Presbyterians and 1776, Part I
As I mentioned to a friend of mine who’s a Presbyterian pastor in Florida in a different denomination, I told him I was doing two weeks of a Sunday school class, combined Sunday school class, on Presbyterians in 1776. His response was, “Wow, what a special church. Not many churches that would come out for that.” As we come to the 250th birthday, anniversary, of the United States of America, of course we want to keep it in perspective that the church of Jesus Christ is a multinational – every tribe, language, and tongue – organization, and Christ’s work in breaking down the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile is to make one new man, one new nation. So, we always want to keep in perspective our allegiance to our particular country, and we know that in this church there are many of you who come from another country and are going to root for another country in the World Cup perhaps, and we’re very glad to have all of us together at Christ Covenant. Yet, it does seem fitting for the 250th birthday of the United States that we might use the occasion to give some attention not only to the founding of our country – I’m going to say our country, because we’re all here knowing that some of you come from different countries – but the founding of our country, in particular as it relates to Presbyterians. This is a Presbyterian church, and as many of you will already be aware, Presbyterians played a key role – and I think you could even replace the indefinite article for the definite article and say of all the religious groups, Presbyterians played the essential role in the revolution in this country.
Two lectures. The first, this morning, will focus on the role Presbyterians here in Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, played in struggling, declaring, fighting with words and ultimately with weapons for independence from Great Britain. I’m not going to quite get to everything that I need to get to this morning. Most significantly, really the high point and the most controversial point, is the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. It’s right there, May 20th, 1775. It’s on our license plates, or it’s on the flag at least. And if you have the “first in freedom” license plate – you could have the “first in flight” license plate. First in flight – well, the Wright brothers, they’re from Ohio, but they flew their plane here. And then the “first in freedom” is a reference to the Mecklenburg Declaration. There’s a lot of controversy on whether that famous event actually took place or took place in the way that we remember it. I just don’t have time to do all of that this morning, so we’re going to pick up with that. I’ll mention it at the end of this lecture, but we’re going to pick up with that next week, which will then lead into the much more well-known Declaration of Independence, the one on July 4, 1776, signed in Philadelphia, and look at the dozen signers of the Declaration who were Presbyterian. So, we’re going to go national next week, picking up where we left off, and stay local this week.
I know we have readers here. In fact, many of you emailed me and said, “Do you know of this book?” And I think I knew of the ones that you were mentioning. Here are just three books. If you want to know more, the blue one is the most readable. It’s sort of a journalistic amateur historian account. There are some curse words in it. He’s a colorful writer. That’s going to be the most fun to read, and he goes through, you can see there, Who’s Your Founding Father? Discovering the MecDec (Mecklenburg Declaration of True Creative American Independence). The middle one – I got this when I first moved here, and I think I got it at the like Harris Teeter checkout or something, and I wasn’t expecting much of a book, but it’s really a very fine historical book. It’s not that long. It’s about 150 pages of text. This is the – if you’re just going to read one book on Charlotte and the American Revolution, that middle one. This is really good. And then the one on the end – this is the expert, and this is a kind of self-published book. It’s got very small margins, a lot of words on each page. Scott Syfert, who is a local attorney and is the world’s expert on the controversy surrounding the Mecklenburg Declaration. Pretty much the blue book takes the historical digging that Syfert did and puts it in a really engaging and fun way, but if you just want to go straight and just want the facts, you can go to those three books. So those I recommend if you want to learn more about this topic.
I have entitled this first lecture “The Mad Men and Ministers of Mecklenburg County.” I use the word “mad” in at least two senses. One, some of them may have been, by today’s terms, mentally ill. At least that’s what some people suppose about Alexander Craighead, who I’ll say much more about shortly. He may have been, his father may have been, what we might call manic depressive or bipolar. He had some wild swings. So, there was a kind of madness, and also they were mad. They were angry, and we’ll hear why. Then the ministers. There are important ministers – one in particular who I just mentioned, Craighead, and we’ll come back to him – here in Mecklenburg County.
But we need to back up before we get to any of that and ask the question, why did this little podunk town of Charlotte – and however podunk you think, it was more podunk than even that back in 1775 – why did this little town in the backwoods of the Carolinas end up being so fierce for independence? Just to give you one statistic to put this in perspective, at the time of the start of the Revolutionary War, Mecklenburg County accounted for 3% of the population in North Carolina. Just 3% of the population in North Carolina in Mecklenburg County. At the same time, it accounted for 25% of the soldiers from North Carolina. So, that is an astonishing percentage. 3% of the population supplying a quarter of the soldiers. Why was this particular place so fierce for independence?
To understand that we need to travel to the other side of the pond to Northern Ireland. A few slides here. Go to the U.K. one first, Caleb. Yes. Just to remind you – this is confusing for us Americans – the United Kingdom, just to make it difficult on us, it’s one country, it’s four countries, it’s two countries. So, you can see there’s England, Wales, Scotland in the north, and on the other side, Northern Ireland. The United Kingdom – they come together as a United Kingdom in 1707, the beginning of the 18th century, and it’s the United Kingdom of Great Britain (which is England, Wales, Scotland) and Northern Ireland. So, Northern Ireland is a part of the United Kingdom. You can see there Northern Ireland. There you see Belfast, and to the south is the Republic of Ireland. So today someone from Northern Ireland, they might consider themselves British, they might consider themselves Irish, they will certainly not consider themselves English. So, you see there how close Scotland in the north – you can see Glasgow and Edinburgh – that belt there, those two major cities are only about 45 miles apart. It’s just 20 miles across the Irish Sea at the narrowest point to make it from Scotland to Northern Ireland.
