Not Self-Evident: Fourth of July Orations in Charleston, South Carolina, 1820–1840

In the antebellum period, no city shaped the development of southern civil religion more than Charleston, South Carolina. Living in the only major southern city with a majority black population, white Charlestonians found themselves at the center of a rhetorical debate that had both theological and political implications: how to live as American Christians in a culture heavily dependent upon the legal subjugation of another group of people. Civil religion succeeded in places where biblical interpretations for a pro-slavery theology fell short for whites in Charleston. While the easy option would have been an acceptance of scientific racism, which argued that black people were naturally inferior or even had been created separately from whites, the vast majority of Southerners were biblical literalists. Therefore, scientific racism seemed to be a direct violation of Genesis 1, in which all people came from one man and one woman. The most common biblical argument for African slavery was based on an interpretation of Genesis 9, in which Noah’s curse of Canaan extends to Ham, the ancestor of African peoples according to Genesis 10. Such an argument, however, would be less persuasive in a political context. Civil religion, or a secular/political framework that could bind a community together, proved more useful in political arguments. In Charleston, and by extension the rest of the South, civil religion was secondarily a belief in white supremacy but primarily a belief in the necessity of African slavery. This article demonstrates how those beliefs integrated themselves into Declaration of Independence orations. These orations helped to shape how white southern audiences thought about their roles as citizens. In this context, southern civil religion glorified patriotism and American values as gifts for whites only.

The establishment of the Confederacy in 1861 hastened the beginning of a military conflict that revolved around two existential questions: who is a human being and who is an American? The colonies became states through revolution, formally announced in the Declaration of Independence, but the document contained a clause that cast a growing shadow over pro-slavery Southerners and their allies in the two generations before the Civil War: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”^[1] In context, the statement privileged the views of soon-to-be ex-colonists over George III and Parliament.^[2] And the statement echoed the sentiment of George Mason’s 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights: “All men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” But such sentiments rang hollow in a slave-owning country, as the debates about the Constitution and the eventual three-fifths clause demonstrated.^[3] A declaration that argues for equality and justifies revolt became increasingly problematic in a region increasingly anxious about slave revolts and abolitionist agitation.^[4] In such a context, the clause could not be taken literally.

Every Fourth of July, white Americans held parades, set off fireworks, and delivered orations, all while fearing the explosive implications of the equality claim in the Declaration of Independence. Southern orators in particular either had to ignore the claim or explain it away.^[5] Speakers did both between 1820 and 1860.^[6] Why take an American celebration of independence as occasion to mention a French revolt?^[7]

Because by connecting the ideal of human equality to a later bloody failure of a revolution, pro-slavery advocates could argue that the phrase in the Declaration of Independence was an unfortunate aberration that could not be used to determine the validity of the American Revolution or justify an end to slavery but could be used to explain the positive conservative elements of the French Revolution, and not its bloody failures. In the South, the Fourth of July therefore became a day in which revolution could be cautiously celebrated,^[8] with the peculiar institution of slavery sometimes combined with Christianity in order to mitigate or redirect the civic religion of American pride and patriotism.^[9] Independence Day orations from South Carolina, and specifically Charleston, will demonstrate this point.^[10] Twenty-four published orations came from South Carolina, more than from any other state. Twenty of the orators spoke in Charleston, so examining those speeches will shed light on the rhetoric that became popular in the state and the region, particularly before the Compromise of 1850, when the prospect of a civil war began to loom.

