Texas Declaration of Independence
The people of Texas do now constitute a Free, Sovereign, and Independent Republic.
Texas Declaration of Independence
On March 1, 1836, forty-four delegates met in convention at the little hamlet of Washington (on the Brazos). The siege of the Alamo was entering its seventh day. It had been a cold winter, and a cold beginning to spring. While men in the Alamo huddled around fires and dodged cannon shot, the delegates who arrived in Washington faced their own difficulties. In a rented building that remained unfinished, the delegates convened in near freezing weather to take up a resolution of independency. If such a resolution was affirmed, the convention would then need to hammer out a Constitution for the newly formed Republic of Texas, as well as organize an ad interim government.
But nothing could be done until the issue of independence from Mexico was resolved.
The convention elected Richard Ellis president and Herbert Simms Kimble secretary. President Ellis then appointed a declaration committee, consisting of George C. Childress, James Gains, Edward Conrad, Collin McKinney, and Bailey Hardeman. Childress was named chairman. Undoubtedly because he had come to the convention with a written declaration in hand, which was adopted by the committee with few changes.
Based on the American Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, the Texas declaration is divided into three sections: a statement on the nature of government, a list of grievances against the Mexican government, and a formal declaration of independence. Among the stated grievances, the Texas declaration charged the government of Mexico with failing to protect the lives, liberty, and property of the people; that the form of government in Mexico had changed from a constitutional federal republic to a consolidated, central, military despotism; that citizens of Texas had remonstrated against the misdeeds of the Mexican government, in their Declaration of the People of Texas, only to have their agents thrown into dungeons and Mexican armies sent into Texas to enforce the decrees of the new government at the point of the bayonet; that the welfare of Texas had been sacrificed to its sister state of Coahuila; that the government of Mexico had failed to provide an adequate system of public education, trial by jury, freedom of religion, and other essentials of good government; and that Indians had been incited to massacre Texas settlers. The declaration went on to charge the Mexican government with invading Texas in order to lay waste her territories, and had commissioned a large mercenary army to carry on a war of extermination. The final grievance charged the Mexican government with “the contemptible sport and victim of successive military revolutions and hath continually exhibited every characteristic of a weak, corrupt, and tyrannical government.”
The Texas Declaration of Independence was adopted unanimously on March 2, 1836.
Delegates began signing the Declaration on the following day. Like the American Declaration, which was signed throughout the summer of 1776, as delegates came and went from Philadelphia, the Texas Declaration of Independence was signed through March 17, 1836, as additional delegates arrived in Washington to help write a constitution and form a government. The signatures herein are those who were present for the March 2 vote, however George C. Childress and Sterling C. Robertson were inadvertently left off the broadside copy above. Other signatories on the original hand drafted Declaration, who arrived after the printing of the broadside, include: John W. Moore, John W. Bower, Samuel A. Maverick, Sam P. Carson, A. Briscoe, and J. B. Woods.
UNANIMOUS DECLARATION of INDEPENDENCE by the DELEGATES of the PEOPLE of TEXAS, IN GENERAL CONVENTION At the TOWN of WASHINGTON, On the 2nd Day of March 1836
When a government has ceased to protect the lives, liberty and property of the people, from whom its legitimate powers are derived, and for the advancement of whose happiness it was instituted, and so far from being a guarantee for the enjoyment of those inestimable and inalienable rights, becomes an instrument in the hands of evil rulers for their oppression.
When the Federal Republican Constitution of their country, which they have sworn to support, no longer has a substantial existence, and the whole nature of their government has been forcibly changed, without their consent, from a restricted federative republic, composed of sovereign states, to a consolidated central military despotism, in which every interest is disregarded but that of the army and the priesthood, both the eternal enemies of civil liberty, the ever ready minions of power, and the usual instruments of tyrants.
When, long after the spirit of the constitution has departed, moderation is at length so far lost by those in power, that even the semblance of freedom is removed, and the forms themselves of the constitution discontinued, and so far from their petitions and remonstrances being regarded, the agents who bear them are thrown into dungeons, and mercenary armies sent forth to force a new government upon them at the point of the bayonet.
When, in consequence of such acts of malfeasance and abdication on the part of the government, anarchy prevails, and civil society is dissolved into its original elements. In such a crisis, the first law of nature, the right of self-preservation, the inherent and inalienable rights of the people to appeal to first principles, and take their political affairs into their own hands in extreme cases, enjoins it as a right towards themselves, and a sacred obligation to their posterity, to abolish such government, and create another in its stead, calculated to rescue them from impending dangers, and to secure their future welfare and happiness.
Nations, as well as individuals, are amenable for their acts to the public opinion of mankind. A statement of a part of our grievances is therefore submitted to an impartial world, in justification of the hazardous but unavoidable step now taken, of severing our political connection with the Mexican people, and assuming an independent attitude among the nations of the earth.
The Mexican government, by its colonization laws, invited and induced the Anglo-American population of Texas to colonize its wilderness under the pledged faith of a written constitution, that they should continue to enjoy that constitutional liberty and republican government to which they had been habituated in the land of their birth, the United States of America.
