July 3, 1848: The Day Freedom Was Taken at Fort Frederik

The morning of July 3: the crowd, the fort and the ride from Christiansted

Fort Frederik held a small garrison, its commander in most tellings a Major Gyllich, and it was a fort built to face the sea, not the town behind it. The soldiers did what a small garrison does with a crowd of thousands: they kept the gate, sent riders east for the governor-general, and waited. A few blocks inland, the parish history of St. Patrick's records that its founding pastor, Father Timothy O'Ryan, worked that day to secure the emancipation and to calm the crowd. The morning was a standoff whose outcome depended on a man who was not yet there.

What the marchers wanted was clear and, by every account, stated: freedom, that day, for everyone. What they threatened, if they did not get it, was the town. Some tellings say by noon and some say by four o'clock; the deadline is one of the details the accounts do not agree on. What matters more is what they did not do. Through the whole morning, with a town at their mercy and a fort that could not have stopped them, the crowd in Frederiksted, by every account we have read, burned nothing and killed no one. That restraint is why the day is remembered as an act of self-liberation rather than a massacre.

Von Scholten got the news in Christiansted and set out west along the cross-island road, roughly the line of today's Queen Mary Highway, past estates that were emptying toward Frederiksted. He arrived in the afternoon. The accounts put the proclamation at around three o'clock or around four, and they differ on where he stood: on the fort's rampart in most Crucian tellings, in front of the fort facing the crowd in others. The choice in front of him was the one the trial in Copenhagen would later pick apart: order the garrison to fire and start a war he could not win, stall and lose the town, or move the date. He moved the date.

The proclamation

What von Scholten said is not in doubt, because it was written down and printed the same day. Its first article, quoted below in the English rendering usually given, is short enough to memorize, and the translations differ only in the last word: some render it "free" and some "emancipated." Either way, it covered every enslaved person on all three islands, St. Croix, St. Thomas and St. John, not just the people in front of the fort.

The proclamation had four points, and the other three matter as much as the first, because they are where the trouble started. The people on the estates were to keep the use of their houses and provision grounds for three months. Labor from now on was to be paid for by agreement, and the allowance of food that estates had provided was to stop. The old and the infirm who could not work were to be maintained by their former owners until further notice. In other words: you are free; you have a roof for ninety days; and you will need wages, from the people who owned you yesterday, on terms nobody had written down.

The crowd got what it had come for. The bell in the south tower of St. Patrick's rang out for freedom, the parish history says; the town emptied of the people who had walked in overnight; and by evening the Danish West Indies had, on paper, no enslaved people. The formal notice went out over the islands and eventually to Copenhagen, where the government, after argument, let it stand. Denmark never repealed the proclamation. What it did instead, over the next year, was write the law that governed the free.

“All unfree in the Danish West Indies are from today emancipated.”

Governor-General Peter von Scholten's proclamation at Fort Frederik, July 3, 1848, first article, in the usual English rendering

The days after: estates plundered, troops out, a pact with Buddhoe

The proclamation ended slavery; it did not end the week. In the days after July 3 the unrest moved out of Frederiksted and into the countryside, where the four points were less clear and the managers were still in the great houses. Some estates were plundered. The militia and the soldiers went out; people were shot, and the accounts do not agree on how many. Spanish troops were sent from Puerto Rico at the Danish request to help hold the island. None of this undoes July 3, but it belongs in the same story.

What is striking in the record is what Buddhoe did next. He worked with the governor and other officials to end the riots and violence, and the older tellings have him riding through the western estates with the fort's officers, telling people that freedom was won and to go home. In an 1852 letter to a Maria Eide, reported from the Danish archives, von Scholten wrote that he and Buddhoe had worked collaboratively and had a pact regarding emancipation. Whether that pact predated July 3 or was struck at the fort is an open question; either way, the man who called the estates out then talked them down.

It did not save him. Buddhoe was taken into custody and, as the next section tells, held at Fort Frederik and then Fort Christiansvaern before he was put on a ship. It did not save von Scholten either. Ill, under attack from the planters and from officers who thought he had surrendered to a mob, he handed over the government and sailed for Denmark within two weeks of the proclamation. He never came back. And it did not settle the estates: the administration that followed spent the winter writing the rules that became the 1849 labor law, which is why this guide has to keep going for another thirty years.

