Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence - Celebration and Controversy

Celebration and Controversy

After 1819, people in North Carolina (and Tennessee, which shared an early history) began to take pride in the previously unheralded Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. Before then, Virginia and Massachusetts had been given much of the credit for leading the American Revolution. The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence clearly enhanced North Carolina's role—already notable because of the Halifax Resolves of April 1776—in establishing American independence. The first celebration of the anniversary of the supposed adoption of the Mecklenburg Declaration took place in Charlotte on May 20, 1825.

Many North Carolinians were therefore offended when Thomas Jefferson's skeptical letter about the Mecklenburg Declaration was posthumously published in 1829. In questioning the authenticity of the Mecklenburg Declaration, Jefferson, a Virginian, had impolitically referred to William Hooper, one of North Carolina's signers of the American Declaration of Independence, as a "tory". Jefferson used the term to mean that Hooper had been a conservative when it came to declaring independence, and did not imply that he had actually been a Loyalist, but North Carolinians took it as a slight against one of their honored Patriots.

The government of North Carolina responded to Jefferson's letter in 1831 with an official pamphlet that reprinted the previously published accounts with some additional testimony in support of the Mecklenburg Declaration. This was followed in 1834 with a book by a leading North Carolina historian, Joseph Seawell Jones, entitled A Defence of the Revolutionary History of the State of North Carolina from the Aspersions of Mr. Jefferson. Jones defended the patriotism of William Hooper and accused Jefferson of being envious that a little county in North Carolina had declared independence at a time when the "Sage of Monticello" was still hoping for reconciliation with Great Britain. On May 20, 1835, more than five thousand people gathered in Charlotte to celebrate the Mecklenburg Declaration. In the many toasts celebrating "the first declaration of American independence", Jefferson was never mentioned.

In 1837, Jefferson's first biographer, George Tucker, came to Jefferson's defense. In The Life of Thomas Jefferson, Tucker argued that Jefferson's Declaration of Independence had been fraudulently interpolated into the Mecklenburg Declaration. North Carolina writer Francis L. Hawks, an Anglican clergyman who regarded Jefferson as an "infidel", responded that Jefferson had instead plagiarized the Mecklenburg Declaration. Hawks's position was apparently supported by the discovery of a proclamation by Josiah Martin, the last royal governor of North Carolina, which seemed to confirm the authenticity of the Mecklenburg Declaration. In August 1775, Governor Martin had written that he had:

seen a most infamous publication in the Cape Fear Mercury importing to be resolves of a set of people styling themselves a committee for the county of Mecklenburg, most traitorously declaring the entire dissolution of the laws, government, and constitution of this country, and setting up a system of rule and regulation repugnant to the laws and subversive of his majesty's government....

Here, at last, was contemporaneous confirmation that radical resolves had been adopted in Mecklenburg County in 1775. Unfortunately, the issue of the Cape Fear Mercury that Martin referred to could not be found. Throughout the 19th century, supporters of the Mecklenburg Declaration hoped that the missing paper would be discovered, proving their case. In 1905, Collier's Magazine published what was alleged to be a clipping from the missing issue, but advocates and opponents of the Mecklenburg Declaration agreed that the document was a hoax. It was later confirmed that the "traitorous" document referred to by Governor Martin was not the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, but was instead a radical set of resolutions known as the Mecklenburg Resolves.