In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820

In this innovative study, David Waldstreicher investigates the importance of political festivals in the early American republic. Drawing on newspapers, broadsides, diaries, and letters, he shows how patriotic celebrations and their reproduction in a rapidly expanding print culture helped connect local politics to national identity.

Waldstreicher reveals how Americans worked out their political differences in creating a festive calendar. Using the Fourth of July as a model, members of different political parties and social movements invented new holidays celebrating such events as the ratification of the Constitution, Washington's birthday, Jefferson's inauguration, and the end of the slave trade. They used these politicized rituals, he argues, to build constituencies and to make political arguments on a national scale.

While these celebrations enabled nonvoters to participate intimately in the political process and helped dissenters forge effective means of protest, they had their limits as vehicles of democratization or modes of citizenship, Waldstreicher says. Exploring the interplay of region, race, class, and gender in the development of a national identity, he demonstrates that an acknowledgment of the diversity and conflict inherent in the process is crucial to any understanding of American politics and culture.

A book that demands the attention of specialists in the early American republic, and of social and cultural historians.

Journal of Social History

[I]t sets the agenda and the standard for future work on American nationalism and political culture.

Journal of American History

Waldstreicher combines cultural theory with fresh research, graceful writing, and a defined subject matter.

American Studies

[I]t sets the agenda and the standard for future work on American nationalism and political culture.

Journal of American History

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

Introduction: The Practices of Nationalism

PART ONE: Revolution, Nation, State

1. The Revolutionary Politics of Celebration

Ancient Rites

Festivity and the Origins of American Politics

Celebrating the American Future

2. The Constitution of Federal Feeling

The Crisis of Virtue and the Virtues of "Crisis"

Celebrating Natural Aristocracy: From Virtue to Sensibility

Inventing Federalist America

3. National Characters

George Washington's Sentimental Journeys

"I Live Here in the Midst of Perpetual Fetes"

National Character: Ideology, Theology, Practice

PART TWO: Elections, Sections, and Races

4. The Celebration of Politics

1800: A Different Kind of Revolution

Nationalism as Partisan Antipartisanship

Celebratory Politics as the Early Republic's Public Sphere

5. Regionalism, Nationalism, and the Geopolitics of Celebration

New England as America

America Going South

West Meets East

6. Mixed Feelings: Race and Nation

Nothing But Union

"Declaration of Independence! Where art thou now?"

"The Africans and their descendants, will celebrate . . ."

Epilogue: "You May Celebrate, I Must Mourn"

Index

Illustrations

1. The Repeal

2. Epitaph

3. The Continental Almanac

4. Federal Pillars, March 1788

5. Federal Pillars, August 1788

6. Reception of Washington at Trenton

7. Proclamation for a Federal Thanksgiving

8. Abraham Bishop

9. The Jeffersoniad

10. Black Cockade Funeral

11. Toasts, for Fourth July 1804

12. Governor Hancock's Ball

13. A Peep into the Antifederal Club

14. Hunters of Kentucky

15. The Battle of Plattsburg

16. Bobalition Broadside, 1816

17. Bobalition Broadside, 1822

18. Reply to Bobalition Broadside, 1819