What became of Buddhoe

Here the Danish archives are precise where the popular story is vague. According to Dowling's translations as reported in the Virgin Islands Daily News, Buddhoe was held at Fort Frederik and transferred on July 24, 1848, to Fort Christiansvaern in Christiansted, where he was held for 139 days. He asked the court for leave to go to one of the English colonies, and the request was granted: a passport for Tortola, money and letters of recommendation, and a berth aboard the Danish naval ship Ørnen in December 1848. Its captain, Carl Irminger, is recorded as having threatened him on the voyage and confiscated his belongings.

The ship did not leave him at Tortola. It landed him at Port of Spain, Trinidad, on January 8, 1849. From there the trail thins. Some accounts, including the St. Thomas Source's 2025 history of emancipation, have him making his way to New York City by 1850. The honest register is that he is said to have been jailed and exiled to Trinidad: after 1849 nobody knows for certain where John Gottlieb lived or where he died, and Crucian tradition has filled the gap in several ways. If a guide at the fort tells you a definite ending, ask where it comes from.

Two things are worth doing with this. Stand in the courtyard of Fort Christiansvaern the next time you are in Christiansted, which our Christiansted guide covers, and count off the 139 days from July 24. And remember that deportation with a passport and letters was not clemency; it was the state removing the most capable organizer on the island so that the estates could be put back to work under new rules. He was 28. He never saw St. Croix again, so far as anyone has found.

What became of von Scholten

Von Scholten's return to Denmark was not a homecoming. He was subjected to a humiliating and hard trial for treason, on the argument that by abolishing slavery he had undermined colonial interests, and he was at first denied his pension. The planters wanted a scapegoat and the colonial office wanted the record to show that emancipation had been forced, not granted. The proceedings dragged through the early 1850s.

His own words did not help him with either. It is tempting to make July 3 von Scholten's day, and the trial in Copenhagen did exactly that, from the other direction. But the man himself, in August 1848, wrote in a memorandum that he had not emancipated the enslaved; they would have taken freedom themselves, and the King owed no one compensation for it. That is from the Danish archives, as reported from Dowling's book: as close to a confession of the true order of events as a governor was going to give.

He was eventually cleared of the charges and acquitted shortly before his death; the standard accounts put the acquittal in 1852. He died on January 26, 1854, in Altona, then in Danish Holstein and now part of Hamburg. Anna Heegaard stayed on St. Croix and died there in 1859. In Denmark he has been rehabilitated in the way nations rehabilitate awkward men, with a 1987 feature film that treats him as the hero of July 3; in the Virgin Islands he is remembered more carefully, as the official who signed what the marchers had already decided.

How to hold both at once is the question the museum leaves you with, and it is worth taking seriously rather than picking a side. He was the governor of a slave colony for twenty-one years. He also, on a July afternoon, with a town at stake, chose the words that ended slavery in the Danish islands rather than the order to fire on the crowd, and he paid for it with his career. Both are true. And after July 1848 the person in charge of what freedom would mean was a new governor and a colonial legislature dominated by the men who had just lost their claim to other people.

Free, but bound: the 1849 labor law and the road to the Fireburn

Freedom on paper met the estate on October 1, 1848, when the three months of houses and provision grounds ran out. Over the winter the colonial government wrote a labor regulation, issued in January 1849, that shaped Crucian life for thirty years. As usually summarized: rural workers were bound to yearly contracts on the estate where they lived; wages were fixed by class at a few cents a day, with housing and a provision plot counted as pay; and October 1 was the one day in the year a worker could lawfully change estates. The law kept the cane cut. It also made the freed, in practice, tenants of the people who had owned them.

The resentment built for a generation, and on October 1, 1878, Contract Day, it broke in Frederiksted. Workers who had gathered in town for the annual change rose, and over the following days much of Frederiksted and many estates across the west and center of the island were burned. Crucian memory gives the revolt to three women, the Queens: Mary Thomas, Queen Mary, whose name is on the highway you will drive in on; Axeline Salomon, Queen Agnes; and Mathilda McBean, Queen Mathilda. They were tried and imprisoned in Copenhagen, and the labor law was repealed soon after. Frederiksted was rebuilt in the Victorian style you walk through today.

What belongs here is the connection. The Fireburn is not a separate story from July 3, 1848; it is the second act of the same one. The proclamation freed people and left the land, the mills and the law with the planters, and the 1849 regulation turned that into a system. Thirty years to the day after the first Contract Day, the system burned. When you stand at Buddhoe Park and look at the town, you are looking at both dates at once: the waterfront where freedom was proclaimed and the streets that had to be rebuilt because it was incomplete.

