The work and worth and greatness of Murphy have never been duly appreciated even in his own State; and yet, when our history is written, if greatness is measured by the public benefit it confers, perhaps Macon, Murphy, and Vance will stand together as the three greatest men the State has yet produced.
In common-sense statecraft, in the choice and application of principles to existing conditions, and in the prophetic knowledge of the fruit they would bring forth after their kind, Macon was greatest. In scholarship and breadth of culture, combined with originality to conceive the most far-reaching policies of public welfare, Murphy was greatest. In the knowledge of men, in his boundless wealth of human sympathy, as the advocate and champion of the people's rights, Vance was greatest. But Graham had a far greater knowledge and grasp of the details of public business than any of them; and Badger, in his ability to rapidly acquire and assimilate law and learning, easily outstripped them all.
The sensibilities of Murphy were too refined for what is called success in practical politics. His love and enthusiasm for the public weal were so great that he forgot himself—but let us never forget him.
If Murphy had lived to write, as he intended, the history of North Carolina, he would have made all the world know and acknowledge that some of her people began the Revolution against British tyranny four years before the battle of Lexington. Perhaps he would have made it too plain for cavil that more than a year before Jefferson penned his immortal document, the spirit that resisted Tryon had formed a government at Charlotte independent of British rule, and that, in the strongest probability, the authors of that government had prepared the way for it by a declaration of independence.
Leavened by that spirit, the people of the whole State, through their convention at Halifax, on May 12, 1776, proposed, and on May 22 adopted, a resolution providing for "declaring independence" in concurrence with the "other colonies"—the first step taken in that direction by any of the colonies.
Perhaps his clear voice could have been heard above the conflicting jargon about the Regulators' War. The threadbare statement that the spirit of these people was so thoroughly crushed by Tryon's dress-parade campaign that they all took sides with the British in the Revolutionary war might have been thrashed a little thinner. Perhaps he would have found at King's Mountain some of the fifteen hundred families who fled west after the battle of Alamance.
Mrs. E. E. Moffitt of this city (a granddaughter of Judge Murphy's sister, Mrs. John Daniel) is my authority for the statement that Peter S. Ney—whom some believe to have been none other than the great Marshal Ney—was Murphy's amanuensis. It was a singular fate which drew these two peculiar men of genius together.
There is grim humor in his pathetic attempt to enkindle a love of history and education in this State by appealing to the love of gain. His other scheme, internal improvements, was equally chimerical; not because it lacked intrinsic merit, but because the times and people had changed. He had not calculated on the soporific effect of indirect taxes upon the unpreferred States. It was too early for any but a prophet to fully see that the States had dug the graves of their ultimate autonomy by adopting a Constitution which forbade them "to emit bills of credit"—a power of which they never stood in dire need until the General Government had monopolized all control of banking and currency.
No State, since the Union was formed, has, without Federal aid, direct or indirect, made any material progress in developing its resources!