In 1824, the United States and Mexico were similar in size and population. Mexico had 6 million inhabitants on 1.7 million square miles of land. The United States had 9.6 million inhabitants on 1.8 million square miles. However, by 1848, the United States had wrested approximately one million square miles from Mexico. This was accomplished thanks to a belief in Manifest Destiny, President James K. Polk, and the American-Mexican war.

The paper begins with a discussion of Manifest Destiny—the ideological backdrop that made the American-Mexican War possible. Next, the paper relates the events of the American- Mexican war, beginning with American settlement of Texas and ending with the Gadsden purchase. Then the paper examines the anti-war protest movement. Finally, it concludes with some observations about the impact of the war on the present-day relationship between Mexico and the United States.

Manifest Destiny

The American-Mexican War occurred against the political backdrop of Manifest Destiny, the idea that the United States was appointed by God, providence, nature, and/or history to spread the ideals of personal freedom, liberty, and democracy throughout the world. John O’Sullivan, founding editor of The Democratic Review, coined the term. O’Sullivan established the journal to disseminate Jacksonian ideals, which he did—sometimes effectively, at other times in relative obscurity—for a number of years. In 1845, months before the American-Mexican War, O’Sullivan wrote that it is, “Our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.� Anders Stephenson does an excellent job of elucidating the origins of Manifest Destiny in his book by the same title. According to Stephenson, manifest destiny is rooted in the convergence of both sacred and secular ideals.

Stephenson writes that the secular roots of manifest destiny are found in the post-revolutionary intellectual-political atmosphere and the project of nation building. John Locke and David Hume’s libertarian and individualist arguments were foundational. Other sources were the writings of various English Renaissance thinkers against the corruption of the Royal court-regime in seventeenth and eighteenth century England. Drawing heavily from classical antiquity, these writings espoused the idea that “a political society built on citizenship could be successful only if the body politic exhibited virtue; since virtue was unstable and liable to be corrupted, so too was the state� (Stephenson, 15).

The problem was that scholars believed that virtue and territorial size were inversely related. They thought states expanding through conquest could not impose their virtues and constitutions on conquered territories. For instance, it was said that conquest magnified the destructive forces responsible for Rome’s undoing. The British solved the problem by creating “an incorruptible empire of the sea� (Stephenson, 17) instead of a corruptible empire of the land. However, the Americans didn’t have that option. Instead, Stephenson writes, they seized on the neoclassical distinction between empire as tyranny and empire as the rule of law. Then, James Madison, “in a stroke of genius, famously solved the whole problem.� Madison proposed that, “for republics of popular sovereignty, vastness was not a problem but a blessing, an insurance against corruption of virtue and decline� (Stephenson, 17). Finally, the Jacksonians hyperbolized Madison’s model by asserting that states would only stay healthy as long as they continued to expand. Thus, the “health of the republic� became the secular basis for expansionism and Manifest Destiny.

A sort of missionary zeal was woven into this whole philosophical question. Stephenson writes that at that time, history was roughly conceived to be:

the uneven but progressive emancipation of the rational human subject from superstition and irrational constraints, a process coming to an end when this subject, invested by nature with certain rights, had become fully knowledgeable and everywhere supreme . . . On that view, the historical meaning of the American Revolution lay chiefly in allowing predestined liberty to break out into the open, revealing it.� 16

Thus, the United States would fulfill history by spreading freedom, liberty, and democracy to the whole world through the great American Experiment. The United States would be a “city on the hill,� inspiring the whole world to emulate itself.

Stephenson traces the sacred roots of Manifest Destiny to the Puritan reenactment of the Exodus story. The Puritans, of course, played the part of the Israelites—God’s chosen people. Like the Israelites, they had a covenant with God—God would take care of them and lead them into a “promised land� as long as they worshiped God alone and obeyed his commandments. So, the Puritans fl ed oppression in England to the promised land of the New World, just like the Israelites fl ed oppression in Egypt to the promised land of Israel. Accordingly, the Puritans thought of the New World as a sacred place allotted to them by God. They were God’s chosen people—set-apart from the rest—and they looked forward to the apocalyptic last-battle between good and evil forewarned by the New Testament book of Revelation. The Puritans would be on the winning side—they already were.