The available sources indicate that Charleston orations established the rhetorical template for the rest of the region. Orators in Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and the District of Columbia delivered thirty-one published orations between 1820 and 1860. Unlike Charleston, which had only five orations printed after 1840, only eight orations in the rest of the South appeared before 1840 and only one before 1834 (New Bern, NC, 1827).^[11] Two mentioned neither the French Revolution nor the Declaration of Independence (Maryland, 1837, and Mississippi, 1837), three mentioned both documents (North Carolina, 1837, Kentucky, 1834, and Maryland, 1836), and the rest mentioned one or the other. Only two texts made an argument not found in a Charleston oration. In 1827, James W. Bryan told his North Carolina audience that Thomas Jefferson “expended his princely fortune in the establishment of free and equal rights.”^[12] Discussing the Boston Tea Party in 1838, Thomas D. Mitchell of Kentucky declared, “The transaction was a glorious commentary on the rights of man, an announcement to the world, in anticipation of the Declaration of Independence, that all men were born free, and equal.”^[13] While the 1856 oration in Jacksonville, Florida used a similar phrase (“‘that all men are created free and equal’”), it appeared to be a misquoting of the Declaration of Independence used positively, which often was not the case in other southern rhetorical contexts. Significantly, the remaining regional orations utilized arguments that appeared in Charleston years before, with the exception of the nullification controversy, which was unique to South Carolina.^[14] The misquoting could be a consequence of the way people remembered the Declaration of Independence. As Guy G. Stroumsa writes, “Memory is in nowise a static conservatory of things past. Rather, memory actively reconstructs the past.”^[15] Texts allow for such reconstruction, and the conflation of texts from the American and French Revolutions became an intentional part of southern collective memories.^[16]

The orators not only deliberately downplayed any universal egalitarian implications of the Declaration of Independence; they insisted that to be a true American Christian citizen, one must use political ideology and structures to reinforce social and racial inequalities.^[17] The celebrations strengthened the resolve of those who believed that their way of life depended upon freedom being a blessing for whites only. “All men are created equal” was neither self-evident nor desirable.

The later debates around 1776 happened precisely because the Declaration and the Revolution created a nation, and identity creation is part of nation building. In the late eighteenth century, how and what one celebrated said much about one’s political and social worldview. David Waldstreicher “[argues] that American nationalism emerged from the conjunction of local celebrations and their reproduction in the press,” creating “an ideology that made consensus the basis of patriotism.”^[18] Upon the Declaration’s signing and publishing in July 1776, some new Americans hung or burned George III in effigy. Public readings of the Declaration led to spontaneous celebrations. In the war years, “the overwhelming intent of these rites was unity.” Not only did the celebrations confirm the establishment and solidarity of the United States, even the French in America gave their support to Independence Day events.^[19]

But the meanings of equality and the Fourth of July became contestable almost as soon as the Revolutionary War ended. As the new United States became divided among Federalists and Republicans in the 1790s, what to do with “all men are created equal” was a political issue. Federalists opposed the implications of the phrase because of its association with revolutionary political activity, including in France. In contrast, the French Revolution had not dampened Republican enthusiasm for the Declaration. Instead, Republicans had described the French Revolution as a positive event that eliminated a harmful aristocracy. As Waldstreicher notes, “Not until 1798 did most Fourth of July orators distance the American Revolution from the French Revolution.”^[20] The 1800 Republican revolution, however, made the Declaration even more popular. The Reign of Terror’s bloodletting no longer had to be associated with the Declaration’s call for human freedom, and eventually in the North, separate Federalist and Republican Fourth of July celebrations ceased.^[21] Once the Federalists died out after the War of 1812, the Declaration of Independence’s popularity increased further, and the document began to be described as “a sacred text.” Philip Detweiler concludes that “the stimulus of the slavery controversy” revived conflict about the Declaration, with “some few to deny their [the Declaration’s principles] ‘self-evident’ truth.”^[22] The phrase is a diplomatically worded understatement.

The politicization of the Declaration of Independence paralleled the political rise of Thomas Jefferson, who eventually becomes credited as the author. In the post-1776 generation, the Declaration was politically useful first because of presumed anonymous authorship and then because of Jefferson’s association with the document. The Republicans played up his role as author while the Federalists downplayed it. During his presidency, Republican southerners generally withheld criticism of the document and its presumed author.^[23] In the years following Jefferson’s death on July 4, 1826, however, his image as an equality-advocating slaveowner became more challenging for southerners.

