From the mid to late 19th Century West India Day was held annually on August 1st in the United States uniting blacks and abolitionists from the British West Indies, British Canada, and Britain proper, with those in the North Eastern United States, and serving as a powerful political statement of antislavery sentiment that crossed national and oceanic boundaries.

August 1st, 1844, "a glorious day" in Hingham, Massachusetts. Following a storm heralded as a cleansing that "has laid the dust and cleared the air," the day seems divinely prepared "for a Pic-Nic, for the celebration of the great jubilee, August First." Local merchants look forward to the festivities, decorating "their store fronts with goods of brilliant colors." The women of Hingham have risen early to prepare large quantities of food—"breads of all kinds, cakes, pies…boiled ham…fruits of all sorts." Delegates and attendees flock in from nearby counties "in endless throngs;" from there they are "proceeding en masse to the appointed rendezvous, in their carriages, with joyous music and elevated banners." In the town square, bands, choirs and marshals—"a milling multitude, seeking their proper places with their banners"—gather for the grand event. In the great crowd of humanity are "men and women, black and white, clerical and lay, rich and poor," all "friends of the cause in Hingham…" All together, it was said that the celebration at Hingham had been attended by "some six or eight thousand men, women and children."

What great cause was so important in Hingham, Massachusetts of 1844 that "joyful bells rang at sunrise," and brought so many out on a hot August morning? The citizenry of Hingham were engaging in what by 1844 had become a popular holiday throughout much of New England and other regions of the United States. It was also well known in the various parts of the British Empire, from Canada to the Caribbean to London. The celebration was in fact a commemoration of the British Abolition of Slavery on August 1st 1834, which came to be known as West India Day.

From the mid 1830s to as far as the 1880s West India Day was held annually on August 1st in the United States. Its origins however lay in the Caribbean, where it emerged after the British 1834 abolition of slavery. Prominent black figures such as Frederick Douglas spoke at West India Day celebrations. White abolitionists of note from William Lloyd Garrison to Ralph Waldo Emerson gave speeches at these events. Honored guests from London, Canada and the Caribbean were invited to speak out against slavery, and participate in the festivities of freedom. The commemoration united abolitionists, black and white, in cities and towns throughout the northern United States with blacks from the British West Indies, British Canada, and Britain proper. And it served as a powerful political statement of antislavery sentiment that crossed national and oceanic boundaries.

Abolitionist Frederick Douglas was a speaker at several August 1st celebrations,

where the politics of anti-slavery featured prominently

West India Day was not the first popular black holiday in the US with transnational dimensions. In the Northeastern US, Negro Election Day had been celebrated as early as 1741. Involving a mock coronation of individuals in the black community, Negro Election Day has been observed as an "African-derived, European-influenced cultural phenomenon." Yet West India Day would by far be the largest, and its origins would lay in London, Canada and the Caribbean.

After a long period of antislavery agitation, the British Parliament in 1833 passed a bill calling for abolition. The law, which would not come into affect until a year later, abolished legal chattel slavery throughout the British Empire and put in its place a form of "labour apprenticeship." On August 1st of 1834 some 800,000 slaves were freed in the British colonies, the majority of which lived in the British West Indies, with the passing of the emancipation act. Britain's actions, the ultimate cause of which remains in dispute, reverberated across national and oceanic boundaries, especially within the United States—divided by slaveholding and non-slaveholding regions, and experiencing a popular abolitionist sentiment.

Like their counterparts in the Caribbean, from the mid 1830s onwards, blacks in the Northeastern US held numerous church services to commemorate the abolition of British slavery in the West Indies. On Monday, 1 August 1836, blacks in Catskill, New York commemorated the anniversary of British abolition at their Baptist church; August 1838, several black churches held devotionals and meetings in Newark, New Jersey; and from 1834 to 1842 annual services, "scripture readings, prayers, addresses and commemorative dinners" were held by Boston's black community at Belknap Street Church.

Early August 1st Emancipation Day celebration- Antigua

These church services would give way to larger celebrations. Historian Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie, author of Rites of August First: Emancipation Day in the Black Atlantic World, attributes this occurrence to the emergence of public politics at a local and national level through "mass-based parties, public meetings and a popular press." By the 1840s celebrations of British Abolition of Slavery in the US had taken on the festivity-like atmosphere of their counterparts in the Caribbean. However instead of fetes, bonfires or bull processions that typified Caribbean celebrations, mainland North America celebrated the anniversary of British emancipation with lavish parades, speeches and rallying cries for abolition in the US.

