Into the hornet's nest: The ‘Meck Dec’ at 250
The May 20 Society, an organization dedicated to raising awareness of the Mecklenburg Declaration, is ready for the 250th anniversary commemoration. May 20 Society photo
Every May 20, beneath the proverbial shadows of Charlotte’s modern glass and steel skyline, supporters gather to commemorate what they believe was the first declaration of independence in the American colonies, made more than a year before the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia.
Whether the Mecklenburg Declaration existed at all is still a topic of dispute, but one thing remains certain — more than 250 years later, the idea it represents still lives.
In 1775, Charlotte was little more than a village carved out of the rugged, restless backcountry, yet it was home to ambitious, educated men who had big plans for their new homeland.
“When he visited all of the original colonies during his presidency, George Washington came through Charlotte [in 1791] and he wrote in his diary that it was ‘a trifling place,’” said Jason Luker, chief operating officer of the Charlotte Museum of History. “Charlotte was pretty much insignificant. It was a small little village at the crossroads of old Native American paths.”
Despite the president’s contempt toward the locals, they’d long been determined to shape their own future.
“The people here were, strangely enough, highly educated,” Luker said. “Some are Princeton graduates or coming from Pennsylvania, moving down to this area to buy up cheap land and to set themselves up for their families to grow and to prosper.”
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Primarily Scottish, many of the colonists were adherents to the Covenanted Reformed Presbyterian Church or related denominations, all of which emphasized that the temporal authority of kings and rulers was secondary to God’s, and to one’s own conscience. Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.
These “Covenanters” were soon presented with plenty of opportunities to test those beliefs.
“There had been a lot of land-grabbing on the part of crown officials, extra taxes and foreclosures and things like that,” said Sarah Sue Hardinger, past president of the Mecklenburg Historical Association. “There’s a thing called the Vestry Act, which meant that you had to be married by an Anglican minister, and your child had to be baptized by one, but there was no Anglican minister anywhere in Western North Carolina. That meant that everybody’s marriage was illegal and every child was a bastard. Covenanters do not like this — that your children are born in sin and that they cannot be baptized or go to heaven. They’re angry at a really visceral level. It’s not just [about] taxation without representation or tea in the harbor. You’ve stolen my land, and you’ve made my child a bastard.”
On May 19, 1775, prominent citizens convened a meeting in Mecklenburg County, which according to Hardinger’s new book, “ One day revolution: the patriots who first declared independence,” was so small that there were only nine graves in the whole county at the time.
As fate would have it, during the meeting, a messenger arrived with startling news — the battle of Lexington had been fought in the Massachusetts Bay Colony exactly one month earlier. Colonists skirmished with a large British force there, and in Concord, and won. It was only a minor strategic victory, but it galvanized anti-royalist sentiment and likely influenced the actions of the delegates at the Mecklenburg meeting.
“These people are extremely angry,” Hardinger said. “They have a belief that says, ‘I can ignore an authority who is not doing what my conscience says is right,’ and so they’re right for doing this. The spark is the express rider that comes down on May 19.”
What, exactly, happened in Charlotte late that night remains shrouded in mystery. The original copy of what would later be called the “Meck Dec” was purportedly lost in a fire in 1800 at the home of Joseph McNitt Alexander.
Much of what is known comes from Alexander, who in 1819 penned an article in the Raleigh Register and North Carolina Gazette recounting the events of May 19, 1775, passed down to him by his father John, a clerk at the meeting.
Around 2 a.m. on the morning of May 20, the 28 delegates, mostly leaders of Mecklenburg’s militia companies, ratified five resolutions:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Mecklenburg Declaration pre-dates the U.S. Declaration of Independence by 14 months. File photo
In addition to rebuking the political authority Great Britain held over Mecklenburg, the Meck Dec reestablished local militias and created a local government. It also served as an expression of unity with the more powerful northern colonies most people think of when they consider the school of thought that led to the American Revolution.
On May 31, 1775, just 11 days after the Meck Dec was ratified, another document called the Mecklenburg Resolves was issued in Charlotte.
Its full text only exists today because the South Carolina Gazette published it on June 13, 1775. The original document, like the original Meck Dec, was purportedly lost in a fire in 1800.
“Within the context of the British Empire, it is a treasonous act,” said Rob Ferguson, an associate professor of history at Western Carolina University who specializes in North Carolina history. “It is a bold act. It is a revolutionary act.”
Among the 20 provisions listed in the Resolves are those stating that colonies in British America were now “invested with all legislative and executive powers within their respective provinces, and that no other legislative or executive power does or can exist at this time in any of these colonies.”
