In what historian William C. Davis dubbed "the three shortest yet perhaps most significant resolutions in the document," the delegates agreed that Texas would pay for the army, would repay any goods purchased by its agents, and would give volunteers public lands. These were powers reserved for states, and under the Constitution of 1824 Texas was not a stand-alone state. With these words, delegates violated the very constitution they had sworn to uphold. Davis asserts that this provision signified that the delegates fully intended for Texas to become an independent nation, eventually.