Note 4 — Chapter CVI
Reading edition
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 restrain this execrable commerce; and, that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting the 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 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.—[Original draught of the Declaration of Independence, as drawn by Mr. Jefferson, and before it was altered by the committee.]