page_title: Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence
section_title: Argument for
hierarchical_section_title: Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence / Discovery alters the debate / Argument for
caption_attribution_description: 1898 picture of one of the old Mecklenburg County Court Houses in Charlotte, North Carolina. This building was the Court House from 1897 to 1928. In front is a monument honoring the signers of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. The building no longer exists, but the monument now stands behind another old court building.
context_page_description: The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence is a text published in 1819 with the claim that it was the first declaration of independence made in the Thirteen Colonies during the American Revolution. It was supposedly signed on May 20, 1775, in Charlotte, North Carolina, by a committee of citizens of Mecklenburg County, who declared independence from Great Britain after hearing of the battle of Lexington. If the story is true, the Mecklenburg Declaration preceded the United States Declaration of Independence by more than a year. The authenticity of the Mecklenburg Declaration has been disputed since it was published, forty-four years after it was reputedly written. There is no verifiable evidence to confirm the original document's existence and no reference to it has been found in extant newspapers from 1775.
  Professional historians have maintained that the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence is an inaccurate rendering of an authentic document known as the Mecklenburg Resolves, an argument first made by Peter Force. The Resolves, a set of radical resolutions passed on May 31, 1775, fell short of an actual declaration of independence.
context_section_description: Advocates of the Mecklenburg Declaration have argued that both the Declaration and the Resolves are authentic. This argument was developed in the 20th century by Professor Archibald Henderson of the University of North Carolina, who, beginning in 1916, wrote numerous articles on the subject. Henderson believed that the evidence showed that Mecklenburg County had adopted two sets of resolutions, that the text of the Mecklenburg Declaration was not recreated from memory, and that the events as described in Alexander's 1819 article were substantially correct. His work was supplemented in 1960 by journalist V. V. McNitt's book Chain of Error and the Mecklenburg Declarations of Independence.
  One of the strongest pieces of nearly contemporaneous evidence in support of the Mecklenburg Declaration is a diary entry discovered in 1904. The entry is unsigned and undated, but internal evidence suggests that it was written in 1783 in Salem, North Carolina, by a merchant named Traugott Bagge. The English translation of the German entry reads:
  I cannot leave unmentioned at the end of the 1775th year that already in the summer of this year, that is in May, June, or July, the County of Mecklenburg in North Carolina declared itself free and independent of England, and made such arrangements for the administration of the laws among themselves, as later the Continental Congress made for all. This Congress, however, considered these proceedings premature.
  Skeptics of the Mecklenburg Declaration argued that the diary entry merely suggests that Bagge, writing eight years after the event, misinterpreted the Mecklenburg Resolves as having been an actual declaration of independence. Archibald Henderson, however, argued that the entry attested to both the Declaration ("declared itself free and independent") and the Resolves ("arrangements for the administration of the laws").
caption: In 1898, this monument was erected in front of the Mecklenburg County Court House to honor the signers of the Mecklenburg Declaration. The building no longer exists, but the monument now stands behind another old court building.
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