Abigail Adams’ absentee husband John spent most of 1776 in Philadelphia, as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress. Fiercely patriotic, Adams argued forcefully for independence from Great Britain. The Congress appointed him to a committee of five, with Benjamin Franklin (PA), Thomas Jefferson (VA), Robert Livingston (NY), and Roger Sherman (CT), to draft a declaration of their rationale.
Adams urged Jefferson to write the document, because he was a gifted wordsmith and “I am obnoxious, suspect, and unpopular. . You are very much otherwise” Jefferson completed his task in seventeen days, at a portable desk he designed, producing a daring, radical and aspirational document. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights . . . That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
The Congress cut a quarter of his draft, but on July 2, it adopted a resolution to declare independence from Great Britain. On July 4, it formally endorsed the Declaration of Independence. John Hancock signed it. Irish immigrant John Dunlop printed 200 copies. A copy was sent to England and it was read to the troops. On August 2, the Declaration was embossed on parchment for delegates to sign.
On July 3, Adams wrote Abigail: “The Second Day of July 1776 will be the most memorable Epocha in the History of America. It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized by Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” Irritated by celebrations on July 4, Adams never celebrated the Declaration.
Adams dismissed Abigail’s demand that the Congress “remember the ladies” in its deliberations. While it wrestled with how to treat enslaved African-Americans, the Congress ignored Indigenous Americans, because they were members of foreign tribes. It never considered rights for women: very few had ever had a legal identity separate from their fathers or husbands. Power rested in privileged white men. In 1776, equality was not equally applied.
Abigail Adams, undated portrait by Gilbert Stuart (public domain)
Women may have been overlooked but they were not invisible. They had responded to boycotts and blockades with creative solutions, making tea from sassafras, replacing sugar with honey, substituting “homespun” cloth for English textiles. During the war, they made bullets and bandages. Most of Washington’s ragtag Continental Army were farmers or shopkeepers. Their female relatives were left to run their operations.
Elizabeth Grisom Ross Ashburn Claypoole (Betsy Ross) had inherited her husband’s Philadelphia upholstery business. She had covered the chairs in the state house where the Congress met. Her descendants claimed that she designed the first American flag in 1776 but many historians dispute their account.
While Benjamin Franklin sought European loans and alliances, his estranged wife Deborah Read ran his printing business. Franklin’s daughter Sarah Bache raised $7000 to purchase cloth and organized women to make 2005 shirts for American soldiers. Mary Katherine Goddard also ran her family’s printing business, publishing the Baltimore Journal from 1774-1784. Because of her reliability, Congress authorized her to print the copy of the Declaration that included the signers’ names. Appearing at the bottom, hers is the only female name on the document.
Sybil Ludington repeated Paul Revere’s ride in 1777, racing forty miles to alert militiamen to a British attack. Deborah Champion carried papers to General Washington. She was a stopped by a British sentry, who dismissed her as “only an old woman.” Emily Geiger was a successful spy. Washington’s enslaved servant Phoebe Fraunces warned him that a British spy disguised as a deserter had poisoned his bowl of peas.
Some wives followed their husbands to war, cooking, washing, mending, and nursing. Some served on the front lines. Nicknamed “Molly Pitcher,” Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley, the illiterate, pregnant wife of a barber, was not taking water to thirsty soldiers. She was hauling buckets to cool the cannon her husband was loading, so it could be re-fired more quickly.
Engraving of “Molly Pitcher” at the Battle of Monmouth, June 1778. (National Archives)
After her husband John was killed and before she was captured, Margaret Corbin was wounded by enemy fire but kept loading a small artillery piece. Deborah Sampson enlisted as Robert Shurtleff and fought on the front lines. When she was wounded, she stitched her wounds rather than reveal her identity. Mercy Warren became a propagandist and historian of the Revolution. Julia Stockton Rush, 18, the daughter and wife of Declaration signers, chastised her husband Benjamin for criticizing Washington’s leadership of the Continental Army.
L: Mercy Otis Warren c. 1763, portrait by John Singleton Copley (public domain). R: Julia Stockton Rush, 1776, portrait by Charles Willson Peale (Winterthur Museum)
In 1775, the formerly enslaved African American poet Phyllis Wheatley sent Washington an ode to Columbia: “Columbia’s arm prevails . . , Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side,/ Thy ev-ry action let the goddess guide.” Long before our country was envisioned, seventeenth-century poets and preachers wrote about “Columbina.” By the eighteenth century, “Columbia” embodied the country’s ambitions and aspirations. Portrayed as a neo-classical goddess, holding a sword, an olive branch and a laurel wreath, symbols of justice, peace and victory, Lady Columbia appeared on posters and pedestals and in political cartoons.
Images of Columbia, the goddess of Freedom, from 1890, 1918, and the 1913 suffrage pageant.(Library of Congress)
Victorious Americans invoked her. “Hail Columbia, happy land,/ Hail ye heroes, heav’n born band,/ Who fought and bled in Freedom’s cause.” Those verses, written by Joseph Hopkinson in 1798, became the country’s first, unofficial national anthem. After the War of 1812, Columbia was paired with Uncle Sam. In 1893, her likeness advertised the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Columbia was replaced by the Statue of Liberty and in 1931 the “Star-Spangled Banner” replaced “Hail Columbia” as our national anthem. Her image remains in a seated statue at Columbia University and in the logo of Columbia Pictures.
Famously Adams and Jefferson died within hours of each other on July 4, 1826, the Declaration’s fiftieth anniversary. Americans followed Adams’ suggestions and have celebrated the Fourth of July with parades, picnics and fireworks ever since. But what about the people not included in 1776.
