The alternate history “What if the British had kept America?” thread reminds me of Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson had a paragraph in which he condemned his fellow Englishmen:
Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. . . . [W]e appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, as well as to the ties of our common kindred to disavow [the English government’s] usurpations . . . . They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity, and when occasions have been given them, by the regular course of their laws, of removing from their councils the disturbers of our harmony, they have by their free election re-established them in power. . . .
He went on some more, and then had this line, which I’ve always found quite poignant:
We might have been a free and a great people together . . . .
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