Tamanend - Tammany Festivals

Tammany Festivals

By the early 1770s, annual Tammany Festivals occurred in Philadelphia and Annapolis. The festivals were held on May 1, replacing the May Day traditions of Europe. The festivals also continued many of the features of the traditional May Day celebrations. For example, the Saint Tammany Day celebrated on May 1, 1771, in Annapolis had a may pole decorated with ribbons. People danced in Native American style to music while holding a ribbon and moving in a circle around the pole.

On May 1, 1777, John Adams wrote of the Tammany festival in Philadelphia during the American Revolutionary War. Adams, who was in Philadelphia attending the Second Continental Congress as a delegate from Massachusetts, wrote a letter home to his wife, Abigail Adams, which said:

"This is King Tammany's Day. Tammany was an Indian King, of this past of the Continent, when Mr. Penn first came here. His court was in this town. He was friendly to Mr. Penn and very serviceable to him. He lived here among the first settlers for some time and until old age. ... The people here have sainted him and keep his day" (Lyman H. Butterfield, ed., Adams Family Correspondence; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963-1973, II, pp. 229–230).

On May 1, 1778, General George Washington and the Continental Army held a Tammany festival while camped at Valley Forge. The "men spent the day in mirth and jollity...in honor of King Tammany" (Military Journal of George Ewing, 1928).

After the end of the Revolutionary War, Tammany celebrations spread throughout America, as far away as Savannah, Georgia. Wherever a Tammany Society had been established, the society would promote a local Tammany festival. Many calendars of the time listed "Saint Tammany's Festival" on May 1.

Tammany celebrations were such important events that, in 1785, George Washington appeared at the Tammany festival in Richmond, Virginia with Virginia governor Patrick Henry. In 1787, New York City first began to have a Tammany festival.