Meck Dec 250: Celebrating the Original Declaration of Independence?
Artist Dan Nance’s Reading of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. Visit his gallery for historical art and dioramas: https://www.dannance.com/revolutionary-war
“A few weeks ago I received an Essex Register, containing resolutions of independence by a county in North Carolina, fifteen months before the resolution of independence in Congress. I was struck with so much astonishment on reading this document, that I could not help inclosing it immediately to Mr. Jefferson, who must have seen it, in the time of it, for he has copied the spirit, the sense, and the expressions of it verbatim, into his Declaration of the fourth of July, 1776.”
Before I moved to North Carolina, I had never heard of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, an event memorialized on both the North Carolina flag (May 20, 1775) and the license plate (“First in Freedom”). I didn’t know there was evidence disappeared from both the British Archives and by a North Carolina professor, or that the case against the document was basically that 1.) 20+ of the most prominent, well-educated community leaders in Charlotte made it up and 2) backwards Southerners were too ignorant to verbalize such lofty principles. (Many of the Southerners in question were Princeton-educated, but no matter.)
I didn’t know that a Moravian scholar found a 1775 description of the heroic ride Captain James Jack made to deliver the document, or that a Moravian merchant recorded in 1778 that “at the end of the 1775th year, that already in the summer of this year, that is in May, June or July, the County of Mecklenburg in North Carolina declared itself free and independent of England.”
I didn’t know there was the very real probability that the nation’s first declaration of independence was born far from Philadelphia, and that Thomas Jefferson borrowed liberally from the words of North Carolinians to create the declaration we celebrate today.
Applying Occam’s Razor, I find it much easier to believe the unpalatable conclusion that Jefferson was inspired by (plagiarized?) this earlier Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence rather than the improbable idea that community leaders and contemporaneous evidence are all part of a massive hoax. But see for yourself -
Dig Deeper: Meet the Meck Dec Signers
Read
Who’s Your Founding Father by David Fleming
The First American Declaration of Independence? The Disputed History of the Mecklenburg Declaration of May 20, 1775 by Scott Syfert
Charlotte Mecklenburg Library: The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence Exhibit
Listen
See/Do
Charlotte Liberty Walk: The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence
Revolutionary War exhibit at Dan Nance pop-up gallery, Southpark
The American Revolution Experience Traveling Exhibition on Tour (March 11-28)
This is Meck: Mecklenburg 250 Festival (April 20)
Meck Dec 250 Exhibit Opening at Charlotte Museum of History (May 15)
“May I enclose to you one of the greatest curiosities and one of the deepest mysteries that ever occurred to me? It is entitled the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. [And] the genuine sense of America at that moment was never so well expressed before, nor since. How is it possible that this paper should have been concealed from me to this day? Had it been communicated to me in the time of it, I know, if you do not know, that it would have been printed in every Whig newspaper upon this continent. You know, that if I had possessed it, I would have made the hall of Congress echo and re-echo with it fifteen months before your Declaration of Independence. What a poor, ignorant, malicious, short-sighted, crapulous mass is Tom Paine’s Common Sense, in comparison with this paper! Had I known it, I would have commented upon it, from the day you entered Congress till the fourth of July, 1776…And yet history is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine! Sat verbum sapienti! (Word to the wise!)”