The aforementioned 1844 August 1st celebration in Hingham, Massachusetts serves as an instructive example of a West India Day commemoration. As throngs of men, women and children, black and white, streamed into Hingham from surrounding regions, they came not only to celebrate the freedom granted to 800,000 British slaves in the Caribbean, but to push their own nation towards eventual abolition. In the procession marshals were said to "carry truncheons and wear gold stars…struck in Great Britain in commemoration of the First of August, 1834." There were as well "Similar stars…distributed among the crowd…the Star of the North, the fugitive's only compass." On one side of these stars was "a picture of a shackled…Negro…wrists bound by chains…. Below the ground on which he kneels is the legend, 'A voice from Great Britain to America 1834." On the opposite side, "a Negro stands upright, arms stretched out…with broken shackles….On the ground lie other broken irons, beneath his feet a broken whip—symbols of his new freedom." In the center is written "Jubilee, Aug. 1 1834."

 
Along with such symbols both celebrating British abolition and urging national emancipation, banners were carried from various New England regions with differing mottos written upon them. The Kingston Banner was said to declare, "No union with slaveholders." From towns in Essex a banner placed British abolition and American slavery within Republican themes, with a decidedly ironic flair: "Shall a republic which could not bear the bonds of a king, cradle a bondage which a king has abolished?" A banner from Boston depicted "a slave at sunrise on the 1st of Aug. 1834…the chains falling from his limbs" with the motto, "This is the Lord's doing."

West India Day commemorations on the mainland of North America were not confined to the Eastern US. In Canada West, the abolition of slavery in 1834 was celebrated in Toronto, Ontario and other cities. Parades, church services, picnics and other festivities marked August 1st as a day of freedom and emancipation. Like their US counterparts, the participants in these events celebrated not only the end of slavery in the British Empire, but pushed for the abolition of slavery throughout North America.

Especially featured at West India Day events were all-black militias, in full military regalia. Organized and disciplined black militias emerged out of a need to protect free blacks from white mobs, and help protect escaped slaves from slave-catchers. Highlighting their importance, they became a staple at many of the West India Day celebrations, with the hopes that "a spectacle of militancy" would "deter would-be aggressors"—namely white mobs that regularly sought out and attacked blacks during festivities. This martial atmosphere was evident throughout the breadth of the West Indai parades, where regular participants marched in single file lines, and carried banners and symbols indicative of military style. Among the marchers were black soldiers as well as sailors, some of whom had served in British regiments and naval vessels.

In Canada there was a similar presence of black soldiers, members of the Queen Victoria Rifle Guards and other militias who served alongside the British army, who marched in West India Day commemorations. Frederick Douglas, witnessing these independent black military units march in a West India Day parade in New Bedford, Massachusetts, voiced his pride at seeing them. A Mrs. Q watching a black militia drill in Staten Island in voiced both pride and challenge to whites who would see fit to disturb black celebrants with violence: 'who dare molest, or make us afraid?"

West India Day's disappearance in the US was ironically a product of its success. With the end of the Civil War, and Emancipation in the United States, August 1st celebrations went into decline, gradually fading, and eventually replaced by more nationalist celebrations. As early as the post-Emancipation Proclamation years, even before the end of the Civil War, this trend was already underway. In a correspondence from Chicago in the August 3, 1864 Philadelphia Inquirer, it was noted, "It has heretofore been the custom of the colored people of Chicago to have a grand demonstration on the 1st of August—a celebration of the anniversary of West India emancipation; but this have abandoned, and now celebrate as their day of Jubilee Lincoln's Proclamation of freedom to the African race, on the 1st of January."

West India Day celebrations would continue on in varied locations, mostly still in the Northeastern US, until the 1880s, after which they mostly disappeared. As slaves become free and American blacks became citizens, the commemoration of an event outside of the national memory became less relevant than one that took place squarely in the American narrative. West India Day's diminishing role and replacement by nationalist celebrations on emancipation was thus a form of both nation-making in the US and the forging of emergent African-American identity. August 1st is still commemorated in various parts of the British Caribbean, the UK, Canada and West Africa.

August 1st Emancipation Day Commemoration in modern day Trinidad & Tobago

References:

JR Kerr-ritchie- Rites of August First: Emancipation Day in the Black Atlantic World.

Mitch Kachun. Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915.