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.