A plan was devised under James I, formerly James VI, of Scotland – this is the James of the King James Bible – to form what they called a plantation. You can go to the next slide. A plantation in Northern Ireland. Now, it may be a little hard to read, but you can see Scots, Scots, and then some English. So, this is up here in Northern Ireland. James had a plan to form a plantation there in Ulster County. There were, historically, the ancient names of four traditional provinces, they were called, of Ireland, and Ulster was this northernmost one. So, James had a plan to claim – I’m trying to use the words advisedly, depending on your telling of history – he confiscated, stole, repurposed, civilized. He claimed the counties of Armagh, Cavan, sorry for the pronunciation, Londonderry, Donegal, Fermanagh, and Tyrone in Northern Ireland for the plantation of Ulster. Now, the inhabitants there in Ulster were almost all Gaelic-speaking poor Catholics. Thousands of lowland Scots made the 20-mile trip across the Irish Sea to Ulster, and this provided a double win as far as James was concerned. First, these impoverished Scots got some cheap land, and so, they were happy, at least for a time. They got to go over to Ireland. And James was happy, because he wanted these English-speaking Protestants to come and civilize these wild Catholic, Gaelic, and Irish people. By 1619, 8,000 Scottish settlers had made their way to Ireland, and by 1715 as many as 200,000 had come, and these became the Ulster Scots, or you often see them called Scots-Irish. Have you ever come across that? What is a Scots-Irish? What are they? Scots or Irish? Sometimes you see in the older language Scotch-Irish, though my Scottish friends say, “We’re not a drink. Don’t call us Scotch.” Scots-Irish. So, it’s a reference to that. It’s the Scots who went over, over the course of a hundred years in the 17th century, to Northern Ireland to Ulster, and they brought over their Presbyterianism.
When we think about Presbyterianism in the United States, yes, there are Scottish transplants. My man John Witherspoon was a direct Scottish transplant. But most of what we know in the founding of Presbyterianism came from Scots-Irish Presbyterianism. Francis Makemie – he’s usually heralded as the father of American Presbyterianism. He lands in Maryland in 1683. He’s a Scots-Irish Presbyterian. The Gettys, we love them. No, they’re not Presbyterian. They should be, but they are Irish. Of course, today it’s centuries later. People in Northern Ireland are not going to refer to themselves as Scots-Irish, but Northern Ireland or Ulster. Rory McIlroy, I don’t think he’s Presbyterian either. He should be. We had Neil Stewart preach here a few weeks ago. He’s from Northern Ireland, and we have people in our own church from Northern Ireland. So, they are almost all Presbyterians coming from Scotland, and they have no love lost for the English. They thought it tyrannical when the English tried to impose episcopacy. That’s a very important term. Episcopacy simply means “rule by bishops.” What do Presbyterians have? Rule by elders – by elders and by presbyteries. One of the reasons that Presbyterianism takes root in Scotland better than anywhere else is it fit the already-familial clannish structure of Scotland – presbyteries and sessions. So, one of the things that they don’t like is any imposition of bishops. They also despise what are called the Test Acts of 1703 that excluded Presbyterians from teaching in schools, from practicing law, from their ministers performing marriages, and they resented that they were taxed to support the Anglican church. Now, keep all of those in mind, because those same laws that apply to the Scots-Irish, Northern Ireland, are going to apply when they come to America, and they will hate the laws even more.
Between 1725 and 1760, 3,000 to 6,000 persons left Northern Ireland every year, nearly a quarter million over the course of the 18th century. There are accounts of whole villages in Northern Ireland being left nearly empty. And where did they go? They came to America. They settled in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and then they made their way down to Virginia and eventually into the back country of the Carolinas. So, the ones who came to the Carolinas did not come here directly. Usually they were transplants from Pennsylvania or elsewhere. By 1775, North Carolina, which is not one of the bigger colonies – by 1775, North Carolina had the third largest population of Scots-Irish, behind the much bigger colonies of Pennsylvania and Virginia. So, you need to understand the Scots-Irish are the ones who come and settle this part of the Carolinas.
There are a lot of people I wish we had time to introduce you to, but at least two names in particular. Here’s the first. Thomas Polk, P O L K. In 1755, a surveyor named Thomas Polk, along with his new bride, Susannah Spratt, built a log cabin at the intersection of two Indian trading paths. The main path went north-south all the way up through Pennsylvania into New York. It was called by many names – Iroquois Path, Great Warriors Path, Trading Path leading to the Catawba and Cherokee Indian nations, or simply trading path. Today we know the road as Trade. The east-west road we know as Tryon, named after William Tryon, who was the royal governor of North Carolina from 1764 to 1771, and when you hear more of the story it’s sort of ironic it’s named after him. They did not like him. There is a photo – as providence would have it, the third graders here at CDS were taking a field trip to the Charlotte Museum, which is up kind of by the Hickory Grove area. If you haven’t been there, you should go there. I hadn’t been there before. They have this really large sort of model of what Charlotte might have looked like, and I snapped a picture. I don’t know if that was legal or not, but here it is. This is the reconstruction. So, I say Charlotte was a little town. It’s a little town. That’s Trade and Tryon, and the nice white house there is Thomas Polk. He would become about the wealthiest person in the area. So, you see, wow, that doesn’t look so bad. Well, he’s the richest person, and then across the way is the courthouse, which we’ll come back to in just a bit. So, Thomas settles there with his wife, Susanna. He’s from a Scots-Irish family, born in Pennsylvania, moved to North Carolina in 1753. He becomes a prosperous planter. He would be active in local and state government. He served as a colonel in the Continental Army. He helped save the Liberty Bell, the Liberty Bell that’s in Philadelphia. He was a part of the army, the baggage train that, when the British were coming into Philadelphia and they wanted to save some of the bells, mainly because they didn’t want the British to melt them down into cannonballs and other artillery. He was a part of the group that saved the Liberty Bell and brought them out of Philadelphia into Allentown. This man, Thomas Polk, was also with George Washington’s army during the winter at Valley Forge in 1777 and 1778. And if you’re thinking, his great nephew James K. Polk would become the 11th president of the United States, born 1795 in Pineville, and there’s a little reconstruction of a log cabin over there on the, what is that, the west side of Charlotte.
