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Primary source: First Continental Congress, Declaration and Resolves, October 14, 1774.
Caption: Representatives of twelve of the thirteen original colonies met in Philadelphia in September and October of 1774 to develop a common response to the Coercive (Intolerable) Acts.
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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 . . . 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: and they have never ceded to any foreign power whatever, a right to dispose of either without their consent.
Resolved
, N.C.D. 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 natural-born subjects, within the realm of England.
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Resolved
, 4. That the foundation of English liberty, and of all free government, is a right in the people to participate in their legislative council: and as the English colonists are not represented, and from their local and other circumstances, cannot properly be represented in the British parliament, they are entitled to a free and exclusive power of legislation in their several provincial legislatures . . .
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Resolved
, N.C.D. 5. That the respective colonies are entitled to the common law of England, and more especially to the great and inestimable privilege of being tried by their peers of the vicinage, according to the course of that law.
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In the course of our inquiry, we find many infringements and violations of the foregoing rights, which, from an ardent desire, that harmony and mutual intercourse of affection and interest may be restored, we pass over for the present, and proceed to state such acts and measures as have been adopted since the last war, which demonstrate a system formed to enslave America.
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First Continental Congress, Declaration and Resolves, October 14, 1774 (House Document 398), in Documents Illustrative of the Formation of the Union of the American States, ed. Charles C. Tansill (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1927), at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/resolves.htm.
Courtesy of The Avalon Project at Yale Law School.
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