Borrowing heavily from the form and words of the United States Declaration of Independence, the delegates of the “people of Texas” meeting in convention at Washington-on-the-Brazos, declared their independence from Mexico on March 2, 1836. As in 1776, a committee of five delegates was appointed to write the document. The committee selected George C. Childress (1804–1841), filling the role of Thomas Jefferson had played sixty years earlier, as chief writer of the document.