Depending on who you ask, one or two presidents were born in North Carolina. Why can’t we decide? Well, Thomas Polk for sure, though he didn’t grow up here that long, and then Andrew Jackson, because he was born in the wilderness of South Carolina/North Carolina, and just one of many things for the two Carolinas to argue about: where was he born?
Within a few years, there’s a smattering of homes and farms surrounding Polk’s house on the trading path. In 1772, a surveyor recorded that the town consisted of a courthouse made of wood, about 80 feet by 40 feet, a jail, a store, a tavern, and a handful of houses made of ordinary logs. The town was small, rustic. It was cut from this rugged wilderness, and by one account, it smelled like either burning wood or pig manure and sometimes both. It was dirty, tiny, backwoods, frontier. Two decades later, in 1791, George Washington called the town – don’t be offended – a trifling place. In June 1755, the royal governor reported that the Rocky River settlement in Mecklenburg had about 75 families that he could see. And except for two of those families, they all had “not less than from five or six or 10 children in each family, going barefooted in their shifts in the warm weather, and no woman” – scandalous – “was wearing more than a shirt and one thin petticoat.” That’s all. Just a petticoat. “They are a colony from Ireland, removed from Pennsylvania, of what we call Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, who, with others in the neighboring tracks, settled together in order to have a teacher of their own opinion and choice.” So, that’s from the report of the royal governor in 1755. He says, “I’m looking out. These are Scotch-Irish Presbyterians.” They settled along creeks. Makes sense. There’s not a major river here, but they settled along creeks. That’s where farmland would be best. That’s where you had water for drinking and washing and setting up mills and having animals nearby. That’s why we have so many names of creek places. Mallard Creek, Reedy Creek, Sugar Creek, Rocky River, Steele Creek, Long Creek, Swift Creek, Flat Rock Creek, Crooked Creek. That one in particular, Sugar Creek – there’s a nice Sugar Creek Greenway uptown; I run on it often – it’s sometimes given as S U G A W. It takes its name from the Sugaree Indians, sugaree meaning “group of huts.” And that name S U G A W was probably pronounced “sugaw,” but it’s often written as S U G A R, and we pronounce it like our word “sugar.” So, you see Sugaw or Sugar – I’ll refer to it, much easier to say Sugar Creek, but that’s where the name – there’s no sugar. Sorry, there’s no sugar nearby. It was an Indian name.
Or, they named places after Indian tribes like the Waxhaw. They also named settlements after the first or the most prominent settlers: Davidson, McDowell, Steele. By 1765, the records state there were 1,352 taxable souls – didn’t know you could tax a soul, but – taxable souls in Mecklenburg recorded as “mostly Presbyterians.” The spiritual wellbeing of these souls were served by a circle of Presbyterian churches known as the seven sisters. So, we got a map up here – it’s a little hard to read – of the seven sisters. So, you can read across. Now there’s actually eight, because we’ll come back to the one on the far right – Philadelphia, or Clear Creek, from 1770 was a mission church. But there were these other seven sisters. Rocky River, around 1750 is formed. Sugar Creek, 1755. Steele Creek – now that’s right by the airport today. Steele Creek is where Billy Graham’s family, they would be a part of that church. Hopewell, 1762. Poplar Tent – you know that road up by Concord? – Poplar Tent, 1764. Centre, 1765. And look it, boy, they’re even spelling Centre wrong there, still, in 1765 before the Americans got ahold of it. And then Providence, 1767, you see at the bottom. You’ve passed that all the time. That building there on Providence Road across from Charlotte Latin – that’s not the original building, but that’s the same church. Of course, all of these – some of them don’t exist. The ones that do are PCUSA, but that one, Providence, would be the nearest to us, just around the corner on Providence Road. That’s why it’s called Providence Road. And then the eighth one, Philadelphia or Clear Creek, that’s Mint Hill, and that was one of the mission churches, the eighth of these. But these seven sisters form a loop. You can see it forms a nice loop around the area where Presbyterians would meet for worship.
In 1762, a new county was formed. Show the current counties, Caleb, just to – okay, so that’s hard to see – but you can see we’re there. North Carolina has such a weird boundary there where we are because again, North Carolina, South Carolina, we’re arguing all the time over where the border is, but you can see Mecklenburg County there and next to us, Union. So that’s what it looks like today. Here’s what it looked like in 1775. You can see the west part of the state, they haven’t figured it out. I don’t know who those people are. They don’t got counties yet. They just go on. And you can see Mecklenburg was cut out of Anson County in 1762, and it includes part of today what would be Union County, part of Catawba County, part of Cabarrus, Lincoln, Gaston. Not Catawba, but Lincoln, Gaston, Cabarrus, Union County. So, it’s bigger. It’s bigger than what we have today, but that’s Mecklenburg County. As you probably know, Mecklenburg was named after the very new German bride of George III. Her name was Charlotte from Mecklenburg-Strelitz, this part of Germany. Not a very well-to-do family by aristocratic terms. Sort of a surprising choice. In 1760, George III assumed the throne. He was a 22-year-old bachelor king, and he went out to find a wife and thought they were a Protestant family. This would be a good alliance. She was all of 17 years old when she became queen in 1761, and we have a picture of her. Now this is the one that hangs – this is in the National Portrait Gallery. There’s one earlier from when she’s 17 that is, well, this is – she was, no offense, she was not reputed for her beauty. That’s not what people said about her. So, this is her grown up a bit more. This is sort of like you go to the photo shoot, and you say, “Okay, this is the best one. This is the one that we’re hanging up.” So, here’s a picture of Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. She was thin, pale, never reputed for her beauty. This is what she looked like. This is what we imagine her to look like in America. That. That’s what we think she looks like. Whether there is a resemblance or not, you can determine.
