Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies, From the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 1 — John Shaqi
Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies, From the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 1Jefferson, Thomas
History
Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies, From the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 1
Jefferson, Thomas
United States -- Politics and government -- 1775-1783; United States -- Politics and government -- 1783-1865
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 amoungst us and has)
endeavored 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 [_of existence._]
[_He has incited treasonable insurrections of our fellow citizens, with
the allurements of forfeiture and confiscation of our property.
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
to 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 also 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 another._]
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 injuries.
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 [_who mean to be
free. Future ages will scarcely believe that the hardiness of one man
adventured, within the short compass of twelve years only, to lay
a foundation so broad and so undisguised for tyranny over a people
fostered and fixed in principles of freedom._]
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