of

Among the political attacks which pestered the last seven years of Thomas Jefferson's life was the charge that he pilfered the sentiment and some of the passages of his draft of the Declaration of Independence from a similar Declaration made by the citizens of Mecklenburg, North Carolina, fourteen months before; and that when he was confronted by a copy the earlier Declaration, he denied that he had ever seen or heard of it. This position he maintained to his dying day; and after his decease the discussion as to the genuineness of the Mecklenburg Declaration of May 20, 1775, was kept up by his political friends and opponents. If it were a genuine document, the resemblance between the two Declarations was so marked that there appeared to be no escape from the inference that Jefferson was chargeable with both plagiarism and untruthfulness. Historical writers have generally mentioned and passively admitted the genuineness of the Mecklenburg Declaration, without raising the question of its authenticity. The historians of North Carolina have uniformly extolled it as

the most illustrious incident in their State annals. Wheeler, in his "Historical Sketches of North Carolina," says: "This important paper is dear to every North Carolinian. The 20th of May is a sacred festival within its borders ; and efforts are being made to erect in the place where the event occurred a monument to perpetuate its memory."

Since the death of Mr. Jefferson, documents have come to light which prove beyond a doubt that the Mecklenburg Declaration of May 20, 1775, is a myth. It is a singular fact, however, that in these developments no evidence appears of intentional fraud on the part of any person; and yet it is evident that the paper was composed (perhaps as an exercise, or a reverie), after Mr. Jefferson's Declaration of July 4, 1776, had been printed, and that the writer adopted Mr. Jefferson's ideas and some of his expressions. That it was not intended as a deception seems probable from the fact that no public use was made of it during the lifetime of the writer.

A brief account of the Mecklenburg Declaration, and of the evidence on which its apocryphal character is shown, may not be without interest.

The first suspicious circumstance connected with the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence is that it did not appear in print, and was never quoted or alluded to by any historical writer, until forty-four years after it was alleged to have been adopted by a committee of the citizens of North Carolina. It was first printed in the Raleigh "Register" of April 30, 1819, with a statement signed by Joseph McKnitt Alexander, giving its history, and affirming it to be a true copy of papers left in his hands by his father, John McKnitt Alexander, deceased, who was the clerk of the committee which adopted the Declaration; that he finds in the files a memorandum that the original book in which the proceedings of the meeting of May 20, 1775, were recorded was burnt in April, 1800; and that copies of the proceedings were sent to Hugh Williamson, who was writing the history of North Carolina, and to Gen. W. R. Davie. Dr. Williamson's "History of North Carolina," which was not printed till 1812, made no mention of the Declaration. Perhaps he was aware of its mythical character, and suppressed it. The copy sent to Gen

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May I inclose to you one of the greatest curiosities, and one of the deepest mysteries, that ever occurred to me? It is in the Essex Register' [Salem, Mass.,] of June 5. It is from the Raleigh Register,' entitled A Declaration of Independence.' How is it possible that the paper should have been concealed from me to this day? You know that if I had possessed it I would have made the halls of Congress echo and re-echo with it fifteen months before your Declaration of Independence. What a poor, ignorant, malicious, short-sighted, crapulous mess is Tom Paine's Common Sense 'in comparison with this paper! Had I known it I would have commented upon it from the day you entered Congress till the 4th of July, 1776. The genuine sense of America at that moment was never so well expressed before or since; and yet history is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine !"

The writer then had evidently no suspicion that the document was not genuine, and perhaps he took pleasure in thrusting a thorn into the ribs of his correspondent. To another person Mr. Adams wrote July 5, before he had received Mr. Jefferson's reply, intimating that Mr. Jefferson had cribbed from the Mecklenburg document, and declaring that "Jefferson has copied the spirit, the sense, and the expressions of it verbatim in his Declaration of the 4th of July, 1776." How Adamsy are these

letters!

Mr. Jefferson, on the 9th of July, replied to Mr. Adams in his best and most attractive form. After a graceful introduction, in which he acknowledged and commented on the contents of several letters from Mr. Adams, he says:

But what has attracted my special notice is the paper from Mecklenburg County, of North Carolina, published in the Essex Register,' which you were so kind as to inclose in your last of June 22. And you seem to think it genuine. I believe it spurious. I deem it a very unjustifiable quiz, like that of the volcano said to have broken out in North Carolina some half a dozen years ago perhaps in that very county of Mecklenburg, for I do not remember its precise locality. If this paper be really taken from the Raleigh Register,' I wonder that it should have escaped Ritchie and the National Intelligencer,' and that the fire should blaze out all at once in Essex [Mass.], one thousand miles from the spot where the spark is said to have fallen. But if really taken from the Raleigh Register,' who is narrator? and is the name subscribed real? or is it as

