Politics

N.C. history: Today's the semiquincentennial of the 'Meck Dec'

By JOHN HOOD, Published: May 20, 2025

Our state’s official seal presents North Carolina as a series of dualities.

In the background of the circular emblem are green-topped mountains to the west and crystal-blue water to the east. In the foreground, two female figures in classical garb symbolize Liberty (clutching a constitution in one hand and the traditional “liberty cap” in the other) and Plenty (holding stalks of grain in one hand and an overflowing cornucopia in the other).

Printed below and above the scene are two dates. One is April 12, 1776. That’s when North Carolina’s Provincial Congress, meeting in the town of Halifax, voted to instruct its delegates in Philadelphia to support America’s formal independence from Great Britain. The other date — May 20, 1775 — is the subject of this week’s column.

It was 250 years ago this week that some two-dozen leaders of Mecklenburg County, then a lightly populated jurisdiction on North Carolina’s frontier, met to discuss longstanding grievances against the Parliament in London and King George III’s royal governors in New Bern.

Some of those grievances were widely shared across British America, including Parliament’s usurpation of fiscal powers traditionally exercised by colonial legislatures. But the settlers of Mecklenburg, mostly Scottish Presbyterians and German Protestants, had their own particular resentments.

One was deeply personal. According to a law they despised, only ministers of the Church of England could legally perform marriages. To the extent other ministers performed such ceremonies, they could be fined and any children produced by the resulting unions declared illegitimate (a status with both legal and social consequences).

Another grievance was communal. For many years, Mecklenburg leaders sought a charter for a school. Having already named their county and its seat for the king’s wife, Charlotte of Mecklenburg, they proposed to call it Queen’s College. A bill to this effect twice passed North Carolina’s legislature only to be vetoed by King George, whose royal governors warned him that Presbyterians, not Anglicans, would dominate the faculty.

In 1775, the leaders of the Mecklenburg militia were Colonel Thomas Polk and Lieutenant Colonel Adam Alexander. They requested that each of the county’s nine militia companies send two delegates to the new Committee of Safety convening on May 19. Along with a few additional leaders, they comprised the group that made history the following day.

Precisely what they did remains a matter of dispute. Years later, eyewitnesses testified that the committee declared formal independence from Great Britain. But the only contemporaneous document we have is the Mecklenburg Resolves, printed in a Wilmington newspaper and dated May 31, 1775.

When the delegates convened on May 19, they didn’t yet know a shooting war had broken out a month earlier in Massachusetts. They knew only that the colonies needed governments independent of royal governors such as North Carolina’s Josiah Martin, who’d improperly disbanded the provincial legislature in early April.

So, the Mecklenburg Resolves declared that “all laws and commissions confirmed by or derived from the authority of the King and Parliament are annulled and vacated, and the former civil constitution of these colonies for the present wholly suspended.” It didn’t convey a complete and permanent break from Britain, however.

I’ve written extensively on the centuries-long debate about the so-called Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. It’s too complicated a tale to relate here, but the most likely scenario — I say this as a descendant of two Meck Dec signatories, John Queary and the aforementioned Adam Alexander — is that the committee arrived on May 19 with a draft of the resolves already in hand, then got word of the battles of Lexington and Concord and supplemented their work with at least extemporaneous words of defiance to angry spectators who later remembered them as a declaration of independence.

Does that make me a believer or a skeptic? Yes! I embrace the duality.

Whatever happened on or about May 20, 1775, the date well deserves its place on North Carolina’s state seal and flag — and our commemoration this week of its 250^th anniversary.

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John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).