`The Celebrated Coup'

On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, adopts the Declaration of Independence, formally severing the 13 American colonies from the British crown. It is written largely by Thomas Jefferson.

Nathaniel Hawthorne is born on this day in Salem, Mass., in 1804. Stephen Foster is born on July 4 in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1826, the same day John Adams, 90, and Thomas Jefferson, 83, die. On this day in 1845, Henry David Thoreau asserts his personal Declaration of Independence and moves into the cabin he has built on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson, at the edge of Concord, Mass., near Walden Pond. On July 4, 1853, Herman Melville, 20 months after publishing Moby-Dick and a year after Pierre goes to press, declines to speak at an Independence Day celebration in Pittsfield, Mass., but attends and hears another speaker praise him for having “drawn from the sea rich and various materials for the entertainment and instruction of the world.”

On July 4, 1855, after setting most of the type himself, Walt Whitman publishes the first edition of Leaves of Grass, unsigned, with an engraving by Samuel Hollyer of Whitman, arm akimbo, in workman’s clothes. On July 4, 1857, Emerson reads his latest poem, “Ode,” at the Town Hall in Concord:

“United States! the ages plead, --
Present and Past in under-song, --
Go put your creed into your deed,
Nor speak with double tongue.”

George M. Cohan (“Yankee Doodle Dandy”) is born July 4, 1878, in Providence, R.I. For many years July 4, 1900, is celebrated as the birthday of Louis Armstrong (scholars have settled on Aug. 4, 1901). Lionel Trilling is born on July 4, 1904, just weeks after Leopold Bloom walks around Dublin. On July 4, 1905, Henry James spends his final day in the United States before returning to England.

In 1906, James publishes The American Scene, an account of his first visit to his homeland in 20 years. Of Philadelphia and his tour of Independence Hall he writes:

“One sees them immediately as `good,’ delightfully good, on architectural and scenic lines, these large, high, wainscoted chambers, as good as any could thinkably have been at the time; embracing what was to be done in them with such a noble congruity (which in all the conditions they might readily have failed of, though they were no mere tent pitched for the purpose) that the historic imagination, reascending the centuries, almost catches them in the act of directly suggesting the celebrated coup. One fancies, under the high spring of the ceiling and before the great embrasured window-sashes of the principal room, some clever man of the period, after a long look round, taking the hint. `What an admirable place for a Declaration of something! What could one here--what couldn't one really declare?’ And then after a moment: `I say, why not our Independence?--capital thing always to declare, and before any one gets in with anything tactless. You'll see that the fortune of the place will be made.’ It really takes some such frivolous fancy as that to represent with proper extravagance the reflection irresistibly, rising there and that it yet would seem pedantic to express with solemnity: the sense, namely, of our beautiful escape in not having had to `declare’ in any way meanly, of our good fortune in having found half the occasion made to our hand.”

Permit me to presume to translate Henry James: Happy Independence Day!