The original first draft of the Declaration of Independence in which Jefferson argues, among other things, that George III
“has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & 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 & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce:[11] and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against theliberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”
Other crucial documents of the era of the Revolution and Early Republic:
Thomas Paine’s collected works
John Locke’s 2nd Treatise on Government
The Federalist Papers (there are 85 of them, though number 10 is one of the most famous)
American Civilization 