John Hood: Push for Liberty Began in Rowan
RALEIGH — If you look at North Carolina’s state flag, you’ll see two dates: May 20, 1775 and April 12, 1776. Each signifies a moment when North Carolinians played a key role in the emerging American Revolution. Each strengthens the claim that our state was, in this context, “First in Freedom.”
On the former date, the leaders of Mecklenburg County either created a new county government or formally declared independence from Britain (depending on which account you accept). On the latter date, the North Carolina Provincial Congress, meeting in Halifax, instructed their delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia to vote for independence.
While very important, neither the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence nor the Halifax Resolves constitutes the first formal act by North Carolinians against British tyranny. That distinction belongs to the Rowan County Committee of Safety. Angered by Parliament’s high-handed legislation and the conduct of royal governors and garrisons in Boston and other American cities, some two dozen Rowan leaders met in Salisbury on August 8, 1774 to draft a response.
Their handiwork, issued 250 years ago this week, is called the Rowan Resolves. While proclaiming their continuing loyalty to King George III, the signers condemned Parliament for enacting what they considered to be illegal levies and regulations.
“The right to impose taxes or duties, to be paid by the inhabitants within this Province, for any purpose whatsoever, is peculiar and essential to the General Assembly, in whom the legislative authority of the colony is vested,” the Rowan leaders wrote. “Every attempt to impose such taxes or duties by any other authority is an arbitrary exertion of power, and an infringement of the constitutional rights and liberties of the colony.”
They were certainly talking about the reviled tax on tea — the target of the protest, staged eight months earlier, that came to be called the Boston Tea Party. But they were making a broader point. To tax Americans without allowing them representation in Parliament was “an act of power without right.” It was a dangerous precedent.
The leaders named three delegates to represent Salisbury and Rowan County, urging other communities to do the same. They further suggested that all North Carolina delegates convene later in the month to discuss the crisis and propose a Continental Congress to “agree upon a firm and indissoluble union and association for preserving, by the best and most proper means, their common rights and liberties.”
Interestingly, the Rowan Resolves also stated that “the African slave trade is injurious to this colony, obstructs the population of it by free men, prevents manufacturers and other useful immigrants from Europe from settling among us, and occasions an annual increase of the balance of trade against the colonies.”
While hardly a full-throated condemnation of chattel slavery, this section does reflect the stirrings of anti-slavery sentiment on the frontier — and mirrors the language Thomas Jefferson tried to insert in the American Declaration of Independence two years later.
Among the members of the Rowan Committee of Safety were Matthew Locke and William Lee Davidson. A former treasury commissioner for North Carolina, Locke would later sign the Halifax Resolves and serve as a brigadier general during the subsequent Revolutionary War. After many years in the state legislature, Matthew Locke served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.
As for William Lee Davidson, he would also serve in the war as a lieutenant colonel in the Continental Line and brigadier general of the Salisbury District militia. On February 1, 1781, the army of General Charles Cornwallis began to cross the Catawba River at Cowan’s Ford, just north of Charlotte, in pursuit of the main American army under General Nathaniel Greene. With 800 Patriots, Davidson attacked the British — delaying their crossing, but at the cost of his own life. Decades later, the founders of a nearby Presbyterian college named it in Davidson’s honor.
Such was the mettle of our Founders. They backed their inspiring words with courageous deeds. So should we all.
John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His latest books, Mountain Folk and Forest Folk, combine epic fantasy with early American history (FolkloreCycle.com).
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