The Great-Awakening, fueled by legendary orator Rev. Jonathon Edwards, revitalized waning new-world Christianity and made it easier for the sacred and secular to join hands. It replaced cataclysmic Puritanical eschatology with a “gradualist ideology of improvement� (Stephenson, 12). Progress, not piousness, became the engine that would bring on Judgment Day. Ever-increasing abundance and prosperity would lead to a “period of perfect peace� (Stephenson, 12), beginning in America, but eventually enveloping the whole world.

Thus, Manifest Destiny was both a secular and a sacred idea. The treasured American ideals of personal liberty, freedom, and democracy could be—and would be—proliferated throughout the world by conquest, commerce, or merely by setting a persuasive example. God, nature, history—it didn’t matter— Providence ordained it so.

As we shall discover, conquest turned out to be the easiest course of action.

Texas

Texas is a good place to begin the history of the American-Mexican War. The United States officially acknowledged that Texas was part of the Spanish colony of Mexico since the Adams-Onís treaty of 1819. In the 1820s, Texas became a destination for large-scale American settlements—especially slave-owning cotton farmers. Eventually the Spanish, and later the independent Mexicans, realized that they couldn’t stop American settlers from following the lone-star of their manifest destiny to this huge, empty land. Accordingly, they decided to regulate the process. Moses Austin was an early beneficiary of regulated immigration—he received a huge tract of land by the Colorado Basin, which he parceled up and sold to 5,000 other American immigrants. Of course, Austin and the rest had to swear allegiance to Spain and convert to Catholicism. Still, those oaths didn’t seem to nullify the “American� in them—by 1820, Americans in Texas had staged three coups—and each of them was (sometimes violently) put down.

By 1830, three quarters of Mexico’s 30,000 inhabitants (including slaves). were American settlers. Many were eager to claim independence from Mexico and join the United States as a new state. As Johnson writes in his History of the American People, “Texas, as part of Mexico, looked increasingly anomalous� (373). Then, in 1830, Mexico suddenly closed off all American settlement. In 1834, General Lopez de Santa Anna staged a coup and installed himself as dictator of Mexico. Santa Anna also halted settlement and tried to establish a strong, centralized Mexican government. This led American settlers to write a “Declaration of Causes� and declare their independence from Mexico. Sam Houston was chosen to head up the settler’s army of 2,500 volunteers. In 1835 they marched on San Antonio and took it.

In 1836, Santa Anna responded by leading 5,000 troops into Texas to reassert Mexican sovereignty. The infamous Alamo was the theater for the first battle in Texas’s War of Independence. Davy Crockett, James Bowie, and almost 200 other settlers purportedly killed 1000 Mexican soldiers before perishing themselves on the 13th day of the siege. That done, Santa Anna limped off to Goliad where his men shot more than three quarters of 400 newly-enlisted American volunteers—after they surrendered. When news of Santa Anna’s atrocities reached their ears, hundreds of Americans went to Texas and volunteered to fight alongside Houston. On April 21, 1836, Houston reversed a long retreat and made a desperate surprise attack on the Mexican army along the San Jacinto River during afternoon siesta. Yelling “remember the Alamo,� 800 American-Texan troops killed 630 Mexican troops, scattered the rest, and allegedly found Santa Anna in the grass alongside the river—out of uniform and in the arms of his mistress. Houston captured Santa Anna and forced him to surrender his army, acknowledge Texas’s independence, and declare the Rio Grande as the new border with Mexico. Mexico refused to acknowledge the independence of Texas, and disavowed Santa Anna’s treaty after he was released. The clause about the Rio Grande was especially infuriating because the Nueces River, 150 miles northeast, was the longstanding traditional boundary between Texas and the rest of Mexico. The Mexicans even advised the Americans that they would sever relations if the Americans annexed Texas.