To fill the power vacuum, the Resolves also outline a military and judicial system, provide for the arrest of crown officials and authorize two committeemen to purchase 300 pounds of gunpowder, 600 pounds of lead for bullets and 1,000 flints for rifles.
“The independence movement was up and down the eastern seaboard, and the Mecklenburg Resolves were as radical as anything being written in Pennsylvania or Virginia or Massachusetts,” said Ferguson. “North Carolina was on the forefront of this mass independence movement.”
The brutal British Col. Banastre Tarleton noted in his memoirs that Mecklenburg County and neighboring Rowan County were “more hostile to England than any other in America,” while British Gen. Lord Charles Cornwallis described Charlotte as a “damned hornet’s nest of rebellion.”
The comment made Cornwallis probably the only British general in history to be responsible for the name of a National Basketball Association franchise.
Although more expansive than the Meck Dec, the Resolves appear distinctly different in intent. The Meck Dec focuses mostly on the abuses by the crown and the philosophical underpinnings of self-government, while the Resolves are more of an organizational document creating various bureaucracies independent of the crown.
Nearly a year after the creation of the Meck Dec and the Resolves, North Carolina’s provincial Congress adopted the Halifax Resolves on April 12, 1776, which authorized the state’s delegates to vote in favor of complete independence from Great Britain in the Continental Congress, making North Carolina the first state to do so.
On the current state flag, two dates are inscribed — the first, the date of the Meck Dec, the second, the date of the Halifax Resolves. The Great Seal of the State of North Carolina bears the same inscriptions.
“If the Meck Dec existed — certainly the Mecklenburg Resolves existed, and the Halifax Resolves existed — it makes North Carolina just as rebellious, just as revolutionary, as any other colony, and I think that that’s been kind of forgotten by the rest of the country,” Ferguson said.
At the heart of the debate over the Meck Dec lies a fundamental question: did a group of backwoodsmen living in a rural, “trifling” North Carolina town named after King George III’s wife in a county named after her place of birth really declare independence from Great Britain and its king more than a year before the rest of the colonies?
One way or the other, the answer is yes.
Some say the Meck Dec is a myth, a tale that emerged from local pride and poor recordkeeping. Others see it as a suppressed piece of revolutionary fervor, conveniently lost to history. The divide often falls along lines of methodology and the weight of oral history, secondhand accounts and a mountain of circumstantial evidence versus the certainty of primary documents.
Many people don’t know what, exactly, the two dates on North Carolina’s flag represent. File photo
“There’s kind of three camps,” Luker said. “You have the camp who believe it is 100% real and will fight for that to their grave. And then you have another group, which is the complete deniers. And then you have another group, and this is where I kind of fall into, calling myself a Resolve-ist.”
The position of some Resolve-ists is to stress the importance of the verifiable Resolves, or that the Mecklenburg Declaration arose from a mis-remembering of the Mecklenburg Resolves, or that they’re actually the same document. There’s even speculation that the 11-day gap between the Meck Dec and the Resolves is the result of a discrepancy between the old Julian calendar and the new Gregorian calendar — a difference of exactly 11 days. Colonists in America began adopting the new calendar in the 1750s.
Most deniers think that Joseph McKnitt Alexander’s 1819 article in the Raleigh Register and North Carolina Gazette is either a complete li, or an attempt to embellish the state’s role as a hotbed of revolutionary thought or a retcon to capitalize on the popularity of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.
The latter theory holds some intriguing possibilities.
In the Meck Dec, several phrases stand out, and for good reason — they’re included in Jefferson’s more famous Declaration but predate it by more than 14 months.
Both use the phrase “dissolve the political bands which have connected” and the phrase “are, and of right ought to be.” The Meck Dec says, “… we solemnly pledge to each other, our mutual cooperation, our lives, our fortunes, and our most sacred honor,” while Jefferson’s Declaration says “… we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
Did Jefferson plagiarize the Meck Dec? Did Alexander, 43 years later, insert Jeffersonian phrasing into his recitation of the Meck Dec to suggest North Carolina as the basis for the Declaration of Independence? Was it all maybe just a complete coincidence?
John Adams wanted to know, too. America’s second president, Adams had previously been close friends with Jefferson, but ideology and a growing sense of resentment by Adams toward Jefferson’s fame as the author of the Declaration of Independence — a document laboriously debated by the 60 delegates to the Second Continental Congress — drove them apart. Adams took note of Alexander’s 1819 newspaper article and was pleased that on its face, it appeared to suggest Jefferson’s Declaration wasn’t completely original, and that Jefferson wasn’t completely honest.
