Lauderdale: Sounds of freedom sounded sweeter in Beaufort County

Freedom rings louder in Beaufort County than most places.

No one can better tell why it is so than the statesman Frederick Douglass.

In a speech to abolitionists in 1852 called "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" Douglass minced no words.

"The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common," he told his large, white audience. "The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth (of) July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn."

His tart words should help South Carolinians who still don't understand the pain caused by Confederate relics like the battle flag on the Statehouse grounds.

"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?" Douglass asked. "I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.

"To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages."

When freedom rang, the Gullah of Beaufort County embraced the Fourth of July.

"The Reconstruction years were among the most politically active and patriotic years in Beaufort's long history," says a new book by Stephen R. Wise and Lawrence S. Rowland with the late Gerhard Spieler, all of Beaufort.

"Rebellion, Reconstruction, and Redemption, 1861-1893: The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina, Volume 2" tells of great galas on Emancipation Day and Memorial Day.

"The Fourth of July was a major celebration with parades, speeches, balls, and music," the book says.

Twenty years after Douglass's ripping speech, the 13-year-old daughter of Robert Smalls read the Declaration of Independence to a large crowd from a verandah high over Bay Street.

Five years later, the Allen Brass Band stepped off the Grand Parade. That evening, there was a dress ball with string band from Savannah. Crowds from other islands flocked to town with half-price fares on river ferries, the book tells us.

On Hilton Head Island, Emory S. Campbell writes, the Fourth of July was a day for picnics, crop inspections, beach trips and dancing. Children wore shiny new clothes. Veterans displayed American flags in their homes, Campbell writes on his Gullah Heritage Trail Tours website.

On St. Helena Island, photographer Marion Post Wolcott captured islanders in their Sunday best on July 4, 1939.

Bobby Middleton of St. Helena recalls the "grease the pole" contest on the Fourth of July in the book "With Open Arms" by Rosalyn Browne. If you got to the top of the pole, it was good for a dollar.

"Beaufort had much to celebrate during the Reconstruction years," write our local historians.

Not the least of it was this:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."