Unfortunately for Mexico, momentum towards annexation was inevitable. Right from the start, American settlers had been focused on that end. The United States had even tried to purchase Texas in the early 1820s. Accordingly, it was a huge surprise when President Andrew Jackson—a white-supremacist, slave-holding, expansionist if there ever was one—refused to annex the newly independent Republic of Texas because it would upset the delicate balance between slave and free states. However, Jackson refused annexation only after he was comforted by the advice of Amos Kendall:

“The time will come when Mexico will be overrun by our Anglo-Saxon race, nor do I look upon it as a result to be at all deplored. I believe it would lead to the amelioration and improvement of Mexico herself; but as guardians of the peace and interests of the United States we are not permitted to go to war through philanthropy or a design to conquer other nations for their own good� (Johnson, 375).

So, the Republic of Texas remained a “lone star� until the issue resurfaced in the early 1840s and became a deciding factor in the 1844 election. President Tyler, who had been pushing for annexation, hoped to run as incumbent. For a moment, providence smiled on Tyler. During a gala voyage of the USS Princeton, the gun named “peacemaker� exploded and killed Tylor’s Secretary of State and Navy Secretary (among others). This allowed Tyler to revamp his cabinet in a pandering attempt to win the Southern Ticket. That’s where Providence marooned him. The Whigs chose Henry Clay as their candidate who—though he was a committed expansionist—curiously refused to support annexation. The Democratic challenger, James Knox Polk, a previously unknown Democrat from Tennessee, ran on an expansionist platform that included not only the “reannexation� of Texas but also the “reoccupation� of the Oregon Territory. Nor did Polk make any secret of his penchant to bring other parts of Mexico—especially California—into the United States.

Polk became the 11th President of the United States with a comfortable win in the Electoral College but less than a 1.5% lead in the popular vote. After Polk’s victory, disillusioned President Tyler acted quickly to deprive Polk the honor of annexing Texas. Tyler put annexation legislation through Congress as a joint-resolution where it barely passed in the Senate, three days before Polk entered office. So, in 1844, Texas entered the Union as the 23rd state, a slave state because it had reinstituted slavery after gaining independence from Mexico. Hearing the news, the Mexican Ambassador to the United States immediately resigned in protest.

Oregon

Polk fervently set to his expansionist agenda with as soon as he assumed presidency. First he concerned himself with the “reoccupation� of the Oregon Territory, an entirely misleading endeavor because until 1840 there were no more than 40 Americans there (Anders, 35). For generations, much of this territory—largely unexplored and including everything from Northern California to Alaska—had been under the control of the Hudson Bay Company. An 1814 treaty between Britain and the United States agreed to leave the northern boundary between Canada and the US undecided and an 1818 agreement established “joint-occupancy� of the region. However, both the British and the Americans had stepped up settlement of the Oregon territory, and pressure was building. Also, with the annexation of Texas, a new slave state, there were calls to establish other free states in the North.

The United States’ long-standing position on the matter had been to extend the 49th parallel to the Pacific Ocean. Even Polk was aiming for the 49th, despite his campaign rhetoric of “54-40 or fight!� War with Mexico seemed certain, and Polk knew that the United States couldn’t fight the British simultaneously. For their part, “the British public did not give a damn� (Johnson, 37) about Oregon because of domestic concerns and because the fur-trade below the 49th was quickly becoming insignificant. Still, Polk managed to trick the British into thinking he would fight. For a while, the British called his bluff, but in 1846 they backed down and signed a treaty agreeing to extend the border along the 49th parallel to the Pacific Ocean. According to one historian, “the United States gave up only what was dimly imagined as some barren, icy stretches to the north. Besides, it was believed that the British possessions, being in every respect so similar, would sooner or later become American anyway� (Anders, 36).

War!

