Mapping the Fourth of July in the Civil War Era

 Virginia Center for Civil War Studies

Civil War history lives at Virginia Tech. From its home in Virginia Tech’s History Department, the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies promotes greater understanding of the Civil War era among academics and the public. Whether you’re a student or a professional historian, a serious history buff or someone who just likes to learn, we have something to offer you.

How did Americans celebrate Independence Day as their nation was falling apart? The answer lies in tens of thousands of Civil War-era sources, from newspaper articles and speeches to private letters and diaries. These documents reveal how a wide range of Americans — northern and southern, white and black, male and female, Democrat and Republican, immigrant and native born — all used the Fourth to articulate their deepest beliefs about American identity during the great crisis of the Civil War.

Did you know that many white southerners stopped celebrating the Fourth at the end of the Civil War? Frustrated by defeat and outraged by black commemorations of Independence Day, they did not fully resume their own celebrations for years. Northerners, meanwhile, used the holiday to celebrate Union victory while African Americans embraced the opportunity to claim their place in the national community. For everyone, the Fourth was a day to argue about who counted as an American and what that meant.

Fourth of July celebrations during the Civil War

Lincoln and Grant on July 4th  . . ."What to do as a blog post for a day like this?  I’ll begin with this really magnificent painting of Ulysses S. Grant on July 4, 1863, at Vicksburg.  Called Glorious Fourth, painted by renowned artist Mort Künstler, it captures the second of two great Union victories that signaled the turn of the Civil War.". . .   

. . ."This is essentially a People’s contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life. Yielding to partial, and temporary departures, from necessity, this is the leading object of the government for whose existence we contend.

…"Our popular government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it, our people have already settled—the successful establishing, and the successful administering of it. One still remains—its successful maintenance against a formidable [internal] attempt to overthrow it. It is now for them to demonstrate to the world, that those who can fairly carry an election, can also suppress a rebellion—that ballots are the rightful, and peaceful, successors of bullets; and that when ballots have fairly, and constitutionally, decided, there can be no successful appeal, back to bullets; that there can be no successful appeal, except to ballots themselves, at succeeding elections. Such will be a great lesson of peace; teaching men that what they cannot take by an election, neither can they take it by a war—teaching all, the folly of being the beginners of a war." . . .