Once abolitionists began to use the Declaration as a proof text, pro-slavery southern Christians began to reject it. They argued “that many God-given institutions opposed the rationalist doctrines of freedom and equality, because they were ordained to control mankind’s natural inclination to evil.”^[24] Beginning in the 1820s, some southerners returned to the law and order Federalist arguments of the 1790s when commenting on the Declaration. According to Kenneth S. Greenberg, “Revolutionary Carolinians” argued that while all had “the right to equal independence,” men exchanged some independence for stable political and social institutions. This sacrifice, however, did not mean that the governed became slaves. Instead, free men followed the law and did not use freedom as an excuse to do whatever they wanted. Such arguments did not form in a historical vacuum. Thomas Jefferson embodied the tension between political liberty and social inequality, supporting both as a Republican slaveholder from Virginia. Later, South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun would insist that natural human equality and the guarantee of human freedom do not exist.^[25] Calhoun rejected the concept of universal human liberty, arguing in A Disquisition on Government (1851) that inferior people should not have liberty. Further, “inequality of condition, while it is a necessary consequence of liberty, is, at the same time, indispensable to government.” The idea “that all men are born free and equal” was false, because it violated the natural human state of submission to parental and legal authority.^[26] Calhoun repeated this argument in A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States (1851). He warned that if the Union were to collapse, the false idea “that ‘all men are born free and equal’” would be to blame. Babies live under parental control; God created woman inferior to man. The superfluous error of the Declaration of Independence’s equality claim would lead to anarchy.^[27]

As Len Travers has argued, “The ritualized celebration of the Fourth of July helped to mask disturbing ambiguities and contradictions in the new republic.”^[28] Slavery embodied all of those ambiguities and contradictions. In Charleston, slaves could not participate in the celebration. By 1808, no blacks, free or slave, could gather on the Fourth. While the celebrations during the War of 1812 supported the military effort, when the war ended in 1815 Charleston’s celebrations became less generically American and more specifically southern. By the Civil War, “Independence Day lost nearly all relevance for the people of Charleston.”^[29] This might be why the majority of published Charleston orations appear before 1840.

The rejection of the holiday paralleled a dismissal of its founding document. Pro-slavery southerners argued that God ordained their way of life and nothing, not even their country’s Declaration of Independence, could change a divinely ordained society. Any other point of view could be branded as irreligious and rejected out of hand by any Christian, northern or southern. Mark A. Noll writes, “In the days before the Civil War, John Hughes, Roman Catholic bishop of New York, was distressed by what he regarded as the atheistic republicanism of extreme anti-slave groups.” Before the party’s demise, some Whigs “[combined] abhorrence of French infidelity with allegiance to Real Whig political principle.”^[30]

As evangelicalism, with its emphasis on biblical authority, became the primary American expression of Christianity in the nineteenth century, the earlier Republican enthusiasm about the French Revolution began to disappear. Instead, the Revolution became associated with any and all political and social disorder.^[31] As early as 1822, Charleston resident Edwin Holland, in the aftermath of the Denmark Vesey conspiracy, called blacks “Jacobins,” the group associated with the French Reign of Terror. Holland wrote, “Let it never be forgotten, that our negroes are truly the Jacobins of the country; that they are the anarchists and the domestic enemy; the common enemy of civilized society, and the barbarians who would, if they could, become the destroyers of our race.’”^[32] Holland overlooked the fact that the endangered whites brought their troubles on themselves in the name of economic opportunity. Beginning in the 1830s, “American proslavery writers pictured abolitionists as anarchists, infidels, and sons of the French Revolution,” and the picture became a commonplace one.^[33] In contrast, “the American war for Independence differed from the later Revolution in France in part because American Protestants aligned faith in reason with, rather than against, faith in God.”^[34] That alignment allowed pro-slavery southerners to cheer on the Fourth of July without undermining their society as they knew it. White solidarity eventually developed out of the common insistence upon black inferiority and the righteousness and necessity of slavery, and that thread of civil religion slowly made its way through the Charleston Independence Day orations, regardless of speaker or subject.^[35]

David Ramsay’s 1820 oration to the ’76 Association^[36] praised American valor while noting French democratic failures. The founders, inspired by God, “beautified the vigour of action with the purity of principle; not merely regardless of self, but pledging their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honour to redeem their country from oppression.” The men who signed the Declaration fulfilled its promise. In a possible allusion to the document, Ramsay pointed out that America “has not only acquainted us with truth, and convinced us of the equality of all men and their right to self-government” but also demonstrated that men could create a fully democratic system. In contrast, the French revolutionary experiment “was manifest in power, resistless, and uncontroulable [sic]” and could not be used as an example of effective democracy—“the ‘rights of man’ is a tragedy.”^[37] Orators who chose to make a comparison commonly argued for the American Revolution’s superiority and the French Revolution’s inferiority.

