On this day, April 12, 1776, North Carolina’s Fourth Provincial Congress approves the Halifax Resolves. After the Patriot victory at Moores Creek Bridge, the Fourth North Carolina Provincial Congress met in Halifax, NC. Members unanimously adopted the Halifax Resolves on April 12, 1776. The Resolves were simply entered into the Congressional minutes, and as such, are not "signed" documents. After adoption, the secretary of the Congress, James Green, sent copies of the Resolves to the North Carolina delegation assembled with the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia for execution.The decision was about as close to declaring independence as the state could come without actually doing so.
The colonial assemblies desired self-governing status within the British Empire in early 1776. However, North Carolina was an exception. The Halifax Resolves ordered North Carolina's delegation to the second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, not only to form foreign alliances, but also to seek and vote for independence from Great Britain. This action made North Carolina the first of the colonial governments to call for total independence. As such, it became a factor leading to the writing of the Declaration of Independence, which was adopted on July 4, 1776.
North Carolina’s delegates to the Continental Congress were now authorized to vote for independence!
The state had changed its mind—drastically—in a relatively short period of time. Only seven short months earlier, the state’s Third Provincial Congress had approved a message to British citizens. That letter scorned the concept of independence:
“We have been told that independence is our object,” that Congress wrote, “that we seek to shake off all connection With the Parent State. Cruel suggestion! . . . We again declare, and we invoke that Almighty Being who searches the recesses, of the human heart, and knows our most secret intentions, that it is our most earnest wish and prayer to be restored, with the other United Colonies, to the state in which we and they were placed before the year 1763 . ."
That letter was written in September 1775. But matters moved quickly, and a battle was soon fought early in 1776. The Battle at Moore’s Creek Bridge has been called the “Lexington and Concord of the South.” The story concludes HERE: https://www.taraross.com/post/tdih-halifax-resolves
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