001You want me to go out? >> Hello everybody. We're here at Mark Beverly for our 249th anniversary reading of the Declaration of Independence. >> Good evening and welcome to Independence Park. I'm Abby Battis, the director of Historic Beverly, and I want to take a moment to welcome our readers and distinguished guests and all gathered for this informal reading of the Declaration of Independence. We are here tonight to launch our commemoration of the Revolutionary Year with a communal reading of the Declaration. While the 250th anniversary of that historic reading will be celebrated in full next year, we're beginning early to honor Beverly's vital role in the American Revolution. As many of you know, Beverly's maritime legacy includes the first naval engagement of the war between the American schoona schooner, the Hannah, and the British ship Nautilus,
002which took place here just offshore. This park marks another significant moment in our local and national history. It is on July 17th at 6:00 p.m. that Colonel John Glover read the Declaration of Independence aloud on this very site just two weeks after its adoption by the Continental Congress. Among those present were Beverly residents and members of the 14th Continental Regiment stationed here to defend the port. Tonight, we honor their memory and reaffirm the enduring principles of freedom, liberty, and equality for all. Now, I'll start the reading of the Declaration of Independence. in Congress July 4th, 1776, the unanimous declaration of the 13 United States of America, when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the
003powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature Nature and of nature's God entitle them. A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. that whenever any form of government government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such
004form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. Prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be charge changed for light and transient causes. And accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to write themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same object invinces a design to reduce them under absolute despatism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufference of these colonies, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present king of Great
005Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurppations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. He has refused his ascent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance unless suspended in their operation till his ascent should be obtained. And when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislator in a legislature. A right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only. He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the
006depository of their public records for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures. He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people. He has refused for a long time after such dissolutions to cause others to be elected whereby the legislative powers incapable of annihilation have returned to the people at large for their exercise. the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without and convulsions within. He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands. He has obstructed the administration of justice by refusing his ascent to laws for establishing
007judiciary powers. He has made judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of their offices and the amount and payment of their salaries. He has erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance. He has kept among us in times of peace standing armies without the consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unagnowledged by our laws, giving his ascent to their acts of pretended legislation. for quartering large bodies of armed troops among us. For protecting them by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states.
008For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world. For imposing taxes on us without our consent. For depriving us in many cases of the benefits of trial by jury. for transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses, for abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these colonies. for taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments. For spending our own for suspending our own legislatures and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever. He has abdicated government here by declaring us out of his protection and waging
009war against us. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coast, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of people. He is at this time transporting large armories of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolution, and tyranny already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perity. Scarcely paralleled in the most barbberous ages and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation. He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country to become the executioners of their friends and brethren or to fall themselves by their hands. He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions. In every state of these
010oppressions, we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms. Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. Nor we have nor have we been wanting in detentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our immigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnuminity. And we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurppations which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguity. We
011must therefore acquies in the necessity which denounces our separation and hold them as we hold the rest of mankind enemies in war in peace. Friends, >> we therefore the representatives of the United States of America in general Congress assembled appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions do in the name and by authority of the good people of these colonies solemnly publish and declare that these United Colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved, and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and
012to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we m mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. [Applause] Thank you all so very much for coming out tonight to do this reading. Um, more poignant than ever on this very day. So, thank you all so much for attending, for everybody tuning in. Thank you so much again. This is Historic Beverly's reading of the Declaration of Independence. And I will see everybody next year, same time, same date for the same thing at a much bigger scale. 250 years. Let's do it. [Applause] Are they going to read the constitution?