With Oregon safely in the fold, Polk could focus his attention on the war with Mexico which had already started. In June of 1845 Polk had secretly ordered Commodore Slout, commander of the Pacific Fleet, to seize all harbors—especially San Francisco—if he ascertained any signs of hostility from either the Mexicans or British. Polk also dispatched a regiment of soldiers under the command of Zachary Taylor to Corpus Christi, Texas, just across the Nueces River—the traditional border between Texas and Mexico. In November, Polk appointed John Slidell as minister plenipotentiary and sent him to Mexico with an offer of $5 million for New Mexico and $25 million for California—provided that Mexico accepted the Rio Grande as the border. He could even go as high as $40 million for the two. The Mexicans kept Slidell and Polk waiting until January 12, when Mexico’s new “violently Anti-American� (Johnson, 379) military government refused to accept the minister.

With a monetary settlement out of the question, Polk had to resort to war. But he didn’t want to start the war, and he didn’t want a big war either. Polk began by ordering Taylor’s army to advance to the Rio Grande—150 miles deep into disputed territory. Upon arriving, Tyler began constructing a fort on the “American� bank of the river, with cannons aimed at Matamoros on the “Mexican� side. To the Mexicans, and many present-day historians, Taylor’s advance was clearly an invasion. Even though Santa Anna was forced to declare the Rio Grande the border, Mexico repudiated that declaration. Furthermore, few Texan settlers had ventured across the Nueces. However, Polk fully intended Taylor’s advance to be the provocation it was, even if he truly considered the near-side of the Grande as “American soil.� On April 25, the Mexicans did exactly what Polk hoped—they crossed the river, killed 11 American soldiers, and captured four times as many. Taylor responded by seizing the Mexican city Matamoros, even though he was out numbered two to one. Several days later, when Polk received word of the April 25 attack, it was all the excuse he needed to declare to congress that the Mexico had “passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory, and shed American blood upon American soil� (Johnson, 379). Congress responded by declaring war.

The Mexicans fi red the first shot. So far, so good for Polk. But he still wanted a small, cheap war—�just large enough to require a treaty of peace� (Johnson, 380). Polk even had a few tricks up his sleeve to make it go that way. Before hostilities started, he sent messages to New Mexico and California to “promise (correctly). that conditions would dramatically improve should revolution or a U.S. takeover occur� (Foote). Polk undoubtedly hoped that the American settlers who had been trickling into those territories would pull a Texas. His second trick—one that backfired horribly—was to assist Santa Anna back into power from his exile in Cuba. In return for the favor, Santa Anna promised to end the war quickly and cede California and Texas to the Americans. Unfortunately for Polk, neither New Mexico nor California claimed independence and Santa Anna, “who always broke his promises� (Johnson, 380), fought to the bitter end.

In August 1846, Polk ordered General Stephen Kearny to march on Santa Fe from Kansas. Kearny captured the New Mexican capital “without spilling any blood,� but one of his officers recorded that “As the American fl ag was raised, and the cannon boomed its glorious national salute . . . the wail of grief arose above the din of our horses’ tread, and reached our ears from the depth of the gloomy-looking buildings on every hand� (Zinn, 164). However, within four months blood began to flow with the tears. The “most influential persons� of Northern New Mexico fomented rebellion in Taos. The Americans quickly reasserted control of Taos, but some 700 rebels fl ed to the mountains from which they staged guerilla attacks. Perusing them, the American Army killed 150 rebels which quashed rebellion in New Mexico for good.

In California, explorer John Charles Frémont—possibly acting on orders from Polk—gathered a mob of a few dozen hoodlums and took the “microscopic hamlet� of Sonoma on June 14, 1846. According to Historian Bernard DeVoto, Sonoma “could have been captured by Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn� (Foote). Raising a fl ag showing the Grizzly Bear, Frémont declared independence for the Republic of California. A few days later, Commodore Slout from the Pacific Fleet declared California American territory. American forces continued to arrive overland and by sea to fight the Mexican resistance. Most significantly, they fought the Battle of the Plains of Mesa in January 1847 to recapture Los Angeles after Mexicans and Indians took the city the previous September.

