where Kilpar is characterized as "full of sentiment, its reading infinitely diverting," one may read of a spurious continuation of the Nouvelle Héloïse under the title: Henriette Volmar. As for Kilpar "here," wrote the "translator," Gain de Montagnac, "here one sees a virtuous man who follows sometimes the beaten road of Vice, but is soon brought back into the straight and narrow path by his remorse and natural penchant. The English author had no other object than to make Virtue loved." Nothing else, in truth, could have excused him. Yet it is not Fielding who is imitated here: rather the author of "Robinson Crusoe," that was still read in France with an enthusiasm, but had grown, too, a little out of date. Hence a "New Robinson:" Defoe, not Fielding, was Kilpars unmistakable progenitor.

And now to the third of the forgeries: the Malheurs du Sentiment, traduit de l'Anglois, de M. Fielding, sur la troisième edition: par M. Mercier. Fielding had died in 1754; this book made its appearance at Geneva and Paris in 1789; the first of the letters that tell its story is dated April 10, 1780! There is no more plausibility to the argument than to these dates. Rousseau is suggested, rather than Fielding, by the sentences: "Such is my confusion of ideas, I cannot separate my real troubles from those which are imaginary;" Mackenzie (or, perhaps, Sterne), by the tears the hero sheds over his dog's affectionate behavior. This man of sentiment refuses to go a-fishing with the apothecary, a Mr. Banks (an agreeable enough companion, though a notorious libertine), for fishing is "a pleasure which destroys the tranquility and affects the life of poor animals. Fishes, above all,

should be exempt from our tyranny; they do not usurp our rights, they do not destroy our happiness." The only fishing our hero does is to fish out the fair Adelaine from the river she falls into; when he realizes that it is the shepherdess, his sweetheart, whom he has rescued, "Oh, why," he asks himself, "did my whole body tremble? Why did my heart beat so?" (The answer is not difficult: because the young man's name is Chatterton; because he is, besides, a reader of "Werther's Sorrows"). "My heart was animated by a gentle sympathy; torrents of tears flowed down my cheeks." Later, he rescues a deer from the pursuing dogs; and Adelaine coyly suggests a comparison between this rescue and the earlier adventure. It is unnecessary for us to weep long

North Carolina's Priority in the Demand for Independence

By R. D. W. CONNOR

Secretary of the North Carolina Historical Commission

A well-known essayist, in a study of "The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence" says, with reference to the movement for a national Declaration of Independence: "To-day the consensus of critical opinion is adverse to the claims of those who would give the 'Old North State' priority in this bold and important step, and the conviction is wide-spread that the Mecklenburg Declaration is of the stuff of which myths are made."* The writer here falls into an error too common among students of American history, for which North Carolinians are primarily responsible. "The claims of those who would give the 'Old North State' priority" in the demand for independence, are not dependent on any thing that occurred, or is supposed to have occurred, at Charlotte in May of 1775; and the true basis for these claims is not affected at all whether a Declaration of Independence was made on the day and in the words claimed, or not. They rest on another event, about which there can be no dispute, which in historical importance and interest takes precedence of either the Declaration of May 20 or the Resolutions of May 31, viz., the adoption by the Provincial Congress, April 12, 1776, of the resolution authorizing the delegates from North Carolina in the Continental Congress to vote for a Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately for correct historical perspective the "acrimonious controversy" which has been waged for more than three-quarters of a century about "The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence," has attracted more attention to that event than its importance deserves, and has tended to throw into obscurity the more significant action of the Congress at Halifax in April of the next year. Whatever action was taken at Charlotte in May, 1775, was but the action of a single frontier county, and was binding on nobody; the Resolution of April 12, on the other hand, was the voice of the province

*H. Addington Bruce: "New Light on the Mecklenburg Declaration," in The North American Review, July, 1906.

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expressed through its chosen representatives in Congress assembled. It is on this latter action that North Carolina's claims to priority in the demand for a national Declaration of Independence must be maintained.

