RALEIGH – If you think you know the whole story of how the American Declaration of Independence came to be, I challenge you to read Pauline Maier’s fascinating American Scripture, first published in 1997, and see if you don’t come away from the experience with new and surprising insights.
Having picked up a couple of the concise book a couple of months ago from one of my favorite used bookstores, I found myself dog-earing page after page and scribbling down notes for further research. I went into American Scripture as an admirer of Thomas Jefferson and many of his colleagues in the Continental Congress. I finished the book with an even-greater appreciation of their accomplishments.
Imagine you are given a major writing assignment on June 11, with a due date of June 28. Imagine further that you will not be working alone, that you will serve on a drafting committee with four other people, several of whom have strongly held opinions that do not always comport with your own.
Also imagine that in addition to this writing assignment, you are also asked to work on several other major projects at the same time. Finally, imagine that after your small committee finishes its work, your writing assignment will then be edited by dozens of other opinionated people over whom you have little influence.
Could you manage, as Thomas Jefferson did, to produce a work as elegant, cogent, and influential as the Declaration of Independence proved to be? Could any of us? Not bloody likely.
Jefferson wasn’t starting from scratch, of course. As Maier explains, he drew heavily from an earlier work, George Mason’s Declaration of Rights of Virginia, as well as Jefferson’s own draft of a new Virginia constitution. These works, in turn, were based on the writings of John Locke and other Whig philosophers and journalists as well as the English Declaration of Rights of 1689.
Still, his work – along with that of his collaborators and editors, including John Adams – was nothing short of astounding. While Maier’s intention may have been to downplay Jefferson’s role to emphasize that of others, most readers will admire all of them more and none of them less.
North Carolinians will find several passages to be of particular interest. For example, one of the charges the Declaration lodged against King George III was that he “suffered the administration of justice totally to cease in some of these states.” Maier explains that this charge originated in a dispute between North Carolina’s colonial assembly and the English Crown. Carolina lawmakers had insisted that the property of absentee landlords be subject to confiscation for payment of debts, a policy that the English government believed to be unjust. Because the two sides were unable to resolve the dispute, North Carolina’s superior courts were shut down in 1773 and didn’t reopen for years.
Maier also discusses North Carolina’s “First in Freedom” claims at some length. Regarding the controversial Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence of May 20, 1775, she agrees with skeptics that the text circulated decades later is incredible. But Maier doesn’t suggest that the Meck Dec, with passages remarkably similar to the American Declaration of Independence produced a year later, was simply a Federalist conspiracy to accuse Jefferson of plagiarism. Instead, it was probably the result of faulty memories trying more than three decades after the fact to reconstruct the events of 1775.
There is no question that the Patriots who met in Charlotte in May 1775 were up in arms about Lexington and Concord. On May 31, they clearly approved a separate document known as the Mecklenburg Resolves that began to sever legal and political ties with England. Whether the group produced an earlier, more radical statement now lost to history is a matter of speculation. But the revolutionary intentions of the 28 Mecklenburg Patriots associated with the Meck Dec – including my 5th great-grandfather, John Queary – seem pretty clear.
Less controversial is the role that North Carolina played in the weeks leading up to the Declaration of Independence. On April 12, 1776, the colony’s congress, meeting in Halifax, instructed its delegates to support independence at the upcoming Continental Congress in Philadelphia. It was the first colony to do so.
That earned North Carolina the title “First in Freedom.” If only it remained true.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.