Emancipation Day: July 3 today

July 3 is Emancipation Day, a public holiday in the U.S. Virgin Islands; government offices close and the governor issues a statement each year, the 178th anniversary in 2026. It sits the day before the Fourth of July, and the two holidays run together on St. Croix as a long weekend; Frederiksted, Freedom City, is where the weight of it lands.

The program is community-run and changes from year to year, so treat what follows as the shape rather than the schedule. In recent years the day on St. Croix has included an early-morning freedom walk from fort to fort, a church service, and an afternoon program of speeches, music and tributes at Buddhoe Park in Frederiksted, at the bandstand by the fort. Frederiksted's celebration, typically around the Fourth, has games for children, orators and historians, quadrille dancers, food and craft vendors, and fireworks from the pier. Anniversary years get more: 1998 brought the statues, and 2023, the 175th, had its own program.

If your stay includes July 3, go, and go as a guest. Expect the roads into Frederiksted to be busy or closed near the waterfront, parking to be scarce, and the fort and the park to be full of Crucian families for whom this is not a spectacle. Listen to the speeches; the historians who speak at Buddhoe Park know the record best, and the quadrille is the island's own culture, which our quelbe and mocko jumbie guide explains. Buy from the vendors. Ask before you photograph people. Bring water and a hat; July on the west end is hot. The St. Croix Source and the VI Consortium publish the schedule the week before.

Buddhoe Park and the Freedom statue

Buddhoe Park is the small green with the bandstand at Custom House Street and Strand Street, beside the fort and a few steps from the pier landing. It is named for General Moses Gottlieb, and it holds two of the three bronzes that the Ghanaian-American sculptor Bright Bimpong made in 1998 for the 150th anniversary of emancipation. The best known is the bust of Buddhoe himself, which stands in the Freedom Fountain in front of the Oscar E. Henry Customs House, the two-story Danish customs building with the long upper gallery facing the park.

The second piece is called Freedom, and it is the one you will see on the postcards: a man, unnamed, blowing a conch shell, with a sugar-cane machete raised in his other hand. The Danish museum that now holds a copy describes it as a symbol of the release of the enslaved and the struggle for freedom; the figure is blowing the call of the night of July 2. Bimpong's third bronze is a bust of D. Hamilton Jackson, the labor leader and newspaper founder of the 1910s, whose own holiday, Liberty Day, is November 1.

The statues have traveled. Copies of all three were sent to Denmark, where the Virgin Islands Daily News reported they would be shown in prominent Danish museums, and a cast of Freedom, given by the Virgin Islands to Denmark for the 2017 centennial of Transfer Day, stands at Asiatisk Plads in Copenhagen, outside the Foreign Ministry. That is a pointed place for it.

What to do there: read the plaques, walk around the bust rather than posing in front of it, and then turn and look at the fort's landward wall, which is what the crowd was looking at. Fifteen minutes is enough. The park is free and open, and on Emancipation Day it is the center of everything.

Fort Frederik today: the museum

Fort Frederik was built by Denmark-Norway between 1752 and 1760, at the water's edge on the north side of what is now the pier, to guard the roadstead and its trade and to ward off pirates. It is named for King Frederik V, like the town, and painted a deep red with white trim, the opposite of Fort Christiansvaern's yellow. It is a low, plain, business-like fort: a courtyard, ramparts with cannon facing the sea, an arcade, a handful of rooms. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 8, 1996, and named a National Historic Landmark on September 25, 1997.

The fort's other famous claim, that its guns answered a salute from an American ship in 1776 and so gave the first foreign salute to the new United States, is real but disputed, and our Frederiksted guide gives it its due. For this guide the fort is the place of July 3, 1848, and that is what the museum inside is built around: exhibits on the fort's history and the emancipation, a gallery with changing art shows, the courtyard, and the ramparts. When Jack Delano photographed the interior for the Farm Security Administration in December 1941, the Library of Congress captioned it "the old fort built by the French," which it was not.

Practicalities, hedged, because St. Croix hours change without notice. As of 2026 the museum lists Monday to Friday 8:30 am to 4 pm and Saturday 1 pm to 4 pm, plus openings when a cruise ship is at the pier, and it is closed Sunday. Admission is quoted at $5 by one listing and $10 by another, with children free with a paying adult on the first; budget ten. Call 340-772-2021 the day before, especially for a Saturday or a holiday. Give it an hour inside and a second on the walls, where you see the pier, the sea, and, behind you, the road the marchers came in on.

