Identify and analyze three or four major events or ideas you believe prompted the British colonists of North America to declare their independence from Britain
Read the following prompt and write a coherent response: Use the following two primary source excerpts to identify and analyze three or four major events or ideas you believe prompted the British colonists of North America to declare their independence from Britain. In other words, what causes the War of Independence? You must include the two excerpts provided below in your arguments. The inclusion of the excerpts can be brief and it is up to you how to wish to utilize their respective importance.
(1) Thomas Paine Common Sense (1776) “… but how a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest, and distinguished like some new species, is worth inquiring into… in the early ages of the world… there were no kings, the consequence of which there were no wars… One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary rights of kings, is that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion… of the many material injuries which these colonies sustain, and always will sustain, by being connected with and dependent on Great Britain. To examine the connection and dependence on the principles of nature and common sense… We may as well assert that because a child has thrived upon milk, it is never to have meat, or that the first twenty years of our lives is to become precedent for the next twenty. But Britain is the parent country, say some. Then the more shame upon the conduct. Even brutes do not devour their young… Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America. This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted… of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe.”
(2) The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America (1776) … 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 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 form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, 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 sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.
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