"On November 5, 1773, an alarm was raised in the City of New York to the effect that a tea-ship had entered the harbor. A large assembly of people at once occurred, among whom those in charge of the movement were disguised as Mohawk Indians. This alarm proved a false one, but at a meeting then organized a series of resolutions was adopted which was received by the other colonies as the initiative in the plan of resistance already determined upon throughout the country. Our schoolbooks are chiefly responsible for the almost universal impression that the destruction of tea, which occurred in Boston Harbor, was an episode confined to that city, while the fact is that the tea sent to this country was either {440} destroyed or sent back to England from every seaport in the colonies. The first tea-ship happened to arrive in Boston and the first tea was destroyed there; for this circumstance due credit should be given the Bostonians. But the fact that the actors in this affair were disguised as Mohawk Indians shows that they were but following the lead of New York, where this particular disguise had been adopted forty-one days before, for the same purpose." Just as the Boston Massacre has been insistently pointed out as the first blood shed for American liberty, so the Battle of Lexington has been drilled into our school children's minds as the first organized armed resistance to the British. Without wishing at all to detract from the glory of those who fought at Lexington, there is every reason not to let the youth of this country grow up with the notion that Massachusetts was the first to put itself formally under arms against the mother country. Lexington was not fought until April 19, 1775. The battle of Alamance, N. C., which occurred on May 16, 1771, deserves much more to be considered as the first organized resistance to British oppression. The North Carolina Regulators rather than the New England Minute Men should have the honor of priority as the first armed defenders of their rights against encroachment. The subject is all the more interesting because the British leader who tried to ride rough-shod over stout Americans in North Carolina and met {441} with open opposition was the infamous General Tryon of subsequent Connecticut fame. Every one knows of his pernicious activity in Connecticut, very few that he had been previously active in North Carolina. That is the difference between history as "it has been written" for New England and the South. That the Battle of Alamance was no mere chance engagement, and that the North Carolinians were aflame with the real spirit that finally gave freedom to the colonies, can be best realized from the fact that the first Declaration of Independence was made at Mecklenberg in North Carolina, and that some of its sentiments, and even perhaps its phrases, were adopted in the subsequent formal Declaration of Independence of all the colonies.