inhabitants of the county to form a military and civil organization independent of the crown of Great Britain which should operate until the Provincial Congress should otherwise provide or the British parliament should “resign its unjust and arbitrary pretensions with respect to America.” The “Mecklenburg Declaration,” which it is alleged was passed on the 20th of the same month by the same committee, “dissolves the political bonds” which have connected the county with the mother country, “absolves” the citizens of that county “from all allegiance to the British Crown,” declares them “a free and independent people,” and abounds in other phrases which closely resemble phrases in the great Declaration of the 4th of July 1776.
The Resolutions were published in at least two newspapers only a few days after they were passed. As for the “Declaration,” the original records of the transactions of Mecklenburg county were destroyed by fire in 1800, but it is claimed that a copy of the “Declaration” was made from memory in the same year, and when, in 1819, a controversy had arisen as to where the movement for independence originated, this copy was published, first in the Raleigh Register and North Carolina Gazette and then in many other newspapers. Several aged men also testified that they had heard a declaration of independence read at Charlotte, the county-seat, in May 1775; and one of them stated that he had carried it to the Continental Congress. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, however, declared that they had never heard of it before, and both believed it spurious. But Jefferson was charged with plagiarism by those who believed in the authenticity of the “Declaration,” and in 1833 there was discovered a proclamation of Governor Martin, dated the 8th of August 1775, in which he mentioned a publication in the Cape Fear Mercury of a series of resolves by a committee of Mecklenburg county which declared “the entire dissolution of the laws, government and constitution of the country.” Another stage of the controversy was reached in 1838–1847 when the Mecklenburg Resolutions of the 31st of May 1775 were discovered either in part or in full in newspaper files. There seems practically no basis for the contention that a declaration of independence was adopted on the 20th other than the tradition that independence was declared by the Mecklenburg Committee on that date, and the occasional references in print, even before 1819, to a declaration of independence in the county in 1775. Those who believe the “Declaration” to be spurious argue that survivors remembered only one such document, that the Resolutions might easily be thought of as a declaration of independence, that Governor Martin in all probability had knowledge only of these and not of the alleged “Declaration,” and that the dates of publication in the Raleigh and Charleston newspapers, and the politics of those papers, show that the Resolutions are authentic. In July 1905 there appeared in Collier’s Weekly (New York) what purported to be a facsimile reproduction of a copy of the Cape Fear Mercury which was referred to by Governor Martin and which contained the “Declaration”; but this was proved a forgery.[1]
The first and the second provincial congress did little except choose delegates to the Continental Congress and the management of affairs passed in large measure from the royal government to the several county committees. The third provincial congress, which met on the 21st of August 1775, still required its members to sign an oath of allegiance to King George III. but formed a provisional government consisting of a provincial council and six District Committees of Safety. The first sanction of independence by any body representing the whole province was given by the fourth Provincial Congress on the 12th of April 1776, and the same body immediately proceeded to the consideration of a new and permanent form of government. Their labours ended, however, in another provincial government by a Council of Safety, and the drafting of North Carolina’s first state constitution was left to a constitutional convention which assembled at Halifax on the 12th of November.
North Carolinians fought under Washington at Brandywine and Monmouth and played a still more important part in the Southern campaigns of 1778–1781. The state was twice invaded, in 1776 and in 1780–1781, and two important battles were fought upon her soil, Moore’s Creek on the 27th of February 1776 and Guilford Court House on the 15th of March 1781.
The territory now comprising the state of Tennessee belonged to Carolina under the charters of 1663 and 1665, and fell to North Carolina when the original province was divided. To this territory settlers, many of them from North Carolina, had gone immediately before and during the War of Independence, and had organized a practically independent government. In 1776 this was formally annexed to North Carolina, but in 1784 the state ceded this district to the national government on condition that it should be accepted within two years. The inhabitants of the district, however, objected to the cession, especially to the terms, which, they contended, threatened them with two years of anarchy; declared their independence of North Carolina and organized for themselves the state of Franklin. But the new state was weakened by factions, and after a brief and precarious existence it was forced into submission to North Carolina by which in 1790 the territory was again ceded to the national government with the proviso that no regulation made or to be made by Congress should tend to the emancipation of slaves (see Tennessee).
North Carolina sent delegates to the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention of 1787, but the state convention, at Hillsboro, called to pass upon the constitution for North Carolina, did not meet until the 21st of July 1788, when ten states had already ratified. On the first day of this convention the opponents to the constitution, among whom were most of the delegates from the western counties, were ready to reject it without debate, but yielded to a proposal for discussing it clause by clause. In this discussion, which was continued for nine days, the document was most strongly opposed because it contained no bill of rights and on the ground that it would provide for such a strong central government that the state governments would ultimately be sacrificed. At the conclusion of the debate the convention by a vote of 184 to 84 declared itself unwilling to ratify the constitution until a bill of rights had been added and it had been amended in several other particulars so as to guarantee certain powers to the states. By reason of this rejection the relations of North Carolina with the other states were severed upon the dissolution of the Confederation, and it took no part in the first election or in the organization of the new government. However, there was a speedy reaction against the opposition which had in no small measure been inspired by fear of a requirement that debts be paid in gold and silver. A second convention met at Fayetteville in November 1789 and the constitution was speedily ratified (on the 13th) by a vote of 195 to 77.
The period from 1790 to 1835 was marked by a prolonged contest between the eastern and the western counties. When the state constitution of 1776 was adopted the counties were so nearly equal in population that they were given equal representation in the General Assembly, but the equality in population disappeared in the general westward movement, and in 1790 the West began to urge a new division of the state into representative districts according to population and taxation. This was stubbornly resisted, and the West assumed a threatening attitude as the East opposed its projects for internal improvements for which the West had the greater need. In 1823 the West called an extra-legal convention to meet at Raleigh, and delegates from 24 of the 28 western counties responded, but those from the far West, in which there were practically no slaves, wished free white population to be made the basis of representation, while those from the Middle West demanded the adoption of the basis for the national House of Representatives and the convention made only a divided appeal to the people. Ten years later, however, at the election of assemblymen, 33 of the western counties polled an extra-legal vote on the question of calling a constitutional convention, and 30,000 votes were cast for it to only 1000 against it. The effect of this was that in January 1835 the legislature passed a bill for submitting the question legally to all the voters of the state, although this bill itself limited the proposed convention’s power relating to representation by providing that it should so amend the constitution that senators be chosen by districts according to public taxes, and that commoners be apportioned by districts according to Federal representation, i.e. five slaves to be counted equal to three whites. When the popular vote was taken, in the following April, every eastern county gave a majority against the convention, but the West, even with the limitation which was decidedly
- ↑ The 20th of May has been made a holiday in North Carolina, and the date appears on the state flag and the state seal; and a statue has been erected at Charlotte in memory of the signers of the “Declaration.”
