Introduction

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 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.

 

 

Premeable

 

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their creators with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

 

To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. 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 overnment laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. Indeed, Prudence 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 right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. When a long train of abuses and usurpations pursues invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right and duty to throw off such government and provide new guards for their future security.

 

Indictment

 

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; 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 of 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 senthither 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 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 benefit 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 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 endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers.

 

Denunciation

 

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 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. Therefore, we must acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, peace, and friends.

 

Conclusion

 

Therefore, in general Congress, we representatives of the United States of America 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 our right ought to be free and independent states; 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, and establish commerce to do all other acts and things that independent states may have done. For the support of this declaration with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.

Signatures