The Mexican War

11 Key excerpts on "The Mexican War"

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  The Routledge Handbook of American Military and Diplomatic History

  The Colonial Period to 1877

  • Christos G. Frentzos, Antonio S. Thompson(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  PART VII

  The Mexican–American War1846–1848

  Passage contains an image

  30THE MEXICAN–AMERICAN WARA Historiographical Overview

  Thomas W. Spahr    

  So often presented as little more than a minor conflict that was a prelude to the U.S. Civil War, the historiography of the Mexican–American War is relatively underdeveloped in the 166 years since the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Yet this overlooked war is as rich with complexities for historians to wrangle with as any other conflict in history. The U.S.’s first endeavor into a foreign conquest, it involved conventional warfare, guerrilla resistance, atrocity, desertion, and an anti-war element. Its results were as great as any war the U.S. has engaged in, doubling the nation’s land mass and bringing valuable minerals that would help enrich the young country.

  Serious debate on the Mexican–American War did not begin until the 1970s, and did not peak until the 1990s as we began to understand the social and cultural causes of the war’s beginning and end. Historians largely agree on the causes of the conflict, but debate the effects of American and Mexican society and politics on the war, and why it ended the way it did. This generation of researchers has investigated many previously unexplored questions including the role of racism and atrocity, the importance of the U.S. anti-war movement, and have reinterpreted James K. Polk—a fascinating man that historians are destined to study for years to come.

  What nearly no one debates is the huge significance of the war in the history of both the United States and Mexico. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo nearly doubled the size of the U.S., bringing to the Union the future states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and half of Colorado. The U.S. acquired a great land mass and resources that proved important to the country becoming one of the world’s greatest powers. The incorporation of a foreign population set the standard for future U.S. imperialist enterprises, and reinforced the racism that was inherent in the ideas of manifest destiny—the U.S.’s invariable providence to dominate the western hemisphere and uplift its “inferior” neighbors. The Mexican War pushed the country closer to the Civil War by forcing the debate over the expansion of slavery into the newly acquired, southern land. The conflict became a training ground, shaping the officers who would lead the U.S. Civil war just 12 years later. Finally, it enhanced the nation’s reputation internationally, while it weakened Mexico’s, contributing to Mexico’s financial instability and making it vulnerable to the French conquest and occupation from 1861–1867.

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  A History of Hope

  When Americans Have Dared to Dream of a Better Future

  • NA NA(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  C HAPTER T HREE M EXICO IN THE U NITED S TATES WAR WITH M EXICO , 1846–1848 THE ATTACK ON MEXICO and the subsequent conquest by the United States of the northern half of its southern neighbor’s territory represents one of the least hopeful stories in this nation’s history. A decade before the war began in earnest, former President John Quincy Adams warned the Congress of what was to come: “Sirs, the banners of freedom will be the banners of Mexico . . . and your banners, I blush to speak the word, will be the banners of slavery . . . . Again I ask, what will be the cause of such a war? Aggression, con- quest and the establishment of slavery where it has been abolished!” A decade later much to his regret, Adams was proved right on all points. 1 The war with Mexico from 1846 to 1848 represents, at best, a footnote in most studies of the history of the United States. Nevertheless, the war was a terribly important event in the history of both nations. It shaped the geography as well as the culture and world view of the citizens of both lands, and most of all it impacted the many citizens of Mexico who virtually overnight found themselves to be citizens—but second-class citizens—of the United States. The Mexican War, as it was known in the United States, was significant in several ways. It was the first clearly imperialistic war in the nation’s history. Al- though both the Revolution and the War of 1812 had some imperialistic conno- tations—one of the causes of the Revolution was the British refusal to let whites settle beyond the fall line of the Alleghenies, and the War of 1812 was sparked by U.S. interest in conquering Canada—The Mexican War was specifically 44 A HISTORY OF HOPE waged in the name of a “manifest destiny” to conquer the land of another nation and expand this one. The War with Mexico was also a precursor of the American Civil War in many ways; it was waged to expand the slaveholding portions of the United States and to support legalized slavery in Texas.

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  American Expansionism, 1783-1860

  A Manifest Destiny?