John Berwick Legaré’s 1822 oration mentioned both the French Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, with emphasis on the former as a foil to the American Revolution. Legaré praised the conservatism of the American Revolution: “Unlike those schemes of reform, which sprang out of the ignorance, and are founded on the excitements of popular feeling, the Revolution of America, exhibits the interesting spectacle of a brave and gallant people, contending for their essential rights, with all the moderation of remonstrance and generosity of action.” In contrast, “genius has consecrated the deeds, and eternized the fame of sanguinary revolutionists, who, in the paroxysms of civil tumult, have ascended the throne, and exchanged the crimsoned dagger of assassination, for the glittering scepter of tyranny.” Legaré’s allusion here to the French Revolution became explicit a few pages later. While initially and rightfully limited to constitutional reform, the meddling of other nations into France’s affairs led to a continental war.^[38]

Legaré made no mention of the legislation that supported African slavery or the spell of pro-slavery argumentation. Reading his oration, one would never guess that Denmark Vesey had been executed just two days before. But the failed Vesey rebellion of June 1822 shaped Charlestonians’ responses to the Declaration of Independence in the next decade. In 1822, Robert Hayne was the attorney general and later part of the second court that investigated the Vesey incident. Robert J. Turnbull was on the initial city court, and Henry Laurens Pinckney, along with Turnbull, was a founding member of the South Carolina Association, “a citizens’ organization devoted to insuring aggressive enforcement of the laws for the ‘better government’ of slaves and free blacks passed by the legislature in 1822.” When the Association decided to defend the Seaman’s Act against the claim of a free black British sailor detained in Charleston, they worked with lawyer Benjamin F. Hunt.^[39] All of these men gave pro-nullification Independence Day orations in Charleston during the 1830s.

Peter J. Shand’s 1830 oration was the calm that hinted at the nullification storm in Charleston. On the fifth of July (“the Fourth falling on Sunday”), Shand spoke to the Revolution and Cincinnati Societies.^[40] Shand, a member of the Revolution Society, praised the Declaration of Independence without reservation. He argued, “Surely we can regard no act of the important era of the Revolution with more sincere pride and gratification, than that imperishable monument of human intellect.” Guided by God and “principle,” the United States led the world, and “through our instrumentality, the cause of justice and virtue has been successfully maintained and secured—the inherent rights of mankind determined and promoted.”^[41] This allusion to the Declaration did not indicate what “the inherent rights of mankind” might be;^[42] however, Shand later stated a few of them, based on principle. They included no taxation without representation, “a principle whose absence is inseparable from slavery, and whose value is worth immensely more than all the blood and treasure that have been lavished in maintaining it.” Shand used the word slavery in a slaveholding state without irony. The slavery that the colonists resisted bore more significance than the slavery they and their posterity maintained. Resistance to the Stamp Act occurred “in the cause of national right and equality.” In response to such injustice, the new American leaders wrote the Declaration of Independence, an immortal document, and then the Constitution, the standard of equality: “No monopolies—no sacrifice of one portion on the altar of another’s aggrandizement—no leading one section like sheep to the slaughter, and fleecing them of their dearest immunities, that others might be enrobed ‘in purple and fine linen,’ were ever contemplated by the authors of our venerable Constitution.”^[43] Clearly, all Americans were equal under the law, and yet Shand feared that fact would be ignored to the South’s detriment.

