pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and, when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. 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. He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures. He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing, with manly firmness, his invasions on the rights of the people. 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 all the danger of invasion from without, and convulsions within. He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose, obstructing the laws for neutralisation of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands. He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers. He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries. He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance. He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature. He has affected to render the military independent of, and superior to, the civil power. He has combined, with others, to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, 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 inhaoitants of these states: For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world: For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury: For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offences: For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighbouring 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 powers of our governments: 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, burnt 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 civilised 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 endeavoured 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 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 K 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 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 connexion 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 to 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 honour. THE COLONIAL TERRITORIES. The war between the colonies and the British government continued until the treaty of 1783. The bloody incidents of that struggle need not be discussed in this work; but we deem it proper to consider the political progress of the colonial governments tending towards the formation of the thirteen separate and distinct republicsand the American nation. The great republic came into existence after an arduous and long-sustained effort of combined wisdom, valour, and perseverance. Of the ac cessions of territory since made-which progressively have enlarged the elastic boundaries of the nation, to dimensions compared with which, the monarchical territories of The Europe are but as secondary provinces-we have referred, heretofore, in the order in which they successively occurred. We deem it necessary, however, to recapitulate, briefly, the extent of the territorial occupancy at the beginning of the war, and what it was on the signing of the treaty of peace in 1783. In 1775, the British possessions · embraced all the lands lying east of the Mississippi river, from its most northern source to its mouth, excepting the island of Orleans. All the territory west of the Mississippi belonged to Spain. The colonial charters and patents extended from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi-sometimes known as the South Sea-and the Ohio rivers, and to the lakes north and west of New York. territory lying west of the Ohio river was British; but it was not embraced within the thirteen colonial charters or patents. Of this immense domain, Massachusetts possessed, including Maine, 39,566 square miles; New Hampshire, 9,280; Vermont, with an area of 10,212 square miles, was a territory claimed by New Hampshire and New York; Rhode Island had 1,306 square miles; Connecticut, 4,674; New York, 47,000; New Jersey, 8,320; Pennsylvania, 46,000: total, in the seven states above mentioned, 166,358 square miles. Delaware, 2,120; Maryland, 11,184. Virginia included the district of Kentucky, and had an area of 99,032; North Carolina, 96,304; South Carolina, 29,885; and Georgia, extending to the Mississippi, or South Sea, had an area of about 159,878: total, in the six latter states, 389,403. Total area, before the war, was about 555,761 square miles. the war, in 1783, the territories of the At the close of states were as before given, excepting Virginia. This state, through its own independent western army, had conquered the northwest territory, being all the lands lying between the Mississippi and the Ohio rivers, and the lakes Erie, Huron, Michigan, Superior, and Lake of the Woods. This immense region enlarged the domain of Virginia to some 341,352 square miles-an aggregate more than double the domain of all the seven states north of Mason and Dixon's line; 50,981 square miles more than all the other states south of the line; and nearly the seventh of the whole territory of the United States. The total territory of the united colonies, relinquished by the king by the treaty of 1783, according to the foregoing, was about 798,081 square miles. The only state that had acquired additional domain was Virginia, which amounted to about 242,320 square miles. Such was the territorial area of the thirteen republics of 1783. Some of the northern states alleged claims to small sections of lands west of the Ohio; but their titles were but imaginary. POPULATION OF THE COLONIES, BEFORE AND after THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR. The population of the colonial territories at the commencement of the revolution, was about 2,450,000; of which, about 400,000 were slaves, and about 55,000 free negroes. At the close of the war, in 1783, the population was about 3,000,000; and, in 1790, when the first authentic census was taken, it was 3,929,827. This rapid increase was owing to the emigration from Europe, and the increased domestic affiliation between the sexes, after the disbanding |