So, they would be married, George and Charlotte, for 57 years. She would give birth to 15 children, 13 of whom lived into adulthood. Yeah, that is impressive. Mecklenburg County named after her, and then of course this town. In 1768, the town was officially established by the name of Charlotte. Even after it was made the county seat, one attorney grumbled, “It did not deserve the name of town. Thomas Polk, come back to him. He had already built a courthouse at his expense, and he wanted Charlotte to be the county seat. That’s why he built it. Okay, if we got a courthouse already here, the General Assembly of North Carolina, they’ll have to make this the county seat. And in 1774, the North Carolina General Assembly declared, “The said courthouse already built in Charlotte Town be, continue, and remain the said courthouse of the county of Mecklenburg.” The courthouse sat at the corner of Trade and Tryon, right across the street from Thomas Polk’s home. Now, when you hear courthouse, you may think of the current courthouse, something very grand, but here’s a replica they rebuilt, I think – it’s in black and white, even though you can see a parking structure in the back. This is not from a long time ago. They built this in 1976 for the 200th anniversary, and this is what they think the courthouse looked like. So, it’s about 40 feet by 80 feet. It’s not big. It would have been built up, so that lower level you could go under there and be sort of an open market. You can do buying and selling, sort of a farmer’s market. Literally – it was a literal farmer’s market. And then on the top was the courthouse. It was a meeting space. You could have public meetings. You could hold court cases. Traveling preachers might meet there. That’s the best guess of what the courthouse looked like. When we come later – I’ll just mention it this week; we’ll pick it up next week – to the Mecklenburg Declaration being announced at the courthouse, that’s the courthouse.
So, life in Charlotte was not an easy life. Most of the settlers were poor, ill-clad, ill-housed. What they had, however – not to sound like a Braveheartmovie – what they had was freedom. I have to be fair, many of them had slaves. They did not see the inconsistency in being so desperate for their freedom while holding others in bondage. But they loved that they had freedom. No landlords, no Anglican bishops, no government officials within days of a horse ride away. They were free to practice their faith as they wished, and that meant being devout Presbyterians. Mecklenburg County might as well have been on the moon, and that’s why people liked it. According to one source in the Scott Syfert book, he says, “An early motto of the county consisted of three simple words: leave us alone.” I’d like to try to get that on the seal once again: “Mecklenburg County. Leave us alone.” Thomas Polk, and we’ll hear more about him again next week.
Here’s the second individual you need to know about. I mentioned him already: Alexander Craighead. He’s the leading minister, really just about the only minister in this area, during these formative years. Craighead was born in 1707 in Donegal, Ireland to a third-generation Presbyterian minister named Thomas Craighead. The family moved to America in 1715. Thomas, his dad, was a charismatic figure, preaching fiery sermons, sometimes causing his listeners to melt into tears. He was also harsh, volatile, and possibly, by our terms, mentally ill. He barred his own wife from communion in 1735, because he did not think she was sufficiently spiritual. Church records note that Thomas was either “under a dreadful delusion of Satan or had delirium in his head.” So when I say mental illness, I’m not, you know, trying to insult. I’m saying even the people at the time said, “This Thomas, for all of his fiery sermons, there’s something not quite right about him.” Well, he has a son, Alexander, who seems to be a chip off the old block. He was described, depending on friend or foe, as colorful, ardent, fiery, direct, energetic, impetuous, angry, harsh, vindictive, and some historians wonder if he might have been bipolar. Alexander became a Presbyterian preacher like his father. He was a New Light Presbyterian – that is, he was pro-revival. He preached revivalistic messages that prompted audiences to stand and shout, to faint and scream and cry. So, these are not the Presbyterians as we know them today. He began his career in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1735, but he ran afoul of the presbytery there by intruding into other parishes, by imposing new and stricter terms of communion than they thought necessary, by requiring members – here’s important – to subscribe to the Solemn League and Covenant. The Solemn League and Covenant from 1643 was an agreement between the kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland that they would all come together, and all three of them were committed to the Reformation and that Jesus was Lord and that one of the things that they committed to, and this will become very important, is that they would extirpate – that means they would remove – they would have no patience, they would get rid of all episcopacy, no bishops.
So, he was a Solemn League and Covenanter, and he started to insist that his members subscribe to the Solemn League and Covenant. When he began to buck against the authority of the presbytery, as his son would do, he was put under discipline. Or, Alexander, his son – his father, Thomas, also ran afoul, but here we’re talking about Alexander Craighead. This is one of the themes of his life. He was easily roused for a fight, and he never submitted himself to authority when they disagreed with his position. So, just want to be fair that there’s some things about this Craighead that make him heroic and things that we probably would not enjoy having him as a minister in our presbytery. By 1743, he was in trouble with church officials and with civil officials. They found his political opinions treasonous, and so he decided it was time to leave Pennsylvania. He refused to submit to the discipline and correction of the presbytery, so he just left. Time-honored way of dealing with church discipline. So, he left, took some of his followers into the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, and he fell into the same patterns. Now, on the one hand, he could attract to himself a very loyal band of followers. They loved him, and he preached the gospel. On the other hand, he alienated and angered everyone else. In June 1752, two justices of the peace in Virginia complained that he maintained “treasonous positions.” He preached “pernicious doctrines.” The Philadelphia Senate – that was the Senate he was a part of – made clear to the authorities in Virginia that Craighead and his followers had been expelled, “by reason of their divisive, censorious, and uncharitable doctrine and practices.” The Philadelphia Senate says we warned them. In fact, we’ve expelled them. They are divisive people.