  • Mark Joy(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER FIVE   THE WAR WITH MEXICO

  Until recently, American scholars have not given The Mexican War the attention it deserves. There are several reasons for this. One is that the significance of The Mexican War is often eclipsed by the American Civil War, a more cataclysmic conflict which began just fifteen years later (Eisenhower, 1989: xvii). The story of The Mexican War often gets lost in the discussion of the myriad of factors leading to the Civil War. Another reason that American historians have failed to devote enough attention to The Mexican War is that the story of America’s role in this conflict is in many ways a sordid one. When Americans do discuss The Mexican War, a question that quickly arises is how and why the war started. Was the United States justified in going to war against Mexico in 1846? Ulysses Grant wrote bluntly in his memoirs of his conviction that The Mexican War had been unjust (Grant, 1999: 26–7). In recent years, the trend of historiographic interpretations has tended to agree with Grant’s assessment. But this has not always been the case. In a scholarly two-volume history entitled The War With Mexico, published in 1919, historian Justin H. Smith argued that Mexico was to blame for the outbreak of the war. Smith believed that Mexico wanted the war, threatened hostilities against the United States, and issued orders to commanders to initiate the fighting (Eisenhower, 1989: xvii; cf. Brack, 1975: 8–9). In recent years, Mexican historians, while not abandoning the concept of US aggression as the major factor in bringing on the war, have nevertheless recognized that there was a considerable pro-war faction in Mexico that bears some responsibility for the conflict.

  The Mexican War led to the United States annexing large parts of northern Mexico as ‘spoils of war.’ However, several US presidents in succession had tried peacefully to negotiate a purchase of portions of these lands, especially Texas, New Mexico, and California. Neither side seemed capable of understanding the other in these attempts. The United States could not see why Mexico would not accept reasonable offers for lands that were largely unsettled and likely to remain so indefinitely under Mexican control. On the other hand, the Mexicans noted that while the US offered to make purchases, there were always American settlers and filibusterers lurking around the lands in question, which seemed to threaten that the territory might simply be taken if a sale could not be arranged. Thus, Mexican politicians were suspicious of American motives, especially in light of the rapid growth the United States had experienced since its independence.

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  Textbooks and War

  Historical and Multinational Perspectives

  • Eugenia Roldán Vera, Eckhardt Fuchs, Eugenia Roldán Vera, Eckhardt Fuchs(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  This annexation was taken by Mexico as an act of war, but for the United States Texas’s agreement to the annexation was a sovereign act by a sovereign country. After a series of threats were exchanged, war between Mexico and the United States broke out in 1846. Following a series of bloody battles on two fronts, one in the north of Mexico and the other on the Gulf coast—the Americans led by the generals Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, the Mexicans by General Antonio López de Santa Anna —the American army advanced through the territory until it seized Mexico City and Mexico accepted defeat. In the ensuing peace treaties signed by both nations, Mexico gave the United States the territories that are now the states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming (that is, for Mexico, the former territories of California, New Mexico and Texas, and parts of its own states of Tamaulipas, Chihuahua and Sonora). With this, Mexico lost more than half the territory it had possessed as an independent country since it had gained independence from Spain in 1821. During the war, countless books about the conflict were published in the United States. Most of them were accounts written by soldiers and war correspondents, and almost none were based on documentary sources or attempted to consider the Mexican side. These works were paralleled by numerous literary war narratives published in the form of novelettes, dime novel series, crime gazettes and paper stories (Rodriguez 2010). Influenced by William Prescott’s widely read History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843), these first accounts used romance and heroic drama to place Hernán Cortés’s conquest of the Aztecs on the same level as Winfield Scott’s American conquest of the “degenerated” race of Mexicans—degenerated because they were the descendants of the degenerated Spanish empire (Johannsen 1986, 241–69)

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  Unintended Consequences

  The United States at War

  • Kenneth J. Hagan, Ian J. Bickerton(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Reaktion Books

    (Publisher)

  They culminated in the outbreak of the Civil War, the most catastrophic event in the history of the United States. The war against Mexico hastened the growing and increasingly evident divisions between rural, agricultural, slave-holding southern states and the more urban, industrial, free-trade northern states. It accelerated the growth of sectional hostilities between the two distinct entities, thereby challenging the future of the Union. Sectional and party differences over the possible admission of Texas and the conquest of Mexican territory had been brewing for years. So great was northern opposition to the creation of a new southern pro-slavery voting bloc in Congress should Texas annexation be approved, that in the early 1840s John Quincy Adams had declared that it would justify the dissolution of the Union. 14 The Mexican War was, in reality, the first phase of the Civil War: the war against Mexico was provoked by a southern president; Major General Zachary Taylor and Major General Winfield Scott, who led the armies, were both from the South; the vast majority of the volunteer militiamen who fought the war were southern; the Texas Rangers were southern (obviously); and the war was fought to extend slavery. The acquisition of 1,193,000 square miles of new territory revived the most volatile issue in American politics at that time: would the new territories be slave or free? President Polk asked Congress for immediate permission to form territorial governments in California and New Mexico. But the question of slavery delayed quick Congressional action. In the summer of 1846 Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot had put forward the proviso that slavery should be excluded from any territory won from Mexico, but, although passed by the House of Representatives in 1846, and again in the succeeding four years, it was rejected by the Senate. The discovery of gold in 1848 led to a tremendous increase in the population of California, which reached over 100,000 by 1849

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  Shaped by the West, Volume 1

