24 Facts About Mecklenburg Declaration

1.

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.

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2.

The authenticity of the Mecklenburg Declaration has been disputed since it was published forty-four years after it was reputedly written.

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3.

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.

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4.

Mecklenburg Declaration'storians believe that the Mecklenburg Declaration was written in 1800 in an attempt to recreate the Mecklenburg Resolves from memory.

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5.

Defenders of the Mecklenburg Declaration have argued that both the Mecklenburg Declaration and the Mecklenburg Resolves are authentic.

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6.

Early government of North Carolina, convinced that the Mecklenburg Declaration was genuine, maintained that North Carolinians were the first Americans to declare independence from Great Britain.

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7.

Each militia company in Mecklenburg Declaration County had sent two delegates to the meeting, where measures were to be discussed regarding the ongoing dispute between the British Empire and the American colonies.

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8.

Alexander concluded by writing that although the original documents relating to the Mecklenburg Declaration were destroyed in a fire in 1800, the article was written from a true copy of the papers left to him by his father, who was now deceased.

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9.

Either these resolutions are a plagiarism from Mr Jefferson's Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, or Mr Jefferson's Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence is a plagiarism from those resolutions.

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10.

Mecklenburg Declaration found it suspicious that the original was lost in a fire and that most of the eyewitnesses were now dead.

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11.

In 1905, Collier's Magazine published what was said to be a clipping from the missing issue, but advocates and opponents of the Mecklenburg Declaration agreed that the document was a hoax.

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12.

In 1847, the complete text of these Mecklenburg Declaration Resolves was found in a South Carolina newspaper published in June 1775.

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13.

Unlike the Mecklenburg Declaration that had appeared in the Raleigh Register in 1819, the Mecklenburg Resolves fell short of an outright declaration of independence, and did not contain language that was parallel to Jefferson's 1776 Declaration of Independence.

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14.

Controversy over the Mecklenburg Declaration entered a new phase with the discovery of the Mecklenburg Resolves.

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15.

Supporters of the Mecklenburg Declaration maintained that both documents were genuine, and were adopted to serve different purposes.

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16.

Argument that the Mecklenburg Declaration is a flawed version of the Mecklenburg Resolves was first made in 1853 by Charles Phillips, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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17.

Hoyt's argument is briefly as follows: After the original documents relating to the Mecklenburg Declaration Resolves were destroyed by fire in 1800, John McKnitt Alexander attempted to recreate them from memory.

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18.

The eyewitnesses were misled into accepting the text of the Mecklenburg Declaration as authentic because it had been published in 1819 with the claim that it was a true copy of the original resolutions.

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19.

Advocates of the Mecklenburg Declaration have argued that both the Declaration and the Resolves are authentic.

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20.

One of the strongest pieces of nearly contemporaneous evidence in support of the Mecklenburg Declaration is a diary entry discovered in 1904.

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21.

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.

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22.

One cannot demonstrate conclusively that the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence is a fake.

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23.

Early government of North Carolina, convinced that the Mecklenburg Declaration was authentic, maintained that North Carolinians were the first Americans to declare independence from Britain.

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24.

Mecklenburg Declaration is referenced in the motto for Davidson College, located in Davidson in Mecklenburg and Iredell counties: Alenda Lux Ubi Orta Libertas .

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