IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
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 unalienable 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 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 shewn, 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.
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 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 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 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 harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies 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 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 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 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 Forms 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 compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & 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 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 attentions to our Brittish 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 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 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 Honor.
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The 56 signatures on the Declaration appear in the positions indicated:
Column 1
Georgia:
Button Gwinnett
Lyman Hall
George Walton
Column 2
North Carolina:
William Hooper
Joseph Hewes
John Penn
South Carolina:
Edward Rutledge
Thomas Heyward, Jr.
Thomas Lynch, Jr.
Arthur Middleton
Column 3
Massachusetts:
John Hancock
Maryland:
Samuel Chase
William Paca
Thomas Stone
Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia:
George Wythe
Richard Henry Lee
Thomas Jefferson
Benjamin Harrison
Thomas Nelson, Jr.
Francis Lightfoot Lee
Carter Braxton
Column 4
Pennsylvania:
Robert Morris
Benjamin Rush
Benjamin Franklin
John Morton
George Clymer
James Smith
George Taylor
James Wilson
George Ross
Delaware:
Caesar Rodney
George Read
Thomas McKean
Column 5
New York:
William Floyd
Philip Livingston
Francis Lewis
Lewis Morris
New Jersey:
Richard Stockton
John Witherspoon
Francis Hopkinson
John Hart
Abraham Clark
Column 6
New Hampshire:
Josiah Bartlett
William Whipple
Massachusetts:
Samuel Adams
John Adams
Robert Treat Paine
Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island:
Stephen Hopkins
William Ellery
Connecticut:
Roger Sherman
Samuel Huntington
William Williams
Oliver Wolcott
New Hampshire:
Matthew Thornton
Matthew Warner: Thank God for the HHS Mandate
Dan Burke: A Novena to the Mother of God for the United States
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Looks like a good idea.
Pax Christi,
Twice,the Holy Spirit led me to peruse this document.Particularly because all of this document except when referring to inciting riots as well as trying to control waters by search and seizure of cargo of ships.Not to mention forming British/native American alliances to terrorize colonizing settlers in the wilderness.Otherwise it is if the document was written between 2009-2012.Thank you for giving me this opportunity to convey my thoughts. This is very first time the gift of courage helped me to over come my fear. God bless all readers of this missive.May Our Lady of Victory shield you with her mantle always Please remember all you ask her, she will petition her Son Jesus,who can refuse her nothing,as long as her son knows what you ask is not what is best. satu, 15 year convert to orthodox Catholism
Thank you so much for publishing this. I can only imagine what it must have been like to be
in their shoes, 236 years ago.
This is excellent and worthy of study.
What a pity the Declaration of Independence has been so defiled by the Supreme Court. I don’t believe our founders intended the court to be entirely supreme. They did mention a God we trust. In defiance of that God the court decreed that over 56 Million unborn American citizens did not deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When we think of them,celebrating independence is a hollow and haunting tragedy. The latest decision in favor of an enemy of the state is strike two against the religious freedom that is no longer guaranteed by a socialist edict. On this day I mourn those who have given their lives to provide for the freedom we are about to lose. We can no longer ask God to bless America;we can only plead and throw ourselves on His mercy. Hopefully, our nation will be free again on our next independence day.
The normative assertions in this Declaration obviously throw up a lot of unwinding discussions whose end is inexorably indeterminate. Look at this: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. How did this statement stack up against the centuries of slavery and slave trade in which the United States formed the epicentre? And how did such statement stand up in the midst of racial segregation that was the lot of the ‘freed slaves’, that are today African Americans? Don’t give me this bumkum argument that Obama is African American and so no racial discrimination happens in the United States. Did John McCain, his opponent in the last presidential race, not refer to him as ‘that one’, in obvious derisive manner meant to convey the fact that an African American was aspiring to the highest office of the land? I am sure the Founding Fathers of America might not have included the negroes of the time in that declaration of equality of mankind. To leapfrog from this and to land in contemporary times, that Declaration was imported into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and grew up in the United Nations Charter 1945 in which the United States overly played a prominent role, an effect we now see in the United Nations. The American Declaration of Independence then went on to say that governments rule nations but citizens must exercise a right of changing their governments should the latter not respect the pursuit of happiness as enshrined in the American Declaration. Did the American fathers in the era of the 1940s when the United Nations Charter was being drafted not envisage that such powers on the citizens might not be ably exercised in the light of Article 2(7) of that UN Charter that precludes foreign intervention in the domestic affairs of another nation? Did the American fathers of this era not recognize that such citizens would be left in the lurch without foreign assistance to change despotic governments as are the cases in Africa, Asia and the Middle East? And where have these indiscretions placed the helpless citizens of the world? They are in the limbo of forgotten things where despotic leaders ride roughshod on their helpless citizens who are victims of horrible crimes perpetrated by these leaders. The bottomline to a criticism of the American Declaration of Independence is that the contents of this Declaration have found their ways to various international documents held in gestation by America and midwifed into fruition by the same America. Thus America has helped in creating mere paper tigers in those documents whose effects have created uncontrollable Frankenstein round the world. And not even America’s Super Power Status can control this monster we now see moving about with roaring flames looking for whom to destroy, especially in the developing countries. I think America should sit down with other members of the Big Five in the United Nations Security Council and some other influential nations to begin talks about retracing mankind’s steps in order to really fulfill the entrenched norms as found in the American Declaration of Independence; and to see how these norms could be effectively and truly applied to these unfortunate and beleaguered nations of the Third World. The citizens of these regions of the world are part of mankind and thus entitled to the enjoyment of all the rights mentioned in that American Declaration. And the enjoyment of these rights MUST apply regardless of sovereignty situations as is found in the UN Charter. When talks begin solutions will surely come; that is why we are members of the Homo sapiens erectus, imbibed with intelligence. The sovereignty issue could remain but MUST be removed completely when a nation is being plundered, destroyed and its citizens subjected to all forms of deprivations by irresponsible and inconsiderate leadership. At this point the comity of nations would step in to remedy the situation. This is the type of leadership role America, as a Super Power and the initiator of the said American Declaration of Independence, should play to save the entire mankind from destruction by a few cabal in power in various nations. If this is not done, then I take it that the said contents in the American Declaration of Independence are mere sham and double-speak.
Our rights come from our Creator. We establish governments to protect these rights.
Remember—you have nothing like a “First Amendment Right.” The Bill of Rights specifies restrictions on the government to make it clear what it may not do, e.g., “Congress shall pass no law ....”, and not “You shall have the right to ....”
Chi: We will never have peace so long as the United Nations exists. The Security Council was set up as a foil to allow Communism to prosper after every failed peace-keeping action. It is the Frankenstein monster of which you speak.
Check this out -
A “Plain English” version of the Declaration of Independence…
Enjoy!
http://opensourceamerica.typepad.com/1/2012/07/plain-english-declaration-of-independence.html
Cyrus
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