The Birmingham age-herald., 1916-05-18
The Mecklenburg Declaration

Charlotte. N. C., the seat ot Mech- ,enburg county, is to have as us ,r,,os+ next Saturday the President or the United States, the occaslon oeii's the annual celebration of the NIGGA ,enburg Declaration, said to have been .donted at a midnight meeting ot rep ,.osentatives of the militia, in May 1775. declaring the people ot the eouh- x, frea and independent of the British crown.
 Some of the people of Charlotte have always cherished the idea that American freedom not only got It's start among the Mecklenburgers, but that the very form of expression which quickened the patriotic splrit and fired the heart of the colonies orig mated in Mecklenburg county and ante-date Thomas Jefferson's inde- nendence document by more than a year.
 But this important episode Ill our colcnfsl history failed to excite gen. oral or national interest until the year 1875. when an elaborate centennial eel ebration was held. Since that time there has been much discussion over the question whether Jefferson was entitled to the honor universally ac- corded him of being the author of the nriceless Declaration of Independence instrument, or whether that glory should not have been given to one ot the sturdy patriots and philosophers of Mecklenburg county.
 It has been something like the con- troversv over the authorship of the Shakespeare plays and sonnets. There is about as much reason to think that MT. Jefferson, scholar, statesman and facile writer, would have been guilty of plagiarism-and that is what the Mecklenburg contention in its last analysis would point to-as to inn agine that Bacon was Shakespeare.
 Whatever criticism might have been made of Jefferson's political theories, he was known for his straightforward, honest ways and his high-mindedness. He could not stoop to anything small. And yet since many of the phrases in the Declaration of Independence are word for word those found Tn the Mecklenburg document, an explana- lion must be found. Did committee of revolutionists go from North Caro- lima to Virginia, look up MT. Jeffer- son and get him to prepare paper suitable for the restive militia to adopt-help them out, so to speak? There is nothing to show that such might have been the case.
 But a plausible explanation might be this: It seems that the minutes of the midnight meeting of the Meek lenburg militia were burned in 1900. Some of those men who had had a voice in the adoption of the declara- tion reproduced from memory what they claimed was the original text. Assuming that their memories" were fairly good, it is hardly probable that the declaration could have been re- called word for word.
 By the year 1860 the declaration which had been ratified by the Conti- mental Congress in session at Phila- delphia was known by heart in all en- frightened circles. It is easy, then, to suppose that the Mecklenburg men in filling out from memory the text of the burned document worked in" some of MT. Jefferson's rounded sen- tences, almost unconsciously.
 Some critics have been so cynical as to raise the question whether or not any declaration of 1775 ever existed Manuscripts purporting to contain the reproduced -from-memory'' version are said by cynics to have been spuri- ous. Historiographers of high repute, however, are positive that some sort of an independence resolution was