Opinion

Essex County Chronicles: Locals had plenty of reason to celebrate Declaration of Independence

Essex County Chronicles
Jim McAllister
Published: July 6, 2009

While the events usually connected with the Fourth of July — parades, fireworks, backyard barbecues — make it one of the most festive of all our holidays, they pale in comparison with the local celebrations that followed the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

In the early summer of that year, when the military effort to achieve independence from England had been underway for more than a year, the Second Continental Congress gathered in Philadelphia to discuss the political future of the 13 American colonies. Finally, on July 4, after weeks of heated debate and wrangling, the delegates approved the wording of Thomas Jefferson's final version of the brilliant Declaration of Independence. Presiding President John Hancock then affixed his now-famous signature to the document.

Radical newspapers in Salem and Newburyport excitedly spread the news of the signing in large print and gleeful prose. In the days that followed, copies of the life-changing document were circulated to towns around the county by horseback. Their arrival led to celebrations — some spontaneous, others organized — in communities everywhere.

In Gloucester, where, at a gathering at the First Parish meeting house on June 24 all 125 residents present had voted to support independence by walking from the east side of the church to the west, the Declaration was greeted with unbridled enthusiasm. As was the case in most towns, the full text of the historic document was entered in the town record book and read from church pulpits. In the meeting house at Annisquam, which is now part of Gloucester, the reading ended with the expressed hope that America would be "Emmanuel's land" and experience perpetual "liberty, peace and safety!"

Just down the coast in Beverly, the Declaration of Independence was read by John Glover of Marblehead to his Marblehead troops and the general public on July 17 at their camp at what would later be appropriately designated Independence Park. The reading was followed by a barrage of cannon fire from the fort's guns and those aboard ships moored in Beverly Harbor. A bonfire on the hill overlooking the town common — then known as Liberty Hill — capped off the festivities.

The following day, the blessed document was read from the balcony of the Town House in Salem where, 21 months earlier, the patriotic members of the Massachusetts Legislature had voted to disband as a Royal government and reorganize themselves into a Provincial Congress answerable to the people of Massachusetts. Here the Declaration was saluted with ringing church bells, the firing of cannon, and a rousing three cheers from the assembled multitude. Later in the day, a group of unruly townspeople dismantled the King's arms on display in King Street and broke them to pieces. Souvenir hunters fought over scraps of the dismantled emblem.

Not everyone shared the patriots' joy and optimism for the new nation's future, however. Three days before the public reading, Salem Tory William Pynchon had gotten a glimpse of the text of the Declaration and groused in his journal that the colonies had blown a good thing.

"We have had our ages of gold and silver, but, not contented, we rejected both, and lost them, and with them our copper and most of our brass and iron," he lamented.

Pynchon's pastor at St. Peter's Anglican church, William McGilchrest, expressed his displeasure by ignoring a directive from the Continental Congress that the Declaration of Independence should be read from every pulpit.

In neighboring Marblehead, the population ran amok at the news that the Declaration of Independence had been signed. Local residents fired their guns until they ran out of powder and gleefully carried the news to the Tories still in residence in the town. The King's Arms, hanging on the walls of St. Michael's Anglican Church, met a fate similar to it counterpart in Salem at the hands of a gleeful mob, which broke into the shuttered and locked building. The vengeful patriots then took turns ringing the church's bell until, according to one witness, it "cracked from top to bottom."

Marbleheaders were as proud as they were ecstatic, for one of the signers of the historic document was their own Elbridge Gerry, an important member of both the Provincial Congress and the Second Continental Congress. His signature sits just beneath those of John Hancock and John Adams.

Residents of Ipswich also had reason to be especially proud upon hearing the words used by Jefferson when shaping the Declaration of Independence. The author claimed that he had drawn on "neither book nor pamphlet" when writing his famous document, but Ipswich folk recognized that many of the sentiments and some of the phrasing echoed those of the famed minister of the town's Chebacco Parish, John Wise, who had stood up so forcefully to England when the mother country had first attempted to impose "taxation without representation" on the colonies in the 1680s.

¢¢¢

Jim McAllister of Salem writes a weekly column on the history of the North Shore. Contact him at jim@nii.net.