A few weeks ago we featured a post regarding this same issue: “Snapshot 1775 – North Carolina Declares itself Independent!” [1]
Tim Hughes penned the following related post which provides the backstory:
The Cape Fear Mercury, from Wilmington, North Carolina, has a “purported” issue dated June 3, 1775 [2]. As the following story informs, this would have to be one of the more interesting colonial newspapers we’ve offered, primarily for being a forgery.
This newspaper began publishing on Oct. 13, 1769, and was suspended for about five months from the fall of 1774 to the spring of 1775. It ceased publication in September, 1775.
As for the intrigue–and this is just a brief explanation–a 1905 article in Collier’s [3] magazine focuses on the existence of a June 3, 1775 issue of the Cape-Fear Mercury which contains on the front page the Mecklensburg Resolves [4], or a “declaration of independence” from North Carolina some 13 months before what was declared in Independence Hall. This was a hoax, believed to have been perpetrated by surviving document signers many years after the event, in an effort to show North Carolina was first in declaring independence from England. See much more online.
The following is taken from the well-respected “History & Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690-1820” by Clarence Brigham. We’ve not seen such text devoted to an avowed forgery as this one in his two-volume reference set, which only speaks to its significance:
“…What purported to be an issue of this paper of June 3, 1775 was exploited in Collier’s of July 1, 1905 by S. Millington Miller, who claimed that he owned the original. The reproduction printed in Collier’s shows only the heading and part of the first and second columns…The paper was immediately believed to be fraudulent & in the ‘American Historical Review’…A. S. Salley and Worthington C. Ford showed the paper to be a forgery with the heading based upon an original issue of Nov. 24, 1769 owned by the American Antiquarian Society. The same defects in type, and even fly-specks in the 1769 issue appear in the spurious 1775 heading.
Miller made up his issue by setting up three columns of new matter, which included the Mecklenburg Resolves…But in giving his issue the date of Friday, June 3, 1775, no. 294, he erred in not knowing that Friday fell on June 2, and that because of a hiatus in publishing, the number of such a paper would be no. 258; also that by June, 1775, the heading [masthead] had been altered and the cut of the royal arms omitted. Later Miller manufactured a better forgery than the one furnished to Collier’s and differing in set-up–for example, the top line of the second column in the first forgery read “ford.—Messirs. Abednego Ramsdell, Dan-“, and in the second forgery: “of Charlestown.—Isaac Gardner, Esq. of.”.
At least 3 copies of this second forgery are now located–in the American Antiquarian Society, the Clements Library at the University of of Michigan, and in the possession of Oliver R. Barreett of Chicago…All of the forgeries were printed on one side of the leaf only, differing from the usual method of printing regular issues of 18th century newspapers.”
This issue we offer is seemingly just the fourth “second forgery” known to exist, unless it is one of the three cited above. The backstory is interesting and attests to what extent some might go to insist upon the greater prominence of North Carolina in early American affairs than what is currently found in history books.