The claim of Chalmers that the passion for independence had latently existed from the very foundation of the New England colonies[694] had been early denied by Dummer in his Defence of the N. E. Charters. John Adams[695] had been outspoken in his advocacy of independence for more than a year before R. H. Lee introduced his resolution into Congress. He had avowed it in letters, which the British intercepted in July, 1775, and printed in a Boston newspaper. If Josiah Quincy, Jr. (Memoirs, 250, 341), can be believed, he found Franklin in London in 1774 holding ideas "extended on the broad scale of total emancipation" (Sparks's Franklin, i. 379). The resolves of Mecklenburg County in North Carolina, in May, 1775, were strongly indicative. John Jay traced the beginning of an outspoken desire to the rejection by the king of the petition of the Congress of 1775 (N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., July, 1776). In the autumn of that year it is certain that the passion for independence animated the army round Boston (Frothingham's Siege of Boston, 263), and in December James Bowdoin was confident that the dispute must end in independence (Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xii. 228). There was very far from any general adhesion to the belief in its inevitableness at all times during 1775. Washington was not conscious of the wish (Sparks, i. 131, ii. 401; Smyth, ii. 457). Gov. Franklin was expressing to Dartmouth the prevalence of a detestation of such views (Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xiv 342). The English historians have dwelt on this (Mahon, vi. 92, 94; Lecky, iii. 414, 447, iv. 41).[696]
AUTOGRAPHS OF THE MECKLENBURG COMMITTEE, MAY 31, 1775.
From the plate in W. D. Cooke's Rev. Hist. of No. Carolina, p. 64. Cf. Lossing's Field-Book, ii. 619, for another fac-simile and accounts of the signers; also see C. L. Hunter, Sketches of Western North Carolina (Raleigh, 1877, p. 39). It has been strenuously claimed and denied that, at a meeting of the people of Mecklenburg County, in North Carolina, on May 20, 1775, resolutions were passed declaring their independence of Great Britain. The facts in the case appear to be these:—On the 31st of May, 1775, the people of this county did pass resolutions quite abreast of the public sentiment of that time, but not venturing on the field of independency further than to say that these resolutions were to remain in force till Great Britain resigned its pretensions. These resolutions were well written, attracted notice, and were copied into the leading newspapers of the colonies, North and South, and can be found in various later works (Lossing's Field-Book, ii. 619, etc.). A copy of the S. Carolina Gazette containing them was sent by Governor Wright, of Georgia, to Lord Dartmouth, and was found by Bancroft in the State Paper Office, while in the Sparks MSS. (no. lvi.) is the record of a copy sent to the home government by Governor Martin of North Carolina, with a letter dated June 30, 1775. Of these resolutions there is no doubt (Frothingham's Rise of the Republic, p. 422). In 1793, or earlier, some of the actors in the proceeding, apparently ignorant that the record of these resolutions had been preserved in the newspapers, endeavored to supply them from memory, unconsciously intermingling some of the phraseology of the Declaration of July 4th in Congress, which gave them the tone of a pronounced independency. Probably through another dimness of memory they affixed the date of May 20, 1775, to them. These were first printed in the Raleigh Register, April 30, 1819. They are found to resemble in some respects the now known resolves of May 31st, as well as the national Declaration in a few phrases. In 1829 Martin printed them, much altered, in his North Carolina (ii. 272), but it is not known where this copy came from. In 1831 the State printed the text of the 1819 copy, and fortified it with recollections and certificates of persons affirming that they were present when the resolutions were passed on the 20th: The Declaration of Independence by the Citizens of Mecklenburg County, N. C., on the twentieth day of May, 1775, with documents, and proceedings of the Cumberland Association (Raleigh, 1831). This report of the State Committee is printed also in 4 Force, ii. 855. The resolves are reprinted in Niles's Reg. (1876, p. 313); in Caldwell's Greene; in Lossing (ii. 622), and in other places. Frothingham says he has failed to find any contemporary reference in manuscript or print to these May 20th resolutions. Jefferson (Memoir and Corresp., iv. 322; Randall's Jefferson, 1858, vol. iii. App. 2) denied their authenticity, and J. S. Jones supported their genuineness in his Defence of the Revolutionary History of North Carolina (Boston, 1834). In 1847 Rev. Thomas Smith, in his True Origin and Source of the Mecklenburgh and National Declaration of Independence, agreed to the priority of the May 20th resolutions, but thought that both those and the national Declaration were drawn in part from the ordinary covenants of the Scottish Presbyterians,—hence agreeing naturally in some of their phraseology.
The principal attempts to sustain the authenticity of the resolutions of May 20th are F. L. Hawks's lecture in W. D. Cooke's Revolutionary Hist. of North Carolina, and W. A. Grahame's Hist. Address on the Mecklenburg Centennial at Charlotte, N. C. (N. Y. 1875). The adverse view, held generally by students, is best expressed in J. C. Welling's paper in the No. Amer. Rev., April, 1874, and in H. B. Grigsby's Discourse on the Virginia Convention of 1776 (p. 21). John Adams was surprised on their production in 1819 (Works, x. 380-83). Cf. further in Moore's North Carolina, i. 187; No. Carolina Univ. Mag., May, 1853; Bancroft's United States, orig. ed., vii. 370, and final revision, iv. 196, and also in Hist. Mag., xii. 378; Gay's Pop. Hist. U. S., iii. 474; Lossing's Field-Book, ii. 619; Johnson's Traditions and Reminiscences of the Amer. Rev. in the South (Charleston, 1851, p. 76); Amer. Hist. Rec., iii. 200; Mag. of Amer. Hist., July, 1882, p. 507; Southern Lit. Messenger, v. 417, 748.
The antedating of the Congressional Declaration of July 4, 1776, by local bodies, stirred beyond a wise prudence, might well have happened in days when the air was full of such feelings; but they were of little effect, except the Suffolk Resolves of Sept. 6, 1774, which were adopted by the Congress of 1774. Perhaps the earliest of these ebullitions were some votes passed by the town of Mendon, in Massachusetts, in 1773 (Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., April, 1870). A fac-simile of the record is given in Gay's Pop. Hist. U. S., iii. 472.