In 1758, Craighead received a new opportunity from Hanover Presbytery. So again, it shows these presbyteries were not in very easy communication with each other, or if they were, it didn’t bother them that the Senate of Philadelphia had said we’ve expelled him, but now this presbytery says we want to call him to be a minister. So, a call is presented to the presbytery from Rocky River, North Carolina, requesting that Mr. Craighead might take the pastoral care of them. The first of these settlers in the Rocky River area settled less than a decade earlier – remember the map of the seven sisters – and they were a ragtag group of Irish Presbyterians. They had never had a pastor in residence. On November 6, 1758, Craighead is installed at both Rocky River Church and Sugar Creek Church. So, he moved to North Carolina with his wife, Jane. This was his second wife. His first wife, Agnes, had died. He had six daughters – Margaret, Mary, Agnes, Nancy, Rachel, Jane, and Elizabeth – and two young sons, Robert and Thomas. Only eight children. What a quitter. At long last, however, from Pennsylvania to Virginia, whether what it says about Craighead or what it says about the people of Mecklenburg County, when he got here, finally, these were his people, and they loved him. They warmed to his sermons, both his fiery gospel sermons and “his principles of religious and civil government.” He preached in a black, flowing Genevan gown with white tabs hanging down from the neck, and he not only preached at Rocky River and Sugar Creek – he was installed at both of those churches – but he basically supplied the pulpits of all seven of the sisters as they were established. A new church was usually a simple log structure with some rough-hewn benches for pews. Craighead rode all over the county – not an easy feat – to preach, and the people listened to him gladly. Many of them had to travel two hours each way to go to one of the meeting houses.
In 1767, a governor’s report noted there were 1600 white inhabitants in Mecklenburg County. So, this whole vast county, 1600 – we might have 1600 people here in this service – that was the whole county in 1767. There were 10 churches – seven Presbyterian, two Lutheran, one Baptist. And of the 1600 white residents, 1100 were parishioners of Craighead’s churches. 70% of the county were Scots-Irish Presbyterians. Craighead, as I mentioned, revered the Covenanters, and this is where it’s most important, he believed that England had violated the terms of the covenant. Why? Because they turned away from Presbyterianism, and they reasserted, to his mind, a pope-ish Anglicanism. If you are here for some Presbyterian-Anglican animosity, you have come on the right Sunday. Not trying to foster it again, but we’re going to have some examples. So, in Craighead’s mind, England violated the terms of the Solemn League and Covenant, because under the Restoration in 1660 (this is Oliver Cromwell in the interim, and then Charles II comes back) the church of England is run by bishops. This was a violation. So, as early as 1743, and this is really, really early, because people are not even fully – they’re not out loud, really, whispering independence in the country until 1775 and then finally in 1776, of course. This is 1743, he was already preaching a message of independence from England. Not because he’s, as far as we know, reading Locke or Montesquieu, but because he thought they violated the Solemn League and Covenant. He published a pamphlet, printed by a little-known printer at the time, Benjamin Franklin, in 1744 denouncing the rights of English rulers to rule. He said the English have no right to rule, because they violated the Solemn League and Covenant, and they reintroduced pope-ish principles. Now, you might think he was calling for a new Presbyterian monarch. He wasn’t. He was calling for something like a republican form of government, free from interference from the British crown. Craighead was not a political theorist, so we should be careful not to ascribe to him nuanced political views. What we do know is he was three things: he was vehemently anti- Anglican; he was anti-English; and very pro-get-off-my-lawn. He was those three things. And in Mecklenburg County, he had the freedom to preach what he wanted, no one looking over his shoulder, and the sort of rough-necked, fiercely independent, devoutly Presbyterian Scots-Irish people, they ate up his message.
People would sometimes meet at the plantation estate of John McKnitt Alexander. I know there’s Alexander Road here. There are so many Alexanders, named after the most important family in Mecklenburg County. I don’t know the exact history of when that was named. We’ll talk about this Alexander a little more next week. He was an elder at the Hopewell Church, and he owned a vast cotton plantation and was a prosperous surveyor. And on a parcel – he had thousands of acres of land – he had a little homestead. Actually, not little for the time. He called it Alexandriana. He’s an Alexander. So, here’s my homestead, DeYoungville. And the leading men of the county and of Craighead’s churches often met there to discuss the two things that men might talk about, religion and politics. There were two laws in particular that the men and the women in these churches despised, and they were based on the same laws back in the United Kingdom. One was the Marriage Act, which stipulated only Anglican clergy could perform marriages. So, all the Scots-Irish Presbyterians in Mecklenburg County, either they had to go travel far and wide – there were no Anglicans around. They had to go find an Anglican clergy, and they didn’t want an Anglican clergy. They wanted their own Presbyterian minister to marry them. Or, as more often happened, they just had the Presbyterian minister marry them and never went along with the law, but that put them at risk that, if England wanted to crack down on the law, they could say, “You were never really married. Therefore, your kids (I’m going to use the word in its proper sense) are bastard children and have no rights of inheritance.” They put themselves at legal risk by not succumbing to this Anglican privilege. So that’s one thing. They hated the Marriage Act.
They also hated the Vestry Act, which required all settlers to pay taxes to support the Anglican Church, and it also insisted school teachers had to be licensed by the Lord Bishop of London, which meant, for all intents and purposes, ain’t no Presbyterian going to get to teach in any of the schools, because the Bishop of London is not going to approve anybody but Anglicans. Now, it did not take much for Craighead to convince his parishioners that these laws were intolerable. In order to quell the influence of Craighead, the royal governor of North Carolina sent an Anglican clergyman named Andrew Morton to be a teacher and a minister in Mecklenburg County. He arrived in Wilmington in 1765, which happens to be the year of the infamous Stamp Act, which outraged the colonies, and Morton made it as far as Cape Fear before he had heard enough, and he decided there was no point in going to Mecklenburg County. Here’s what he wrote to his ecclesiastical superior in England: “I wrote to you in June last, informing you of my journey to my new mission in Mecklenburg County. From New Bern, I pursued my journey to Cape Fear, where I received such intelligence as discouraged me from proceeding any further. There I was well informed that the inhabitants of Mecklenburg are entire dissenters (dissenters meaning they’re not a part of the Anglican Church) of the most rigid kind, that they had a Solemn League and Covenant teacher among them, that they were in general greatly adverse to the church of England, and they looked upon a law (here he means the Vestry Act), lately enacted in this province for the better establishment of the church, as oppressive as the Stamp Act and were determined to prevent it taking place there by opposing the settlement of any minister of the Church of England that might be sent among them. In short, it was very evident that in Mecklenburg County, I would be of little use to the honorable Society, and I thought it but prudent to decline embroiling myself with an infatuated people of no purpose.” I’m not going to Mecklenburg County. They don’t take in Anglicans. He turned around. To England’s royal officials, the people of Mecklenburg County seemed utterly ungovernable, and they sort of were.
