Twelve years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Postmaster of Philadelphia shared a peace pipe with an Indian chief before thousands of onlookers. Postmaster Peter Baynton was dressed in the wool coat and cravat of the prosperous merchant he was, having made his fortune by supplying goods for the fur trade in the decades preceding the American Revolution. The Indian chief in the other seat wore a silver nose ring and silver earrings, a decorated vest, and a red and white feathered headdress. The peace pipe they shared commemorated more than a century of friendly relations between William Penn’s colony and the local Indigenous people.
This was not a treaty signing or even a diplomatic event: it was a historical reenactment. The Indian chief was a white man named Isaac Melchor who may never have even met an Indigenous person.
Reenactment of the 1788 Federal Edifice, 1989 inaugural parade for George H. W. Bush, Washington D.C.
Melchor and Baynton’s peace pipe was part of the Grand Federal Procession held in Philadelphia on July 4, 1788 to mark the ratification of the Constitution. Similar celebrations had been previously held in Boston, Baltimore, and Charleston, but Philadelphia’s was to be the biggest yet. This grand piece of street theater was intended to cement Philadelphia’s place as the political center of the new nation despite New York City’s impending designation as the new national capital.
The parade was led by twelve ambiguously symbolic “axe-men.” Dressed in “white frocks,” black girdles, and ornamented caps, these twelve men may have represented the twelve states excluding Rhode Island that participated in the Constitutional Convention; the angelic messengers dressed in white who the biblical Ezekiel saw mark the righteous in Jerusalem; the severing of American ties with Britain in the Revolution; former Roman slaves wearing the pileus cap of freed slaves that would become more famous as the bonnet rouge or liberty cap of the French Revolution in a few short years; or a colonial clearing of the American woods before the march of manufacturing progress that followed in the rest of the parade.[11]
Following the axmen was a procession of groups symbolizing the nation’s Independence in 1776; the American treaty of alliance with France in 1777 and the 1783 treaty of peace with Britain, marked with placards on poles to tell a short history of the infant nation’s birth. Although the pamphlet describing the procession is vague, these groups seem to have been local dignitaries wearing their best parade attire, not a pastiche representing any of these recent-historical moments. This short timeline was followed by military and militia units like the 3rd Pennsylvania, which served in the Revolution but had been disbanded five years before the parade. The action seen by the 3rd Pennsylvania and the moments commemorated by the placards were all within living memory of the thousands of onlookers, who had lived through the signing of the Declaration and the subsequent British occupation and American recapture of the city barely more than ten years before. This was not a historical reenactment but a celebration of recent events that both the parade marchers and their audience had participated in.
At the end of all these came a carriage with Baynton and Melchor. Their carriage carried no date placard, and their little reenactment might stand in for the many inclusions and exclusions of Revolutionary commemoration. Seemingly no Native American men marched in the procession and Baynton and Melchor; the veterans of the 3rd Pennsylvania included three Black men but no Native men. Invoking both contemporary diplomatic conventions and the 1772 Benjamin West painting of Penn’s 1683 treaty with the Lenape, Baynton and Melchor’s tableau occupied an ambiguous point in time.
Baynton and Melchor’s shared peace pipe was meant to invoke Pennsylvania’s imagined past as peaceful Indian traders and a rosy future of peaceful relations even as the Northwest Indian War raged in the Ohio valley. Baynton had made his fortune as a supplier of goods for the Indian trade before Revolution and had suffered financial losses when the Paxton Boys burned a number of his shipments to traders in 1765 during a series of anti-Indian attacks across the frontier.[12] Baynton’s success as a supplier of the fur trade had led to his appointment as the first Postmaster of revolutionary Philadelphia in 1776, a clear symbolic line between peaceful, profitable relations with Native groups in the past and civic progress into the future.
Melchor had less direct connection to Indigenous relations, but his casting in the role of the Indian chief was symbolic in other ways. During the Revolution Melchor had served as the Barrack-Master General to Pennsylvania, a position that put him in charge of supplying troops, overseeing prisoners of war, and requisitioning supplies. This might not have been explicit in the minds of the procession organizers, but his turn as the faux Indian chief carried undertones of the way Indian people from Pocahontas and Squanto have been cast as providers to colonists in the American mythos.
This miniature peace treaty in a carriage was ambiguously placed in both time and the narrative of historical progression that the Grand Federal Procession staged. Baynton and Melchor were not clearly part of the historical timeline that led the parade, nor the celebratory part of the procession that followed behind. Immediately behind Baynton and Melchor was the Grand Federal Edifice itself, a columned and domed shrine depicting the sacred unity of the thirteen states in union with the pillar Rhode Island missing with that state’s pending ratification of the Constitution. (George H.W. Bush’s 1989 inaugural parade included a centennial reenactment of the Federal Edifice). Making up the majority of the parade were groups of tradesmen and merchants carrying symbols of their trade, reminiscent of rennaissance and early modern processions of guilds.
