Thomas Jefferson died a few minutes after noon on the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of his Declaration of Independence. Attended by a University of Virginia medical professor, along with a grandson and a grandson-in-law, the third president reportedly asked whether it was the Fourth of July, before answering himself, “It soon will be,” and then quite promptly dying. Six hours after Jefferson’s death, John Adams—the man whom Jefferson beat in the 1800 presidential election—suffered a heart attack at Peacefield, his “Old House” in Quincy, Massachusetts. As is well known, Adams’s last words were the erroneous “Thomas Jefferson still survives.” (Whether this was grudging or reassuring is uncertain.)
That these two architects of the Republic, the last and most significant pair of the revolutionary generation, died on the half-centennial appeared providential. The then-occupant of the White House, John Quincy Adams (son of the second president), saw the coincidental deaths as “visible and palpable remarks of Divine Favor.”
Another palpable remark of divine favor happened on that Independence Day as well, in a place far south of Peacefield and north of Monticello, though farther west than either. In the burgeoning frontier metropolis of Pittsburgh, Stephen C. Foster, the most significant author of parlor and minstrel songs in nineteenth-century America, was born. “The North and the South Poles of the American Revolution,” Steve Erickson notes in his contribution to A New Literary History of America, “never knew Stephen Foster.… But Foster’s melody already waits in the American night.” Neither a philosopher nor a legislator, a gentleman-farmer or a statesman, Foster was rather the first of an American type: the pop star.
Foster would become the celebrated author of hundreds of songs, many of which, including “Oh Susanna!,” “Camptown Races,” “Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair,” and “Beautiful Dreamer.” have passed into the semi-eternal firmament to become folk tunes rather than mere compositions by a distinct author. These are works that all can recognize, even if none of us listen to them, enduring missives from what critic Greil Marcus described in Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes as that “old, weird America.” Adams, the Northern revolutionary elitist and Jefferson the Southern slave-owning Republican, were both still attached to the old world and its ways. By contrast, Foster was neither a Northerner nor a Southerner but a Westerner, which made all the difference.
The Founders conceived of a particular nation, an Enlightenment experiment firmly European, but the popularity of Foster signaled the emergence of a very different country, a nation of self-mythologizing grifters and confidence men, of boot-strappers and self-inventors. Allegorically, Foster—in both his subjects and his example—was the first of a new type of man: the American.