  A History of North America to 1877

  • William F. Deverell, Anne F. Hyde(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  211 CHAPTER I n the 1840s, annexation of land became war between nations. War and the threat of more war brought Texas, the Southwest, California, and the Pacific Northwest into the borders of the United States. By 1850, the United States had acquired more than three times the land and nearly four times the population of Mexico. Although many Americans regarded the annexation of territory as natural, even preordained by God, this growth came at a high social, military, and political cost. The United States now extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but it took the Texas Revolution, The Mexican War, and finally the Civil War to absorb these contested regions into the national fabric. The nation’s center moved steadily west. St. Louis and New Orleans became the most important US ports. The Mississippi no longer seemed to be a national boundary. During the 1820s and 1830s Anglo-American traders, fur trappers, and farmers began moving beyond the borders of the Louisiana Purchase into areas claimed by Mexicans, English, Russians, and Indians. Sometimes they were invited in as trading partners and family mem-bers, but at other times they simply squatted, traded ille-gally, or invaded. Texas and New Mexico offer good examples of the complex situations that led to war. Before 1821, when the Mexican Revolution ended the Spanish empire’s hold in The US-Mexico War 11 212 Chapter Eleven: The U.S.–Mexico War North America, the Spanish forbade Americans to enter New Spain. Recogniz-ing the prodigious land hunger of white Americans, they didn’t want them around as traders or settlers. But the overextended empire could rarely police its borders. After the revolution, however, the new Mexican government decided to change policy and to accept American trade and settlement, hoping that new residents would strengthen and populate their vast northern border.

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  The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction

  • Mark E. Neely Jr., Mark E Neely(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  C 1 c THE MEXICAN-AMERICAN WA R Republicanism and the Ethos of War The early literature on the Mexican-American War—histo-ries emphasizing diplomacy, generals, and strategy—casting it as a “rehearsal” for the greater conflict of the later Civil War, is fast being replaced by a newer literature that focuses on the common soldier and on his cultural perceptions of the enemy. Historians of the Civil War have not yet digested this new history of the Mexican-American War or considered the many implications that lie in the contrasts suggested by it. Historians now have available to them, in addition to the familiar printed diaries and letters of men who became major figures in the Civil War (such as George B. McClellan), newly pub-lished sources from more obscure soldiers who campaigned in Mex-ico. It may well be that we can reach a better understanding of the Civil War by viewing it from a long-range chronological perspective than we can by following the lead of recent scholarship on the Civil War, examining single battles day by day, adding detail, and putting a relentlessly microscopic focus on the events. Instead of the micro-scope, in this chapter I will employ the wide-angle lens of compari-son in an attempt to capture the essence of the American Civil War. 1 Cc C 7 c The Mexican-American War 1. Mexico, 1855. Acquisitive interest in Latin American lands remained high even after the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848. The inset detail map of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a route favored in proposals for Latin American passages to California, reveals what people in the United States found most interesting on maps of Mexico. [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.] The advent of popular national wars after the French Revolution meant that warfare could no longer be a matter merely of diplomacy and dynastic or ministerial objectives.

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  John White Geary

  Soldier-Statesman, 1819-1873

  • Harry Marlin Tinkcom(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection

    (Publisher)

  II The Mexican War FOR some time trouble had been brewing between the United States and Mexico over the Texas Territory. The annexation of Texas had been a bitter issue in Congress. Because of the intense desire of southern congressional members to secure addirional slave states, and the determination of certain north-ern members to prevent such action, the ensuing quarrel presiged the gigantic conflict between the states which was soon to come. Aided by a fairly strong expansionist sentiment which prevailed in the country, it was not long before those favoring the admission of Texas succeeded. The House of Rep-resentatives on February 25, and the Senate on March 1, 1845, passed resolutions which made Texas a member of the Union. Tyler signed the resolution on March 1, three days before Polk was inaugurated. Polk had been so interested in the measure that he had hurried to Washington to force it through. Of course Mexico had never recognized the independence of Texas, and now that the United States had taken her into the fold, little friendliness existed between the two countries. The immediate cause of the rupture between them concerned the boundaries. The United States claimed the Rio Grande as her proper frontier, while the Mexicans insisted that our claims did not extend beyond the Nueces River. It was to be expected that Polk would back up the expansionist claim, having been elected to the Presidency on that platform. N o w in the chief seat of government, he forthwith prepared to satisfy the American de-mand by sending General Zachary Taylor into the disputed territory with a small force. Obviously, the President wanted the quarrel to be resolved one way or another: either the Mexi-cans would tolerate American soldiers in the contested area and accept the situation with as much grace as possible, or else they would attempt to drive Taylor from his position by violence. Mexico, now forced to make a decision, sent General Arista ï