His fear stemmed from the tariff controversy, which threatened unity and equality and had to be resolved. A selfish violation of noble principles and American values, the tariff embodied the opposite of the Revolution. Shand lamented, “Has not the South—the high-minded and chivalrous South—that bled at every pore, and consecrated every energy to secure the fruits of independence, not only to herself, but to all, who with her, had embarked in its cause, been despoiled of every thing but her lofty and generous character?” The poor yet righteous South resisted “these sacrilegious invasions of her rights,” and it had virtuous allies, such as President Andrew Jackson, who would help to “bring back the uncorrupted and single-eyed patriotism of our ancestors—until it shall restore the principles of ’76—the principles of our Constitution.”^[44] Shand concluded his oration with a call for a return to past unity, “when throughout all America, no boundary lines were heeded, save those which distinguished between slavery and independence,” and when “those exalted apostles of liberty” who died on July 4, 1826 helped birth their nation.^[45]

Just one year later, responses to the tariff controversy resulted in separate Independence Day celebrations in Charleston. The Union and State Rights Party delivered its oration at the First Presbyterian Church, and speaker William Drayton used the Declaration of Independence as a proof text for secession. Drayton noted that the revolution began because the founding fathers “refused to yield to taxation without representation; and in defense of an abstract principle, their citizens mutually [pledged] ‘to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honors.’” The Declaration, and not the Constitution, however, gave citizens the right to leave the Union, due to the Declaration’s equality clause.^[46] Because there was no constitutional right to secede, the Union Party rejected secession as a legitimate form of resistance to the tariff.

Robert Y. Hayne delivered the 1831 oration for the State Rights and Free Trade party. Bypassing both the Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution, Hayne instead emphasized the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions and justification for manly Christian patriotic resistance to the oppressive tariff and what he called the “American system.”^[47] He argued that the 1776 “Revolution had its origin, not so much in the weight of actual oppression, as in the great principle—the sacred duty, of resistance to the exercise of unauthorized power”: the men rejected “‘voluntary slavery’” even in the form of small and seemingly insignificant taxes, out of principle.^[48] Like previous orators, Hayne rejected slavery for white men, who could own property but could not allow themselves to be treated as property. Because the tariff would destroy the southern economy, it had to be opposed. Such an economy had divine roots: “God, in giving us a fertile soil, and genial climate peculiarly adapted to those great staples which supply the world with food and raiment, has marked out this pursuit for us too plainly to be mistaken, and, accordingly, all our habits, as well as our inclination, irresistibly impel us to the cultivation of cotton and rice, for exportation.” “Under the old System” and in “those good old times,” free planters’ efforts benefited all southerners, regardless of social class. Hayne does not mention dependence on black slave labor as a prerequisite for white economic independence. Under the tariff, however, prices in the South had declined precipitously, for rice, cotton, “lands and negroes, houses and lots.” Free trade therefore must be restored, and the South must be allowed to manage its own affairs: “For if the power claimed by Congress in this case be conceded, then there is an end to all limitation on the powers of the Federal Government… They may tax you at pleasure, render your property worthless, overturn your institutions, and reduce you to slavery.”^[49] Without resistance, the 1776 revolution meant nothing.^[50] Hayne feared and wanted to resist metaphorical slavery. At the same time, he glorified an economic system based upon literal slavery, making his argument an indirect support of the civil institution upon which he thought white southern economic uplift depended.

Resistance, however, must not lead to secession, so nullification became a crucial concept. Since South Carolina’s economy could not survive without agriculture, the state called for maintaining its rights over and against the federal government. Hayne insisted that no one would put the federal government above the will of a state and the maintenance of the Union.^[51] He urged his audience to fulfill their religious obligation and protect state rights, but he warned that if need be, they should follow Thomas Jefferson and advocate for nullification of the tariff as a way to avoid secession. Thanks to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, nullification had a long and clear rationale.^[52] Hayne praised them “‘as a light to our feet and a lamp to our path,’”^[53] inspired by Jefferson, “all radiant in the glowing armour of liberty and truth.” The Supreme Court could not be the arbiter between a state and the federal government: “How can you bring before a Court the question of the constitutionality of a protective Tariff, in relation to a bill which on its face fraudulently purports to be for revenue? Or how will you test the validity of any appropriation for Internal Improvements—Colonization—Emancipation or anything else?” According to Jefferson, “whose words…come in the garb of wisdom, invested with authority,” the majority did not rule.^[54]

Instead, when a serious conflict arose between the states and the federal government, the states must call a convention to resolve the dispute. Hayne remained convinced that because the government would not war against a state, nullification asserted a state’s right without leading to military conflict.^[55] He concluded that nothing should be placed above freedom: “Dear as is the Union, the Constitution is dearer to my heart, and Liberty dearest of all. The love of the Union, without a corresponding devotion to Liberty and the Constitution, is like faith without works, it is dead; and however we may deceive ourselves or delude the world, he who loves not the Constitution more than the Union, and liberty above all, is no disciple of the true faith.”^[56] Thirty years later, South Carolina decided to put their freedom and independence above the Union.

