Texas Almanac, 1945-1946 Page: 83
[610] p. : ill. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this book.
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TEXAS DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. Ed
the early part of 1860. In 1859, he and 100
of his men had taken possession of Browns-
ville for a short time, terrorizing the citizens
and killing three Americans. Texas Rangers
invaded Mexican soil and put the Cortinas
army to flight.
During Civil War.
During the Civil War, the Ranger organiza-
tion was neglected. Many members and for-
mer members of this frontier fighting outfit
enlisted in Terry's Texas Rangers, which
made an admirable record in the Confederate
Army. In the Reconstruction period, the
Rangers were reorganized as the state police
during the administration of Gov. E. J. Davis,
and were used to enforce carpetbagger laws,
many of which were unpopular with Texas
citizens. The state police was abandoned
with the overthrow of the Reconstruction
government.
In 1874, the state police body was succeeded
by two organizations of Rangers. One, known
as the Special Force of Rangers, put down
banditry on the Rio Grande. A larger body,
officially called for some time the Frontier
Battalion, was made up of mobile companies
used wherever needed. Indian raiders in
Northwest Texas, cattle thieves on the Rio
Grande and train robbers operating out of
Denton County kept these Rangers especially
busy during the remainder of the decade.
In 1877, the Rangers restored order in the
westernmost part of Texas after the El Paso
Salt War-resulting from a dispute over the
removal of salt from salt lakes near the
Guadalupe Mountains-had led to the killing
of a number of citizens. One of the most
celebrated exploits of the Rangers came
Texas Declaration of In
The Declaration of Independence of the
Republic of Texas was adopted by the dele-
gates of the people of Texas, in general con-
vention at the town of Washington-on-the-
Brazos, March 2, 1836. (See p. 59.) The
text follows, with the names of the signers
at the end of the text:
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 their inesti-
mable and inalienable rights, becomes an in-
strument 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 sub-
stantial existence, and the whole nature of
their government has been forcibly changed
without their consent, from a restricted Fed.
erative Republic, composed of sovereign
states, to a consolidated central military des-
potism, 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 in-
struments of tyrants; when, long after the
spirit of the Constitution has departed, mod-
eration 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 re-
garded, 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 conse-
quence of such acts of malfeasance and abdi-
cation 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 right of the peo- *
pie to appeal to first principles, and take
their political affairs into their own hands
in extreme cases, enjoins it as a right towardthe following year, with the killing of Sam
Bass and several members of his train robber
band at Round Rock.
After Passing of Frontier.
In the following decade, the Rangers con-
tinued to catch cattle thieves and also oper-
ated against fence cutters, in the conflict be-
tween cattlemen and farmers.
By this time, the frontier had almost dis-
appeared, and the activities of the Rangers
were directed not so much against Indians
and Mexfcans as against outlaws of their own
race. This gradual change made the service
distasteful to many who had fought coura-
geously on the frontier. It also tended to
lessen the popularity of the Rangers, espe-
cially since more and more of the counties
were organized and many sheriffs resented
the invasion of their territory by outside-
and sometimes uninvited-forces. Following
World War I, use of the Rangers to enforce
liquor prohibition also made the organization
less popular in some quarters.
Following World War I, the Ranger force
was allowed to dwindle and often was tam-
ered with by politics. In 1935, however, the
angers were reorganized and, with the State
Highway Patrol, were placed under a new
Department of Public Safety. Provision was
made for the adoption of modern methods of
detecting crime.
The Texas Rangers today comprise one
division of the State Department of Public
Safety. The Texas Rangers are charged with
the enforcement of laws governing major
crimes, riots and insurrections, while the
Highway Patrol, another division of the de-
partment, has as its primary function the
enforcement of traffic and safety laws.
dependence--Signers
themselves, and a sacred obligation to their
posterity, to abolish such government, and
create another in its stead, calculated to res-
cue them from impending dangers, and to
secure their future welfare and happiness.
Nations, as well as individuals, are amen-
able for their acts to the public opinion of
mankind. A statement of a part of our griev-
ances 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 coloniza-
tion laws, invited and Induced the Anglo-
American population of Texas to colonize its
wilderness, under the pledged faith of a writ-
ten Constitution, that they should continue to
enjoy that constitutional liberty and republi-
can 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. inas-
much as the Mexican Nation has acquiesced
in the late changes made in the government
by Gdn. 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 intol-
erable of all tyranny, the combined despotism
of the sword and the priesthood.
It hath sacrificed our welfare to the State
of Coahulla, 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 Con-
gress, a Republican Constitution, which was,
without just cause, contemptuously rejected.
It incarcerated in a dungeon, for a long
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Texas Almanac, 1945-1946, book, 1945; Dallas, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth117166/m1/85/: accessed April 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.