In July 1776, John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, that it would be a fine idea if America’s “day of deliverance” could be “solemnized with 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”. But he meant July 2 not July 4, for on that day the Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, had adopted a resolution to break its allegiance from Britain and make an independent state.
It was not until 1801 that such celebrations became official. Thomas Jefferson, in the first year of his first term, chose the fourth to mark Congress’s adoption of the Declaration of Independence, not least perhaps because he took the lion’s share of credit for writing it. And there he stood on the day, dressed in buckskin breeches, in the White House’s Elliptical Saloon surrounded by five Cherokee chiefs he had invited along with a crowd of dignitaries and military officers, partaking of wine, cakes and punch. In the “President’s Park” beyond the White House there were horse races and fights between spurred cocks rather than greased men in a cage. The public were served festive fare while Jefferson surveyed the merriment standing on the White House steps bareheaded, his grey locks ruffled by the breeze.
Twenty-five years later, as two of the few surviving signers of the Declaration, both Adams and Jefferson were invited to its 50th anniversary by the Mayor of Washington, Roger Weightman. It would, in part, have been a family affair, presided over by Adams’s son, the bookish sixth president, John Quincy Adams, and held on the same day that his son, John II, celebrated his 23rd birthday.