Robert J. Turnbull’s 1832 oration to the State Rights and Free Trade Party lamented the Constitution’s focus upon individual freedom and not property rights, which led to the nullification crisis.^[57] As free men and citizens of a state, they had the right to serve as a check on federal power. The basis of this power came from state sovereignty, described in the 1798 Virginia Resolutions: “the right of a State Legislature to arrest the progress of usurpation within its limits, is most distinctly placed upon the ground of the compact, and not on the ground of the right of revolution.”^[58] Not even the Supreme Court had the authority to arbitrate between a state and the federal government. Turnbull praised Thomas Jefferson for establishing the concept of nullification, which enabled South Carolinians to avoid enslavement and “to stand at once upon our sovereign rights as becomes men and freemen.”^[59] The concept would not lead to civil war, as the example of Georgia’s rejection of federal laws about Cherokee lands suggested.^[60] Turnbull expressed confidence that Georgia, as well as Kentucky and Virginia, the states responsible for the Resolutions, would support South Carolina in any protracted struggle with the federal government. He concluded that just as during the American Revolution, South Carolinians must resist unjust taxation as “voluntary slavery” and act as men: “let us do our duty, and leave the consequences to god.”^[61] For Turnbull and those who followed him, equality was not an abstract concept, but a civil right of white southerners who could therefore reject what they claimed were unjust laws.^[62]

Perhaps as a thank you for his 1831 efforts for the State Rights and Free Trade Party, Henry L. Pinckney delivered the 1833 oration in Charleston’s Independent (Congregational) Church.^[63] Pinckney addressed “the State Rights & Free Trade Party,” the Cincinnati and Revolution Societies, “the ’76 Association, and the State Volunteers.”^[64] In keeping with his audience and his political views, Pinckney praised the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution only within the context of state rights and the nullification convention. His hero, Thomas Jefferson, also insisted in 1798 that “‘Nullification is the rightful remedy.’” Those listening to him were his true heirs, and the heirs of the 1776 revolutionaries. Madison and Jefferson’s Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, “those immortal documents—those imperishable monuments of political liberty and wisdom,” maintained the freedom that the men of 1776 declared.^[65] Following Jefferson, South Carolina used the Constitution to defend state rights and free trade. And that action, solidified in the 1832 nullification convention in South Carolina, was the greatest of all time, greater even than the Second Continental Congress’ passing of the Declaration of Independence.^[66] The participants in the nullification convention were the true protectors of liberty and the Union: “Yes, fellow-citizens, the day on which our State Convention nullified the Tariff Acts, was a proud day for South-Carolina. It should ever be honoured as the day of her second declaration of independence.” The Fourth of July became a celebration of November 24, 1832.^[67]

Pinckney called for southern slaveowners to resist their own enslavement through a two-pronged defense against African slavery. The first was radical revolution. In discussing the nullification controversy, he noted that the tariff, if unopposed, “would leave them no alternative but voluntary slavery.” By ending John Adams’ “reign of terror,” embodied by the Alien and Sedition Acts, Jefferson acted as an inspiration for the nullifiers’ resistance. Such acts truly were in the spirit of the French Revolution, as opposed to the unfair characterization of the State Rights party: “What orator spoke who did not denounce the most distinguished members of our party as Catalines, Dantons, and Robespierres, and our State Rights Associations as nurseries of rebellion and Jacobinical Clubs?” In contrast, nullifiers were freedom fighters. The convention was “a beacon by which the oppressed will be directed to the peaceful preservation of their rights: a lamp from which suffering humanity will relume its hopes.” The suffering humanity consisted of South Carolina men, who must remain free and not slaves. If the Force Bill remained a law, then South Carolina would not be completely free. Nevertheless, its people would not yield to slavery, either: “Slavery exists in the mind and not in the body. He is no slave, however bound in chains, who still retains the unconquerable spirit of a free man.”^[68] Someone not legally in chains could speak of slavery in metaphysical terms.

