The Mexican War

6 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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  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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  Army of Manifest Destiny

  The American Soldier in the Mexican War, 1846-1848

  • James M. Mccaffrey(Author)
  • 1994(Publication Date)
  • NYU Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 1 “War Exists by the Act of Mexico Herself ”*

  Seventy years after Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence the United States went to war with Mexico—our first foreign war. This war did not begin suddenly; there was no Pearl Harbor. Rather, events from many years previous had sown the seeds for this conflict. Beginning in the early 1820s, Mexico allowed Moses Austin and his son Stephen to bring large numbers of Americans into its northern province of Texas. The new Mexican republic could not get its own citizens to settle in Texas, but it needed to have the area populated as a buffer against both Indian depredations and the already-evident land hunger of the United States. During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the United States had doubled its geographic area at the expense of its Spanish-speaking neighbors by acquiring the Louisiana Territory and Florida. The Mexican government, therefore, believed that peopling its northernmost territory would make it more difficult for the United States to take this land arbitrarily.

  The Americans who followed Austin and other empresarios into Texas did so primarily for land. Public land in the United States sold for $1.25 per acre, and buyers had to pay cash. The Mexican government, on the other hand, offered large tracts of land to these colonists for about a tenth of that cost, and even that was not always collected. In addition, the land grants favored families. Farm families could get 177 acres, and families who intended to ranch got 4,428 acres. The newcomers were required to embrace the Roman Catholic religion and to become Mexican citizens, but they were also exempt from customs duties for seven years and from all other taxes for ten years.

  The colonists willingly accepted the conditions that the Mexican government imposed upon them. Since the central government did not provide a priest for these new settlers until about 1830, and even then he was unable to get to all the settlements on any sort of regular basis, the religious requirement posed no great burden. Most of the Anglo settlers became Catholics, but in name only. Mexican citizenship also represented a rather nebulous concept for the Americans. Since dissension and internal turmoil wracked the central government of Mexico, it had very little time to devote to its new citizens in faraway Texas. Coupled with the tax moratorium, this meant that the Anglos were free to continue living very much as they had in the United States. They set up separate communities from the Mexican towns and generally made little effort to mingle with the Tejanos.

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  The American West

  The Reader

  • Walter Nugent, Martin Ridge(Authors)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Indiana University Press

    (Publisher)

  The cumulative effect of these and similar observations contributed to the creation of a public opinion that by the spring of 1846 was so rigidly opposed to American expansion that it forced Mexico into a war that she was not likely to win. Many of the pronouncements demanding war in order to ‘‘defend the national honor” (pronouncements often quoted by American writers who blame Mexico for the war) may be dismissed as chauvinistic appeals of demagogic politicians, ambitious soldiers, or irresponsible journalists, or as attempts to pursue private ends by exploiting anti-Americanism. But these demands struck a responsive chord among Mexicans who, rightly or wrongly, from their knowledge of the racist nature of American society, had come to fear the extinction of Mexican civilization should the United States acquire dominion in Mexico.

  NOTES

    1. The body of literature treating the origins of The Mexican War is somewhat sparse, and it tends to concentrate upon the motives and methods of the United States. The once fashionable theory that American policy toward Mexico was motivated by a southern conspiracy designed to expand slavery has been discredited. William Jay, A Review of the Causes and Consequences of The Mexican War (Boston 1849), and Hermann von Hoist’s treatment of the war in volume three of his Constitutional and Political History of the United States (Chicago 1881), typified the conspiracy thesis. Chauncey W Boucher, “In Re That Agressive Slavocracy,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review , 8 (June 1921), 13–79, effectively challenged its validity. Albert Weinberg, Manifest Destiny (Baltimore 1935), suggests that Americans believed themselves divinely willed to achieve continental dominion, a view expanded upon and somewhat modified by Frederick Merk’s penetrating Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History (New York 1963). Norman Graebner, Empire on the Pacific (New York 1955), describes the importance of California’s seaports in luring Americans westward. Richard R. Stenberg, “President Polk and the Annexation of Texas,” Southwestern Social Science Quarterly , 14 (March 1934), 333–356, and Stenberg, “The Failure of Polk’s Mexican War Intrigue of 1845,” Pacific Historical Review , 4 (March 1935), 39–68, portray Polk as the person most directly responsible for the war. Glenn Price, The Origins of The Mexican War: The Polk-Stockton Intrigue (Austin 1967), takes a similar view of Polk’s behavior. Polk’s most recent biographer, Charles G. Sellers, is also critical of the president’s actions in his James K. Polk, Continentalist, 1843–1846 (Princeton 1966). Diplomatic relations between the two countries prior to the war are described in Jesse H. Reeves, American Diplomacy under Tyler and Polk (New York 1906), and George Lockhart Rives, The United States and Mexico, 1821–1848

