Creating the Declaration of Independence

Transcription: Page 3

for taking away our charters, abolishing our most important valuable laws [Dr. Franklin] & altering fundamentally the forms of our governments;
for suspending our own legislatures & declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever;

he has abdicated government here by declaring us out of his protection & urging war against us, [withdrawing his governors, & declaring us out of his allegiance & protection:]

he has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, & destroyed the lives of our people:

he is at this time transporting large armies of Scotch and other foreign mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation & tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation:

he has excited domestic insurrection amoungst us and has he has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, & conditions [of existence:]

[he has incited treasonable insurrections of our fellow-citizens, with the allurements of forfeiture & confiscation of our property:

he has constrained others, falling into his hands, taken captives on the high seas to bear arms against their country, & to destroy & be destroyed by their brethren whom they love, to become the executioners of their friends & brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold. he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another].

in every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only [Dr. Franklin] by repeated injuries. a prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people [who mean to be free. future ages will scarce believe that the hardiness of one man, adventured within the short compass of twelve years only, to lay build a foundation so broad & disguised for tyranny on so many acts of tyranny without a mask, over a people fostered & fixed in principles of liberty. freedom]

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