Second, Pinckney warned his audience against being enslaved by abolitionists, “who would delight to see every southern city a St. Domingo”; they embodied “the spirit of political hostility, flying like a fury, from city to city and from State to State, proclaiming destruction to our local institutions, and the spirit of fanaticism, redress to the injured and liberty to the captives.” Pinckney refused to acknowledge that slaves may be captives. Instead, he insisted upon the supremacy of the local institutions, criticizing northerners for “legislative interference with our rights,” distaste for “our policy,” and harm to “our rights and liberties.” While abolitionism came from “the wild delusions of false benevolence and mistaken duty” and “the demon of fanaticism,” slavery was “the sacred rights of property.” Rejecting abolitionism’s “false notions of philanthropy,” the South must defend its “properties and liberties.” “No! The South may be assailed, but never overcome. No people can be enslaved who are not ready for a master. No power can conquer freemen who are determined to continue free.” Pinckney not only insisted upon the free status of his white audience; he implied that the slaves they held naturally belonged in that category and were ready for a master. He concluded that southerners must choose freedom; the alternative was “to be called a freeman, yet know that you are not free—to speak of your property, yet know that you are not suffered to enjoy its fruits.” In contrast, liberty for white slaveowners meant knowing “that you are a man with all the rights of man.”^[69] No doubt remained that American humanity belonged to whites who celebrated and fought for their freedom from tyrannical masters while being masters.

While state politics would continue to dominate the 1835 Fourth of July oration,  the Declaration of Independence at least had regained some of its luster. Speaking to the Whigs and the Cincinnati Society, Edward R. Laurens, a Cincinnati member, praised the Declaration as a gift from “the Goddess of Liberty… The desire of freedom is an essential attribute of humanity, and glows in the bosoms of all who are endowed with the moral functions of nature.” Any resistance to federal overreach that South Carolinians showed was because of the lessons of 1776 and not in spite of or above them.^[70]

By 1839, the nullification crisis had passed. Speaking to the Washington Society, Benjamin Faneuil Hunt alluded to the French Revolution and the Declaration of Independence.^[71] He stated that the 1776 revolution happened because “our fathers, [believed] with religious faith in the ability of the people to govern themselves.” Because this revolution was second in significance only to the rise of Christianity, Hunt refused to give a partisan speech: “This day has too often been desecrated by pouring forth the phials of political wrath and exasperating the ferocity of party animosities. The American people have too often exhibited the revolting spectacle of converting the temple into an arena for sectarian strife, and the birthday of national freedom into an occasion for mutual reproaches and vituperation. The day, the place are suited to other and higher themes.”^[72] While politically non-partisan, the speech praised white superiority and purported non-white savagery.^[73]

The courage of the white men of 1776 inspired other freedom movements, including the French Revolution. Every new state supported the Declaration of Independence and fought for “the vindication of its domestic institutions.” The new Constitution, with its “great conservative principles” guaranteed state rights, and it inspired the French.^[74] Sadly, their revolution got out of hand, “And however humanity may weep over the excesses of the Revolution, it is not unnatural that maddened by the contrast of sudden emancipation they should have inflicted an indiscriminate vengeance upon all who were connected with those, who opposed their efforts, or attempted to interrupt their progress.” Fortunately, France had recovered and had a better government, “and for this she is indebted under God to the principles promulgated on the 4th of July, 1776.”^[75] But Hunt noted that initially the revolution’s violence delayed the spread of republicanism, which was a right. The United States led the world in rejecting political hierarchy.^[76] Instead, it “proclaimed to the world as ‘self-evident truths’” the right of self-government, republicanism, and social equality. Hunt left no doubt that Europeans should enjoy these civil rights, and he complained about tyranny in Austria, Siberia, and Poland.^[77]

