JOSJiril II EWES.
155
JOSEPH HEWES AND THE DECLARATION OF
INDEPENDENCE.
BY K. D. W. CONNOR, SECRETARY OP THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL
COMMISSION.
In his famous letter to John Adams, July 9, 1S19, repu¬
diating the “Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence,”
Thomas Jefferson paid his respects to the North Carolina
delegates in (he Continental Congress, declaring there was
“not a greater Tory in Congress than Hooper; that Hughes
[sic] was very wavering, sometimes firm, sometimes feeble,
according as the day was clear or cloudy”; and that their
line of conduct was very uncertain “until Penn came, who
fixed Hughes [sic], and the vote of the State.”1 When this
letter was made public, “Jo Scawell Jones,” as Dr. Aider-
man says, “choking with rage, rushed to the rescue in his
celebrated ‘Defence of North Carolina’ and with an uncom¬
mon mingling of invective, passion, partisanship, critical
power and insight, effectually disposed of his great antago¬
nist.”2 Jones, however, directed his defence to Hooper
alone, and although he shows the statement, in regard to him
to be a libel, yet the accompanying assertion characterizing
Hewes’s position on independence has been accepted even in
North Carolina, and by Hewes’s biographers, without dissent.
Hewes’s attitude toward independence, as depicted by Jef¬
ferson, is so entirely out of harmony with his whole course,
throughout the Revolution, and with the attitude toward
independence displayed in his official and personal corre¬
spondence, as at once to raise a question of the accuracy of
•Jefferson’s memory. Let us then examine his statement
critically, and ascertain, if possible, how much of truth there
'Works. Memorial Edition. XV, 200.
*Hfc of William Hooper, p. 37.