History of Texas, Together with a Biographical History of Milam, Williamson, Bastrop, Travis, Lee and Burleson Counties. Page: 61

61

tI STORY OF TEXAS.

Anglo-American population of Texas to
colonize its wilderness, under the pledged
faith of a written constitution, 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 disap.
pointed, 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
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 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, the palladium
of civil liberty and the 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 domains), 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 comnmandants
stationed among us to exercise arbitrary acts
of oppression and tyranny, thus trampling
upon the most sacred rights of the citizen
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 front
the seat of government, thus depriving us ot
the fundamental political right of representation.

It has demanded the surrender of a number
of our citizens, and ordered military detach
ments to seize and carry them into the interior
for trial, in contempt of the civil authorities
and in defiance of the law and the constitution.

It has made piratical attacks on our commerce
by commissioning foreign desperadoes
and authorizing them to seize their vessels,
and convey the property of our citizens to far
distant parts for confiscation.
It denies us the right of worshiping the
Almighty according to the dictates of our own
conscience, by the support of a national religion
calculated to promote the temporal interests
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 defense, the rightful
property of freemen, and formidable only
to tyrannical governments.
It has invaded our country both by sea and
by land, with the intent to lay waste our
territory and drive us from our homes, and
has now a large and 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 inabitants of
our defenseless frontiers.
It has been, during the whole time of our
connection with it, the contemptible sport
and victim of successive military revolutions,
and has continually exhibited every characteristic
of a weak, corrupt and tyrannical government.