Spanish rule of New Spain, encompassing present-day Mexico, the Caribbean and Gulf Coast, and a large portion of the American West, began to collapse in 1810, and a bloody war of independence raged for eleven long years. After Mexico achieved independence from Spain, settlers in the Mexican state of Texas began to agitate for independence from Mexico. In this speech, Stephen F. Austin (1793–1836), known as the “father of Texas,” offers some history to his American audience and justifies the Texas Revolution of 1835–36, which sought Texas’s independence from Mexico to become either an independent republic or a part of the United States.