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:. Under the terms of the treaty, which ended the War of the American Revolution, Great Britain officially acknowledged the United States as a sovereign and independent nation.
Menu Menu. Home Milestones The Declaration of Independence, Milestones: — For more information, please see the full notice. The Declaration of Independence, By issuing the Declaration of Independence, adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, , the 13 American colonies severed their political connections to Great Britain. The Declaration of Independence.
This struggle erupted into violence in when British troops killed five colonists in the Boston Massacre. Three years later, outrage over the Tea Act of prompted colonists to board an East India Company ship in Boston Harbor and dump its cargo into the sea in the now-infamous Boston Tea Party.
In response, Britain cracked down further with the Coercive Acts, going so far as to revoke the colonial charter of Massachusetts and close the port of Boston. Then the first shots rang out between colonial and British forces at Lexington and Concord, and the Battle of Bunker Hill cost hundreds of American lives, along with 1, killed on the British side.
Some 20, troops under General George Washington faced off against a British garrison in the Boston Siege, which ended when the British evacuated in March Washington then moved his Continental Army to New York, where he assumed correctly that a major British invasion would soon take place. Its second meeting convened in Philadelphia in The delegates to Congress adopted strict rules of secrecy to protect the cause of American liberty and their own lives. In less than a year, most of the delegates abandoned hope of reconciliation with Britain.
Thomas Jefferson, who chaired the committee and had established himself as a bold and talented political writer, wrote the first draft. On June 11, , Jefferson holed up in his Philadelphia boarding house and began to write.
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