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  War of a Thousand Deserts

  Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War

  • Brian DeLay(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  First, U.S. president John Tyler presented Congress with a plan for the annexation of Texas in the spring of 1844. Tyler’s scheme failed, but most observers realized that annexation was now only a mat-ter of time, and commentators throughout Mexico began discussing the likeli-hood of war with the United States. While officials in Mexico City struggled over whether and how to prepare for such a war, the second change took place: inde-pendent Indians dramatically escalated their raiding activities across the whole of northern Mexico. In Chihuahua a series of agreements that had secured peace with Apaches in 1842 and 1843 started unraveling in 1844 and came entirely un-done in 1845. In New Mexico the deepening conflict with Navajos seemed every month less comprehensible, and as of September 1844 well-armed Utes had declared war against the department as well.⁴⁵ Most disastrously, after a relatively uneventful 1843 Comanches and Kiowas launched several huge campaigns into Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Durango, and Zacatecas in 1844 and 1845. The renewed, indeed unprecedented, energy behind the assaults seems to have been connected to the long-delayed consummation of peace between the Hois and Houston’s Texas. 5. Zones of interethnic violence in northern Mexico, c. 1844 216 Nations No matter the treaty Pia Kusa made with Galán, the potential threats of Texan expansion, or Lamar’s treacheries and massacres, there remained the hard logic that seasoned leaders such as Pahayuco and Mopechucope evidently subscribed to. War with Texas had been ruinous and peace with them could be profitable, whereas the reverse seemed to be true with Mexico. By mid-1844, Comanche elders had convinced a critical mass of young warriors that a Texas treaty would be in their interest.

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  Voices of the U.S. Latino Experience

  [3 volumes]

  • Rodolfo F. Acuña Ph.D., Guadalupe Compeán, Rodolfo F. Acuña, Guadalupe Compeán(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Source: Samuel E. Chamberlain, My Confessions (New York: Harper & Row, 1956), pp. 75, 87–88. 51. Excerpts from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 1848 With the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded Arizona, New Mexico, California, and parts of Utah, Nevada, and Colorado to the United States. Mexico was forced to relinquish claims to Texas—recognizing the Rio Grande as the boundary (Article V) between the two countries. The United States paid Mexico for taking half its territory. The United States paid Mexico $15,000,000 in compensation for war-related damage to Mexican property and agreed to compensate American citizens for debts owed to them by the Mexican government. These debts were mostly related to the loss of runaway slaves who found refuge in Mexico. The Treaty called for the property and civil rights of Mexican nationals on what was to become the U.S. side of the bor- der. Finally, the United States promised to police its boundaries. The Senate ratified the treaty by a vote of 34–14 on March 10, 1848. It only passed by a one-vote margin since a two-thirds majority was required for passage. Article X, which guaranteed the protection of Mexican land grants, was deleted. The following are key articles of the Treaty. … ARTICLE V The boundary line between the two Republics shall commence in the Gulf of Mexico, three leagues from land, opposite the mouth of the Rio Grande, otherwise The Mexican-American War 107

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  Whitewashed Adobe

  The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past

  • William F. Deverell(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  What had been the Mexican American War only a few years earlier became a war against Mexican Americans. The treaty that ended the U.S.-Mexico War had been explicit about the citizenship consequences of peace. Mexicans who stayed would become Americans. 17 But diplomatic assurances have rarely meant less on the ground. As the his-torian David Gutiérrez has noted, Guadalupe Hildago “could do little to 1 5 t h e u n e n d i n g m e x i c a n wa r transform the biased views of Mexicans that Americans continued to enter-tain.” In some ways, enmity only increased, as “Americans” and “Mexicans” still existed worlds apart, treaty or no treaty. 18 Fig. 1 about here Despite de jure citizenship status, Mexicans could not exercise the fran-chise with anything close to the same ease as lighter-skinned Angelenos. On the contrary, the poorest among the Indians and Mexicans of the village might get literally corralled and violently coerced into casting bought votes, as Wallace’s diary for 1857 detailed. “All shades of dark colors (the ‘piebald classes’) were there, half breeds, Indians, Soñorenses . . . . They were plied with bad whiskey, and when they became riotous were knocked on the head.” Such civic obscenities further emphasized a paradox. Mexicans were not Americans, even though they were. 19 Mexicans, as Figure 1 suggests, did not even live in Los Angeles. Mexicans still lived in Mexico, in Sonora or Sonoratown, in “homes for the defeated.” Both logic and geography argue that 1850s Sonoratown, north of the plaza, not far from the banks of the Los Angeles River, was in fact in Los Angeles, in California, in the United States. But logic and social reality do not of course always operate in tan-dem. Sonora and Sonoratown were Mexico in the popular perceptions of many an Anglo Angeleno, a Mexico gradually becoming surrounded by an Americanizing Los Angeles (which, as the dominant spatial and political category, did not need a corresponding “Anglo town” reference).

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