Enslaved Americans used the Fourth of July to advance the cause of freedom -

Nat Turner’s story is the stuff of legend. In August 1831, the enslaved Virginia preacher with a reputation for resistance led the largest slave revolt in the history of the United States. In a jailhouse interview given shortly after his arrest, Turner shared the spiritual reasons behind his decision to lead dozens of Black men in the revolutionary uprising that took the lives of more than 50 White men, women and children.

He also revealed the originally scheduled date for the rebellion: “It was intended by us to have begun the work of death on the 4th of July last.” But for a brief illness, Turner and his followers would have turned the national holiday into a nightmare for enslavers and their proslavery allies.

The revelation is unsurprising. In the decades before the Civil War, many enslaved Americans revered the Fourth of July. Given their status as property rather than people, the annual celebration of the Declaration of Independence and the idea that all men were created equal made the national holiday an incredibly powerful symbol for them. They repeatedly marked the occasion by running away, revolting and in other ways resisting their enslavement.

The tradition of enslaved people striking for freedom on the Fourth of July led some of slavery’s defenders to try making the holiday a White-only event.

In Charleston, after an enslaved cook poisoned the Independence Day dinner on his owner’s plantation, Frederick Dalcho declared that the Fourth of July belonged “exclusively to the white population of the United States.” As the status of “Negroes” had not changed since the American Revolution, it was necessary to exclude them from the annual celebration of national independence. “In our speeches and orations, much, and sometimes more than is politically necessary, is said about personal liberty, which Negro auditors know not how to apply, except by running the parallel with their own condition,” Dalcho said. “They, therefore, imbibe false notions of their personal rights, and give reality in their minds, to what has no real existence.”

Despite Dalcho’s admonishment, enslaved people continued to observe Independence Day and use it as a flash point for resistance. Evidence abounds in the classified pages of southern newspapers, which every summer documented the flight of enslaved people on Independence Day.

A particularly memorable advertisement began: “$250 Reward! Runaway from the subscriber, on the 4th of July, a negro man named Henry.” Though handcuffed, the dark-skinned 19-year-old jumped off a horse-driven stagecoach near Alexandria, Va., and immediately headed north in the direction of “a free State.” Henry’s enslaver, Joseph Bruin, informed readers of the Washington, D.C., Union that he would pay the hefty reward for the return of the Independence Day deserter, “dead or alive.”

Evidence also abounds in the testimony of fugitive enslaved people who managed to permanently escape from the house of bondage. Today, William Wells Brown is remembered as a leading abolitionist and one of the United States’ first Black novelists, but he spent the first decades of his life enslaved in Kentucky and Missouri. While a teenager, Brown had the opportunity to hear a Fourth of July oration by Sen. Thomas Hart Benton (D-Mo.). According to Brown’s daughter, “The boy’s young heart leaped with enthusiasm as he listened to the burning eloquence of ‘Old Bullion.’” From that moment, the words of the Declaration of Independence “were indelibly impressed on the heart of this uneducated boy. In his sleep, he dreamed of freedom; when awake, his thoughts were about liberty, and how he could secure it. From the moment that William heard the speech of Mr. Benton, he resolved that he would be free.”

It was not an exaggeration. Shortly after hearing Benton’s address, Brown slipped away from a steamship that was docked in Cincinnati and immediately began his new life as a free man.

Several years after Brown’s escape, the largest collective effort to secure freedom on or about the Fourth of July occurred in Charles County, Md., in 1845. The incident began when dozens of enslaved men, organized under the leadership of an enslaved man named William Wheeler and a free Black carpenter named Mark Caesar, armed themselves with pistols, scythes and clubs.

Over Independence Day weekend, they abandoned their enslavers and overseers and began the long and dangerous trek north toward Pennsylvania and freedom. As the group passed in formation through Washington, D.C., they caused hysteria among the city’s White population, which responded by sending as many as 200 armed citizens and soldiers in pursuit. Less than three days after taking flight, the fugitives clashed with mounted militiamen on the outskirts of the village of Rockville, Md. In the end, authorities captured nearly all the Black outlaws, though several made their way through Pennsylvania and eventually all the way to Canada.

As could be expected, abolitionists’ reaction to the incident was swift and sure. While celebrating the fugitive enslaved people as American patriots who put the principles of the Declaration of Independence into action, they condemned the White citizens who thwarted the escape attempt.

William Lloyd Garrison, one of the true titans of American abolitionism, considered the episode a national disgrace. Dedicating nearly an entire column of his radical abolitionist tract, The Liberator, to the first reports of the event, he demanded rhetorically, “Who can read the following account of the heroic attempt of a band of slaves in Maryland to effect their deliverance by flight, at whatever cost — of the savage manner in which they were shot down or dangerously wounded — of the captured being marched in chains through the city of Washington, to realize a horrible doom — and all this almost at the same hour on which cannon were firing and bells ringing to celebrate the 4th of July — without groaning in spirit, and being ashamed of the American name?”

Several years after the fugitive-slave rebellion at Rockville, the formerly enslaved famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass delivered what is widely considered one of the most important speeches in American history. In “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” the fugitive enslaved man and abolitionist icon wondered what the United States’ preeminent national holiday meant for enslaved people. He declared the holiday a day of “mockery” and “hypocrisy,” a painful annual reminder of the nation’s failure to achieve its promise of freedom for all people.

Having spent more than two decades in bondage, Douglass was certainly qualified to speak on behalf of enslaved people. Nevertheless, the record reveals the Fourth of July meant something else to those held in captivity besides disappointment and pain.

Before the Civil War, the preeminent national holiday fired the hearts and minds of enslaved people. In so doing, it moved and inspired them to fight for the freedom and equality promised to all Americans in the Declaration of Independence. More than a day of food, drink and fireworks, the day was for enslaved people a celebration of the nation’s revolutionary principles and ideals, things they could not and did not take for granted.

July Fourth is a day to remember the real meaning of the holiday. Indeed, at a time of tremendous stress and conflict, when the fate of American freedom and democracy hangs in the balance, it is vital to acknowledge the radical egalitarian ideals that birthed the United States and rededicate ourselves to making them a reality. For like 200 years ago, when slavery led to Civil War, we must determine whether, in Abraham Lincoln’s legendary words, a “nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, can long endure.”

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