The Declaration of Independence accused the king and Parliament of Great Britain of "exciting domestic insurrections" among the half-million people enslaved in the American colonies. This was a reference to the November 1775 proclamation by Virginia's royal governor, Lord Dunmore, that he would free "all indentured servants, Negroes, or others, (appertaining to rebels)" who were "able and willing to bear arms" against the American revolutionaries.
Today's readers often consider it hypocritical that the Founders denounced Britain for offering black Americans the same freedom for which they were themselves fighting. Some of the revolutionary era's readers thought the same thing. In 1776, the London writer John Lind published a pamphlet responding line by line to the Declaration, and in it he ridiculed the patriots: "Is it for them to complain of the offer of freedom held out to these wretched beings? of the offer of reinstating them in that equality which, in this very paper, is declared to be the gift of God to all?"