Craighead often preached about the need to resist colonial authority, and in this exhortation his people obeyed him cheerfully. The king had given large tracts of land in the Piedmont to an Englishman, John Selwyn. You’ve seen that name around here, S E L W Y N. North Carolina, as a colony, started as a private business. It was a reward that the king gave to eight lords proprietors. These were eight noblemen, aristocrats, in England who had been loyal to the crown. And so, when they have the restoration of the monarchy, they say, well, lords proprietors, you can have this land in the Carolinas. Shaftesbury was one of them. There’s a Shaftesbury Road up here. One of them was the Duke of Albemarle, which is why there’s so many of those around here. They were the lords proprietors. Years later, now under royal governance – so it started out, really, as a private business – royal governor. Now he had given this tract of land to John Selwyn, which passed on to his son, George Augustus Selwyn, who sent a man, Henry McCulloch, to be his agent for collecting taxes, because here’s what Selwyn (he’s a rich Englishman) – he’s saying the settlers of Mecklenburg County, they’re living on my land. They owe me rent and taxes. The king gave me this tract of land in the Piedmont. It’s mine. Who wants to go and get the taxes from them? McCulloch was given the unenviable task. He didn’t want to do it. The settlers had already threatened anyone who came. They had already once beat up another man who tried to collect money. In 1762, McCulloch had written to the governor of North Carolina. He said, “There are about 150 families there, and they stick together, and they form a posse any time they think someone has committed a wrong against any one of them.” They had beaten up a sheriff’s detail in 1762. So, McCulloch says it’s not going to go well, but he went, and it didn’t go well. So, at first, he encounters Thomas Polk. Remember Thomas Polk? He’s got the house there at Trade and Tryon. He built the courthouse later. Thomas Polk is the wealthiest man. He’s the most important man. He’s a justice of peace. And at first Thomas Polk helps – the settlers trust him, he’s one of them, and he’s an important man – and he tries to negotiate a purchase price. Okay, this is our land. We’ve been here, but okay, we’ll try to negotiate a fair purchase price. But then the settlers realized that Selwyn didn’t really have a clear title to the land. The governor said, “Okay, time out. The title – until we get this thing cleared up, don’t go and try to collect the taxes and the rent, because we got to clear up this title business.” But McCulloch foolishly went anyway. So, when you hear what happens to him, it’s not good, but he was doing this illegally. So, they agreed to meet at the home of Abraham Alexander on Sugar Creek, and Thomas Polk showed up with 150 men. Not a good sign for McCulloch. The settlers agreed to a price that was lower than the price they had agreed to a few months earlier, at which point McCulloch then refused. He said, “No, I’m not going any lower than we had agreed to,” at which point, Polk suggested that the best new offer he could give them was that McCulloch would be tied up at his neck and his heels and carried away down the Yadkin River – that was the new offer – and that he should be happy if he were so fortunate. Well, after that meeting dispersed, McCulloch still insisted on sending out crews to survey the land, and on May 7, 1765, Thomas Polk led a group of 12 farmers who attacked McCulloch and his party. When they saw McCulloch with just a few men with him at his side, they asked, “Do you think you’ll have more men to carry you to the grave?” Also not a good sign. One of them – so, they were beaten up – one of them, the report, “very near had daylight let in his skull.” McCulloch later called the incident the War of Sugar Creek, when these settlers led by Polk beat up and attacked McCulloch and his men. Polk, it should be said, was not a member of Craighead’s church. As best we can tell, he was probably a deist, but his whole family was a part of the Steele Creek Presbyterian Church, and the men with him were almost certainly all Presbyterians.
