What Trump doesn't get about America's 250th
A forgotten New York holiday and the values worth celebrating
On the morning of November 25, 1783, the last of the defeated British troops left the soil of New York City. It was the end of a seven-year-long occupation. Yet as the redcoats headed to their ships on that cold day, the royal flag still flew over Fort George at the tip of Manhattan.
The United States of America had won its war of independence against Britain at Yorktown two years earlier. Now the Treaty of Paris, which formally ended the war, ushered in a transition to peace.
When General George Washington and 800 troops reached the fort at the Battery, they discovered that the “flag had been nailed to the staff, the halyards taken away, and the pole itself besmeared with grease; obviously to prevent or hinder the removal of the emblem of royalty, and the raising of the Stars and Stripes.”
As James Riker wrote a century later, “gunners stood ready to salute our colors. But the grease baffled all attempts to shin up the staff.”
Sgt. John Van Arsdale stepped forward. Wounded in battle at Fort Montgomery, he had survived imprisonment by the British.
With the help of cleats nailed to the pole and a ladder, he reached the top, “tore down the British standard, and rove the new halyards by which the Star-spangled Banner was quickly run up…and floated proudly, while the multitude gave vent to their joy in hearty cheers, and the artillery boomed forth a national salute of thirteen guns!” The crowd, the troops, and even Washington himself, dropped money into hats that were passed around to reward Van Arsdale for his initiative, Riker wrote.
For decades, the holiday of Evacuation Day would mark the triumph over the British, with Van Arsdale and eventually his son David receiving special honor.
In Boston, the earlier evacuation of British troops in 1776 is still observed as the Evacuation Day holiday on March 17.
Yorktown, Virginia, celebrates the victory over Lord Cornwallis’ troops with a parade on October 19.
Any one of these three days could have become America’s principal remembrance of the Revolutionary War.
Yet our national holiday is none of them. It’s July 4th — the date that the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence.
Theory and facts
In 1320 words, the Declaration sets forth a theory that all men are created equal, that they have “inalienable rights,” that governments derive their powers from the people and that citizens can abolish governments which violate these principles. It declares “to a candid world” a set of “facts” aiming to show that King George III’s abusive rule over the 13 colonies was therefore invalid. (Delegates to the convention chose to brush over the rank hypocrisy of many slave owners denying “inalienable rights” to those they held in captivity.)
At the moment of its adoption, the Declaration’s impact could have been seen as merely symbolic. As David McCullough pointed out, “Such courage and high ideals were of little consequence, of course, the declaration itself being no more than a declaration without military success against the most formidable force on earth.” It was on the battlefield that independence would be won.
We are little more than a month away from the 250th anniversary of that declaration. By making July 4 America’s key holiday, the nation chose to honor the ideals of equality and freedom, rather than the fact of victory in war. That choice is getting lost in the Trump administration’s conception of the semiquincentennial’s meaning.
The White House website quotes President Trump saying, “With a single sheet of parchment and 56 signatures, America began the greatest political journey in human history.”
Trump wants to build a 250-foot-tall triumphal arch to mark the anniversary. The Treasury Department is proposing a $250 bill with Trump’s portrait. (Congress would have to approve honoring a living person on U.S. currency.) A commemorative gold coin with Trump’s image is in the works. Trump’s signature is going to appear on U.S. money; his face may be placed on U.S. passports and passes to national parks.
A “UFC Freedom 250” match is set for the White House grounds on June 14, Trump’s birthday. An Indy car race through the streets of Washington could follow later this year.
Even Trump’s controversial Justice Department fund to compensate people supposedly targeted by prior administrations has a 250th anniversary connection: it’s in the amount of $1.776 billion.
“Just this past week at a White House Cabinet meeting,” Mallory Wilson wrote for The Hill, “Trump promoted bright red $55 hats sold by his family company in honor of the America 250 celebrations. And in a span of two days, performers were announced for a two-week-long National Mall event, and many quickly withdrew their participation, claiming they were misled about the political nature of it.”
The anniversary of a document drafted to revolt against an imperial king has become the excuse for a profusion of imperial monuments to Donald Trump.
