Paragraph 21. "He has excited treasonable insurrection," etc. Compare Common Sense, page 61, as follows: "The tories dared not have assembled offensively, had they known that their lives, by that act, were forfeited to the laws of the State. A line of distinction should be drawn between English soldiers taken in battle and inhabitants of America taken in arms: the first are prisoners, but the latter traitors—the one forfeits his liberty, the other his head."
The above paragraph and the following one, it will be remembered, were stricken out by Congress.
I now come to the closing paragraph of this part of the indictment, and, as it is the most important of all, the author kept it for a climax, and he throws his whole soul into it. I will transcribe it here:
Paragraph 22. "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 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; 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."
The capital words in the above are his own. Let us begin with the last sentence, and go backward. The substance of the last sentence is, that by exciting the negroes to rise on the people of this continent, the king was guilty of a double crime, both against the liberties of the negroes and the lives of the American people. Compare Common Sense, page 47, as follows: "He hath stirred up the Indians and negroes to destroy us; the cruelty hath a double guilt—it is dealing brutally by us and treacherously by them." This is the same complex idea, well reasoned out, and expressed almost in the same language—certainly in the same style. But Jefferson "never consulted a single book," so original was the Declaration to his own mind and habits of thought!
Let us now take the sentence: "This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain." The antithesis above between infidel and Christian, falls upon the mind with such stunning weight; with such boldness of religious sentiment; with such emphasis in expression, and with such withering sarcasm toward the king, that it becomes an epitome of Mr. Paine himself, and a concise record of his whole life, up to that period. The reader can not fail here to see the pen of Junius, and to recall the great power of antithesis in all his Letters. This peculiarity of style is absolutely wanting in Jefferson.
The first sentence in the paragraph, is in every phrase so like Mr. Paine, the reader must think it superfluous to comment upon it. The expressions, "cruel war," "against human nature," "sacred rights," "life and liberty," "in the persons of," and especially "prostituted," are all to be found in Common Sense and Junius. For the phrase "in the persons of," see it repeated three times on page 22 of Common Sense.
Thus ends the indictment. It is Article I, of Mr. Paine's Manifesto, heretofore pointed out. I now proceed with Article II of the Manifesto, which he states to be "the peaceful methods which we have ineffectually used for redress." See Common Sense, p. 56. It is as follows:
Paragraph 23. "In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned in the most humble terms; our repeated petitions have been answered by repeated injuries." Compare Common Sense, pp. 39-40, as follows: "Every quiet method for peace hath been ineffectual. Our prayers hath been rejected with disdain, and only tended to convince us that nothing flatters vanity or confirms obstinacy in kings more than in repeated petitioning."
Paragraph 24. "A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a people who mean to be free. Future ages will scarcely believe, that the hardiness of one man, adventured within the short compass of twelve years only, to lay a foundation so broad and so undisguised for tyranny over a people fostered and fixed in principles of freedom."