IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776
The Unanimous Declaration of the 13 United States of America

When it becomes necessary in human affairs for one people to cut their political ties with another, a decent respect for world opinion requires them to set forth the reasons driving them to assume a separate and equal position in the global power system (a status which both natural and divine law entitles them to).

We hold these basic principles to be unquestionable:

1) All men are created equal;
2) Their Creator has invested them with certain inherent rights;
3) Among these rights are life, liberty, and the quest for fulfillment;
4) To secure those rights people establish governments, which derive their legitimacy from their acceptance by
those governed;
5) And whenever any government system works against those ends, it is the people's right to change it or
remove it, and then to institute a new government based on those principles and power arrangements
that appear most likely to ensure their comfort and security.

Of course, sound wisdom demands that long-established governments should not be changed for minor and passing reasons, and indeed history itself has long shown that people are more inclined to put up with wrongs while they are endurable rather than fix matters by overthrowing the systems they are accustomed to. But when there is a long series of abuses and violations, with the singular purpose of subjecting the people to dictatorship, it is both their right and duty to throw off such a government, and to install new guardians for their future security. Such describes the patient endurance of these colonies, and it also describes the necessity which compels them to alter their prior systems of government.

The record of the current King of Great Britain is an account of repeated injuries and violations, all having as their clear objective the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States. To demonstrate this, let facts be submitted in open evidence:

1) He has refused to give his consent to laws which are necessary and helpful to the public good.

2) He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance unless suspended in operation until his consent is obtained; and while they are suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

3) He has refused to pass other laws to normalize life for large areas full of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right of supreme value to them and a problem only for tyrants.

4) He has summoned legislative bodies at unusual and inconvenient places, and distant from public record repositories, just to fatigue them into compliance.

5) He has repeatedly dissolved Representative Houses for offering firm steadfast opposition to his violations of the people's rights.

6) He has refused for a long time after those dissolutions to authorize elections, and as a result the Legislative Powers (being incapable of being dissolved) have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the meantime exposed to all the risks of external invasion and internal disturbance.

7) He has attempted to inhibit the population growth of these States; for that purpose he has obstructed the existing naturalization laws for aliens and has refused to pass others which would encourage their immigration, and has also raised the burdens for the acquisition of land.
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8) He has obstructed the administration of justice by refusing his consent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

9) He has made judges dependent on his pleasure alone for their terms of office, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

10) He has established a huge number of new offices, and sent over here swarms of officials to harass our people and consume their wealth.

11) He has kept among us standing armies in peacetime, without the consent of our legislatures.

12) He has attempted to render the military independent of, and superior to, the civil power.

13) He has conspired with certain other parties to subject us to a rule of governance alien to our system and unacknowledged by our laws, and has given his assent to those others' purported acts of legislation which have authorized:

a) The quartering large bodies of armed troops among us, and a mock trial to protect them from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of our states

b) The cutting off of all our global trade

c) The imposition of taxes upon us without our consent:

d) The deprivation in many cases of the benefit of trial by jury

e) The transporting of our people overseas to be tried for false charges

f) The abolition of the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, and establishing an autocratic system there, and then enlarging that province's boundaries so as to render it simultaneously an example and an appropriate tool for introducing the same absolute rule into our own colonies

g) The taking away of colonial charters and the abolition of our most valuable laws; and fundamentally altering the forms of our governments

h) The suspension of our legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with the power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever

The King has abdicated his rule by declaring us out of his protection, and by waging war against us. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign military contractors to finish the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, works already begun under circumstances of cruelty and deception scarcely seen in the most barbaric times, and totally unworthy of the head of a civilized nation.

He has forced our fellow citizens who have been taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, so as to become the executioners of their friends and fellows or else to be themselves killed by their fellows' hands. He has incited rebellions among us, and has attempted to bring against us the inhabitants of our frontiers -- the merciless Indian savages -- whose well-known rules of engagement are indiscriminate killing of all, regardless of age, gender or status.

During each step of these oppressive acts, we petitioned for relief in the most humble terms. Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is so tainted by every type of act which defines a tyrant is unfit to be a ruler of a free people.

Nor have we failed to call these matters to the attention of our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of the attempts by their legislature to extend an unjustified level of authority over us. We have reminded them of the situations that caused our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have appealed to them by the ties of our common ancestry to disavow these violations which would inevitably disrupt our communications and relations. But they too have been deaf to the voice of justice and common ethnicity. Therefore, we must accept the necessity, despite objections or reservations, to regard them -- as we regard the rest of mankind -- as enemies in wartime and friends in peacetime.

THEREFORE, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rightfulness of our intent, we, the Representatives of the United States of America assembled in General Congress, in the name and by authority of the good people of these colonies, do solemnly declare and publish that these united colonies are, and as a matter of right ought to be:

1) Free and independent States, which are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and
2) All political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved; and
3) As free and independent States, they possess full power to wage war, conclude peace, contract alliances,
establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States by right may do.

With a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, and in support of this Declaration, we each pledge to each other our lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.

{JOHN HANCOCK etc.}