The press was an agent in the cause of liberty no less potent than the platform, and patriots such as Adams, Otis, Quincy, Warren, and Hancock wrote constantly, for the newspapers, essays and letters on the public questions of the time signed “Vindex,” “Hyperion,” “Independent,” “Brutus,” “Cassius,” and the like, and couched in language which to the taste of to-day seems rather over-rhetorical.  Among the most important of these political essays were the Circular Letter to each Colonial Legislature, published by Adams and Otis in 1768; Quincy’s Observations on the Boston Port Bill, 1774, and Otis’s Rights of the British Colonies, a pamphlet of one hundred and twenty pages, printed in 1764.  No collection of Otis’s writings has ever been made.  The life of Quincy, published by his son, preserves for posterity his journals and correspondence, his newspaper essays, and his speeches at the bar, taken from the Massachusetts law reports.

Among the political literature which is of perennial interest to the American people are such State documents as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the messages, inaugural addresses, and other writings of our early presidents.  Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, and the father of the Democratic party, was the author of the Declaration of Independence, whose opening sentences have become commonplaces in the memory of all readers.  One sentence in particular has been as a shibboleth, or war-cry, or declaration of faith among Democrats of all shades of opinion:  “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.”  Not so familiar to modern readers is the following, which an English historian of our literature calls “the most eloquent clause of that great document,” and “the most interesting suppressed passage in American literature.”  Jefferson was a Southerner, but even at that early day the South had grown sensitive on the subject of slavery, and Jefferson’s arraignment of King George for promoting the “peculiar institution” was left out from the final draft of the Declaration in deference to Southern members.

“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty, in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.  This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain.  Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative by suppressing every legislative attempt to restrain this execrable commerce.  And, that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms against us and purchase that liberty of which he deprived them by murdering the people upon whom he obtruded them, and thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people by crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”