As part of our celebration of America at 250, we’ve started a weekly newsletter by historian Jonathan Horn. Learn what happened this week in American history, why it matters, and what else you should see and read in The Free Press and beyond. This week Jonathan looks at the 250th anniversary of the Halifax Resolves. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors
For anyone who has ever experienced the embarrassment of sharing a news story and finding out only afterward that it was too good to be true, here’s some solace: John Adams could relate. In June 1819, he forwarded to fellow ex-president Thomas Jefferson a newspaper article claiming that Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, had declared independence from Great Britain on May 20, 1775, in terms strikingly similar to the ones Jefferson would use the next year when drafting the Declaration of Independence. Bitter that Jefferson had gotten “all the glory” for a document that Adams denigrated as a “theatrical show,” the New Englander relished evidence that the Virginian had stolen some of his most vaunted phrases, including “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor,” from the Carolina backwoods.