Baynton and Melchor’s Indian treaty in a carriage was not clearly part of Philadelphia’s past, present, or future, staged ambiguously out of time. Its ambiguity as a historical or contemporary moment presented Indigenous nations within the jurisdiction of the new Constitution without the messy bother of actual Indigenous sovereignty that pre-dated the new American nation or contemporary Indian troubles.
The performance of historical belonging creates nations. Who is allowed to participate in that performance has been contested almost as long as there has been an American nation. The 1788 Grand Federal Procession included a handful of free Black men as veterans and tradesmen and almost certainly thousands more free and enslaved Black men, women, and children in the spectating crowd. In the earliest days of the nation, local celebrations of the Revolution and Independence helped create American nationalism and Black participants were often excluded by violence. The public nature of these street parades and festivals opened space for the non-elite and white children and women to claim space in the popular celebration and representation of the nation.[3] Independence Day has been marked as an annual observance with readings of the Declaration of Independence since 1777. These readings were sometimes accompanied by violence with racial undertones, as when the windows of Philadelphia Loyalists were broken and Long Island patriots carried a blackface King George effigy wearing a feathered headdress through the streets in impromptu parade.[4]
Free Black men and women were routinely and forcefully excluded from these commemorations by white violence, drawing a hard boundary around the expanding definitions of American citizenship.[5] Free and enslaved Black people quickly seized on the promise of the Declaration, that all men were created equal, to bring and sometimes win suits for freedom in court. It was this connection between the Declaration’s unintended promises—the unfulfilled promise for political equality—and Independence Day that contributed to dangerous and racially charged celebrations of Independence in the early republic.[6] This violence led to Black community observance of Independence to be marked on July 5 in the early 19th century, often as much a protest of the continuing legality of slavery as a celebration of Independence.[7] In the South, white communities’ July 4 observance was increasingly divorced from its connections to Independence and the Declaration because of the seeming threat to slave-holding; the Constitution with its promise to protect (human) property was more widely read in the slave-holding antebellum South.[8]
In the first decades of the nation, the Revolution was not widely commemorated outside of July 4 observance. The modern marketing materials of Fort Ticonderoga, one of the major modern sites of Revolutionary-era tourism, touts George Washington as America’s “first tourist” because he visited the site in 1783 in the last days of the war. Washington himself wrote nothing about the visit; a fellow traveler who accompanied him noted only that the party briefly put ashore to view the ruins of the fort, which had already been scavenged by locals as an easy source of stone for house and barn foundations. Very few people visited the battlefields or locations that now compose the majority of modern heritage tourism sites, and many fell into disrepair or were used as livestock pasturage.[9]
During the lifetimes of the people who actually experienced the Revolution, there were relatively few commemorations of the Revolutionary past like the Grand Federal Procession. Early 19th century July 4 observance often included readings of the Declaration of Independence, but these did not include historical dress up: even as the long-tailed coats and knee breeches of the 18th century gave way to the long trousers and short coats of the early 19th, no one borrowed old uniforms or tricorn hats to stage these readings.[10] There was perhaps no need while the men and women of the Revolutionary generation was still alive—they didn’t need to embody the moment of the Declaration in an old coat because everyone listening had been there themselves.
It was only in the 1820s and 30s as the veterans of the Revolution began to die of old age in great numbers that Americans began to seek out the people, places, and objects connected to the Revolution.[13] The beginning and end of Nicholas Veeder’s reenacting coincided with two major shifts in how Americans remembered the Revolution. As the Revolutionary generation aged and passed away, Americans paid greater attention to the sites and stories of the average soldier rather than the great names and orations of the early years of the nation.[14]
Like other veterans, Veeder told war stories part in recollection and part as a means of support. Major figures of the Revolution sometimes served as battlefield and historic site interpreters; those with means and connections to obtain a letter of introduction could seek out General Philip Schuyler at his Albany home and request a tour of the Saratoga battlefield. Schuyler guided one such party of early tourists through the Saratoga woods in a foot of snow while giving an account of the Saratoga campaign and battles.[15] Other veterans like Ezra Buel and Isaac Rice lived on site at Ticonderoga and Saratoga for lack of other homes and made their living by giving tours of the grounds to visitors. These veteran-tour guides were common and expected enough that novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne complained bitterly of their absence when he visited Ticonderoga in 1835.[16] The figure of the “suffering soldier” invoked both awe and pity in the early republic as Congress approved small pensions in fits and starts and indigent veterans, some disabled by their service, appealed to public charity and told the story of their service in exchange.[17] Veeder likely began his own memory-marking in this context in the 1830s, one of a number of enlisted veterans who traded on the memory of their service as public interest turned to the fading generation and the memory of the Revolution grew increasingly democratized fifty years after the end of the Revolution.