The end of Evacuation Day
Few New Yorkers know of Evacuation Day any more, but there’s still a lesson it can teach us.
While the 100th anniversary in 1883 was a grand occasion, the holiday soon fell out of favor and was mostly celebrated by organizations such as the Sons of the Revolution, wrote historian Clifton Hood for the Journal of Social History in 2004.
Like a supernova that exploded in a final brief display of brilliance before being reduced to the nothingness of a black hole, the 1883 parade was both the largest Evacuation Day gala ever staged and the last big one. Over a million people attended, including President Chester A. Arthur, several Cabinet officers, and eight governors. Twenty-five thousand troops marched in the parade, while a marine pageant featured 300 warships, private yachts, and other vessels.
The holiday’s significance was diminished by the passing of generations and by subsequent wars including the War of 1812 and the Civil War, Hood wrote. A nation founded in opposition to the British began to view the U.K. favorably.
In 1883, “the last straw” for New York’s large Irish-American population “was a report that ‘Anglo-maniac snobs’ from the Produce Exchange had invited the British ambassador to an Evacuation Day banquet and toasted Queen Victoria’s health.”
But Evacuation Day did play a part in creating a different holiday. In 1789, a proclamation from President Washington declared a day of thanksgiving on Thursday, November 26, one day after the observance of Evacuation Day. Though the president and his aides didn’t cite Evacuation Day, “their thinking seems clear since Washington’s proclamation and the Federalist representations of the evacuation emphasized the same themes of wartime sacrifice, national independence, and social unity,” Hood observed. Plus, New York City was then the national capital.
Over time, Hood noted, Thanksgiving overshadowed and essentially replaced Evacuation Day. For one thing, Thanksgiving was a national holiday rather than a regional one.
That November 26th 1789 fell on a Thursday was inconsequential to Washington and his contemporaries; it was the date that mattered, not the day of the week. By happenstance and accident this 1789 Thanksgiving ultimately led to the establishment of Thanksgiving as a national legal holiday on the 4th Thursday of November.
New York was a wounded city by the time the British troops headed home. It had been damaged by fire, the taking of thousands of prisoners of war — many of whom died of disease on prison ships floating in the waters off Brooklyn — and the exodus of pro-Independence residents.
When the U.S. won the war, the loyalists began looking for a refuge from the retribution they expected to suffer without the protection of Britain’s army and navy. Tens of thousands left the city for colonies in Nova Scotia and the Caribbean and for Britain itself.
As the loyalists left, the revolutionists moved back to New York, with many shocked at the poor condition of the homes to which they were returning. Evacuation Day was thus an emotional homecoming.
After the raising of the Stars and Stripes, the celebrations went on for a week.
Hood wrote:
At many events — a dinner that Governor Clinton held for General Washington and his generals on the 25th, for instance, and the balls that merchants threw in taverns and coffee houses— attendance was restricted to social and military elites and genteel standards of decorum prevailed. More raucous merrymaking took place in public spaces as artisans and farmers raised liberty poles and enlisted men fired thirteen- gun salutes. The festivities climaxed on December 2nd when the Continental Army staged a fireworks display said to be the grandest ever held in North America.
But even the “genteel” events were very well lubricated. Mary Tsaltas-Ottomanelli wrote that guests at Governor Clinton’s dinner at Fraunces Tavern on November 25, 1783 consumed 75 bottles of Madeira, 18 of claret, 16 of port, and 24 of porter (a dark beer).
Still, it’s revealing to note that the toasts at this dinner honored not only the heroes and supporters of the American cause, but also many of its ideals, as voiced in the Declaration of Independence. Washington and Clinton raised their glasses 13 times to toast, among others, the USA, France, the American Army and the war dead.
But, according to Riker, their toasts included salutes to these values:
May Justice support what Courage has gained.
The Vindicators of the Rights of Mankind in every Quarter of the Globe.
May America be an Asylum to the Persecuted of the Earth.
May a close Union of the States guard the Temple they have erected to Liberty.
May the Remembrance of This Day, be a Lesson to Princes.
Let’s not lose sight of those values as we celebrate the 250th.