In this expectation they have been cruelly disappointed, inasmuch as the Mexican nation has acquiesced in the late changes made in the government by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who having overturned the constitution of his country, now offers us the cruel alternative, either to abandon our homes, acquired by so many privations, or submit to the most intolerable of all tyranny, the combined despotism of the sword and the priesthood.
It has sacrificed our welfare to the state of Coahuila, by which our interests have been continually depressed through a jealous and partial course of legislation, carried on at a far distant seat of government, by a hostile majority, in an unknown tongue, and this too, notwithstanding we have petitioned in the humblest terms for the establishment of a separate state government, and have, in accordance with the provisions of the national constitution, presented to the general Congress a republican constitution, which was, without just cause, contemptuously rejected.
It incarcerated in a dungeon, for a long time, one of our citizens, for no other cause but a zealous endeavor to procure the acceptance of our constitution, and the establishment of a state government.
It has failed and refused to secure, on a firm basis, the right of trial by jury, that palladium of civil liberty, and only safe guarantee for the life, liberty, and property of the citizen.
It has failed to establish any public system of education, although possessed of almost boundless resources, (the public domain,) and although it is an axiom in political science, that unless a people are educated and enlightened, it is idle to expect the continuance of civil liberty, or the capacity for self government.
It has suffered the military commandants, stationed among us, to exercise arbitrary acts of oppression and tyranny, thus trampling upon the most sacred rights of the citizens, and rendering the military superior to the civil power.
It has dissolved, by force of arms, the state Congress of Coahuila and Texas, and obliged our representatives to fly for their lives from the seat of government, thus depriving us of the fundamental political right of representation.
It has demanded the surrender of a number of our citizens, and ordered military detachments to seize and carry them into the Interior for trial, in contempt of the civil authorities, and in defiance of the laws and the constitution.
It has made piratical attacks upon our commerce, by commissioning foreign desperadoes, and authorizing them to seize our vessels, and convey the property of our citizens to far distant ports for confiscation.
It denies us the right of worshipping the Almighty according to the dictates of our own conscience, by the support of a national religion, calculated to promote the temporal interest of its human functionaries, rather than the glory of the true and living God.
It has demanded us to deliver up our arms, which are essential to our defence, the rightful property of freemen, and formidable only to tyrannical governments.
It has invaded our country both by sea and by land, with intent to lay waste our territory, and drive us from our homes; and has now a large mercenary army advancing, to carry on against us a war of extermination.
It has, through its emissaries, incited the merciless savage, with the tomahawk and scalping knife, to massacre the inhabitants of our defenseless frontiers.
It hath been, during the whole time of our connection with it, the contemptible sport and victim of successive military revolutions, and hath continually exhibited every characteristic of a weak, corrupt, and tyrannical government.
These, and other grievances, were patiently borne by the people of Texas, until they reached that point at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue. We then took up arms in defence of the national constitution. We appealed to our Mexican brethren for assistance. Our appeal has been made in vain. Though months have elapsed, no sympathetic response has yet been heard from the Interior.
We are, therefore, forced to the melancholy conclusion, that the Mexican people have acquiesced in the destruction of their liberty, and the substitution therefor of a military government; that they are unfit to be free, and incapable of self government.
The necessity of self-preservation, therefore, now decrees our eternal political separation.
We, therefore, the delegates with plenary powers of the people of Texas, in solemn convention assembled, appealing to a candid world for the necessities of our condition, do hereby resolve and declare, that our political connection with the Mexican nation has forever ended, and that the people of Texas do now constitute a FREE, SOVEREIGN, and INDEPENDENT REPUBLIC, and are fully invested with all the rights and attributes which properly belong to independent nations; and, conscious of the rectitude of our intentions, we fearlessly and confidently commit the issue to the decision of the Supreme arbiter of the destinies of nations.
RICHARD ELLIS, President
Austin—Charles B. Stewart | Thomas Barnett
Brazoria—James Collinsworth | Edwin Waller | Asa Brigham | John S. D. Byrom
Bexar—Francis Ruis | J. Antonio Navarro | Jesse B. Badgett
Colorado—Wm D. Lacy | William Menifee
Sabine—Jms. Gaines | Wm. Clark, Jr.
Gonzales—Jn. Fisher | Matthew Caldwell
Goliad—William Motley
Harrisburg—Lorenzo de Zavala
Jasper—Stephen H. Everett | George W. Smyth
Jackson—Elijah Stapp
Jefferson—Claiborne West | Wm. B. Scates
Liberty—M. B. Menard | A. B. Hardin
Matagorda—Bailey Hardeman
Mina—J. W. Bunton | Thos. J. Gazley | R. M. Coleman
Nacogdoches—Rob. Potter | Thomas Jefferson Rusk | Chas. S. Taylor | John S. Roberts
Red River—Robert Hamilton | Collin McKinney | Albert H. Latimer
San Augustine—Martin Parmer | Edwin O. Legrand | Stephen W. Blount
Shelby—Sydney O. Pennington | Wm. Carrol Crawford
Refugio—James Power | Sam Houston | David Thomas | Edwd. Conrad
San Patricio—Jno. Turner
Washington—Benj. Briggs Goodrich | G. W. Barnett | James G. Swisher | Jesse Grimes
H. S. KIMBLE, Secretary