[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 3]
[House]
[Pages 3243-3244]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                   TEXAS DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Texas (Mr. Olson) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. OLSON. Mr. Speaker:
  ``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 those whose happiness it was instituted, and 
so far from being a guarantee for the enjoyment of those . . . 
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 . . . both the 
internal enemies of civil liberty, the everready minions of power, and 
the usual instruments of tyrants.''
  ``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.''
  ``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 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 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.
  ``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 had been 
made in vain. . . .
  ``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.''
  181 years ago, the Republic of Texas was born. God bless Texas.

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