once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same
absolute rule in these [states]; 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.

16. "He has abdicated government here [withdrawing his governors
and declaring us out of his allegiance and protection].

17. "He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our
towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

18. "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.

19. "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.

20. "He has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of the
frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of
warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and
conditions of [existence].

21. ["He has excited treasonable insurrection of our
fellow-citizens, with the allurements of forfeiture and
confiscation of our property.]

22. ["He has waged cruel war against human nature itself,
violating 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 prostituted his
negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or
restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of
horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, 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 on whom he has 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 anoth