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  From Lexington to Baghdad and Beyond

  War and Politics in the American Experience

  • Donald M Snow, Dennis M. Drew(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Following the capture of Mexico City, peace negotiations began in earnest at Guadalupe Hidalgo and an agreement was reached on 2 February 1848. The last American troops left Mexico City in June and evacuated Vera Cruz in August.

  Better State of the Peace

  After the U.S. Army had compelled the toppling of a hostile Mexican government and seen it replaced by a regime more amenable to negotiating a settlement on the basis of American objectives, the war ended. The terms of the peace were negotiated in the form of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in February 1848. The United States acquired the territories it had desired in the beginning (the disputed areas of Texas, California, New Mexico, and Arizona territories) in return for a $15 million payment to the government of Mexico. After the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 added remaining sections of New Mexico and Arizona to the Union, the territorial boundaries of the 48 contiguous states took on their final shape; manifest destiny was served.

  The settlement was certainly imposed. Militarily, the forces of the United States had all but destroyed Mexico’s ability to resist the imposition of our policies, and the occupation of Mexico City exceeded Mexico’s cost-tolerance, the factor that proved pivotal in the end. At the same time, Mexican hostile will (defined as acceptance and embracing of our policy) was not overcome, and no serious efforts were made to convince the Mexicans of the virtues of manifest destiny. Instead, we sought to buy the Mexicans off in the peace treaty and the Gadsden Purchase. Much of the anti-Americanism that still exists in Mexico surely has its roots in our failure to overcome that aspect of hostile will.

  The war had its consequences and its lessons. It provided, among other things, a training ground for the officer corps that would lead the forces (especially Southern) in the Civil War a little over a decade later; virtually all of the major military leaders of the fratricidal conflict received their first major blooding in Mexico. Moreover, the performance of that portion of the officer corps who had attended the academy proved to be a vindication for the West Point system. At the same time, the soldiers who fought under those leaders were, by and large, the same sort of citizen-soldiers who had fought all of America’s wars, apparently supporting once again the virtues of the militia system. Manifest destiny was served and, for the time, sated. It would return again a half-century later, and the result would be the Spanish-American War.

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  José María de Jesús Carvajal

  The Life and Times of a Mexican Revolutionary

  • Joseph E. Chance(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Trinity University Press

    (Publisher)

  FOUR

  The Mexican-American War in Northern Mexico

  Oh! General! Must we after so many sacrifices for the honor of our country, suffer such outrages from vile and infamous cowards? I therefore ask you to certify publicly, if I and my squadron act under your orders and instructions.

  COLONEL JOSÉ MARÍA CARVAJAL ,commanding a brigade of irregulars, to General José Urrea,Independente, San Luis Potosí, 31 July 1847

  With the collapse of the dream for an independent northern Mexico, José María Carvajal availed himself of the amnesty agreement to return to peaceful pursuits. But he still considered himself a strong Federalist and bided his time for the next opportunity to pronounce against the Centralists governing Mexico. He settled in Camargo, Tamaulipas, returning to his civilian trade of surveying and the teaching of literature in the local school “to survive.”1 For the next four or five years of his turbulent life, Carvajal seemed to find some peace and domestic tranquility. But by 1845 another dark cloud loomed on the horizon that would affect the future of Mexico: the prospect for annexation of the Republic of Texas to the United States.

  Since the formation of the republic in 1836, Mexicans retained the hope that some day Texas would be returned to Mexico, either by force or diplomacy. To Mexicans, seething with anger over the dispossession of their northern territory, the Republic of Texas was an illegitimate government without even a well-defined boundary. The State of Tamaulipas, south of Texas, claimed the Nueces River as its northern boundary, while the Republic of Texas claimed the Rio Grande as its southern limit, leaving the strip of land between these two rivers, known as the Nueces Strip, in disputed ownership. In the decade between the battles of San Jacinto and Palo Alto, the opening shots of the Mexican-American War, this territory became a no-man’s-land that saw armies from Mexico and the Republic of Texas cross and recross in what historian John Milton Nance has referred to as a period of attack and counterattack.

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