In the 1760s, the Church of England sent another minister – this is a very colorful Reverend Charles Woodmason – to be a missionary in the Carolinas, sort of in the backwoods, South Carolina/North Carolina, and, if it could be done, to help minister in Mecklenburg County. He left behind no spiritual fruit for the Anglicans, but he did leave behind a very colorful journal. Writing in his diary in 1765, Reverend Woodmason, Anglican missionary clergy, opined, “The whole county is a stage of debauchery, dissoluteness, and corruption, and how can it be otherwise? The people are composed of the outcasts of all the other colonies, who take refuge there.” In particular, Woodmason thought the Scots-Irish “were certainly the worst vermin on earth. They were ignorant, mean, worthless, beggarly Irish Presbyterians.” He called them “the scum of the earth and refuse of mankind.” Also, “they delight” – I mean, this is a string of insults – “they delight in their present low, lazy, sluttish, heathenish, hellish life and seem not desirous of changing it.” Now, how fair is that? A lot of things not fair, but something to work with. It was a rough, dirty, mostly impoverished existence. Life expectancy, if you survived childhood, was still around about 40. There were, in the county at that time, wolves, bears, feral dogs. Summers were brutal. The work was hard. Accidents were common, disease was rampant, the people were violent. Now, we have the really nice homes from the rich people, but most people lived in simple log cabins with dirt floors, with a permanent fire at one end of the house and virtually no privacy. I don’t even want to think how they had 10 kids. According to Woodmason, our resident Anglican crank, there was almost no bedding, hardly any clothes. “The children run around half naked. The Indians had better shelter and better clothing, and all of this arises from their indolence and laziness.” He was slightly kinder to the Presbyterians further south, probably not considered part of Mecklenburg County, because it was still under dispute, but where some of you live in Waxhaw. He described Waxhaw in 1767 as “extremely beautiful and fruitful. A finer body of land is nowhere to be seen.” Proud for all of the JAARS folks. The problem, however, “it is occupied by a set of the most lowest crew-breathing (I’m not sure what that insult means – is it like mouth-breather or what, but crew-breathing) Scotch-Irish Presbyterians from Northern Ireland.” He said they have a nice minister, William Richardson, but they won’t even let him say the Lord’s Prayer. They thought that was Anglican. They won’t let him say Watts’ Psalms. They insist on the barbarous Scottish Psalms, but, he said, the church is some 900, 1,000 or 1,200 people. They have never heard an Episcopal minister. They have never heard the Book of Common Prayer. They are thinly scattered but have numerous progeny. Even more than being prolific in reproduction, the Scots-Irish had the reputation, fair or not, as being violent, independent, crude, unsophisticated. Think Hatfields and McCoys. Hatfields were from England; the McCoys were Scots-Irish – think that sort of stereotype. One origin story of the term “redneck,” which later would be applied to poor southern whites, that the term goes back to Scotland in the 1640s when the Covenanters, rejecting the rule of bishops, would signify their rejection of the episcopacy by wearing red cloths around their necks. They were the original rednecks, and as they came down, and it became a synonym with Scots-Irish Presbyterians and then later with poor white farmers. It should be said that they did not treat Reverend Woodmason very well either. When he tried to establish an Anglican mission in their midst, they changed the posted dates of his sermons. They stole the keys to the church. They gave out incorrect directions to the meeting house. They passed out whiskey before services began. Woodmason complained in his journal, saying when he arrived for a church meeting he “found the houses filled with the debauched, licentious fellows and Scots Presbyterians, who had hired these lawless ruffians to insult me.” On one occasion, they hired men to come to his church with 57 dogs. So, Woodmason faced obstacle after obstacle, and he thought, “Well, I can appeal to the local authorities,” but that was a dead end. “As all the magistrates are Presbyterians, I could not get a warrant. And if I got a warrant, as all the constables are Presbyterians, likewise, I could not get them served.” All in all, he considered the Presbyterians “the most audacious of any set of mortals I ever met with.”
In March 1766, Alexander Craighead died. He was buried at the first cemetery at the Sugar Creek Church. There is a monument in Uptown Charlotte on West Sixth Street. The monument mentions he was the pastor of Rocky River and Sugar Creek churches. It also says “advocate of American independence from 1743,” which seems to be the case, and the final side says “inspirer of Mecklenburg Declaration,” which I’ll talk about more next week. Between the Mecklenburg Declaration and the Mecklenburg Resolves, which both took place in May 1775, Charlotte can rightly be called the first place in the country to call for outright independence from England. Now we’ll hear about the controversy, and some people doubt whether MecDec existed, and the more I’ve read the more convinced I am that it did – certainly something very close to it, if not it exactly. But the Mecklenburg Declaration said, “We do hereby declare ourselves a free and independent people, and we are, and of right ought to be, a sovereign and self-governing association under the control of no power other than that of our God and the general government of Congress” in May 1775 from that courthouse you saw the replica of. In 1769, leaders from Mecklenburg County, including Hezekiah Alexander – show that nice picture I took on the field trip. Again, it’s at the Charlotte Museum. That’s the Charlotte, but go to house – the Rock House. Some of you have been there before. Oldest residence in Charlotte, 1774. Hey, your house is going to last 250 years. Now, again, you say that wasn’t so bad. That’s the richest person. Okay, so that is a very nice 1774 Rock House, owned by Hezekiah Alexander. Not mentioned on the tour that I recall with the third graders is that he was a ruling elder at the Hopewell Presbyterian Church. Put that in next time. And he was one of several men in 1769 – Hezekiah Alexander, that house – who wrote a petition to Governor Tryon protesting two grievances. Now, that’s an important word, because ever since 1712, the General Assembly in Scotland had protested the grievance of patronage. So, he’s using this word, I think, intentionally. These are their grievances, and it was those two things, the Marriage Act and the Vestry Act. And he petitioned the governor “to be wholly relieved from the grievances of the Marriage Act and the Vestry Act.” He said, “We conceive ourselves highly injured and aggrieved by the Marriage Act, the preamble whereof scandalizes the Presbyterian clergy and wrongfully charges us with celebrating the rights of marriage without license or publication of bans.” And about the Vestry Act, he said, “We pray we may be relieved from the grievance of the Vestry Acts and acts requiring the supporting of episcopal clergy.” They asked in this petition that they be allowed, “to worship God according to their consciences without molestation.” And, just so their point to Governor Tryon was not lost, the petition also stated, “We would inform you that there are about 1,000 free men of us who hold to the established church of Scotland able to bear arms within the county of Mecklenburg.” And then at the very end, it says, “We shall ever be more ready to support the government under which we find the most liberty.” So, there it is. There’s about a thousand of us. We got guns, and we’re ready to support the government that gives us the most liberty. You got a chance, Tryon. Is that you or somebody else?
