HIS LORDSHIP'S venturing into North Carolina had been disastrous. The carefully thought out southern campaign upon which he had embarked so hopefully was shattered never to be reshaped. The backbone of the British offensive against the South was broken.
THREE weeks after Charleston fell and the British started toward the Waxhaw settlements, General Griffith Rutherford assembled nine hundred militiamen in Charlotte. The situation in the South, he told them, was desperate. "Go home, boys," he said, "and get all the powder and balls and flints you can find, and be ready when I call you."
PERPLEXING to the motorist traveling along the highway from Charlotte to Lancaster, South Carolina, paralleling the eight-mile stretch of the north-south boundary line between the Carolinas, are two signs but a few miles apart.
HARDLY had the business of the May meetings been completed before Mecklenburgers began planning for their participation in the session at Hillsboro in August of the North Carolina Provincial Congress.
THE PAMPHLET published by the legislature of North Carolina in 1831 sought to answer all questions then being asked about the Mecklenburg declaration. It introduced documentary evidence to support the Mecklenburg claim. "By the publication of these papers," the committee appointed by the General Assembly to undertake that task officially finds, "it will be fully verified, that as early as the month of May, 1775, a portion of the people of North Carolina . . . did by a public and solemn act, declare the dissolution of the ties which bound them to the crown and people of Great Britain. . . .
MILLIONS of words, often impassioned and frequently more resonant than reasoned, have been spoken and countless tens of thousands have been written in letters, books, historical journals, magazines, and newspapers on the subject of the Mecklenburg declaration of indepenence. It has been one of the nation's liveliest historical controversies, a continuing debate that has engaged the interest of historians from time to time in many sections of the nation.
SOCIAL historians studying the more than two-century story of Mecklenburg might well agree that this community's character has its roots in the independent-mindedness of her early citizenship. Theirs was a continuing struggle to achieve and maintain a new way of life.
MECKLENBURGERS insist that few counties in America have as intriguing a story to tell as their own. They are convinced that Mecklenburg is unique; they declare that they can trace through their region's history from the earliest days a pattern of attitude and action demonstrably different from that of even the closest neighbors.
AND NOW the rolling gentle hills of northeastern Mecklenburg, the warm red clay of his native county. Home again, and good to be home.
THE writing of history more than any other literary enterprise puts writers in debt to other people. Historians, if left to their own devices, would never find much of the important data that gives color and life to their work. One of the wonders of civilized life is that there should be so many people willing to go to a great deal of trouble for a handful of infinitely less agreeable individuals who regard it as their mission to write books.