North Carolina's flag is a lesson in how a state edits its own story. The design has carried two dates since 1861, but not the same two. The first pair commemorated a revolution and a secession; the second pair, substituted in 1885, commemorates two revolutions and no secession at all. The bones of the flag survived the change: a single star in a vertical union at the hoist, two bars trailing behind it. What changed was the argument the flag makes, and one of the dates it still carries is an event most historians believe never happened.
A flag for leaving the Union
North Carolina was a reluctant Confederate. It voted down a secession convention in February 1861 and left the Union only on May 20, 1861, after Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call for troops made neutrality impossible. The secession convention promptly took up the question of a state flag, since North Carolina had never had one, and formed a committee to procure a design. The committee consulted William Garl Browne, an English-born portrait painter who had opened a studio in Raleigh the year before, and the convention approved his model on June 22, 1861.
Browne's flag had a red union at the hoist bearing a white star, with a blue bar and a white bar in the fly. Two dates arched around the star. Above it: May 20, 1775, the Mecklenburg Declaration. Below it: May 20, 1861, secession day, chosen deliberately to echo the first date, eighty-six years apart to the day. The message was that leaving the United States was the same act as leaving Britain, performed by the same people on the same date. North Carolina regiments carried the flag through the Civil War, and surviving examples are among the state's most treasured relics.
The 1885 rewrite
Twenty years after Appomattox, the flag was a problem. It was the banner of a failed rebellion, stamped with the date of secession. In 1885 Johnstone Jones, a former Confederate officer who had served as the state's adjutant general, introduced a bill to revise it, and the General Assembly ratified the new design on March 9, 1885.
The revision kept the structure and changed the meaning. The union turned from red to blue, and the bars in the fly became red over white, bringing the flag's palette in line with the national colors. The star stayed, now flanked by gilt letters, N to its left and C to its right. And the bottom scroll got a new date: April 12, 1776, the Halifax Resolves, replacing May 20, 1861. Secession was quietly deleted from the flag. In its place went the moment North Carolina's Provincial Congress, meeting at Halifax, authorized its delegates in Philadelphia to concur in declaring independence, the first colony to give that authorization. The flag now claims two firsts in the American Revolution and says nothing about the Confederacy, though the design's Civil War ancestry is plain to anyone who knows the 1861 original.
The date that probably didn't happen
The upper scroll is the awkward one. The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence holds that on May 20, 1775, a meeting of citizens in Charlotte declared Mecklenburg County "free and independent" of Britain, over a year before the Continental Congress got around to it. The story rests on reconstructions published in 1819, more than four decades later, assembled from participants' memories after the original papers had supposedly burned. No contemporary copy of the declaration has ever surfaced.
What does survive from 1775 is a set of documents called the Mecklenburg Resolves, dated May 31, which suspended royal authority in the county but stopped short of declaring independence. Most historians conclude the "declaration" of May 20 is a misremembered version of the Resolves, improved in the retelling. North Carolina has never accepted the demotion. The date is on the flag and the state seal, May 20 was long observed as a state holiday, and "First in Freedom" appears on the state's license plates. The flag, in other words, carries one date historians affirm and one they doubt, and the state flies both without embarrassment.
The flag since 1885
The design has now outlived its Confederate predecessor by more than a century, essentially unchanged. The one modern adjustment came on June 24, 1991, when the General Assembly revised the statute's proportions, making the flag's length one and a half times its width; the 1885 law had specified a stubbier ratio, and the change brought the official geometry in line with how the flag was actually being made. The statute still specifies the details with nineteenth-century precision, down to the gilt letters and the semicircular arrangement of the scrolls.
As state flags go it is a middling performer with vexillologists, better than the seal-on-blue crowd because its star, letters, and bars survive at a distance, marked down for the dates, which are unreadable on a pole and inexplicable without a history lesson. Within the state it is ubiquitous and uncontroversial, flown from courthouses, schools, and front porches. Few of the people flying it could say what happened on April 12, 1776, and fewer still know that the other date is contested. The flag has outlasted the argument.
References
[1] "State Flag of North Carolina," NCpedia, North Carolina Government & Heritage Library. https://www.ncpedia.org/symbols/flag
[2] "Browne (Brown), William Garl, Jr.," NCpedia biography. https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/browne-brown-william-garl
[3] North Carolina General Statutes, Chapter 144, Section 144-1 (state flag), as amended 1991 (c. 361, s. 1).
[4] "Flag of North Carolina," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_North_Carolina
[5] "Flag of North Carolina," Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/flag-of-North-Carolina