The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence is a text published in 1819 with the now disputed claim that it was the first declaration of independence made in the Thirteen Colonies during the American Revolution. It was supposedly signed on May 20, 1775, in Charlotte, North Carolina, by a committee of citizens of Mecklenburg County, who declared independence from Great Britain after hearing of the battle of Concord. If true, the Mecklenburg Declaration preceded the United States Declaration of Independence by more than a year.
Professional historians have maintained that the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence is an inaccurate rendering of an authentic document known as the Mecklenburg Resolves, an argument first made by Peter Force.Dictionary of American Biography, Volume 3, p.513 The Resolves, a set of radical resolutions passed on May 31, 1775, fell short of an actual declaration of independence. Although published in newspapers in 1775, the text of the Mecklenburg Resolves was lost after the American Revolution and not rediscovered until 1838. Defenders of the Mecklenburg Declaration have argued that both the Mecklenburg Declaration and the Mecklenburg Resolves are authentic.
North Carolinians, convinced that the Mecklenburg Declaration was genuine, and also because of the Halifax Resolves passed by the North Carolina Provincial Congress on April 12, 1776, maintained that they were the first Americans to declare independence from Great Britain. The official seal and the flag of North Carolina display the dates of both the declaration and the Halifax vote. A holiday commemorating the Mecklenburg Declaration, "Meck Dec Day," is celebrated on May 20 in North Carolina, although it is no longer an official holiday and does not attract the attention that it once did.
Initial publication The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence was published on April 30, 1819, in an article written by Joseph McKnitt Alexander in the Raleigh Register and North Carolina Gazette, of Raleigh, North Carolina.Maier, American Scripture, 172. Alexander's 1819 article is reprinted in Hoyt, Mecklenburg Declaration, 3–7. "It is not probably known to many of our readers," wrote the editor of the Raleigh Register in an introduction to the article, "that the citizens of Mecklenburg County, in this State made a Declaration of Independence more than a year before Congress made theirs."Hoyt, Mecklenburg Declaration, 3.
According to Alexander, his father, John McKnitt Alexander, had been the clerk at a meeting convened in Charlotte on May 19, 1775. Each militia company in Mecklenburg County had sent two delegates to the meeting, where measures were to be discussed regarding the ongoing dispute between the British Empire and the American colonies. Relations between the colonies and British leaders had reached a crisis in Boston, Massachusetts following the 1774 passage of the Coercive Acts by the British Parliament. During the meeting in Mecklenburg County, the delegates received official news that the battle of Lexington had been fought in Massachusetts one month earlier. Outraged by this turn of events, wrote Alexander, the delegates unanimously passed the following resolutions at about 2:00 a.m. on May 20:
1. Resolved, That whosoever directly or indirectly abetted, or in any way, form, or manner, countenanced the uncharted and dangerous invasion of our rights, as claimed by Great Britain, is an enemy to this County, to America, and to the inherent and inalienable rights of man.
2. Resolved, That we the citizens of Mecklenburg County, do hereby dissolve the political bands which have connected us to the Mother Country, and hereby absolve ourselves from all allegiance to the British Crown, and abjure all political connection, contract, or association, with that Nation, who have wantonly trampled on our rights and liberties and inhumanly shed the innocent blood of American patriots at Lexington.
3. Resolved, That we do hereby declare ourselves a free and independent people, are, and of right ought to be, a sovereign and self-governing Association, under the control of no power other than that of our God and the General Government of the Congress; to the maintenance of which independence, we solemnly pledge to each other, our mutual cooperation, our lives, our fortunes, and our most sacred honor.
4. Resolved, That as we now acknowledge the existence and control of no law or legal officer, civil or military, within this County, we do hereby ordain and adopt, as a rule of life, all, each and every of our former laws - where, nevertheless, the Crown of Great Britain never can be considered as holding rights, privileges, immunities, or authority therein.
5. Resolved, That it is also further decreed, that all, each and every military officer in this County, is hereby reinstated to his former command and authority, he acting conformably to these regulations, and that every member present of this delegation shall henceforth be a civil officer, viz. a Justice of the Peace, in the character of a 'Committee-man,' to issue process, hear and determine all matters of controversy, according to said adopted laws, and to preserve peace, and union, and harmony, in said County, and to use every exertion to spread the love of country and fire of freedom throughout America, until a more general and organized government be established in this province.Hoyt, Mecklenburg Declaration, 4–5.
A few days later, wrote Alexander, Captain James Jack of Charlotte was sent to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Jack carried a copy of the resolves and a letter asking North Carolina's congressmen to have the Mecklenburg proceedings approved by Congress. The North Carolina congressional delegation—Richard Caswell, William Hooper, and Joseph Hewes—told Jack that although they supported what had been done, it was premature to discuss a declaration of independence in Congress.Hoyt, Mecklenburg Declaration, 5–6.
