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Show CITIZENS OF NORTH ! CAROLINA FIRST TO DEFY KING GEORGE i Proclamation of Freedom Made at Mecklenburg j More Than 152 ' ' Years Ago. j In spite of doubting Thomas Jefferson Jeffer-son and the reluctance of certain less Interested Virginians to admit that anything good ever came out of North Carolina, no sufficient reason now . exists for questioning the proud boast that the citizens of Mecklenburg 1 county, in the latter state, did lling defiance In the face of Great Britain In the form of a declaration of independence inde-pendence just thirteen months and fifteen days before the Continental congress in Philadelphia saw fit to make the same decisive move. The date was May 20, 1775, the place was Charlotte, N. C, and the immediate provocation of precipitate action was the arrival of the express with the news of the shooting down of Capt. John Parker's Minute men by British regulars under Major Piteairn on Lexington Lex-ington common. It was in 1S19 that a newspaper re-nrlnt re-nrlnt of what was said to be the tion of the people. They "transformed themselves from time to time" into , one and then the ether, so Governor i flartin, who was a soldier, said, and j thus, as Doctor Morrison sees It, ' strained the British constitution to the utmost or, in other words, the breaking break-ing point. At the same time, a certain Col. Richard Henderson and Ids associates, asso-ciates, all North Carolinians, had formed a company, with Daniel Boone for field leader, and set up a govern- . ment in a tract of land which they , had bought from the Cherokees with- i out royal warrant. That laud, which they named Transylvania and which included a great part of Tennessee and Kentucky, they had practically proclaimed to be independent not only ' of Great Britain but of Noith Carolina, Caro-lina, and Virginia as well. They asked, indeed, to have It acknowdedged by congress as the fourteenth province of the Confederation. Denounced King George. Obviously, the North Carolinians were not in submissive mood when the news of the first blood shed in tl.e North arrived. What happened at Anson county courthouse when the messenger rode Into that place is recorded in a certain family Bible to which Doctor Henderson has had access. The writer is- a young man named Morgan Brown, an eyewitness. He says that the messenger found the county court in session and the magistrates, magis-trates, some of whom were tories, on declaration itself a document containing con-taining several of the phrases of Ids own famous paper was failed to the attention of Thomas Jefferson by John Adams. Writing to Adams from Mon- ticello, Jefferson said he believed It spurious, because up to that moment he had never heard of it, though he lived in the adjoining state of Virginia. Vir-ginia. He called attention also to the circumstance- that the witnesses appealed ap-pealed to were, most of them, dead. - Jefferson's Mind Open. j However, Jefferson was careful to j add that he based his opinion on negative neg-ative evidence which positive evidence . was perfectly competent to overthrow. ' One of the most valiant collectors of this evidence lias been Archibald Henderson, Hen-derson, who Is otherwise known as the American familiar of Bernard Shaw. Another furiously assailed when he first collected the data was Dr. George Washington Graham, who has written a whole book on the subject, i The controversy was heated and acrl- . monious. I On the affirmative side It extended to the Insinuation that one of the Virginia Vir-ginia champions of Jefferson's priority had used his position as minister from tlds country to the Court of St. James to abstract from the British colonial archives a copy of the Cape Fear Mercury, which was material evidence because it contained the text of the Mecklenburg declaration printed within with-in the month after it was issued. It was known that such a copy had, In .fact, been sent to Lord Dartmouth by Joslah Martin, the royal governor of North Carolina at the time. Martin described it as "the late most treasonable treason-able publication of a committee in the county of Mecklenburg explicitly renouncing re-nouncing obedience to his majesty's government" and added that it "surpassed "sur-passed all horrid and treasonable publications pub-lications that the inflammatory spirit of the country lias produced." On the n-rgative side there were charges of forgery and mendacity the manufacture manu-facture of history out of whole cloth. Events Leading to Action. Assuming the evidence as sufficient, the story of what happened becomes ' a part of a well-connected series of . events in the province whose position . between two ostentatiously aristo- . 'cratic neighbors has sometimes, it is said, deprived her of due considera- j tion. In March, 1774. Governor Martin j had dissolved an unruly assembly. In August of that year a convention had met under the governor's nose in New Berne and sent delegates to the Continental Con-tinental congress. For the rest of that year the separate counties bad been busy with meetings and preparations, prepara-tions, and in April. 177."i. the assembly which met by the authority of the crown the last one wasalsoaconvcu- |