Recalling the fact that in all previous remonstrances[682] and petitions, without a single exception, whether coming from a convention, an assembly, or a congress, the ministry and Parliament were made to bear the burden of all complaints and reproaches, we note with emphasis that in the Declaration of Independence, for the first time, "the present king of Great Britain" is charged as the offender. Its scathing invectives in its short sentences begin with "He." His tools and supporters are all lost sight of, passed unmentioned. This substitution of the monarch himself as chargeable, through his own persistency, with the whole burden heretofore laid at the door of his advisers indicates the necessity which Congress felt of seeming to sever their plain constitutional allegiance to the monarch, and of ignoring all dependence on his ministers or Parliament, whose supremacy over the colonies they had always denied. Hence the tone and wording of all the previous utterances of Congress, deferential and even fulsome as they now seem, in sparing the king, for the first time, in the Declaration, are changed to give the necessary legal emphasis of the capital letter in _He_. Indeed, the law and the man were essentially as one, for the candid monarch told John Adams, on his subsequent appearance as the minister of the United States, that he was the last person in his realm to consent to the independence of the colonies. The utter hopelessness of the measures of government was obvious to the wiser statesmen of Britain and to those whose observation was guided by simple common sense.[683]
A matter of sharp and reproachful criticism—which has not wholly disappeared from more recent pages of history and comment—was found in what certainly had the seeming of insincerity and duplicity in the earnest professions of loyalty made by leading patriots while the spirit of absolute independence, latent and but thinly veiled, was instigating measures of defiance, and even of open hostility. The patriots, it was boldly charged, had practised a mean hypocrisy. The shock of the disclosure was at the time sudden and severe. Joseph Galloway, though perhaps the most hostile and vengeful, was by no means the least able or the most estranged and disappointed of a class of very prominent men, who avowed that they had been alienated from the patriot cause by the exposed duplicity of its wiliest leaders. They had joined heart and hand in council and measures with those who professed to be seeking only a redress of grievances, with an unqualified loyalty as British subjects to the king and the constitution, and in a disavowal of any idea of independence.