Charleston’s citizens’ complicated relationship with the Declaration of Independence was a microcosm of the much larger questions of race, class, and American identity that have haunted the United States since 1776. Most of the orators spoke in local churches, combining a religious location with a secular argument. The combination may not have been arbitrary. In his discussion of religious memory, Guy G. Stroumsa notes that “ritual patterns are reinforced by thought patterns, while theological conceptions are reinforced by ritual behavior.”^[78] The specific ritual activity of expounding the Declaration of Independence, the primary document in American civil religion, in a church gave the exposition the power and authority of a sermon. The Declaration of Independence did not problematize questions about slavery and liberty. The claim of equality was never a universal one. Combined with the reality of African people being legal property, the establishment of the United States and subsequent interpretations of that establishment included a design flaw that neither a war nor a social movement has been able to fix. The Fourth of July orations bring that design flaw to the surface, but they also suggest that the tension between black slavery and white freedom began long before 1861. The Civil War was a consequence of southern civil religion, not its foundation.

Yet, while white Charleston residents praised their liberty in the 1820s and 1830s, African-American abolitionists spoke, too. In 1827, Nathaniel Paul celebrated New York’s abolition of slavery on the Fourth of July. Arguing for human equality as a divine gift, Paul condemned slavery as the opposite: “It is so contrary to the laws which the God of nature has laid down as the rule of action by which the conduct of man is to be regulated towards his fellow man, which binds him to love his neighbor as himself, that it ever has, and ever will meet the decided disapprobation of heaven.”^[79] The combination of the Declaration of Independence’s God of nature with Mark 12:31 was a common abolitionist proof.[80] Paul, however, recognized the contradiction inherent in the Declaration of Independence’s words and the United States’ deeds: “Strange, indeed, is the idea that such a system [slavery], fraught with such consummate wickedness, should ever have found a place in this the otherwise happiest of all countries—a country, the very soil of which is said to be consecrated to liberty, and its fruits the equal rights of man.” Paul saw the design flaw. But he also used the Declaration’s “Nature’s God” to argue that blackness did not naturally embody inferiority. Paul concluded that “the God of Nature has endowed our children with intellectual powers surpassed by none; nor is there anything wanting but their careful cultivation in order to fit them for stations the most honorable, sacred, or useful.”^[81] The test for citizenship need not include color.

But the test often did. The Declaration of Independence did not easily lend itself as a proof for universal equality, in spite of free blacks’ best efforts. Writing in 1813 to oppose a bill that would have restricted the liberty of Pennsylvania’s free blacks, James Forten, a “man of colour,” began: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that god created all men equal, and is one of the most prominent features in the Declaration of Independence, and in that glorious fabrick of collected wisdom, our noble Constitution. This idea embraces the Indian and the European, the Savage and the Saint, the Peruvian and the Laplander, the white Man and the African.” While the Pennsylvania Constitution repeated the Declaration’s argument, Forten saw clearly the challenge for free blacks. He wrote, “It appears as if the committee who drew it up mistook the sentiment expressed in this article, and do not consider us as men.”^[82] The last phrase was precisely the problem, because humanity is a prerequisite for citizenship. If blacks were not people, then they could not be citizens, and the United States was not their country. Therefore, the Fourth of July remained contested and contestable. While slaves typically received the day off, free blacks divided over whether to celebrate or boycott the holiday. Even in the North, those who did celebrate faced segregated gatherings and white backlash.^[83] The message remained the same: citizenship and its privileges belonged to whites only.

This historical reality should challenge any rose-colored-glass reading of the Declaration of Independence and the country it created. In 1981, Lawrence M. Jones argued “one of the strengths of American society is its commitments to the Declaration of Independence and to the Judeo-Christian tradition so that they have functioned as primary authorities in social and political arrangements. They have been less potent in changing racist attitudes and the actions which flow from these attitudes.”^[84] American society’s commitment to the Declaration, however, remains debatable—as only a document with a statement about equality written by a slaveowner can be.^[85] African Americans and other minority groups have read themselves into an American story that initially did not include them.^[86] “All men are created equal” is not self-evident; the claim must be appropriated and re-appropriated by those initially excluded from the American experiment.