By letter, Adams asked Jefferson about the Meck Dec. Jefferson replied that he’d never heard of it and found that odd, given the voluminous documentation of the American Revolution that even then had already existed — not to mention his lived experience as a key player in the literati of the revolutionary movement. He said that although he couldn’t prove the Meck Dec was a fabrication, he would hold that belief until he saw proof it was real, which also convinced Adams that the existence of the Meck Dec was sketchy at best.
But that’s not exactly something you should say out loud in modern-day North Carolina, especially in Charlotte this week where 250th anniversary celebrations of the Meck Dec are currently taking place.
Hardinger called claims of the Meck Dec’s fabrication “specious.” Charlotte attorney Scott Syfert offered much more pointed support for the authenticity of the Meck Dec.
“The reason there is a controversy is that the original documents were burned in a fire in April of 1800 so there’s no one piece of paper that anyone could point to and say, ‘That’s the piece of paper,’” said Syfert, who co-founded the May 20 Society with a group of young professionals and friends 25 years ago. “You also have a controversy because people from South Carolina and Virginia and Massachusetts didn’t like the story, and so they took the position that ‘We don’t really care about the evidence, we’re against this because this just doesn’t interest us and because it doesn’t involve us.’”
The May 20 Society immediately became a hit, hosting a bar event with more than 300 people in attendance just two months after the group had formed. Since then, the group has been involved with fundraising for historical monuments related to the Meck Dec — including the $500,000 statue of Capt. James Jack on the campus of Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte. Jack is said to have delivered a copy of the Meck Dec to Philadelphia, where Jefferson may have had a chance to read it.
Initially, there was a lot of negativity directed toward the May 20 Society.
“I’ve grown up in Charlotte and gone through public schools and all that stuff, and I had never heard of this, or if I had, I completely forgot it. It certainly wasn’t a thing at all,” Syfert said. “It was sort of not something talked about in polite society around here 30 years ago. It was like, ‘Oh, that’s a silly hoax story. It’s a kindergarten fairytale.’”
Hardinger thinks that the Meck Dec wasn’t taught in schools for a time, leading younger generations to overlook its possible existence. The May 20 Society worked to increase awareness among schoolchildren by bringing in eminent speakers.
“We decided, let’s hire some national historians and bring them to Charlotte and donate them to the school system to speak to a bunch of school kids, because that will shed light on the project and the story as well,” Syfert said. “We brought David McCullough here, Ken Burns, Lord Andrew Roberts, Baron Roberts of Belgravia twice, the author Jeff Shaara, Cokie Roberts, Isabel Wilkerson.”
Students numbering in the thousands were bussed in to the presentations.
In 2014, Syfert wrote his own book, “The first American declaration of independence? The disputed history of the Mecklenburg Declaration of May 20, 1775” in which he lays out the case for the Meck Dec.
“What interested me a lot when I started looking into it was just how much information there really is on this,” he said. “Just look at my book, 280-something pages, fully footnoted, all the information.”
As a corporate attorney and a graduate of the London School of Economics, Syfert is a man used to evaluating documents, evidence and facts. He believes there’s plenty of proof for the existence of the Meck Dec. A dozen eyewitnesses, very good witnesses he says — Presbyterian ministers and Revolutionary War veterans — testified under oath to its provenance. Several veterans who later applied for pensions referenced the Meck Dec in their applications. North Carolina’s brick in the Washington Monument reads, “Declaration of independence Mecklenburg May 1775” but mentions neither the Meck Dec nor the Mecklenburg Resolves.
Additionally, Syfert says newspaper accounts from the early 1800s mention veterans reunion events held on May 20, with veterans wearing “May 20” badges to commemorate the historic occasion. Toasts mentioned North Carolina as the state that declared independence before anyone else.
Whether true or not, the significance of the date itself has become symbolic of a people fighting for what it believes to be its rights, whether right or wrong. When North Carolina seceded from the Union, it did so by repealing the 1789 ordinance ratifying the U.S. Constitution on May 20, 1861. When students from Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte wanted to protest segregation, they did so by marching to a courthouse on May 20, 1963.
“David McCullough believes it happened. Lord Andrew Roberts believes it happened,” Syfert said. “I can give you five marquee-named historians, and they’re quoted in the book. We’ve got them on the record, so to speak. I always say, ‘Well, we’ve got our five historians. Who do you have?’”
The debate over the Meck Dec may never be fully solved to the liking of those who would require an authenticated original copy, but whether it was created and signed in Mecklenburg County on May 20, 1775, or fabricated for a newspaper in 1819, it still goes a long way toward explaining North Carolina’s “first in freedom” slogan.
“It’s the foundation story of the country, in miniature,” Syfert said. “It’s that we are a free and independent people.”
