-the Habeas Corpus and Magna Charta.

But the English lawyers had decided that Parliament was
omnipotent--and Parliament, in its omnipotence, instead of trial
by jury and the Habeas Corpus, enacted admiralty courts in
England to try Americans for offences charged against them as
committed in America; instead of the privileges of Magna
Charta, nullified the charter itself of Massachusetts Bay; shut
up the port of Boston; sent armies and navies to keep the peace
and teach the colonies that John Hampden was a rebel and
Algernon Sidney a traitor.

English liberties had failed them. From the omnipotence of
Parliament the colonists appealed to the rights of man and the
omnipotence of the God of battles. Union! Union! was the
instinctive and simultaneous cry throughout the land. Their
Congress, assembled at Philadelphia, once--twice--had
petitioned the king; had remonstrated to Parliament; had
addressed the people of Britain, for the rights of Englishmen--
in vain. Fleets and armies, the blood of Lexington, and the
fires of Charlestown and Falmouth, had been the answer to
petition, remonstrance, and address....

The dissolution of allegiance to the British crown, the
severance of the colonies from the British Empire, and their
actual existence as independent States, were definitively
established in fact, by war and peace. The independence of
each separate State had never been declared of right. It never
existed in fact. Upon the principles of the Declaration of
Independence, the dissolution of the ties of allegiance, the