Lamb's stewardship. 

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It was not until the end of the war that the Black population, particularly the enslaved, would be afforded the unalienable rights outlined in the Declaration of Independence. Emancipation and Reconstruction enabled Black communities to publicly celebrate their liberty, which they commemorated on both the Fourth of July and Emancipation Day. In most southern cities, they almost exclusively organized Independence Day celebrations while white citizens generally observed the holiday bitterly and without joy.

In 1868, Wilmington’s Daily Journal reported, “The only public demonstrations observable were participated in, not by the whites, for whom the Declaration was made, but by negro organizations of small boys and the fire companies parading the streets to some extent, rejoicing in a new found feeling of patriotism which they are incapable of analyzing." 

Even President Johnson’s proclamation of amnesty to all former Confederates, except those under indictment, ironically made on July 4th, 1868, failed to ease much Southern resentment of the holiday. Celebrations did not fully return to parts of the South for more than 35 years, according to James Heintze, a retired American University librarian and a historian of Independence Day.

The Daily Journal. [Wilmington, N.C.], July 4, 1868. Accessed on www.digitalnc.org.

The Daily Journal. [Wilmington, N.C.], July 7, 1868. Accessed on www.digitalnc.org.

While former Confederates like the Bellamy family lamented their lost cause and the Union’s treatment of them, Black Wilmingtonians seized every opportunity to make the most of their freedom. The same year of Johnson’s proclamation, George W. Price, Jr., formerly enslaved plasterer of the Bellamy Mansion site, was elected to the state legislature as one of three New Hanover County representatives.  

The black community would work alongside whites as elected officials, business owners, civil servants, and civic leaders until the 1898 Wilmington Coup and Massacre restored power to white Southern Democrats. North Carolina quickly disenfranchised Blacks, joining the rest of the former Confederate states which had done so after the end of federal Reconstruction twenty years earlier. It would take over sixty years and the struggle for Civil Rights for freedom and equality for all to come into focus once again.