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, captivatng 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 for 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.]
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“We must therefore acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our [eternal] separation [Added: and hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends]!”
A very wise edit. (Do ya think ol’ Jefferson was a bit pissed when he wrote this? And it needed that “attitude” - but this was a wise addition indeed. And very true (England, Germany, and Japan come to mind).