DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.
A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of
America, in Congress Assembled.
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one
people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them
with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the
separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of
nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of
mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel
them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident--that all men are created
equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments
are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government
becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people
to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying
its foundations on such principles, and organizing its powers in
such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety
and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long
established should not be changed for light and transient causes;
and, accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more
disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right
themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing
invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under
absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw
off such government, and to provide new guards for their future
security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies,
and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their
former systems of government. The history of the present king of
Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations,
all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute
tyranny over these States. To prove this, let facts be submitted to
a candid world.
1. He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and
necessary for the public good.
2. He has forbidden his government to pass laws of immediate and
pressing importance, unless suspended in their operations till his
assent should be obtained; and, when so suspended, he has utterly
neglected to attend to them.
3. He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large
districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right
of representation in the Legislature--a right inestimable to them,
and formidable to tyrants only.
4. He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual,
uncomfortable, and distant from the repository of their public
records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance
with his measures.
5. He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing,
with manly firmness, his invasions on the rights of the people.
6. He has refused, for a long time after such dissolutions, to
cause others to be elected, whereby the legislative powers,
incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for
their exercise; the State remaining, in the meantime, exposed to
the dangers of invasions from without, and convulsions within.
7. He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States;
for that purpose obstructing the laws for the naturalization of
foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration
hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.
8. He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his
assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.
9. He has made judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of
their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
10. He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither
swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
11. He has kept among us in times of peace, standing armies,
without the consent of our Legislatures.
12. He has affected to render the military independent of, and
superior to, the civil power.
13. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction
foreign to our constitutions, and unacknowledged by our laws;
giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:--
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us;
For protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any
murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these States;
For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world;
For imposing taxes on us without our consent;
For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of a trial by
jury;
For transporting us beyond seas, to be tried for pretended offences;
For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring
province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and
enlarging its boundaries, so as to render it at once an example and
fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these
colonies;
For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws,
and altering, fundamentally, the forms of our governments;
For suspending our own Legislatures and declaring themselves
invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
14. He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his
protection and waging war against us.
15. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns
and destroyed the lives of our people.
16. 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.
17. 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.
18. He has excited domestic insurrection among 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 repeated 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 our attentions to our British brethren.
We have warned them, from time to time, of attempts 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 of 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 these united colonies are, and of right
ought to be, free and independent States; that they are absolved
from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all political
connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and
ought to be, totally dissolved, and that, as free and independent
States, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract
alliances, establish commerce, and do all other acts and things
which independent States may of right do. And for the support
of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of
Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our
fortunes, and our sacred honor.