Unabhängigkeitserklärung von Mecklenburg

The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence is said to be the first declaration of independence made in the Thirteen Colonies during the American Revolution. It was supposedly signed on May 20, 1775, at Charlotte, North Carolina, by a committee of citizens of Mecklenburg County, who declared independence from Great Britain after hearing of the battle of Lexington. No original document exists and no reference to it has been found in extant newspapers from 1775. The text, first published in 1819, is said to have been recreated from memory after the original document was destroyed by fire in 1800. There is no conclusive evidence to confirm the original document's existence.

The North Carolina flag bears the date of the Mecklenburg Declaration, May 20, 1775.

The early government of North Carolina, convinced that the Mecklenburg Declaration was authentic, maintained that North Carolinians were the first Americans to declare independence from Britain. As a result, both the seal and the flag of North Carolina bear the date of the declaration. Coins have been minted that celebrate the Mecklenburg Declaration, and the story was printed in elementary school textbooks. North Carolinians who believe the story celebrate "Meck Dec Day" on May 20. U.S. Presidents Taft, Wilson, Eisenhower and Ford each traveled to Mecklenburg to participate in the celebration.

Many professional historians have maintained that the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence is not authentic. They instead argue that the genuine document is a set of resolutions passed on May 31, 1775, known as the Mecklenburg Resolves. The Mecklenburg Resolves, which were published in newspapers in 1775, were a set of strong anti-British resolutions similar to other local resolutions that were common in the colonies in 1774 and 1775. The original text of the Mecklenburg Resolves was lost after the American Revolution and not rediscovered until 1838. Historians argue that the Mecklenburg Declaration was written after 1800, and is a flawed reconstruction of the Mecklenburg Resolves that, perhaps inadvertently, borrowed language from the 1776 United States Declaration of Independence, and that no declaration of independence was issued in Mecklenburg County in 1775.

Initial publication

The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence was first published on April 30, 1819, in an article written by Dr. Joseph McKnitt Alexander in the Raleigh Register and North Carolina Gazette, a newspaper based in Raleigh, North Carolina. "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."

According to Dr. 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, which was reaching a crisis in Boston, Massachusetts, following the 1774 passage of the Coercive Acts by the British Parliament. During the meeting, 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 Dr. 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.

A few days later, wrote Dr. 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.

Dr. 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.

Jefferson skeptical

The 1819 article about the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence was republished in many newspapers across the United States. 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". 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." 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. 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 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."

Jefferson's skeptical letter about the Mecklenburg Declaration was not published before his death in 1826, but doubts about the declaration's authenticity were expressed in newspapers across the county following the publication of Dr. Alexander's article in 1819. In response, 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, 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. For many, the authenticity of the Mecklenburg Declaration had been firmly established.

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.

A fraudulent recreation of a page from the June 3, 1775, issue of the Cape-Fear Mercury, which supposedly printed the text of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. Published in Collier's Magazine in 1905, the reproduction was quickly shown to be a hoax.

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 wrote 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. As it turned out, the "resolves" 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.

Discovery changes the debate

In 1838, the reputation of the Mecklenburg Declaration suffered a setback when archivist Peter Force discovered, in newspapers published in 1775, references to resolutions adopted in Mecklenburg County on May 31, 1775, that were different from the alleged Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence of May 20. In 1847, the complete text of these Mecklenburg Resolves was found in a South Carolina newspaper published in June 1775. The same Resolves were subsequently discovered in a North Carolina newspaper, also published in June 1775. Unlike the Mecklenburg Declaration that had appeared in the Raleigh Register in 1819, the Mecklenburg Resolves—while radical—fell short of an actual declaration of independence, and did not contain language that was parallel to Jefferson's 1776 Declaration of Independence.

Reminiscent of the Sally Hemings debates that have persisted to the present, the discovery of the Mecklenburg Resolves led to a long running controversy, with many arguing that the Mecklenburg Declaration was a distortion of the authentic Mecklenburg Resolves. After more than a half-century of debate, in 1906 William Hoyt published a scholarly work that many historians have regarded as the conclusive refutation of the Mecklenburg Declaration.

The argument against the authenticity of the Mecklenburg Declaration, now widely accepted by historians, is briefly as follows: After his original papers were destroyed by fire in 1800, John McKnitt Alexander attempted to recreate the text of the Mecklenburg Resolves from memory. In doing so, he inadvertantly borrowed language from Jefferson's well-known Declaration of Independence. Like some of his contemporaries, Alexander mistakenly remembered the Mecklenburg Resolves as being an actual declaration of independence because the Resolves were radical enough to be interpreted by some as a virtual declaration of independence. When the elderly eyewitnesses were interviewed decades after the events of May 1775, they too misremembered the Resolves as an actual declaration of independence, especially because the only document they had before them was Alexander's recreated version, which had been presented in 1819 as a true copy of the original. Unfortunately, by the time the authentic text of the Mecklenburg Resolves had been rediscovered, all of the eyewitnesses were dead, and so no testimony about the Resolves could be taken.

