Historic Charlotte

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President Woodrow Wilson visited Charlotte
on May 20, 1916 to mark the anniversary
of the signing of the Mecklenburg
Declaration of Independence. Annual
observances still take place every May 20th
to commemorate the “Meck Dec,” despite
the fact no copies of it have yet been found.
COURTESY OF CAROLINA ROOM, PUBLIC LIBRARY
OF CHARLOTTE AND MECKLENBURG COUNTY.
Carolina at Charlotte, a disbeliever, knows
what it is like to be a skeptic. “This is very,
very serious to a lot of people here,” he
declared. “When they figure out who I am,
they’re just not nice.”
There is no controversy concerning
Mecklenburg County’s role in the American
Revolutionary War. In 1780-1781 British and
Tory troops invaded the Carolina hinterland
and brought the war literally to Charlotte’s
doorstep. Tories were settlers who supported
the king. After Charleston, South Carolina had
fallen to the British on May 12, 1780, Charles
Cornwallis, the newly-appointed commander
of the British army in the South, was instructed
to take his troops inland and provide protection
for the backers of the King. Among his
subordinate officers was Banastre Tarleton, a
highly aggressive commander of cavalry.
Any realistic expectations that the Patriots
or Whigs could stop Cornwallis appeared to
end on August 16th in the pine forests outside
Camden, South Carolina, where Cornwallis
and Tarleton overwhelmed General Horatio
Gates’s force in a bloody frontal assault. The
people of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County
faced an ominous threat in the late summer
and early fall of 1780. Local folks recognized
that a powerful occupying force was about to
come into their midst.
Cornwallis and his 2,300 men marched out
of Camden on September 8, 1780. The initial
British objective in North Carolina was
Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, where
numerous gristmills along its fast-flowing
creeks would allow Cornwallis to replenish his
supplies before proceeding on to Salisbury and
eventually to Hillsborough. Opposing him was
General William Lee Davidson, commander of
the patriot militia in western North Carolina.
A 35-year-old former Indian fighter, Davidson
was determined to slow down the British
advance. He dispatched William R. Davie and
a small force of mounted militiamen into the
Waxhaws to torment the redcoats. Davie, a
South Carolinian, did just that. At daylight on
September 20th, he led his men on a daring
strike at Wahab’s Plantation in what is now
Union County. The British army, however,
moved inexorably toward Charlotte.
Cornwallis reached Charlotte on September
26, 1780. Davidson had ordered Davie’s militia,
assisted by local irregular troops commanded
by Joseph Graham, to fight a delaying action.
Outnumbered about ten to one, Davie’s small
force of about 300 men looked southward
down Tryon Street from the courthouse, then
located in the middle of Charlotte, and waited
for Cornwallis’s redoubtable army to appear.
According to Davie, Charlotte was a town containing
“about twenty Houses built on two
streets which cross each other at right angles in
the intersection of which stands the Court-
House.” Graham described the structure as “a
frame building raised on eight brick pillars ten
feet from the ground, which was the most elevated
in the place.” A rock wall some three and
a half feet high extended between the pillars so
that the local residents could use the ground
beneath the courthouse as a marketplace.
HISTORIC CHARLOTTE
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