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Texas Declaration of Independence, 1836
© 2013 The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
www.gilderlehrman.org
impending dangers, and to secure their 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 Santa
Ana, who having overturned the constitution of his country, now offers, as 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 hath 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 a just cause,
contemptuously rejected.
It incarcerated in a dungeon, for a long time, one of our citizens, for no other cause but a
zealous endeavour 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