Happy 4th of July

Celebrating Independence with Barbecue for (Almost) 250 Years

I’m preparing for a few upcoming talks on barbecue history, and that got me digging back into the archives to see what else I could turn up on the early days of barbecue in colonial America and the new Republic. In particular, I’ve been trying to see how far back I could trace the tradition of the 4th of July barbecue.

The earliest instance that I cite in my book Barbecue: The History of an American Institution took place in Oconee County, South Carolina, in 1808, more than two decades after the Declaration of Independence was signed. Since then, I’ve been able to take it back two more decades.

I thought I would share a little of what I’ve turned up. Happy 4th of July, everyone, and happy 250th, America!

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Barbecue does not seem to have been a part of the celebrations of the first anniversary of American Independence. On July 4, 1777, the city of Philadelphia marked the occasion with “demonstrations of joy and festivity”, including a procession at noon of all the armed ships and galleys in the Delaware River “dressed in the colours of the United States” with streamers and flags. “In the afternoon,” the Virginia Gazette reported, “an elegant dinner was prepared for Congress,” which was accompanied by music from a band of Hessian musicians who had been captured as prisoners of war.

At that time, Britain and the American colonies were still at war. (Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in October 1781, and the Treaty of Paris wasn’t signed until almost two years later.) Over time the celebratory dinners expanded and moved outdoors, and by 1788 they incorporated barbecue.

That year, the Pennsylvania Packet reported that on July 4 in Richmond, Virginia, “a respected body of gentlemen of this city” assembled about a mile outside of town “where an excellent barbacue was provided.” After dinner, they drank 13 “patriotic toasts accompanied by the discharge of 13 cannon.”

That same day in York, Pennsylvania, the day was greeted by the ringing of bells. At 10:00 am, the local militia company and students from the town academy led a procession to the German Calvinist church, where the Reverend J. Campbell delivered a patriotic sermon. They then marched, accompanied by music, to a nearby spring, where “a barbecue was prepared for them.”

Not to be outdone, in Augusta, Georgia, a “large and respectable number of citizens of the town and country” watched the governor review the state troops and then “joined in partaking of a very elegant Barbecue,” followed by 13 toasts and cannon salutes.

Within ten years of the signing of the Declaration, then, Americans were celebrating their independence with barbecue. From there, as I describe in my book, the events grew decade after decade to become important civic institutions in communities throughout the United States.

In Georgia, Augustus C. G. Elholm, the Adjutant-General of the state militia, tried to make barbecue a more official part of the celebration. In December 1793, he wrote a letter to the Georgia General Assembly with a simple request:

[T]o establish a jubilee throughout the state, annually on the 4th of July, consisting of a barbecue and home distilled spirit, furnished by government to each battalion and every citizen within its limits, with an arrangement of shooting matches and regulated premiums for encouragement of martial dexterity

“Home distilled spirit” at that time would have been apple or peach brandy or corn whiskey.

The legislators, unfortunately, denied the Adjutant-General’s request, admitting that the idea “would tend to interest the state, but your committee are sorry to observe, that, at this time the situation of our finances will not allow them to grant those supplies”

Which is a shame. What better way to foster patriotic spirits and instill civic virtue than by celebrating the 4th of July with state-supplied barbecue and liquor?

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Burnt Ends

An Unsung Barbecue Capital

Milwaukee magazine this week published a round up of the city’s notable barbecue restaurants. In a city of over 550,000 residents (1.57 million if you count the greater metropolitan Milwaukee area), the author managed to track down two brick and mortar restaurants and five food trucks.

Austin, watch your back.

Slopping the Hogs

MSN.com is horning in on my beat. Last week it published an exhaustive round up of “legendary” South Carolina barbecue joints:

Yes, I could spend plenty of time mocking the content. The picture above, for instance, was sourced from Getty Images, and it accompanies the blurb for Swig & Swine here in Charleston. (No, Swig & Swine does not serve its barbecue on sub rolls nor top it with alpha sprouts.) And, yes, the text is filled with the kind of vapid generalities that could only be generated by a freshman composition student or a soulless large language model (Re: Midway BBQ, “Generations of locals return for its scratch-made sides and time-honored barbecue traditions.”)

Perhaps most egregious, this “feature,” which posted just a week ago, recommends as one of its four legendary destinations Rodney Scott’s BBQ in Charleston, which closed May 3rd amid some rather widely-reported legal and financial issues.

I didn’t need to wonder whether the article was generated by AI, for instead of a byline, it says right on the story, “Curated by AI.” That unashamed brazenness is what makes the piece truly remarkable.

MSN.com originated back in the 1990s as a web portal that competed with Yahoo, and it remains today primarily a content aggregator, pulling in articles and videos from hundreds of different publishers. If you happen to be a Microsoft Windows user (thankfully I am not), you might recognize MSN.com as the default page that is displayed when you open a new tab in the Edge browser, with a grid of cards with various news, entertainment, and sports stories.

In March 2024, MSN.com got moved under the newly-formed Microsoft AI organization, led by Mustafa Suleyman. Some two years later, we seeing the remarkable potential of AI starting to bear fruit. Instead of a lame story hand-typed by some underpaid scribbler at a legacy news organization, MSN is cutting out the middleman and “curating” its own content.

What’s really depressing is that the article lists the sources the AI bot used for its material. Here they are:

• 12 Iconic BBQ Joints In South Carolina Locals Say Are The Best In The State | familydestinationsguide.com

• 10 Classic Barbecue Joints In South Carolina That Are Totally Worth The Drive | familydestinationsguide.com

• 10 Legendary BBQ Joints In South Carolina Only Locals Know About | familydestinationsguide.com

• The 25 Best BBQ in South Carolina - BBQ Revolution | bbqrevolt.com

• Whole hog, pork shoulder, vinegar, mustard: The Carolinas’ great barbecue argument is the best reason to drive through both states | Food Drink Life

I actually recognized the name of one of those esteemed publications, BBQ Revolt, for I’ve made fun of it here in the Cue Sheet before. It’s an obvious cobbled-together-from-the-Internet clickbait content farm. Based upon a cursory review, Family Destinations Guide seems pretty much the same thing. If the content wasn’t created using AI tools, it might as well have been.

Food Drink Life appears to be a grift of a different sort, for in addition to licensing its “content” to MSN, it offers to sell bloggers access to its library of articles (“your secret weapon to blogging success”) as well as let them cross-post their own articles on Food Drink Life. Without getting into the weeds, this is basically a way of gaming the search engine algorithms to “build authority” and place higher in the search rankings. It’s a grimy world out there, folks.

So now, the geniuses at Microsoft are using their own AI tools to hoover up all that lazy, vacuous, and often error-laden content, run it through the whirring word-guessing machine, and publish it to the world in a limitless stream of self-replicating botslop.

I need to go lay down in a cool room and take a nap. Will the last human left on the Internet please switch off the light on their way out?

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