The Unanimous Declaration of Independence made by the Delegate 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 everready 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 tyrrany, 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 tyrranical government.

These, and other grievances, were patiently borne by the people of Texas, untill 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 therfor 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.

[Signed:]
Richard Ellis, President of the Convention and Delegate from Red River.
H. S. Kimble, Secretary

Signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence -alphabetical listingJesse B. Badgett
G. W. Barnett
Tho. Barnett
Stephen W. Blount
John W. Bower
Asa Brigham
A. Briscoe
J. W. Burton
John S. D. Byrom
Matthew Caldwell
Sam P. Carson
Geo. C. Childress
Jms. Gaines Wm. Clark, Jr.
R. M. Coleman
James Collingsworth
Edwd. Conrad
Wm. Carrol Crawford
Richard Ellis
Stephen H. Everett
Jn. Fisher
S. Rhoads Fisher
Thos. J. Gazley
Benj. Briggs Goodrich
Jesse Grimes
Robert Hamilton
Bailey Hardeman
A. B. Hardin
Sam Houston
H. S. Kimble
Wm D. Lacy
Albert H. Latimer
Edwin O. Legrand
Saml. A. Maverick
Collin McKinney
M. B. Menard
William Menifee
John W. Moore
William Motley
J. Antonio Navarro
Martin Palmer
Sydney O. Pennington
Rob. Potter
James Power
John S. Roberts
Sterling C. Robertson
Francis Ruis
Thomas Jefferson Rusk
Wm. B. Scates
George W. Smyth
Elijah Stapp
Charles B. Stewart
James G. Swisher
Chas. S. Taylor
David Thomas
Jno. Turner
Edwin Waller
Claiborne West
J. B. Woods
Lorenzo de Zavala

Dear friends of liberty,

Two hundred thirty-seven years ago today, a group of men from all the colonies scattered across the eastern North American seaboard gathered in Philadelphia and considered their position. They sought the most self-evident things: basic liberties and self-governance. The tools they had at hand were a few militias, mostly of yeoman farmers, and the power of their convictions. Arrayed against them were the forces of a powerful monarchy, the world's most potent fleet, an experienced professional army, and a globe-spanning empire with possessions on every single continent. 

The Americans didn't have a chance. But they did have a prayer. And so, with the "Appeal to Heaven" for their rights and liberties, they cast the die in the only way their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor would allow: They declared independence.

The Declaration of July 4th, 1776, was not the fulfillment of the American nation's aspirations for law-governed liberty. It was the beginning of a long and fraught process—not only of Revolutionary War, but of revolutionary society that definitively overturned the old order of unearned privilege, hereditary aristocracy, and arbitrary rule. The story of that transformation into a nation "of the people, by the people, for the people," as Lincoln said at Gettysburg, is the story of America itself, written on the hearts and histories of our ancestors from Valley Forge to the Underground Railroad to the Arsenal of Democracy to the Tea Parties and beyond. Whenever a patriot left his farm to fight General Gage's soldiers … whenever a pioneer scoured prairie ground with its first plow … whenever an explorer sighted new land in the distant West … whenever a slave yearned for freedom, or a freedman set himself to productive labor for his own sake … whenever a woman left home for the munitions factories that would beat the Axis … and whenever an immigrant set foot on our shores with nothing but a dream and the liberty to achieve it … that story continued.

The story is unfinished. We live it today. And to us falls the task, as it fell to our forefathers, of securing the ideals of the Declaration anew with every generation. "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction," said Reagan, and he was right—but that also means it is always one generation away from fulfillment. The Declaration of Independence we celebrate again and again with every year retains its enduring quality because of that simple truth. And we are reminded even in Texas, now, that we may never slacken in our devotion to seeing it sustained. The alternative—the replacement of republican democracy with the democracy of the mob—is too terrible to contemplate.

This is the 237th anniversary of American independence. On the 150th anniversary, President Calvin Coolidge reminded the Americans of his era to always remember its central importance in our life and prosperity: 

"[T]he Declaration of Independence … is the product of the spiritual insight of the people. We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp."

It is an admonition worth recalling today. Our rights and dignities as men and women are the gift of our Creator, or "Nature's God" as the Founders wrote: but our privileges and blessings as Americans flow from the font of that Declaration of Independence signed 237 years ago. The men who put their names to that rebellion for liberty risked their lives and honor to see its promise made whole. They would give no less, and they could give no more. 

And we today, in Texas and beyond, owe them the same full measure of devotion to that same cause. Happy Fourth of July.

Yours in American liberty,
Brooke L. Rollins, President & CEO