In April 1771, a group of young men from Craighead’s churches called themselves the Mecklenburg Black Boys because they dressed up as Indians, painted their faces black, destroyed a British ammunition wagon train. Some of these men from Craighead’s churches fought in the battle of Almanac near present-day Burlington on May 16, 1771, where Governor Tryon’s troops crushed the Colonial Regulators. This is part of North Carolina history. You could consider that the first battle of the Revolutionary War. True, it was not regulars from the British Army, but it was royal troops fighting against colonial insurgents four years before Lexington and Concord. Around the same time, early in 1771, two blocks down from that courthouse in Charlotte, Queens College was incorporated. Now, not the same Queens we know today, but same name for obvious reason. The Sugar Creek Academy was already educating boys and young men, and some of Charlotte’s leaders who had come from Princeton – we’ll meet some of them next week – desired to establish a college of their own, sort of off the model of the College of New Jersey, Princeton. This was the first attempt to establish a college in in North Carolina – Queens College in Charlotte. But despite the assurances of the governor, King George eventually refused the charter. That further outraged the Presbyterians. The king thought better to keep the people uneducated. The school operated anyway until it moved to another part of the state, and it closed in 1780. So, doesn’t count as the first official college. The charter for UNC Chapel Hill was approved in 1789, making that the first official college in the state and the oldest public university in the country. But here, Queens College, which folded – we tried. The Presbyterians here tried to make it the first. In May 1775, the rising swell of independence finally crashed onto the Charlotte courthouse with a declaration of independence from Mother England.
One Presbyterian, or rather one British officer said, “All Presbyterian churches are sedition shops.” Presbyterian pastors, which were mostly Scottish or Scots-Irish descent, were almost uniformly in favor of the revolution. One 19th century English historian concluded that throughout the revolted colonies, “All evidence shows that the foremost, the most irreconcilable, the most determined, and pushing the quarrel to the last extremity were the Scots-Irish, whom the bishops and Lord Donegal and company had been pleased to drive out of Ulster.” We were so glad to get rid of them. In 1775, still 70% of the residents of Mecklenburg County were parishioners in those seven churches that had been pastored by Craighead. He also served as a missionary minister to Unity Presbyterian Church near Beatties Ford, north of Charlotte, and then the Clear Creek out in Mint Hill – so about 70%. It stands to reason, then, that about 70% of the soldiers that went to the North Carolina militia were Irish, Scots-Irish, Presbyterians of those from Mecklenburg County. That 25% that came from here, surely 70% or more were from these churches. Take, for example, the men from the vast Alexander clan who fought in the war. Here’s just – get ready for some Alexanders. Colonel Abraham Alexander, Sugar Creek Church. Colonel Adam Alexander, Rocky River Church. First Lieutenant Hezekiah Alexander, his nice house, Hopewell Church. Isaac Alexander, Sugar Creek. Captain James Alexander, Steele Creek. Ensign John Alexander, Hopewell Church. Captain John McKnitt Alexander, Hopewell. Colonel Nathaniel Alexander, Sugar Creek. Captain Steven Alexander, Poplar Tent. Major Thomas Alexander, Sugar Creek. William Alexander Jr. and Sr., Sugar Creek. William Bain Alexander, that’s out by Mint Hill, you know the Bain Elementary, Hopewell Church. Captain William Lee Alexander, Rocky River Church. Lieutenant William S. Alexander, Rocky River Church. That’s just the Alexander clan that were officers and fought in the Revolutionary War, every single one of them belonging to one of these Presbyterian churches. It’s not for no reason that King George III called the Revolution at one point “a Presbyterian war.”
Now, why? That’s a whole other lecture, to think about why Presbyterians were almost uniformly for independence and leading the way in fighting against England, especially because they had come from the United Kingdom. I think there’s several reasons. One, I do think it is the liberty of conscience as a part of the Westminster Standards coming to fuller form and fruition, so a passion for the liberty of conscience. I think it’s a burgeoning flower of religious freedom. Certainly, mixed in with those high-minded principles was simple distrust of Anglicans and dislike of the English. And a people dispositionally inclined toward independence and not afraid to fight. So, you put all of that together – liberty of conscience, religious freedom, we don’t trust Anglicans, we don’t trust bishops, many of us Scots and Scots-Irish, we have long history of not liking the English, and we’re sort of a cantankerous lot at times – there you go. They were fiercest for independence. Horace Walpole, the Earl of Oxford and an MP remarked, “Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian parson,” which is a reference, very likely, to John Witherspoon. An agent for the colonial secretary wrote in 1776, “Presbyterianism is really at the bottom of the whole conspiracy, has supplied it with vigor, and will never rest till something is decided upon.” A captain in the Hessian army in 1778: “Call this war whatever name you may, only call it not an American rebellion. It is nothing more or less than a Scotch-Irish rebellion.” Cornwallis, here’s the one you know, famously commented on the stinging reception he received in Charlotte, his troops here, and said the town was “the hornets’ nest of America” – hence on the badges and the Charlotte Hornets, may they rest in peace. They’re on their way up. British Colonel Banastre Tarleton, who’s sort of – The Patriot movie, that bad British guy is sort of based on him – wrote, “It was evident, and it has been frequently mentioned to the king’s officers, that the counties of Mecklenburg and Rowan were more hostile to England than any other counties in America.” So, wear that as a badge of ignominy or honor.
So, in conclusion, we are certainly right to remember Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, Washington as the preeminent founding fathers, and we are right to think of the leading role that New England played in the effort. If you had to think about the two most important cities, surely Boston, Philadelphia are more important. They’re vastly bigger international cities – when you saw the picture of what a tiny little hamlet Charlotte, North Carolina was – and yet, certainly in a symbolic sense, and being ahead of even some Bostonians and Philadelphians, Charlotte deserves an important place alongside them. Here in Mecklenburg County were irascible, fearless, spirited, liberty-loving Calvinists. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the colonies would not have declared themselves independent as soon – we don’t want to say they never would have – they would have, but not as soon, and the soldiers would not have fought as fiercely or had the moral and spiritual resources to carry out such a bold undertaking were it not for the sort of people here in Charlotte. As the famed American historian from the 19th century George Bancroft wrote, “The first voice publicly raised in America to dissolve all connection with Great Britain came not from the Puritans of New England, nor the Dutch of New York, nor the planters of Virginia, but from Scotch-Irish Presbyterians.”
Kevin DeYoung is the senior pastor at Christ Covenant Church (PCA) in Matthews, North Carolina and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary.
