CLASS SET

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON (Loyalist or Patriot)?

Volumes have been written on the subject of the struggle between England and America. Men of all ranks have embarked in the controversy from different motives, and with various designs; but all have been ineffectual, and the period of debate is closed. Arms as the last resource decide the contest; the appeal was the choice of the king, and the continent has accepted the challenge.

I have heard it asserted by some, that as America has flourished under the former connection with Great Britain, the same connection is necessary towards her future happiness, and will always have the same effect. Nothing can be more fallacious than this kind of argument. We may as well assert that because a child has thrived upon milk, that it is never to have meat, or that the first twenty years are to become a precedent for the next twenty.

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Alas! We have been long led away by ancient prejudices and made large sacrifices to superstition. We have boasted the protection of Great Britain without considering that her motive was interest, not attachment; and that she did not protect us from our enemies on our account, but from her enemies on her own account.

But Britain is the parent country, say some. Then more shame upon her conduct. Even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their families.

However strange it may appear to some, or however unwilling they may be to think so, matters not, but many strong ad striking reasons may be given to show that nothing can settle our affairs so expeditiously as an open and determined declaration of independence.

COMMON SENSE

-Thomas Paine 1776

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON (Loyalist or Patriot)?

I remember no laws which any Colony has been restrained from passing.

We shall find, my Lord, that Massachusetts Bay is more concerned in this Declaration than any other Colony. This article deals with that Colony alone. . . No Governor ever refused to consent to a law for making a new town . . . if provision was made that the inhabitants of the new town should continue to join with the old, or with any other town contiguous or near to it, in the choice of Representatives; so that there never was the least intention to deprive a single inhabitant of the right of being represented . . . This is a willful misrepresentation made for the sake of the brutal insult at the close of the article.

He has kept no armies among them without the consent of the Supreme Legislature [Parliament]. It is begging the question to suppose that this authority was not sufficient without the aid of their own Legislatures. When troops were employed in America in the last reign to protect the Colonies against the French invasion [French and Indian War], it was necessary to provide against mutiny and desertion and to secure proper quarters [housing]. Temporary Acts of Parliament were passed for that purpose and submitted to in the Colonies.

They have, my Lord, in their late address to the people of Great Britain, fully avowed these principles of Independence by declaring they will pay no obedience to the laws of the Supreme Legislature. They were under necessity of a separation, and of involving themselves, and all over whom they had usurped authority, in the distresses and horrors of war against that power from which they revolted.

“A List of Imaginary Grievances”-A Rebuttal to the D.O.I.

-Thomas Hutchinson (Governor of Massachusetts) 1776