The 1924 Native American Citizenship Act, promoted by Indigenous women, Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin and Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), granted conditional citizenship. Sixteen states with large Native populations denied voting rights until they were won in post-World War II court cases and secured by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. They remain vulnerable.
Abolitionists relied on the Declaration to make the case for emancipation. On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass addressed an audience of 600 at an Independence Day celebration, sponsored by the Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Association. Formerly enslaved, the editor of The North Star, Douglass became the most famous Black man in America. A powerful orator, he asked his Rochester, NY, audience, “What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July?” Douglass acknowledged the commitment of the Declaration’s authors to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
“Fellow citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers . . . were brave men. . . . They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for . . . the principles the contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.” Then Douglass turned critcal.
“Were the great principles of freedom and of natural justice . . . extended to us? . . . The blessings in which you . . . rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not me. . . This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”
Douglass biographer David Blight called it a “rhetorical masterpiece” and “a symphony in three movements” – praise for the founders, followed by a condemnation of the horrors of slavery, ending with the hope that the nation might yet extend freedom to the enslaved.
Frederick Douglass, 1855 (Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History)
In 1848, Douglass had attended a women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, NY. One of its organizers, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, had drafted a Declaration of Rights and Sentiments for attendees to approve. Based on the Declaration of Independence, it declared “all men and women equal” and replaced the tyrant King George with “all men.” The resolution proposing voting rights for women might have failed without Douglass’ support. He was the only African American present.
In 1858, Stanton voiced her frustration with Fourth of July celebrations in a letter to Susan B. Anthony. “How rebellious it makes me feel when I see [husband] Henry going about where and how he pleases . . . As I contrast his freedom with my bondage, and feel that, because of the false position of women, I have been compelled to hold all my noblest aspirations in abeyance in order to be a wife, a mother, a nurse, a cook and a household drudge. . . I have been alone today as the whole family except [baby] Hattie and myself have been out to celebrate our national birthday. What has a woman to do with patriotism?”
(After the 2022 Dobbs decision, some American women “took a knee.” “[I’m] Joining women in solidarity wearing black and not celebrating the Fourth of July, because it certainly is not a day of independence for us,” tweeted actress Rosanna Arquette. “It never was.”)
In 1876, Anthony determined that the Declaration’s Centennial provided an opportunity to present suffragists as patriots and to propose a new Declaration of Women’s Rights. Stanton was unenthusiastic. Anthony finally persuaded her to write the document and to present it in Philadelphia with Lucretia Mott, then 83.
The Centennial was a summer-long event. An enormous Corliss steam engine powered 8000 machines in the main exhibit. Almost everything made in the America was on display, including caskets, false teeth, safety pins and the newly invented telephone. There were fragments of the unfinished Statue of Liberty. Promised a booth in the Main Building, the Women’s Centennial Committee underwrote the exhibition. When told there would be no room, they funded the ornate Women’s Building, with its own engine powering machines operated by women.
National Suffrage Association members march in Philadelphia, 1876 (National Archives)
Stanton’s document was not memorable. Nonetheless, Anthony asked to be part of the July Fourth ceremony. Turned down, she decided to crash the event. Armed with press passes, she and four other women marched into Independence Hall as a band played. Stanton did not participate. The women advanced on the startled chairman, presented a parchment copy of their Declaration, then filed out while distributing copies. Once outside, Anthony mounted a bandstand and read it to onlookers.
Pamphlet written by Stanton, distributed by Anthony (National Archives)
Stanton was discouraged. She refused to attend the 1878 anniversary of Seneca Falls. “As I sum up the indignities toward women, as illustrated by recent judicial decisions – denied the right to vote, denied the right to practice [before] the Supreme Court, denied jury trial – I feel the degradation of my sex more bitterly than I did . . . that July.”
That same year, Senator Aaron Sargent (R-California) introduced a constitutional amendment to enfranchise women. His wife, Ellen Clark Sargent, was an ardent suffragist and an ally of Stanton and Anthony. It was called the Anthony Amendment, which annoyed Stanton because Susan had not been present in 1848. Anthony wrote the proposed amendment. Its wording had not changed when it was ratified as the Nineteenth Amendment in August 1920.
The effect of women’s contributions to the Revolution was summed up by a British officer: “We may destroy all the men in America, and we shall still have all we can do to defeat the women.”
Happy Fourth of July! Please celebrate, in Anthony’s words, by “educating, organizing, agitating” and voting.
SOURCES:
Linda Grant DePauw and Michael McCurdy, Founding Mothers: Women in America in the Revolutionary Period (Houghton Mifflin, 1975)
Linda Grant DePauw and Conover Hunt, “Remember the Ladies:” Women in American 1750-1815” (Viking, 1976).
Petula Dvorak, “Why Many Women Took a Knee This July Fourth,” Washington Post (July 4, 2022), https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/04/july-fourth-abortion-women-boycott-celebrations/
Stephen Fried, “A New Founding Mother,” Smithsonian Magazine (September 2018).
Elisabeth Griffith, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Oxford, 1984).
Michael D. Hattem, Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution (Yale University Press, 2020).
“A Nation’s Story: “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog/series/paradox-and-promise
Cari Shane, “Before Lady Liberty,” Smithsonian Magazine (October 2023).
Emily J. Tiepe, “Will the Real Molly Pitcher Please Stand Up?” Prologue Magazine (Summer 1999), https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1999/summer/pitcher.html
Selma Williams, Demeter’s Daughter’s (Atheneum, 1776).
https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/suffragists-crashed-centennial-celebration/
I love this, thank you!
Elizabeth, I loved this. Especially the quote from the British officer: “We may destroy all the men in America, and we shall still have all we can do to defeat the women.” Thanks you for all of the research you did to write it. You have certainly followed your own maxim to educate all of us.