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America’s First Constitutions and Declarations of Rights
ances; and their dutiful, humble, loyal, & reasonable petitions to the
crown for redress, have been repeatedly treated with contempt, by His
Majesty’s ministers of state:
The good people of the several Colonies of New-hampshire,
Massachusetts-bay, Rhode-island and Providence plantations, Connecticut, New-York, New-Jersey, Pennsylvania, Newcastle, Kent and Sussex on
Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North-Carolina, and South-Carolina, justly
alarmed at these arbitrary proceedings of parliament and administration,
have severally elected, constituted, and appointed deputies to meet, and
sit in general Congress, in the city of Philadelphia, in order to obtain such
establishment, as that their religion, laws, and liberties, may not be subverted:
Whereupon the deputies so appointed being now assembled, in a full
and free representation of these Colonies, taking into their most serious
consideration the best means of attaining the ends aforesaid, do in the
first place, as Englishmen their ancestors in like cases have usually done,
for asserting and vindicating their rights and liberties, declare,
That the inhabitants of the English Colonies in North America, by the
immutable laws of nature, the principles of the English constitution, and
the several charters or compacts, have the following Rights:
Resolved, N. C. D.
1. That they are entitled to life, liberty, and property, & they have never
ceded to any sovereign power whatever, a right to dispose of either without their consent.
2. That our ancestors, who first settled these colonies, were at the time
of their emigration from the mother country, entitled to all the rights, liberties, and immunities of free and natura