After the discovery of the Mecklenburg Resolves, advocates of the Mecklenburg Declaration maintained that both documents were authentic. This argument was developed in the 20th century by two North Carolinians, Professor Archibald Henderson and journalist V. V. McKnitt, who believed that the evidence showed that Mecklenburg County had adopted two sets of resolutions, that the text of the Mecklenburg Declaration was not recreated from memory, and that the events as described in Dr. Alexander's 1819 article were substantially correct.

Current status of the debate

At present, professional historians tend to agree with Jefferson and Hoyt's assessment of the document. In 1997 historian Pauline Maier wrote:

When compared to other documents of the time, the "Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence" supposedly adopted on May 20, 1775, is simply incredible. It makes the reaction of North Carolinians to Lexington and Concord more extreme than that of the Massachusetts people who received the blow. The resolutions of May 31, 1775, of which there is contemporary evidence, were also radical, but remain believable.

Professor William S. Powell, in his standard history North Carolina: A History (New York: Norton, 1977) does not mention the Mecklenburg Declaration at all; Professor H.G. Jones, in his North Carolina Illustrated (Chapel Hill: University of N.C. Press, 1983), pointedly places ironic quotation marks around the name of the declaration. The Harvard Guide to American History (1954) lists the Mecklenburg Declaration under the heading of "spurious declarations." Allan Nevins says "Legends often become a point of faith. At one time the State of North Carolina made it compulsory for the public schools to teach that Mecklenburg County had adopted a Declaration of Independence on May 20, 1775—to teach what had been clearly demonstrated an untruth."

Despite much scholarly opinion against the authenticity of the Mecklenburg Declaration, belief in the Declaration remains important to some people, says historian Dan L. Morrill, who notes that the possibility that it is genuine cannot be entirely discounted. Morrill writes, "Let's make one thing clear. One cannot demonstrate conclusively that the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence is a fake. The dramatic events of May nineteenth and May twentieth could have happened. Ultimately, it is a matter of faith, not proof. You believe it or you don't believe it."

References

• Current, Richard M. "That Other Declaration: May 20, 1775-May 20, 1975", North Carolina Historical Review 54 (1977): 169–91.
• Fries, Adelaide. The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence as Mentioned in the Records of Wachovia (1907) online edition
• Graham, George W. The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, May 20, 1775, and Lives of Its Signers. New York: Neale, 1905. Accessed online via Google Book Search
• Graham, George W. Why North Carolinians Believe in the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence of May twentieth, 1775 (1895).
• Graham, William. "The Declaration of Independence by the people of Mecklenburg County" online edition
• Henderson, Archibald. Cradle of Liberty: Historical Essays Concerning the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence.... Charlotte, N.C.: Mecklenburg Historical Association, 1955.
• Hoyt, William Henry. The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence: A Study of Evidence Showing that the Alleged Early Declaration of Independence...is Spurious. New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1907. Accessed online via Google Book Search.
• Jones, Joseph Seawell. A Defence of the Revolutionary History of the State of North Carolina from the Aspersions of Mr. Jefferson. Boston and Raleigh, 1834. Accessed online via Google Book Search.
• King, Victor C. Lives and Times of the 27 Signers of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence of May 20, 1775 (1956).
• McKnitt, V. V. Chain of Error and the Mecklenburg Declarations of Independence. Palmer, Massachusetts and New York: Hampden Hills Press, 1960. Available online in a series of PDF files from the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County, although a few pages are missing.
• Maier, Pauline. American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence. New York: Knopf, 1997. ISBN 0679454926.
• Morrill, Dan L. Historic Charlotte: An Illustrated History of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County. San Antonio, Texas: Historical Pub. Network, 2001. ISBN 1893619206. Online edition, ch. 2.
• Peterson, Merrill D. The Jefferson Image in the American Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960.
• Phillips, Charles. "May, 1775". North Carolina University Magazine, May 1853.
• Salley, A. S., Jr. "The Mecklenburg Declaration: The Present Status of the Question", The American Historical Review, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Oct., 1907), pp. 16–43.
• Welling, James C. "The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence", The North American Review 118, Issue 243 (April 1874).

External links

• "Celebrating the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence", from the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County: documents, background, history of the May 20 celebrations, etc. Encourages readers to come to their own conclusion about the controversy
• May 20th Society, a non-profit organization promoting commemoration of the Mecklenburg Declaration
• Mecklenburg Historical Association

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