We your Majesty’s most loyal, dutiful, and affectionate subjects, the house of Assembly of this our Majesty’s colony of North-Carolina, now met in General Assembly, beg leave, in the most humble, manner, to assure your Majesty, that your faithful subjects of this colony ever distinguished by their loyal and firm attachment to your Majesty and your Royal ancestors, are from countenancing traitors, treason or misprison of treason, and ready at any time to sacrifice our lives and fortunes in defence of your Majesty’s sacred person and government.

It is with the deepest concern, and most heartfelt grief, that your Majesty’s most dutiful subjects of this colony find, that their loyalty has been traduced, and that those measures, which a just regard for the British constitution, (dearer to them than life) made necessary duties, have been misrepresented as rebellious attacks upon your Majesty’s government.

When we consider that by the established laws and constitution of this colony, the most ample provision is made for apprehending and punishing all those who shall dare to engage in any treasonable practices against your Majesty, or disturb the tranquility of governments we cannot, without horror, think of the new unusual, and permit us, with all humility, to add, unconstitutional and illegal mode, recommend to your Majesty, of seizing and carrying beyond sea, the inhabitants of America, suspected of any crime, and of trying such persons, in any other manner than by the ancient and long established course of proceeding; for how truly deplorable must be the case of a wretch American, who, having incurred the displeasure of any one in power, is dragged from his native home, and this dearest domestics connections, thrown into a prison, not to await his trial before a court, jury or judges, from knowledge of whom he is encouraged to hope for speedy justice, but to exchange his imprisonment in his own country for fetters among strangers; conveyed to a distant land, where no friend, no relation, will alleviate his distresses, or minister to his necessities, and where no witness can be found to testify his innocence, shunned by the reputable and honest, and consigned to the society and converse of the wretched and abandoned, he can only pray that he may soon end his misery with his life.

Truly alarmed at the fatal tendency of these pernicious councils, and with hearts filled with anguish, by such dangerous invasions of our dearest privileges, we presume to prostrate ourselves at the foot of your [Royal Throne, Beseeching] your Majesty, as our king and father, to avert from your faithful and loyal subjects in America, those miseries which must necessarily be the consequence of such measures.

After expressing our firm confidence in your royal wisdom and goodness, permit us to assure your Majesty, that the most fervent prayers of your people of this colony, are daily addressed to the Almighty, that your Majesty’s reign may be long and prosperous ever Great-Britain, and all your dominions; and that after death, your Majesty may taste the fullest fruition of eternal bliss, that a descendent of your illustrious house may reign over the British empire until time shall be no more.