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By Mike DeVine, Legal Editor of TMR/The HinzSight Report

For those that missed Gamecock’s front page column, today is the 233rd anniversary of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence from England.

On July Fourth of this year, America will celebrate the 232nd anniversary of the better known such Declaration signed by representatives of all Thirteen Colonies. For the denizens of the North Carolina city dubbed a Hornets’ Nest by occupying British forces, it was redundant.

British Redcoats failed to pacify hostile hornets in their native habitat of Charlotte in the 18th Century. San Antonio Spurs had no such problem in New Orleans yesterday in the 21st Century, but I digress.

The purpose of this column is not to re-visit the issue of the declaration discussed earlier.

My purpose here is to provide vivid examples of a real establishment of religion that lead to the revolution and the ratification of the First Amendment’s ban on such an establishment. The Founding Fathers and Framers of the Constitution knew of what they spoke when they wrote the words prohibiting the federal government from establishing a religion, and as the experience in the Queen City shows, mere prayer in schools nor nativity scenes prompted colonists to become armed hornets.

When you hear residents of this area gripe about taxes or protest infringements on property rights or take umbrage at the dictates of a faraway government, you may think this place has more than its share of independent-minded malcontents. You'd be right. It has always been this way.

On this day in 1775, patriots in this area are said to have issued the colonies' first declaration of independence from King George III. That was more than a year before Thomas Jefferson's declaration of July 4, 1776.

Some historians doubt the existence of the Mecklenburg Declaration. They cite the lack of the original document and speculate that the men who recalled it much later were confusing it with the Mecklenburg Resolves, a May 31, 1775, plan for governing without royal authority whose authenticity is undisputed.

What's not in doubt is that Mecklenburg residents of that day were a disorderly lot. The county was created from a portion of Anson in 1762. British Gov. William Tryon donated land for a county seat, to be named Charlotte in honor of the British queen. A fight ensued over where to put the county seat, but community leader Thomas Polk successfully pushed for southern Mecklenburg, a heavily Scots-Irish area.

The Scots-Irish chafed under the royal government for several reasons. To strengthen the Church of England, Gov. Tryon pressured the colonial legislature to enact measures to ensure that tax money would support the Anglicans and to require that to be legally married couples must pay a fee to the Church of England. That rankled the Scots-Irish Presbyterians, who disliked paying taxes to support the king's religion.

The king's denial of Charlotte's petition to establish a seminary because it would help "dissenters" further worsened relations. So did violent confrontations over collection of rents on land owned by Lord George Augustus Selwyn but settled by Scots-Irish squatters. Andrew Morton of the Church of England visited the Catawba-Yadkin region in 1766 and wrote to his superiors in London, "the Inhabitants of Mecklenburg are entire dissenters of the most rigid kind."

That they were, and we celebrate their fierce independence and undaunted courage today.

Mike DeVine’s Charlotte Observer columns
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"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson