During the difficult years of the Revolutionary War, patriots began to celebrate the anniversary of American independence on July 4. They also marked battle victories, and their anniversaries. These patriots focused on what unified them and on the glorious national future they expected would follow from their victories, rather than on the British past that they had once actively remembered on such occasions. The revolutionary movement’s need to simultaneously practice politics and create national unity only raised the stakes of celebrating national holidays.
The trend in the early republic would be for July Fourth, and other celebrations modeled on the Fourth, to spread nationalism and, at the same time, to provide venues for divisive political expression. In this way, Americans learned both to be American and to practice partisanship without any sense of contradiction. Just as they blamed the British and their Native and African allies while drawing on British traditions, they used the Fourth of July to praise and criticize their governments and one another, in the process struggling over who, and what, was truly American.
In 1787 and 1788, proponents of the new federal Constitution staged supposedly spontaneous celebrations of ratification in the various states, not only to express their relief, but also to attack their opponents and to try to convince doubters that the new national charter would inevitably be accepted by all the states. During the 1790s, when disputes over foreign affairs and the role of public opinion between elections led Federalists and Democratic Republicans to begin to coalesce into informal national political parties, these partisans began to hold separate Fourth of July celebrations in larger towns. They also used the Fourth and its now more fully developed repertoire of parades, sermons, toasts, and newspaper reportage as a model for new celebrations with explicit political meanings.
Federalists began to celebrate Washington’s Birthday in order to support Washington’s policies and to confirm their claims to embody the nation. For a time, Democratic Republicans marked anniversaries of the French Revolution, which they felt expressed the more democratic version of politics they sought to turn into American tradition. After 1800, they also celebrated March 4, the anniversary of Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration as president, as an alternative to what they called the “monarchical” tradition of Washington’s Birthday. Such celebrations helped Americans put into practice a two-party system, which few justified on its own terms but which, along with the newspapers that were increasingly subsidized by parties, provided an orderly meeting ground between an unwieldy federal electoral politics and a tradition of popular rituals.