How to visit respectfully

Frederiksted is a working town of a few hundred people in its historic core, and the fort and the park are its front yard. The first rule is the one you would want at home: this is a place of memory for the people who live here, and their families were on the road that night. Behave in the fort as you would in a church you do not belong to. Read the exhibits before you climb the walls. Do not sit on the bust or the fountain for a photograph. If there is a ceremony or a school group in the park, wait, and if you photograph people, ask.

The second rule is language, and we have tried to keep to it in this guide: the people who marched were enslaved people, not slaves as a category of person; they freed themselves, and the governor proclaimed it. That is the usage of the Virgin Islands government and the museum, and visitors who pick it up are noticed. The third is money, which matters in a town that has been through Hugo, Marilyn and Maria: pay the fort's admission, buy lunch on Strand Street, and if there are vendors in the park on a holiday, buy from them.

The estates are a different case. La Grange, where the record says Buddhoe was born, is the district just north of town on the way to Rainbow Beach, and Slob and the other names in the story are on the maps inland; most of the mill towers you can see are on private land, and none is a museum. Look from the road, photograph from the road, and go to Estate Whim, on the Queen Mary Highway east of town, for the one estate that is open, explained and honest about who did the work; the Landmarks Society keeps a research library there.

Finally, timing: a weekday morning is the quietest and coolest, a cruise-ship day the busiest, and a Sunday finds the museum closed and the park open. Emancipation Day is described above and is its own kind of day. Here is the ordinary half day, in order.

Reading the record: the Danish National Archives online

Most of what is solid in this guide, and most of what has been corrected in the popular story in the last decade, comes from paper in Copenhagen. When Denmark handed the islands to the United States in 1917 it took most of the colonial government's archive home, and for the centennial of the transfer in 2017 the Danish National Archives, the Rigsarkivet, digitized the Danish West Indies records and put them online, millions of pages, free, at virgin-islands-history.org, with English guides to what is where. The records that came with the islands are in the U.S. National Archives.

What is in the 1848 file, according to the Virgin Islands Daily News's account of Kathleen D. Dowling's book A Closer Look, translated by Niklas Thode Jensen, Birgit Christensen and Karen V. Sivertsen: von Scholten's memoranda and letters, including the August 1848 memorandum and the 1852 letter about his pact with Buddhoe; the testimony and detention records of John Gottlieb and of Admiral Martin King; the file on Anna Heegaard; and the papers of the men who prosecuted, shipped and replaced them. The birth date at La Grange, the 139 days at Christiansvaern and the landing at Port of Spain all come from these.

Two cautions before you open the site. The records are the enslavers' paperwork: estate lists, tax rolls, court files, church books. The enslaved appear in them by first name, by estate and by valuation, and the words used are the words of 1848. And the site is large and only partly indexed by name, so a casual search will not turn up an ancestor in an evening; genealogists on St. Croix and the historians who work the archive are the people to ask, and the cultural and historic listings in our directory are the place to start on island. Tradition got the big things right; the archive is filling in the names and dates.

Doing it from The Cerulean

The Cerulean is on the East End; Fort Frederik is at the far West End, and the drive is about 50 minutes each way, on the island's roads and at Crucian speeds. The route is the whole island in one line: East End Road into Christiansted, then Route 70, the Queen Mary Highway, west through the center of the island past the estates and Whim to Frederiksted. It is worth doing once, deliberately, and this is the way we would build the day.

Leave the villa after breakfast, which the chef's kitchen is set up for, and be at the fort when it opens at 8:30 on a weekday; do the museum and the walls while it is cool. Buddhoe Park and the customs house take fifteen minutes. Lunch on Strand Street. Then either Estate Whim on the way back, which fits the afternoon exactly, or a swim off the town beach north of the fort and the sunset, the only one on St. Croix that goes down over open sea; the villa faces the other way. If you stay for the sunset, you will be home about 8.

The concierge can arrange a driver, which turns the cross-island road into an hour of looking at mill towers, and can point you to island historians who give guided tours of Frederiksted; ask early around July 3. Bring the children. The march is a story of courage and organization that a ten-year-old understands at once, the fort has cannon and walls, and the conch-blowing statue is a better lesson than most classrooms; our St. Croix with kids guide has more on pacing a history day.

And when you are back on the East End, with the sea in front of the veranda and the drive behind you, think about the seventeen thousand people who could not leave the island and the eight thousand who walked anyway. The fort's number is 340-772-2021.