fictitious as the paper itself? It appeals, too, to an original book which is burnt; to Mr. Alexander, who is dead; to a joint letter from Caswell, Hughes, and Hooper [Members of Congress from North Carolina], all dead; to a copy sent to the dead Caswell [Davie ?], and another to Dr. Williamson, now probably dead, whose memory did not retain, in the history he has written of North Carolina, this gigantic step in the county of Mecklenburg. Horry, too, is silent in his history of Marion, whose scene of action was the county bordering on Mecklenburg. Ramsay, Marshall, Jones, Gerardin, Wirt, historians of the adjacent States, are all silent. When Patrick Henry's resolutions, far short of Independence, flew like lightning through every paper and kindled both sides of the Atlantic, this flaming Declaration (of the same date) of the Independence of Mecklenburg County of North Carolina, absolving it from the British allegiance and abjuring all political connection with that nation, although sent to Congress, too, is never heard of! It is not known even a twelvemonth later when a similar proposition is first made in that body. Armed with this bold example, would not you have addressed our timid brethren in peals of thunder? Would not every advocate of Independence have rung the glories of Mecklenburg County in North Carolina in the ears of the doubting Dickinson and others who hung so heavily on us? Yet the example of Mecklenburg County in North Carolina was never once quoted. For the present I must be an unbeliever in the apocryphal gospel."

Mr. Adams, on receiving this letter and giving the matter further consideration, changed his first impressions, and fully concurred with Mr. Jefferson in the opinion that the Mecklenburg Declaration was a spurious document.

The publication of Mr. Jefferson's letter aroused an intense feeling of patriotic antagonism in the Old North State. Everybody who could wield a pen took up the defense of the Declaration and to defaming the character of Mr. Jefferson. The matter was brought before the General Assembly of the State, and a committee was appointed during the session of 1830-31, to collate and arrange all the documents accessible on the subject, and to collect new evidence in support of the authenticity of the Declaration. The committee performed its duty, and made a report in print, which, in the opinion of the committee, was "sufficient to silence incredulity."

Rev. Dr. Hawks, one of the historians of North Carolina, in an address before the New York Historical Society in 1852, thus summarized the report of the committee, which he regarded as conclusive :

"No less than seven witnesses of the most unexceptionable character swear positively that there was a meeting of the people of Mecklenburg at Charlotte on the 19th and 20th days of May, 1775; that certain resolutions distinctly declaring independence of Great Britain were then and there prepared by a committee, read publicly to the people by Colonel Thomas Polk, and

adopted by acclamation; that they were present and took part in the proceedings themselves; and that John McKnitt Alexander was the secretary of the meeting. In addition, seven others equally above suspicion swear that they were present at precisely such a meeting as that described above. Here are fourteen witnesses who, if human testimony can prove anything, do show beyond all peradventure that on the 20th of May, 1775, a certain paper was read and adopted in their hearing, whereby the people of Mecklenburg County did abjure allegiance to the British Crown, and did declare themselves independent. Such a paper, then, was in existence on that day, and was in the possession of the secretary, John McKnitt Alexander."

The committee's report and the accompanying testimonies printed in Force's "American Archives" (4th series, vol. ii., pp. 855-864), are less conclusive than Dr. Hawk's summary would indicate. The witnesses whose affidavits are printed were very aged men, and testified to what occurred fifty-five years before with a precision and a minuteness of detail which is incredible. James Graham states that he was present on the 20th of May, heard the discussion and the reading of the Declaration by Dr. Ephraim Brevard, " in the very words I have since seen several times in print." It is a wellknown fact that the memories of aged persons are, unconsciously to themselves, very defective in matters where time and place are the questions at issue. Mr. Jefferson noticed this fact in correcting some errors of Governor McKean concerning the Declaration of July 4, 1776. He says: The Governor, trusting to his memory at an age when our memories are not to be trusted, has confounded two events." This is precisely what was done by these aged wit

nesses.

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One of the printed testimonies is that of Captain James Jack, who states that he was the messenger who carried the Declaration of May 20 to the Congress at Philadelphia, and delivered it into the hands of the three North Carolina members. In explanation of the fact that it was not printed at the time and no mention of it appears in the proceedings of Congress, he says that these gentlemen thought it was not prudent to make it public then. Three persons certified that they had heard William S. Alexander, deceased, say that he met Captain Jack at Philadelphia in the early summer of 1775, who told them that he came the bearer to Congress of a Declaration of Independence, and that they themselves met Captain Jack the day General Washington started to take command of the Northern army- the day known to be June 23, 1775.

The evidence which seemed to be most con

clusive of the genuineness of the Declaration was a letter of Josiah Martin, colonial governor of North Carolina, written August 8, 1775, on board a British gunboat, in which he says:

"I have seen a most infamous publication purporting to be resolves of a set of people styling themselves a committee of the county of Mecklenburg, most traitorously declaring an entire dissolution of the laws, government, and constitution of this country, and setting up a system of rules and regulations repugnant to the laws and subversive of His Majesty's government."

In the British State Paper Office is a letter from Governor Martin, of June 30, 1775, to Lord Dartmouth, Secretary of State, which says:

"The resolves of the committee of Mecklenburg, which your lordship will find in the inclosed newspaper, surpass all the horrid and treasonable publications that the inflammatory spirits of the continent have yet produced. A copy of these resolves was sent off, I am informed, by express to the Congress at Philadelphia as soon as they were passed by the committee."

