He forbade governors to enact laws of immediate and urgent importance unless the application was suspended until their assent was obtained, and once suspended, he ceased to pay them any attention.
He refused to enact other laws for the welfare of large people's districts unless they abandoned the right of representation in the legislature, an invaluable right for them and fearful only of tyrants.
He summoned the legislative bodies to unusual places, without comfort and distant from the places where the public archives were, with the sole aim of pulling them out, through fatigue, the assent to the measures that would suit him.
He dissolved Houses of Representatives repeatedly because they opposed with firm mastery of the invasions of the rights of the people.
He refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; by virtue of which the legislative powers incapable of annihilation returned to the general people to exercise them; during which time the State was exposed to all the dangers of external invasion or internal convulsion.
It sought to prevent the settlement of these states, thereby obstructing the naturalization laws of foreigners, refusing to promulgate others that would encourage migration here and complicate the conditions for new land appropriations.
It hindered the administration of justice by refusing to consent to laws establishing judicial powers.
He made the judges dependent only on his will to enjoy the office and the value and payment of the respective salaries.
He created a multitude of new offices and for them sent swarms of officials to persecute the people and devour us the substance. He kept among us, in time of peace, permanent armies without the consent of our legislative bodies.
He tried to make the military independent of and superior to the civil power. He combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution and not recognized by our laws, giving assent to their acts of pretended legislation:
to house large bodies of troops between us;
to protect them by means of simulated judgments, of punishment for assassinations that they would commit against the inhabitants of these states;
to cease our trade with all parts of the world;
for levying taxes without our consent;
by depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by the jury;
for transporting us by sea for trial for alleged offenses;
to abolish the system free of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing an arbitrary government and extending its limits, so as to make it immediately an example and an appropriate instrument for the introduction of the same absolute domain in these colonies;
by taking away our letters, abolishing our most valuable laws and fundamentally altering the form of our government;
for suspending our legislative bodies, declaring itself invested with the power to legislate for us in all cases.
He abdicated the government here by declaring us out of his protection and making us war.
He has plundered our seas, devastated our coasts, burned down our cities, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is now carrying large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the work of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun in circumstances of cruelty and treachery seldom equaled in the most barbarous and totally unworthy ages of the head of a civilized nation.
He obliged our fellow prisoners on the high seas to take up arms against their own country, so that they might become the tormentors of their friends and brothers or that they might fall into their hands.
It provoked internal insurrections among us and sought to bring against the inhabitants of the frontiers the savage and ruthless Indians, whose known rule of war is destruction without distinction of age, sex, and conditions. At every stage of these oppressions we ask for reparation in the humblest terms; responded to our petitions only with repeated aggravation. A prince whose character is marked in this way by all acts capable of defining a tyrant is not in a position to govern a free people. Nor have we failed to catch the attention of our British brethren. From time to time, we warned them of their attempts by the Legislature to extend an unsustainable jurisdiction over us. We remind them of the circumstances of our migration and establishment here. We appeal to natural justice and magnanimity, and we urge them, by the bonds of our common kinship, to repudiate these usurpations that would inevitably interrupt our connections and our correspondence. They also remained deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity. We must therefore accept the need to denounce our separation and consider them, as we consider the rest of men, enemies in war and friends in peace.
