Leadership Quote by William H. Wharton

A revolution is easier to sell when you can frame it as a failed marriage. Wharton’s line isn’t just a complaint about governance; it’s a pre-emptive argument for separation, built on the language of social cohesion rather than policy dispute. By insisting that “none of those ties” existed, he empties the relationship between Anglo-American colonists in Texas and Mexican authorities of any moral obligation. If there’s no binding tissue - shared identity, loyalty, or trust - then breaking away becomes not rebellion but inevitability.

The phrasing does strategic work. “Necessary” smuggles in a claim of political science: nations don’t simply choose unity, they require it, like infrastructure. “Bind a people together and make them one” reads less like a description than a standard Mexico has allegedly failed to meet. The subtext is that the colonists are already a people, already coherent; Mexico is cast as an external force trying to govern without legitimacy.

Context sharpens the intent. Wharton was writing in the heat of the Texas Revolution era, when Anglo settlers - many with U.S. cultural and economic ties and a commitment to slavery - were clashing with a Mexican state moving toward centralization and restrictions on immigration and slavery. “Colonists and Mexicans” draws an ethnic and civic boundary in one stroke, collapsing a complex society into two incompatible blocs. It’s nation-building rhetoric: define the “we,” deny the “we” ever included them, and the case for independence starts to sound like common sense.