With the recent passage of the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, commemorating the end of slavery in the United States, the country now has 12 federal holidays. Many are fixtures in the American calendar, but their presence isn’t only a story of continuity. They reflect how the U.S. has evolved — from an affiliation of states with a relatively small federal government to a more centralized nation.
“They followed the Civil War, but, by no accident, they had nothing to do with the Civil War. The war wounds were still deep and irrevocable, and any commemoration of the war itself would have been seen as divisive,” Chernow says. He notes that Memorial Day, the honoring of those who died in war, did not become a federal holiday until 1888.
Columbus Day became a national holiday in 1968, endorsed by Congress and President Lyndon Johnson as a tribute to immigrants and as a “declaration of willingness to face with confidence the imponderables of unknown tomorrows,” according to a Senate report at the time.
Independence Day has been caught up in the country’s divisions almost from the start. In the 1780s and 1790s, supporters of a stronger central government and those who worried about a return to British-style monarchy , argued over the authorship of the Declaration of Independence, with Republicans giving sole credit to their own Thomas Jefferson and Federalists countering that many others had worked on it.
“Our adversaries have adopted some declarations of independence in which, unlike the good old one penned by Jefferson, they omit the words `all men are created equal,’” Lincoln wrote, adding that the Union was upholding “government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men; to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all; to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life.
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