down to the time of the Oxford Gazette, November, 1665, — the Monday issue, for example, having one title and the Thursday issue another . A second proof of its spuriousness is its date, Cromwell suppressed licensed periodicals in 1655; and still another evidence comes from its contents and phraseology .
The parts of the paper that are true can be traced to other papers that appeared much later, while the language used is not always that of the Cromwellian period .14 Altogether different in character and purpose was an un questionable forgery apparently executed “ to fill a long-felt want.” No contemporary newspaper giving an account of the Mechlenburg Declaration of Independence had been known,
and it had long been a desideratum , but what purported to be a facsimile of the Cape Fear Mercury bearing the date of June
3, 1775, and giving the Declaration was published in 1905. Itwas quickly pronounced a forgery that had been accomplished by making up a paper from a photograph of an original heading
of a Cape-Fear Mercury and at least two other distinct and separate pieces of paper put together and photographing the
whole. The forgery was clumsily executed , easily detected , and quickly exposed by two historical experts.15 These detailed illustrations are given to show how extremely
difficult it is to forge or to fabricate a newspaper so successfully that its spuriousness escapes the eye of the trained observer. In this very difficulty lies, in a measure, the protection of the historian. It is clear that in the case of the English Mercurie and probably in that of the Commonwealth Mercury the object
of the fabricators could only have been the love of a jest or the
desire to lay a harmless trap for unsuspecting readers. The recent war gave an opportunity for issuing newspapers that had been forged and were then circulated as propaganda. A facsimile of a local Italian newspaper, “ so adroitly done as to defy detection ,” was circulated among the Italian troops 14 This evidence is summarized from the article of J. B . Williams. 16 The photograph was first published in Collier's Weekly , July 1, 1905.
The forgery was exposed by A . S. Salley, Jr., in a pamphlet, The True Mechlenburg Declaration of Independence, and by A . S. Salley, Jr., and Worthington C . Ford in the American Historical Review , April, 1906 , 11:
