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Charlotte: |
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The Jack family of five heroes changed colonial American history
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The one place in America to ask about Captain James Jack is Charlotte, North Carolina. In this city can be found walking historians who can tell with affection and accuracy the story about this Revolutionary personality who mounted his horse and carried the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence from Charlotte to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia 14 months before the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776.
But ask those same informed citizens who this fellow Captain Jack was, where he came from, who his family members were and whatever happened to him, and you may hit a stone wall.
Recent research reveals a wealth of information just coming to light.
One of the founding fathers of Charlotte was innkeeper Patrick Jack, born in 1750. He came from Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, to make a new life in the South. He and his four sons James, John, Samuel and Robert, joined the rebel army to fight heroically in the American Revolution, a war they helped win.
Lord Cornwallis marched with his troops into Charlotte September 26, 1780, to restore North Carolina to the British crown. By then Patrick Jack was aging and infirm. He still lived and worked at his place on the second block of West Trade Street that the British knew to be a patriot base. They made an example of Patrick Jack by removing him from his feather bed, piling him with his possessions on the street and burned the famed Patrick Jack’s Tavern to the ground. The family escaped into the nearby woods.
When Patrick died, he was buried in nearby Spratt Cemetery where Vail, Fourth and Caswell streets now meet. A century ago Mercy Hospital and its parking lot were built at that location. To make that happen, Spratt Cemetery had to be destroyed. The construction process trashed what was left of Patrick Jack.
Other founders of Charlotte today rest nobly in marked graves at Presbyterian church cemeteries across Mecklenburg County. But there is nothing, not so much as a small sign, at the site of Spratt Cemetery to remind the public of the Jack family and its significant part in the American revolution.
Small wonder that the Jack family rode away from their bittersweet North Carolina memories and moved to promising futures in Elbert County, Georgia, Jefferson County, Alabama, and San Felipe, Texas, where they made names for themselves.
What they left behind was the town they helped save and one amazing deed of Patrick Jack’s oldest son. It was Captain James Jack who made Revolutionary period history by carrying the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence and the May 31 Resolves from Charlotte, immediately after they were written and signed, to Philadelphia.
History was riding with this lone horseman. If he didn’t reach Philadelphia with the two documents in his saddle bag, he would never have met with two of North Carolina’s delegates to the Continental Congress, Richard Caswell and William Hooper. And the infant nation might not have known that patriots in the back-country town of Charlotte had defiantly drawn their own declaration of separation from the English Crown.
On his 584-mile ride north he stopped over in Salisbury, North Carolina. Elsewhere he looked for inns. Lacking that, he settled for sleeping on dry spots alongside the pioneer road.
Captain James Jack died in Elbert County, Georgia, January 18, 1823, at the age of 84. In his fighting days in North Carolina he spent 7,646 pounds sterling, or $38,000, in behalf of the Revolutionary cause—including his pay as an army officer.
Today just outside Washington, in the piedmont region of Georgia, is Smyrna Church. The small congregation is Methodist, but in Captain James Jack’s day it was Presbyterian. It was where the Jack family that had moved from Charlotte prayed. So did the prolific and influential Barnett family. Jean Jack, sister of James, married William Barnett. They had a daughter Charity. James Jack and his family appear in both the 1820 and 1830 (seven years after his death) Elbert County, Georgia, census reports.
Among the earliest graves in the Smyrna churchyard are those of James Barnett, his wife Jean Jack, sister of Captain James Jack, and their daughter Charity.
But Captain James Jack and his wife are not buried with these closest of relatives and friends. Instead they are on record as having been buried at Jack Plantation, an imposing spread of 628 acres (at least 200 of which were deemed “good land”) on Uptons Creek waters in Wilkes County, Georgia. Three deeds dated 1798 and 1801 mention a mansion house, gardens, kitchens and stables.
Uptons Creek is historically famous because that is where Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793 that forever changed the American economy and revived Southern slavery. It took Whitney only ten days to build the first cotton gin in Uptons Creek, five years before Jack Plantation came into being.
The Jack family name may have originated with Jacques de Molay, the last grand master of the Knights Templar who lived from 1244 to March 18, 1314, when he was burned at the stake in Paris. The Masonic youth institution, De Molay, was named for him. What is quite definite is that Guillaume Jacques married Jeanne Daniel in 1654 and died in 1713. Their children were Jacob, born in 1650, and Madelaine in 1655. An exact, unbroken Jack family connection has been charted from Guillaume Jacques, born in 1630 in Chesney, west France, to the Jack family in Charlotte, NC.
The family migrated to Ballykelly, Londonderry, Ireland, in the early 1700s and on to Wast Caln, Chester County, Pennsylvania, in the late 1700s.
The names Patrick Jack and James Jack recur through many generations of this family, in France, Ireland, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Texas.
Was Captain James Jack a Freemason? No hard evidence yet points to such affiliation. But several indications keep this question alive. In Colonial America, the place Masons chose to meet was inevitably a tavern. For example, the Boston Tea Party was composed largely of Masons who had just met at the Green Dragon Tavern. When Patrick Jack and his family lived in Charlotte, the community was known as a hotbed of Masons. The only tavern in town was Patrick Jack’s Tavern. When the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence was read at the courthouse, the signers and supporters were strongly Masonic. When Captain Jack arrived in Philadelphia carrying the most precious documents in Mecklenburg history, he met with North Carolina’s delegation, all of whom were known Masons. Why would Masons in Charlotte, faced with appointing an absolutely trustworthy man to carry priceless papers to Masons in Philadelphia, choose as their lone courier a patriot who was not a Mason?
Interestingly, on April 29, 2007, 220 Masons attended the annual Divine Service of the Provincial Grand Lodge in Uddingston Old Parish Church, Scotland. Reading the lesson was the Provincial Grand Master, Brother James Jack.
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Produced by the public relations committee of the Grand Lodge AF&AM of Masons in North Carolina,
2921 Glenwood Avenue, Raleigh, NC 27628 MMVIII
Author/editor: Walter J. Klein wklein(at)carolina.rr.com
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