The Ideological Origins of the Texas Revolution

Abstract

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• The Ideological Origins of the Texas Revolution
• Stefan Roel Reyes (bio)

During the convention of 1836, delegates adopted the Texas Declaration of Independence. It justified independence by accusing the Mexican government of having failed “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.” Later in the document, the writers reiterated the association between property and liberty by arguing that trial by jury was the “guarantee” of the right to “life, liberty, and property of the citizen.”¹ Such statements almost echo the American Revolution’s declaration, which espoused the rights to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”² In fact, Thomas Jefferson had originally considered property among the inalienable rights. While historians debate whether Jefferson substituted happiness to signify a life of virtue or to reflect his uneasiness with slavery in the euphemism of property, Texans held no such qualms.³ Why this difference between the American and Texas Declarations of Independence? Did Texans see property in slavery as a prerequisite for the pursuit of happiness as well as other liberties?

It is difficult to take Texas revolutionaries’ language of freedom and rights seriously when they also believed in racism and slavery. Modern historians dismiss Texas revolutionaries’ arguments as a propagandistic narrative. Indeed, scholarly skepticism toward such rhetoric is well justified. Since the nineteenth century, Texas historians and writers have attempted to cleanse Texas history of the stain of slavery, often by emphasizing American exceptionalism—that is, by casting the Texas [End Page 479] Revolution as an heir to supposedly irresistible American ideas of universal human liberation. In 1855, Henderson K. Yoakum published one of the earliest accounts of the Texas Revolution. Although Yoakum refers to slavery a few times, the account is dominated by a narrative of affinity between Texan and American values.⁴ Eugene C. Barker built on this perspective that the Texas Revolution was the offspring of the American Revolution. Barker’s work recognizes that the issue of slavery called into question the sincerity of Texan ideals. Nonetheless, he argues that the Mexican government’s attempt to enforce laws on a culturally different people was the impetus for the Texas Revolution, drawing parallels to Britain’s attempts to bring the American colonies under control. Barker suggests that Texas settlers were too American to blend successfully into Mexican society.⁵ Amelia Worthington Williams was a historian, a student of Eugene Barker’s, and an active member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group that perpetuated the idea that the American Civil War was not fought over slavery. Williams’s 1931 dissertation reflects Barker’s depiction of a tyrannical Mexican government and Texans’ cultural differences as the main drivers of the Texas Revolution.⁶

Should historians take Texas revolutionaries’ arguments at face value? After all, to explore seriously the language of the revolutionaries has traditionally served to sanitize Texas history. Barker’s and Williams’s mythologization of Texas history has left its mark on the historiography. Some historians, such as Phillip Thomas Tucker, have reacted to older literature. In his examination of American volunteers in the Texas Revolution, Tucker concludes that allusions and references to the American Revolution were simply rhetorical.⁷ Other historians, such as Sam W. Haynes, have walked a tightrope between older and newer sentiments. Haynes analyzes how Texas revolutionaries drew from [End Page 480] their national historical experience to perpetuate the discourse of the American Revolution. He argues that Anglo-Texans used the American Revolution as a template to understand their own crisis with the Mexican government. Although Haynes underscores a shared discourse of tyrannical government among American and Texas revolutionaries, he highlights the “performative” aspect of this historical experience.⁸

What can reexamining the ideas espoused in the Texas Revolution add to the existing literature? It is imperative to understand, on a deeper level, how concepts employed during the Texas Revolution intersected with contemporary and historical revolutionary traditions. Such work goes beyond the U.S.-centrism in the historiography and reveals Texas’s connection to a larger Age of Revolutions. Texas revolutionaries believed that their justifications were genuine, and they drew...