For Black citizens of the early United States, the Fourth of July was a yearly reminder of a revolution deferred—the always-not-yet nature of Black freedom in a “pseudo-republic.” Such was the case even at the moment the Declaration of Independence was circulating. The July 15, 1776, issue of the New-York Gazette and the Weekly Mercury, for instance, featured the Declaration’s text and news about its being read before the New York regiment of the Continental Army, led by General George Washington. The paper also printed two freedom notices of a different sort: one originating from Flatbush featuring 21-year-old Prince, who was “supposed to have gone towards Rye [NY] or entered the Army”; and the other featuring brothers, Nathaniel and Jacob, who absconded from separate enslavers near Long Island. In my mind’s eye, I imagine Prince, Nathaniel, and Jacob hearing the Declaration read somewhere in New York. What would they have been thinking in an audience that might have included the enslavers who had offered rewards for their return to enslavement?
After the war, Black intellectuals simultaneously laid claim to the Revolution and registered increasing disappointment, frustration, and anger at white Americans who believed that its results applied only to themselves. Across the nineteenth century, Black citizens leveraged language from the Declaration of Independence and tropes from the revolutionary era to claim citizenship and press for emancipation. The delegates of the 1853 Colored National Convention, for instance, addressed themselves to their “Fellow-Citizens,” claiming,
By birth, we are American citizens; by the principles of the Declaration of Independence, we are American citizens; within the meaning of the United States Constitution, we are American citizens; by the facts of history, and the admissions of American statesmen, we are American citizens; by the hardships and trials endured; by the courage and fidelity displayed by our ancestors in defending the liberties and in achieving the independence of our land, we are American citizens.
This avalanche of claims was not purely rhetorical; rather, Black citizens could count themselves among the nation’s founders—its soldiers and institution builders—and did the work of citizenship through conventions, newspapers, civic organizations, and other venues, often despite hostile state and federal legislation.
When they did observe the Fourth, Black citizens confronted a national double-speak in which many white Americans celebrated their freedom from political oppression while continuing to support and participate in the enslavement of African-descended people. Frederick Douglass famously made this tension between citizenship and national belonging the backbone of his July 5, 1852, oration before the Rochester Ladies Antislavery Society, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”. He addressed his largely white audience as “fellow citizens,” even as he asked them, “What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence” when that “high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us?” Martin R. Delany similarly described Black citizens as a “nation within a nation” in his Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People in the United States (1852); yet, he dedicated the volume “to the American People, North and South. By Their Most Devout, and Patriotic Fellow Citizen, the Author.” For both Douglass and Delany, the “fellow citizen” invoked an imperative and an indictment: an imperative to the United States to recognize their share in the project of self-governance and an indictment of their white fellow citizens’ refusal to abide by their own professed creeds.