Texas Tales - Texas' First Declaration of Independence

History teaches many lessons, including one often overlooked: Few changes are instantaneous.

Texas' "Fourth of July" is a good example. The 59 signatures on Texas' Declaration of Independence did not change things overnight. Nor were those signatures even affixed on the day we celebrate. March 2 is observed as Texas Independence Day, but the holiday could as easily be March 3. Or, by not too much of a stretch, December 20 could be the day Texans remember as the date when Texas separatists slapped Mexico's face with the figurative gauntlet of a document asserting independence.

A delegation of aggrieved Texans-though only two of them had actually been born in Texas-gathered at Washington-on-the-Brazos on March 1, 1836 to ponder what to do about Mexico's repressive government.

The Republic of Mexico, of course, had already decided what to do about its Texas problem: Kill anyone involved in what the Mexican government correctly-from its viewpoint-saw as open rebellion. As the delegates gathered in Washington-on-the-Brazos, soldiers under General Antonio de Lopez de Santa Anna already surrounded the Alamo in San Antonio. In barely five days, they would storm it and kill every male combatant inside.

Meanwhile, back on the Brazos, the delegates adopted a declaration of independence on March 2. But it is quite clear that the document was not actually signed until the following day. Technically, then, March 3 is the true Texas Independence Day.

One of the signers was Sam Houston, whose ego was as big as Texas. His birthday happened to be March 2. So, since the document was approved on March 2, and on Houston's birthday, it was March 2, not March 3, that evolved into the Texas holiday. (Austin cartoonist Roger T. Moore, who produces an annual Texas history calendar, believes March 2 should be regarded as Texas' New Year's Day. And that's the way his calendar starts.)

However, Moore and other Texans could as well celebrate the state's independence on December 20.

On that day in 1835, at Goliad, a document now known as the Goliad Declaration of Independence was read to a group of Texas separatists gathered outside the old Spanish presidio there. Ninety-one men had signed it with great enthusiasm.

Texas, the document boldly stated, should be a "free, sovereign, and independent State." The signers pledged their honor, their fortunes and even their lives in enforcing the declaration.

The document signed 73 days later at Washington-on-the-Brazos was no less forceful.

The Goliad separatists had several copies of their declaration made for distribution across the province. A committee of four delivered a copy to the closest thing the Texans then had to their own government, a body called the General Council. On Dec. 30, that body referred the declaration to a committee.

The province was drifting toward open war-fights had already occurred in Gonzales and San Antonio-but some cooler heads still believed they could work things out with the Mexican government without resorting to revolution.

The General Council instructed the authors of the Goliad declaration not to distribute it any further, the committee report said it had been inappropriately adopted, and it, like many another proposed measure, was vanquished to a file containing other dead documents.

By March 1836, however, the notion of independence had rekindled. The rest is the history we remember much better than the story of the Goliad declaration.