and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same State with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President, and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and of all persons voted for as Vice-President, and of the number of votes for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate;-the President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates, and the votes shall then be counted;-the person having the greatest number of votes for President shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and, if no person have such majority, then, from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by States, the representation from each State having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the States, and a majority of all the States shall be necessary to a choice. And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following, then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in the case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President. The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice-President shall be the VicePresident, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and, if no person have a majority, then, from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice. But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President, shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States. ARTICLE XIII. SECTION I. Slavery prohibited.-Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. SECTION II. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. ARTICLE XIV. SECTION I. Citizens and their rights.-All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States, and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. SECTION II. Adjustment of representation to the elective franchise.-Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of Electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive or judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State. SECTION III. Disabling conditions.-No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or Elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State Legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress, by a vote of two-thirds of each house, may remove such disability. SECTION IV. Treatment of public debts.-The validity of the public debt of the United States, including debts incurred for the payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States, nor any State, shall assume, or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations, and claims, shall be held illegal and void. SECTION V. Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. ARTICLE XV. SECTION I. Right to vote secured. The right of the citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or by any State, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. SECTION II. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776. The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America. 1. 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 powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of 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. 2. We hold these truths to be self-evident-that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable 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 abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundations on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect 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 shown 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. The history of the present king of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, 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. 3. He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. 4. He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing im portance, unless suspended in their operations till his assent should be obtained; and, when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. 5. 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 Legislature a right inestimable to them, and formidable to tyrants only. 6. He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the repository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures. 7. He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing, with manly firmness, his invasions on the rights of the people. 8. 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 invasions from without, and convulsions within. 9. He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the laws for the naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands. 10. He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers. 11. He has made judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries. 12. He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance. 13. He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our Legislatures. 14. He has affected to render the military independent of, and superior to, the civil power. 15. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitutions, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation: 16. For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us; 17. For protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these States; 18. For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world; 19. For imposing taxes on us without our consent; 20. For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefit of trial by jury; 21. For transporting us beyond seas, to be tried for pretended offences; 22. 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; 23. For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering, fundamentally, the forms of our governments; 24. For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever; 25. He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection, and waging war against us. 26. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. 27. He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries, to complete the work of death, desolation, and tyranny already begun, with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation. 28. 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. 29. He has excited domestic insurrection among 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. 30. In every stage of these oppressions 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. We 31. Nor have we been wanting in our attentions to our British brethren. 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 emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them, by the ties of a common kindred, to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They, too, have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our separation, and hold them as we hold the rest of mankind-enemies in war-in peace, friends. 32. 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 the 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 do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do. And for the support of |