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They were subjects at the time...Old habits are hard to break. My old, Southern grandmother never, ever referred to my bike as a “bicycle”, or “bike”...she called it a “wheel”. When I rode over to her house, she would ask, “Did you come over her on your wheel?. Obviously a holdover from her childhood when people rode those big wheel bikes, and I think they did call them “wheels” then.

I take a completely different perspective on this. As this probably was the 1st draft, the subjects were writing their grievances to the King. But how can subjects who derived their rights from the King, not from God as inherent rights, justify such a course of action? With the smudging, which no doubt took place immediately because of the lightness of the wording underneath & the croosing off in all other places, it would be a more reasonable conclusion that Jefferson realized this grave error rather quickly & corrected it. We have to keep in mind that although the Brit Parliament came in & forced themselves on the colonist, from the beginning, the colonies were always considered separate from that of the Brit Parliament as they were afforded no representation in it. The owed loyalty to the crown, but not Parliaments laws. Each colony had its separate constitution well before the revolution & the laws differed in each state as did the whole of the citizenry of each colony (the ancestry of each colony established, i.e. Holland, Sweden, France, England etc). IOW, not all the colonies(less than half) were of British origin and thus their laws were derived from a completely different ancestry. To get a real grasp of the make up of the colonies, prior to and after the very short rule of the English Parliament (separate from the crown), you need to read ALL the appendixes to St George Tucker's Blackstone. Balckstone's Commentaries are NOT a place to look for original intent of the framers says St George Tucker.

“That neither the common law of England, nor the statutes of that kingdom, were, at any period antecedent to the revolution, the general and uniform law of the land in the British colonies, now constituting the United States.”

http://www.lonang.com/exlibris/tucker/index.html

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2539663/posts?page=83#83

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=lljc&fileName=024/lljc024.db&recNum=90&itemLink=D?hlaw:2:./temp/~ammem_DwR3::%230240091&linkText=1

“John Jay & Washington both were taught in French in grammar school as well as most of the framers that grew up in America. But especially Jay who’s heritage is Dutch and who’s ancestry can be traced back to those 1st Dutch settlements (New Netherlands). It is no coincidence that so much attention was given to the United Netherlands in the Federalist Papers because it was from that heritage that many of the framers had their ancestry in.”

http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa00.htm