Jefferson Scholar Reads the Texas Declaration Line by Line With Daniel Miller

Dr. M. Andrew Holowchak brought Texas Nationalist Movement President Daniel Miller back to his Jefferson show this week for a clause-by-clause reading of the Texas Declaration of Independence of March 2, 1836, and found Thomas Jefferson’s hand in it at nearly every turn.

Holowchak has written dozens of books on Jefferson and edits The Journal of Thomas Jefferson and His Time. He hosts the show, now titled Thomas Jefferson Survives after John Adams’ last words, with Cap’n George Gori. Courtney Crowley, an instructor of history at West Texas A&M University, joined them for this episode. It is Miller’s second appearance, after a May conversation on the Texas independence movement. The full episode is embedded above.

Jeffersonian bones

The hosts read the 1836 document aloud and stopped at each clause to set it beside Jefferson’s. Holowchak marked where the Texans parted from him. Their opening speaks of a government that has ceased to protect “the lives liberty and property of the people,” putting property, an idea he traced to John Locke, where Jefferson had the pursuit of happiness. On the grievance that Mexico had failed to establish public education, he said, “whoever wrote this absolutely had Thomas Jefferson in mind.” What struck him most was “the extent to which these people have Jefferson’s declaration right next to it.”

“This has Jeffersonian bones,” Miller said, but the Texans wrote it for themselves. They put their appeal to world opinion well below where Jefferson put his, and Miller read the Texian attitude as “we don’t owe you an explanation, but here it is.”

Why 1836 reads like 2026

Miller argued the declaration’s charge against Mexico describes the federal system today, “completely independent of who’s in the White House or who controls Congress.” He said, “What we have seen is the centralization of more and more and more power into Washington, D.C.” The document resonates, he said, because “people in 2026 can look at this statement that was written in 1836 and say, I recognize this. I see this right here, right now. I’m living this.”

He walked through the grievances in plain terms. Settlers were recruited under a written federal constitution that Santa Anna then overturned; in his modern version, they ordered an iPhone and were shipped “a picture of an iPhone.” The jailing of Stephen F. Austin in Mexico City, after Austin went to negotiate in good faith, was “a flex,” a despot consolidating power, and it backfired. The demand that Texans give up their arms, which began with the Gonzales cannon, was never about hunting, Miller said. “It is about defense against tyrannical government.”

The melancholy conclusion

The longest exchange came over the declaration’s hardest line, that the Mexican people “are unfit to be free and incapable of self-government.” Miller said it took him years to understand. The delegates were Mexican citizens writing to their own countrymen, he said, and when no other state answered them, they drew a conclusion: “If we’re gonna be the only ones that hold the line, then we’re gonna be the ones that hold the line.”

“Your silence is your choice,” Miller said. “I think this actually speaks more to us in our day than any other part of the declaration of independence.” He made the full case earlier this month in The Melancholy Conclusion.

Holowchak pushed back. Russians who stay quiet about the war in Ukraine, he said, are often afraid, not consenting. Miller answered with a man beaten on a sidewalk while 15 or 20 bystanders watch. “What would your attitude be toward those people that were there as bystanders?” he asked. That, he said, is how the Texans who signed in 1836 felt about the rest of Mexico.

A wider trend

Miller placed Texas inside a global move toward self-government. He called the movement “kind of the 800 pound gorilla in the room when it comes to independence movements” and said the world is near “an explosion of new nation states on the globe that we haven’t seen since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.”

Holowchak closed by saying both declarations give a people the right to replace a government that stops representing them. Of the Texas effort, he said, “I hope like hell it works.”