This claim must not be considered as an assertion that the idea of independence originated in North Carolina. The very absurdity of such a claim would refute it. In fact it cannot be said that the idea of independence "originated" any where: it was a growth, and was present, unconsciously, in the minds of political thinkers and leaders long before England's conduct crystallized it into conscious thought. Prophecies and academical discussions of the possibility of an independent American nation, were not uncommon, either in Europe or America, for some years before the outbreak of the Revolution; but it may be safely stated that no serious, definite thought or plan of separation from the mother country took shape in the minds of even the most advanced political thinkers until after the struggle over the Stamp Act. There may be found, it is true, certain expressions in the literature of the period which may possibly seem to support a contrary statement. Thus, as early as May 1760, Governor Dobbs of North Carolina, appealed to the king for greater authority that he might "prevent the rising spirit of independency stealing into this province."* But such expressions would clearly be "all amiss interpreted" in any effort to prove from them that their writers even dreamed of separation from the British Empire. Even so acute a political thinker as Thomas Jefferson declared that before the battle of Lexington, April 19, 1775, he had never heard a whisper of a desire to separate from the mother country; and Washington confessed that when he took command of the army, July 3, 1775, he "abhorred the idea of independence." The first statesman of weight and influence to conceive the idea of independence, with a fixed and definite purpose to pursue it, was Samuel Adams, and we have his own word for it that he made up his mind during the summer of 1768. The movement, therefore, began definitely with the Stamp Act, and this is the logical starting point of this inquiry. The principles on which the Americans opposed the Stamp Act were not hatched out for the occasion. They had long been

*Colonial Records of North Carolina, VI., 251

regarded as lying at the very basis of the colonial governments; indeed, they were incorporated into their polity by the very charters which created them. The charters of North Carolina, for instance, guaranteed to the people "all liberties, franchises and privileges" possessed and enjoyed by their fellow-subjects in the realm of England.* Adherence to these charters and resistance to their perversion were cardinal principles with the early Carolinians and their records are replete with appeals to them against the encroachments of the proprietary and royal authorities throughout their colonial history. As early as 1678, "when a few families were struggling into a consciousness of statehood along the wide waters of our eastern sounds," the Assembly declared that "the doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary power and oppression is absurd, slavish and destructive to the good and happiness of mankind." In 1716 when the colony was but little more than fifty years old and the population all told was less than ten thousand souls, the Assembly entered on their journal the declaration "that the impressing of the inhabitants, or their property, under the pretence of its being for the public service, without authority from the Assembly, was unwarrantable and a great infringement upon the liberty of the subject." A still more distinct statement of the principles of the Revolution was made in 1754 when the Assembly resolved that an attempt by the Council to amend an appropriation bill levying a tax "tends to infringe the rights and liberties of the Assembly who have always enjoyed uninterrupted the privilege of framing and modelling all bills by virtue of which money has been levied on the subject as an aid for his Majesty."§ Moreover a committee of the Assembly protested to the governor against the Navigation Acts both as burdensome to the trade of the province, and as levying taxes on the people against what they esteemed their inherited right and exclusive privilege of imposing their taxes through their own representatives. A few years later Governor Dobbs wrote that the Assembly openly set him and the king's instructions at defiance on the express ground "that their charters still subsisted," and declared that when the royal

*Colonial Records of North Carolina, I. 25, 107.

+Col. Rec. Prefatory Notes, IX., p. XI.

Saunders: Lessons from our North Carolina Records, p. 7.

§ Col. Rec. V. 287.

Saunders: Col. Rec. Pref. Notes, IX. p. XI.

instructions differed from their charters, the latter and not the former was their rule of action.* "The key to North Carolina character in this inchoate period," as Dr. Edwin A. Alderman says, "is the subordination of everything-material prosperity, personal ease, financial development-to the remorseless assertion of the sacredness of chartered rights."+

The ministry therefore no sooner asserted the constitutional authority of Parliament to levy taxes on the colonists, than the people of North Carolina denied it. Their contest, however, before the outbreak of hostilities was for constitutional government within the British Empire, though a few far-sighted leaders soon began to think of independence as possibly the ultimate solution of their political troubles with the mother country. Among the leaders of North Carolina who foresaw it, first place must be assigned to William Hooper. On April 26, 1774, in a letter to James Iredell, Hooper made this remarkable forecast of the political tendencies of the time:

"With you I anticipate the important share which the colonies must soon have in regulating the political balance. They are striding fast to independence, and ere long will build an empire upon the ruins of Great Britain, will adopt its constitution purged of its impurities, and from an experience of its defects will guard against those evils which have wasted its vigor and brought it to an untimely end. . . . Be it our endeavour to guard against every measure that may have a tendency to prevent so desirable an end."‡

In the same prophetic vein Samuel Johnston a few months later, September 23, referring more specifically than Hooper to the quarrel with the mother country, wrote to a friend in London:

"The ministry from the time of passing the Declaratory Act, on the repeal of the Stamp Act, seem to have used every opportunity of teasing and fretting the people here as if on purpose to draw the people into rebellion or some violent opposition to government; at a time when the inhabitants of Boston were, every man, quietly employed about their own private affairs, the wise members of your House of Commons on the authority of ministerial scribbles, declare they are in a state of open rebellion. On the strength of this they pass a set of laws which from their severity and injustice cannot be carried into execution but by a military force, which they have very wisely provided, being conscious

*Col. Rec., VI., 1261.

+Alderman: William Hooper, p. 13.

Col. Rec. IX. 983-86.