7944. SLAVERY, George III. and.—
He
[George III.] 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
dye, 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 upon 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 another. [455]
—
Declaration of Independence as Drawn by Jefferson.