A letter of June 20 to the Secretary of State from Governor Wright of Georgia also inclosed a copy. The newspapers containing the treasonable document are filed with the letters. We have now reached surely the genuine Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence of May 20, 1775! Not at all. The document is a series of resolutions, of quite a different purport and character, adopted at Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, May 31-eleven days afterward,- in which there is no allusion to the Declaration of May 20, nor an intimation that such action had been taken or was intended. It is a set of patriotic high-toned resolutions, such as were adopted in all the colonies at that time. To the fugitive colonial governor they doubtless appeared a "horrid and treasonable publication"; and they were the resolutions which were taken by express to Philadelphia by Captain Jack, and out of which the myth of the Mecklenburg Declaration had grown! They were forgotten in North Carolina when the spurious draft of a Declaration of Independence came up in 1819; but Mr. Peter Force, at Washington, found them in 1838, when he was searching for materials for his "American Archives," and before they were found in London. They have since been found printed in several Northern and Southern newspapers of the Revolutionary period; but no contemporary trace has been discovered of the alleged Declaration of May 20, 1775. The twenty or more witnesses who testified before the committee of the North Carolina Assembly were doubtless honest; but in the lapse of fifty-five

years their memories were in fault as to the date of the meeting and the purport of its action.

It is probable that much of what is termed literary plagiarism is as groundless as these charges against Mr. Jefferson. It lessens our respect for popular history, when myths like the Mecklenburg Declaration and the story of Pocahontas saving the life of Captain John Smith still regarded in North Carolina and Virginia as their most notable events-can so persistently maintain a place in books of American history. W. F. POOLE.

THE LIFE OF HENRIK IBSEN.*

There are writers who direct the thought and mould the spirit of their age, and there are others whose works serve rather to indicate the thought and reveal the spirit of their generation. Henrik Ibsen is to be classed among the latter, rather than with the former. This is not

saying that Ibsen is not a great writer, for undoubtedly he is; but he is not a Goethe, nor even an Emerson or a Carlyle. Is it objected that Ibsen does not indicate the thought or any general trend of the thought of the time? Let

us not be too dogmatic upon that point; there is evidently a movement in European thinking that just now struggles for expression along these lines. Its forms may be crude, repellant; but nevertheless the spirit is there, existing, insistent. Happily, nothing has yet been said by the Norwegian dramatist to cast a doubt in any wise upon his sanity.

Just where among the world's great minds Ibsen is to find his place, is a riddle which the future alone can solve. One thing seems indeed decided, and that is that in the literature of his native Norway Ibsen's place is at the head and front; the critics are agreed in this, and the poet's countrymen apparently approve. It is in the character of first Norwegian writer of the day that Ibsen should primarily be judged; for Ibsen has always written for a Norwegian public, his scenes are Norse scenes with stern and stormy backgrounds, and his themes and problems are suggested by an environment and an experience in a measure peculiar to his northern home. In a word, the social structure in Europe and the society of the American cities in the aggregate are two very different things;

* HENRIK IBSEN. A Critical Biography. By Henrik Jæger. From the Norwegian, by William Morton Payne, translator of Björnson's "Sigurd Slembe." Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co.

and the individual in the one society sustains relations to which his cousin is a stranger. Hence, Ibsen, like the other continental philosophizers, is in one sense outside the circles of American appreciation or American criticism, although not so far removed that the power of his pen or the truths in his denunciations should go quite unnoted by us. And now that Ibsen has crossed the water, introduced through his writings by enthusiastic admirers of his boldness and his art, there is need that we should view the Norse poet and dramatist against a broader field and in a sharper light.

The American public has been startled by Ibsen's arraignment of certain institutions in society and state; but we seriously doubt that the power of Ibsen's genius or responded to half his readers in this country have really felt the contact of his ideas. That they should give any general assent to the truth of his assertions, or anticipate the realization of his suggestions, is out of question altogether. Ibsen is too revolutionary, too much of an extremist, to permit of any large following here. The present curious interest in him will doubtless recede, and only a small circle of admirers will ultimately

be left who will continue to read their Ibsen as

they read their Goethe or their Tolstoi,-marvelling at the art of the dramatist, pondering with him the harsh unsolved problems of an imperfect and illusory social life, and conjecturing whither these shadowy suggestions of untried schemes would lead the world if tested. At present, however, curiosity is still unsated. The American reading public demands to be told something more concerning the author of "The Doll's House" and of "Ghosts"; and Mr. William Morton Payne seeks to gratify this demand with a translation of a recent Norse

biography from the pen of Henrik Jæger. This is a real biography at last, and especially welcome after the unsatisfying host of light and popular magazine articles which have been trivial details long ago familiar to Ibsen readers. wearying us of late with their repetition of And yet we confess to some degree of disappointment in Herr Jæger's work; for into the inner life of the dramatist during the decade just finished, the period of his most extraor dinary and most brilliant creations, Ibsen's biographer gives us hardly a glimpse. Perhaps this may be the wisest course,—but pre

cisely in this period was it that we most desired

to know the man; and now we find ourselves compelled to withdraw, as it were, our acquaintance only just begun. However, we will not