Mecklenburg Resolves

The Mecklenburg Resolves, or Charlottetown (Charlotte Town) Resolves, and sometimes referred to as the "Mecklenburg Declaration", was a list of statements reputed to have been introduced in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina to the Mecklenburg Committee of Safety on or after March 20, 1775 and adopted by the committee on May 31, 1775. The document may have proclaimed that all laws originating from the British King or Parliament are null and void, and that the only legitimate government over the American colonies was the Continental Congress, then meeting in Philadelphia. Further, it is purported to have stated that royal authority in America was suspended and crown officials were to be detained, ostensibly becoming the "first" declaration of independence by a colonial entity. More likely it was simply a list of resolves as was somewhat common that year in the months following the British military action in Lexington and Concord. The actual document text, however, is somewhat in dispute, as there exists no known original copy of these resolves or of any declaration.

Captain James Jack is reputed to have relayed the resultant document to the North Carolina delegation at the Continental Congress where the delegates received it, but opted not to present it to Congress as a whole.^[1] These resolves were drafted only a month following the outbreak of war at Lexington and Concord, but over a year earlier than the United States Declaration of Independence.

The Resolves

The impetus of the Mecklenburg Resolves required Great Britain to "resign its unjust and arbitrary pretensions with respect to America", in which case the county's self-governing authority manifest in those resolves would become moot. Although a radical display of defiance, the Mecklenburg Resolves were not by any means a declaration that the people of Mecklenburg County were "free and independent."

Some proof of the Mecklenburg Resolves existence was acquired in 1847, with the uncovering of an archival newspaper copy of the text which had been published in the South Carolina Gazette of June 13, 1775. The article gave the date of adoption of the Resolves as May 31, 1775. No similar publication of a Declaration, purported to have been adopted eleven days earlier and by then considered a separate document, has been uncovered.

The Resolves vs. The Declaration

According to North Carolinian folklore, citizens of Mecklenburg County assembled in Charlotte on May 20, 1775, and wrote a declaration of independence from Britain. This is known as the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence and some claim it to be the first 'declaration of independence" in America. This declaration would have antedated the less freedom-seeking resolves by eleven days, a contradiction in logic.

Conclusive evidence of that document, however, has not been forthcoming. The original version of the "Mecklenburg Declaration", plus the five official copies, was said to have all burned together in a fire in 1800. Attempts at that time to re-create the text of the document just added to the confusion and controversy, especially because some of this re-created text borrowed actual passages from the United States Declaration of Independence. What has since been published is a reconstruction made decades later from the memories of supposed surviving signers. Many believe the story of a declaration of freedom was concocted by some old-timers many years after the event, who were simply embellishing or mis-remembering the actual events surrounding the adoption of the Mecklenburg Resolves.

Nonetheless, the North Carolina government has endorsed the story, and the date of the Mecklenburg Declaration is memorialized on the state seal and the North Carolina Flag.

Notes

1. ^ Graham, George Washington (1905). The Mecklenburg Declaration Of Independence, May 20, 1775, And Lives Of Its Signers. The Neale Publishing Company. http://books.google.com/books?id=QSdp4scHnZEC. Retrieved 3 February 2011. 

External links

• The Charlottetown Resolves at Yale
• Rootsweb text version
• Learn NC
• Harts Log
• Live Journal - NC

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