3341. GAGE (General Thomas), Oppressor.—
General Gage, by proclamation
bearing date the 12th day of June, after reciting
the grossest falsehoods and calumnies
against the good people of these Colonies,
proceeds to declare them all, either by name
or description, to be rebels and traitors, to
supersede the exercise of the common law of
the said province [Massachusetts], and to
proclaim and order instead thereof the use
and exercise of the law martial. This
bloody edict issued, he has proceeded to commit
further ravages and murders in the same
province, burning the town of Charlestown,
attacking and killing great numbers of the
people residing or assembled therein; and is
now going on in an avowed course of murder
and devastation, taking every occasion to
destroy the lives and properties of the inhabitants.
To oppose his arms we also have
taken up arms. We should be wanting to
ourselves, we should be perfidious to posterity,
we should be unworthy that free ancestry
from which we derive our descent,
should we submit with folded arms to military
butchery and depredation, to gratify the
lordly ambition, or sate the avarice of a British
ministry. We do, then, most solemnly, before
God and the world declare that, regardless
of every consequence, at the risk of
every distress, the arms we have been compelled
to assume we will use with perseverance,
exerting to their utmost energies
all those powers which our Creator hath
given us, to preserve that liberty which he
committed to us in sacred deposit and to protect
from every hostile hand our lives and our
properties.—
Declaration on Taking up Arms.
Ford ed., i, 473.
(July. 1775)
