The Mecklenburg Declaration: Real Document or False Memory?

The date May twentieth, seventeen seventy-five appears on the North Carolina state flag and state seal. It commemorates the day that citizens of Mecklenburg County, meeting in Charlotte, supposedly declared independence from Britain, a full fourteen months before the Continental Congress in Philadelphia did the same thing. If true, Charlotte residents declared independence from the British Crown before any other Americans. They call it the Meck Dec.

Here is the problem. The original documents burned in a house fire at the home of John McKnitt Alexander in eighteen hundred. All the evidence for the Mecklenburg Declaration rests on the recollections of men who were present in seventeen seventy-five and who gave their testimony decades later, in old age, when the event had had time to grow.

Professional historians have largely concluded that what actually happened is this: on May thirty-first, seventeen seventy-five, Mecklenburg citizens passed a real document called the Mecklenburg Resolves, a strongly worded statement of grievances against British rule that stopped short of declaring independence outright. When survivors gave their testimony years later, their memories had fused the actual Resolves with something more dramatic. A true event became a better story.

The May twentieth date persists on the seal. The state flag still carries it. Charlotte treats the Meck Dec as settled history, and its boosters are not wrong that the Mecklenburg Resolves themselves are among the most radical pre-Declaration documents in the colonies. Whether the full declaration existed is a question that burned with Alexander's house. The historians who argue for its authenticity are not crackpots. Neither are the skeptics.

Charlotte put a contested memory on its flag, which is perhaps fitting for a city that has always been more interested in its own story than in whether historians agree.