251 years ago today, a group of Scots-Irish frontiersmen in a log courthouse in Charlotte, North Carolina voted to nullify every British law on the continent, raise their own army, and declare anyone who took orders from the King "an enemy to his country."
This was 14 months before the Declaration of Independence. The ink on Lexington and Concord was barely dry.
Charlotte in 1775 was not a city. It was 20 cabins clustered around an intersection of two dirt roads called Trade and Tryon. The county had been settled mostly by Presbyterian Scots-Irish who had been chased out of Ulster by English landlords a generation earlier and were in no mood to take orders from another one. When word of the fighting in Massachusetts reached the backcountry, Colonel Thomas Polk, the great uncle of a future President, called every militia captain in Mecklenburg to the courthouse.
They drafted 20 resolutions. The third one read: "All Laws and Commissions confirmed by, or derived from the Authority of the King or Parliament, are annulled and vacated."
They were not asking for representation. They were not petitioning for redress. They were declaring British law dead on the ground in their county. Then they raised a regiment, elected Polk colonel, and started buying gunpowder.
This is where it gets strange.
For decades, North Carolinians insisted that 11 days earlier, on May 20, 1775, the same men had adopted an even more radical document: a full Declaration of Independence, predating Jefferson by 14 months and using language so similar to the 1776 Declaration that Jefferson must have plagiarized it.
Thomas Jefferson, when shown a copy in 1819, called it "spurious." John Adams was less sure. The original was supposedly lost in a house fire in 1800. No contemporary newspaper printed it. But every old man in Mecklenburg County in 1819 remembered hearing it read aloud.
The state of North Carolina sided with the old men. The date May 20, 1775 is on the state flag. It is on the state seal. It is stamped on every license plate in the state.
Historians have argued for 200 years about whether the May 20 declaration ever existed. The May 31 Resolves are not in dispute. They are real, they survived in print, and they are arguably the most radical statement made anywhere in the colonies before Lexington Green had even stopped smoking.
The Revolution was not declared in Philadelphia in July 1776. It was declared in a log courthouse in Charlotte 251 years ago today, by men whose names no one remembers.
"What the flag symbolizes for the millions who revere, cherish, or love it, however, is the heroism of those who fought and died under it."
- Pat Buchanan
This memorial stood for over 100 years before the Biden Administration decided reconciliation is over.
Mr Biden will be remembered alongside Mr Obama for reopening ancient hostilities.
President Trump ordered that it be returned. Which has yet to happen.
THEY WOULD NOT LET THEM BE FORGOTTEN. NEITHER WILL WE.
Spring of 1866. Tennessee mud still cold beneath the surface. A woman in black walks the old Federal breastworks south of Franklin with hired men and a book.
And they dig.
Nearly fifteen hundred Confederate soldiers buried in haste after the Battle of Franklin. Wooden markers rotting. Names fading. A landowner about to plow the field under.
Carrie McGavock would not allow it.
What she did next, and what the women who came after her kept doing for the next hundred and sixty years, is the real story of Memorial Day.
Not the speeches. Not the proclamations.
The women who showed up with flowers and shovels and subscription lists and a refusal so deep and so stubborn that forgetting was simply never allowed to win.
The graves are still tended. The names are still spoken. The book still exists.
Because of them.
Full essay, footnotes, and bibliography at the link. Read it. Share it. Say the names.
🔗 https://t.co/ptY63Rqhmf
South Carolina Senate just passed cloture on the America First redistricting bill. 26-18. 🇺🇸
It's heading to Governor McMaster's desk by Wednesday.
The RINOs who tried to stop it:
-Massey
-Bennett
-Campsen
-Davis
-Hembree
-Rankin
-Zell
They failed.
Sign it, Governor McMaster. Finish the job.