Alexander concluded by writing that although the original documents relating to the Mecklenburg Declaration were destroyed in a fire in 1800, the article was written from a true copy of the papers left to him by his father, who was now deceased.Maier, American Scripture, 173; Hoyt, Mecklenburg Declaration, 6.
Thomas Jefferson's skepticism
The 1819 article about the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence was reprinted in many newspapers across the United States.Hoyt, Mecklenburg Declaration, 7. People immediately noticed that, even though the Mecklenburg Declaration was supposedly written more than a year before the 1776 United States Declaration of Independence, the two declarations had some very similar phrases, including "dissolve the political bands which have connected", "absolve ourselves from all allegiance to the British Crown", "are, and of right ought to be", and "pledge to each other, our mutual cooperation, our lives, our fortunes, and our most sacred honor".Peterson, Jefferson Image, 140–41. This raised an obvious question: did Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the American Declaration of Independence, use the Mecklenburg Declaration as a source?
One person who thought so was John Adams, who like Jefferson was elderly and in retirement when the Mecklenburg Declaration was published in 1819. When Adams read Dr. Alexander's article in a Massachusetts newspaper, he was astonished because he had never previously heard of the Mecklenburg Declaration. He immediately assumed, as he wrote a friend, that Jefferson had "copied the spirit, the sense, and the expressions of it verbatim into his Declaration of the 4th of July, 1776."Hoyt, Mecklenburg Declaration, 7–8. Adams, who had played a major role in getting the Continental Congress to declare independence in 1776, had become somewhat resentful that Jefferson now received most of the praise for independence just because he had written the now-revered document announcing it.Maier, American Scripture, 173. Adams was therefore privately delighted with the emergence of the Mecklenburg Declaration, since it clearly undercut Jefferson's claim to originality and precedence. Adams sent a copy of the article to Jefferson to get his reaction.
Jefferson replied that, like Adams, he had never heard of the Mecklenburg Declaration before. Jefferson found it curious that historians of the American Revolution, even those from North Carolina and nearby Virginia, had never previously mentioned it. He also found it suspicious that the original was lost in a fire and that most of the eyewitnesses were now dead. Jefferson wrote that while he could not claim for certain that the Mecklenburg Declaration was a fabrication, "I shall believe it such until positive and solemn proof of its authenticity shall be produced."The correspondence between Adams and Jefferson pertaining to the Mecklenburg Declaration has often been reprinted. Extracts can be found, for example, in Hoyt, Mecklenburg Declaration, 7–11, or D.A. Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg County and the City of Charlotte (1904), p. 14.
Jefferson's argument, Adams wrote in reply, "has entirely convinced me that the Mecklengburg Resolutions are a fiction".Hoyt, Mecklenburg Declaration, 11. Adams forwarded Jefferson's letter to the editor of the Massachusetts newspaper, who wrote an article expressing reservations about the Mecklenburg Declaration without mentioning Jefferson or Adams by name.Hoyt, Mecklenburg Declaration, 11–12. In response to this skepticism, North Carolina senator Nathaniel Macon and others collected eyewitness testimony to the events described in the article. The now elderly witnesses did not agree in every detail, but they generally corroborated the story that a declaration of independence had been read in public in Charlotte, although they were not all certain about the date. Perhaps most importantly, eighty-eight-year-old Captain James Jack was still living, and he confirmed that he had delivered to the Continental Congress a declaration of independence that had been adopted in May 1775.Captain Jack's testimony was often reprinted, for example in Hoyt, Mecklenburg Declaration, 251–52. For many, the authenticity of the Mecklenburg Declaration had been firmly established.Hoyt, Mecklenburg Declaration, 12–14.
Possible signers After the Mecklenburg Declaration was published in 1819, supporters compiled a list of men who they believed had signed the document. William Polk, who said that he had heard his father Thomas Polk read the Declaration to the public, listed the names of fifteen delegates present when the Declaration was adopted; other testimony produced other names.Hoyt, Mecklenburg Declaration, 219. A pamphlet issued in 1831 by the government of North Carolina listed the names of twenty-six delegates. Eventually, supporters of the Declaration settled on a list of twenty-seven or twenty-eight men who they claimed had signed the document. In alphabetical order, they are:
1. Abraham Alexander 2. Adam Alexander 3. Charles Alexander 4. Ezra Alexander 5. Hezekiah Alexander 6. John McKnitt Alexander 7. Waightstill Avery 8. Hezekiah J. Balch 9. Richard Barry 10. Ephraim Brevard 11. John Davidson 12. Henry Downs 13. John Flenniken 14. John Foard 15. William Graham 16. James HarrisKenneth C Bullock, Author, Editor & Compiler, A Genealogy of McGee Harris Latter-Day Saint Pioneer (Provo, Utah: n.p., 1962), . 17. Robert Harris 18. Robert Irwin 19. William Kennon 20. Matthew McClure 21. Neil Morrison 22. Duncan Ochiltree 23. Benjamin Patton 24. John Phifer 25. Thomas Polk 26. John Queary 27. David Reese 28. Zacheus Wilson, Sr.