Texas history
Texas Independence Day: March 2, 1836
The day Texas declared independence and became a republic, why Texans still mark it, and the idea behind it that has not expired.
On March 2, 1836, in an unfinished building at Washington-on-the-Brazos, fifty-nine delegates signed the Texas Declaration of Independence. Texas stopped being a Mexican province that morning and became a republic. Texans have marked the day ever since.
What happened on March 2
The delegates gathered on the Brazos River while Santa Anna's army marched north. The Alamo was under siege as they wrote. They worked fast, adopted the declaration the same day they finished it, and organized a government for a country that did not yet control its own ground. Four days later the Alamo fell. Seven weeks after that, on April 21, Sam Houston's army settled the whole question in about eighteen minutes at San Jacinto.
The document they signed reads a lot like the one Jefferson wrote sixty years earlier. It lists grievances against a distant government that had stopped answering to the people it ruled. And it rests on one idea: that a people have the right to govern themselves, and to withdraw their consent from a government that no longer serves them.
Why Texans still mark it
Texas Independence Day is a state holiday. Schools teach it, and Washington-on-the-Brazos fills up every March 2. It stands with San Jacinto Day and the memory of the Alamo as the founding story Texans tell about themselves: that Texas was once its own nation, and that it became one on purpose.
That is not a small thing to remember. Most states were carved from federal territory and admitted by Congress. Texas was its own country first, won in 1836 and held for nearly ten years as an independent country, before it joined the union in 1845.
The idea did not expire in 1845
The principle in that declaration, the right of a people to govern themselves, was not a one-time argument. It was the reason the United States existed at all. And it is the reason the Texas Constitution still says, in Article 1, Section 2, that Texans hold the right to alter or abolish their government whenever they judge it necessary.
The Texas Nationalist Movement makes that case today. Not with an army. The Texans of 1836 fought a war because it was the only door open to them. The door open now is a lawful one: a vote of the people on whether Texas should govern itself as an independent nation again. 670,304 Texans across all 254 counties are already on record for that vote.
Texas Independence Day honors a people who decided their future belonged to them. The movement asks whether that is still true.