rters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and
altering fundamentally the forms of our government:

For suspending our own legislatures, and 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,
and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and
destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries, to
complete the works of death, desolation, and 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 constrained our fellow-citizens, taken captive on the high seas,
to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their
friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and 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, and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in
the most humble terms; our petitions have been answered only by repeated
injury. 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.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have
warned them, from time to time, of attempts made by their legislature to
extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of
the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have
appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured
them, by the ties of our common kindred, to disavow these usurpations,
which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence.
They, too, have been deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity. We
must therefore acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our
separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in
war--in peace, friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in
General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world
for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the
authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and
declare that the