NUMBER V. Copy of the letter written by Thomas Jefferson to Richard Henry Lee, Esq. enclosing the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, as first reported. The passages omitted by Congress are printed in Italics, and the substitutions are given at the bottom of each page. PHILADELPHIA, July 8th, 1776. DEAR SIR-For news, I refer you to your brother, who writes on that head. I enclose you a copy of the Declaration of Independence, as agreed to by the House, and also as originally framed you will judge whether it is the better or worse for the critics. I shall return to Virginia after the 11th of August. I wish my successor may be certain to come before that time in that case, I shall hope to see you, and not Wythe, in convention, that the business of government, which is of everlasting concern, may receive your aid. Adieu, and believe me to be, Your friend and servant, THOMAS JEFFERSON. A Declaration by the Representatives of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in general 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 inherent and 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 when d * Certain unalienable rights. ever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation 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, begun at a distinguished period, and 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 expunge* their former systems of government. The history of the present king of Great Britain, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpations; among which appears no solitary fact to contradict the uniform tenour of the rest; but all have‡, in direct object, the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world; for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood. He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has neglected utterlys 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 and continually, 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, * Alter. † Repeated. + Having. • Utterly neglected. incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise, the state remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within. He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither; and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands. He has suffered the administration of justice totally to cease in some of these states, refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers. He has made our 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 by a self-assumed power, 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 and ships of war, without the consent of our legislatures. 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 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 any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants. of these states; for For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world; 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 states; For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our government; For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring them * He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing. selves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever. He has abdicated government here, withdrawing his governors, and declaring us out of his allegiance and 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, unworthy the head of a civilized nation. * He 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 of existence; he has excited treasonable insurrections of our fellow citizens with the allurements of forfeiture and confiscation of our property. He has constrained others, † taken captives 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 waged cruel war against human nature itself, vio. lating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people, who never offended him, captivating and 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 and sold, he has prosti tuted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, 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 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 by repeated injury. A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define а tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a people who mean to be Scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally. free.* Future ages will scarce believe that the hardiness of one man adventured within the short compass of twelve years only, to build a foundation, so broad and undisguised, for tyranny over a people, fostered and fixed in principles of freedom. Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them, from time to time, of attempts by their legislature to extend af jurisdiction over these our states. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here; no one of which could warrant so strange a pretension: that these were effected at the expense of our own blood and treasure, unassisted by the wealth or the strength of Great Britain: that in constituting indeed our several forms of government, we had adopted one common king, thereby laying a foundation for perpetual league and amity with them; but that submission to their Parliament was no part of our constitution, nor ever in idea, if history may be credited: and we appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, as well as to the|| ties of our common kindred, to disavow these usurpations, which were likely to interrupt our connexion and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice, and of consanguinity; and when occasions have been given them, by the regular course of their laws, of removing from their councils the disturbers of our harmony, they have, by their free election, re-established them in power. At this very time too, they are permitting their chief magistrate to send over not only soldiers of our common blood, but [Scotch and] foreign mercenaries to invade and destroy us. These facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection; and manly spirit bids us to renounce for ever these unfeeling brethren. We must endeavour to forget our former love for them; 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 might have been a free and a great people together; but a communication of grandeur and of freedom, it seems, is below their dignity. Be it so, since they will have it. The road to happiness and to glory is open to us too; we will climb it apart from them, and acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our eternal separation! We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America in general Congress assembled, appealing to the * Of a free people. † An unwarrantable. + Us. § Have. |