to the city of Mexico, praying that Texas be admitted as a State. Instead
of granting this just and legal request, they imprisoned our delegate in
the dungeons of the Inquisition, and detained him without a trial for more
than a year, deprived of the common air and common use of his own limbs!
Under all of those multiplied oppressions, the colonists, from a spirit of
forbearance, or rather from physical inability to resist, long groaned and
languished. Not a voice, not an arm was uplifted. The wheels of government
were not retarded in their operation by us. We consoled ourselves with
the pleasing but delusive hope that a returning sense of liberality and
justice would give to these obnoxious laws a brief duration. While laying
this flattering unction to their souls, while indulging dreams of fancied
felicity never to be realized, the dictator, Santa Anna, developed his
tyrannical course. He surrounded Congress with an armed force, dissolved
the body, and declared the constitution at an end. He dispersed our State
Legislature by violence, imprisoned our Governor, demanded the arrest of
some of the unoffending colonists, to be tried by military tribunals for
(if any) civil offences, disarmed the militia, leaving only one gun to 500
citizens, and sent an army of mercenaries into Texas to rivet upon us the
chains of centralism. When these glaring oppressions were attempted to be
practised, the people of Texas felt that the cup of their bitterness was
full to overflowing--that the rod of persecution had smitten sufficiently
severe, and that they could no longer submit without relinquishing forever
the glorious appellation of freemen. They struck, and struck with the
potent arm of _liberty_. They conquered and drove the enemy from their
soil. They wish not to wage a war of cupidity and conquest. They only ask
to be permitted to govern the territory they occupy after the republican
mode of their fathers. If this, their reasonable demand, is not conceded,
they will carry the war into the enemy's country, and force the tyrant (as
they have the power to do,) to acknowledge the independence of Texas within
the very walls of his capital. After so many descriptions it is useless to