Meanwhile, Taylor’s army was marching towards Mexico City, the capital. They took Camargo, Monterrey, Chihuahua and other Mexican cities in sweltering heat, raging sickness, bloody battles, and atrocious war-crimes. Polk dispatched another army to Mexico under the command of General Winfi eld Scott. On March 9, 1847, General Scott reached Vera Cruz and launched the United States’ first amphibious assault. After two days and 1,300 shells, Mexico surrendered Vera Cruz along with the lives of 500 to 1000 Mexicans—mostly civilians. Scott and his 10,000 soldiers marched down the coast, fighting more battles, taking more cities, and committing more atrocities on the way. Morale was low, and by the time Scott’s army was a three-day march from Mexico City, it only numbered 3,700—most of his soldiers refused to continue because their enlistment time was up. Still, Scott pressed on to Mexico City and took it on September 13, 1847. Santa Anna fl ed to Huamantla where another battle was fought. Then he fl ed again.

By the time the Americans captured Mexico City there wasn’t a government to sign a treaty with. Polk’s negotiator, Nicholas P. Trist, finally found a Mexican Government and signed the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848. In return for $15 million dollars plus the cancellation of around $3 million in indemnities, the United States got what is now California, Nevada, and Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and parts of Washington and Colorado.

Polk did not run for reelection. One term of eighteen-hour days spent micromanaging the Mexican War was all he could take. Less than four months after retiring from office, Polk retired from this world as well. In the words of Johnson, “He was a sour, stiff, elderly-looking man, with a sad, unsmiling face, who did nothing but work . . . He was the first president killed by the office, though the choice was his� (Johnson, 376).

Gadsden Purchase

But the United States still wasn’t finished with Mexico. Even though the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo saw Mexico forfeit more than half of its territory, there were still several problems. First, the United States wasn’t holding good to its promise to protect Mexico from American-Indian incursions. Second, American land speculators were creating a nuisance in Mexico. Third, Mexico had reneged on one of two grants given to private Americans to build a railroad across the isthmus. Fourth, and most importantly, Mexico still controlled the territory that some Americans wanted for a railroad to the Pacific. James Gadsden, minister to Mexico under President Franklin Pierce, was ordered to work out a treaty to resolve these issues. On April 25, 1854, the Senate ratified a scaled-back version of the Gadsden Treaty that saw the United States hand Mexico $10 million dollars in exchange for a further 45,535 square miles of land—the southern bits of Arizona and New Mexico. The Gadsden Treaty also promised Mexico assistance in suppressing American-Indian incursions and protected the interests of one of the two Americans grantees. Thus concludes the fi nal chapter of American expansionism within the “lower 48.�

Protests

Howard Zinn writes that many historians erroneously argue that the American people enthusiastically backed the American-Mexican war. Zinn points out that these historians build their argument almost exclusively out of the material published in newspapers and journals of the day. However, Zinn argues that this material does not represent popular public opinion accurately. There was, in fact, a sizable anti-war protest movement. One convincing piece of evidence that Zinn uncovers is the difficulty that the United States had in assembling an army. Many of the soldiers in the American army were volunteer conscripts. They were promised 160 acres of land, a federal bounty of $24, and $7 to $10 dollars a day. Initially, response was high. However, as the anti-war movement grew, recruiters had to resort to more nefarious ways of getting volunteers. These included asking people who were under the influence of alcohol to sign enlistment papers, and even falsely promising three months of advance pay that conscripts could leave with their families. Enlistment slowed even more after reports began to trickle back about the horrible conditions soldiers faced in Mexico and the rampant atrocities that they were committing. Zinn argues that the difficulty the United States had recruiting soldiers is one thing that suggests that public opinion was not unanimously behind the war, as some historians suggest.

In Washington, the Whigs spoke out against the war but did little to prevent it. Their main concern was the problem of slavery—they thought that territory acquired from Mexico would upset the uneasy balance between slave and free states. However, even though they delivered copious amounts of ant-war rhetoric, the Whigs still gave Polk all the votes he needed for war appropriations. Lincoln, for example, blasted Polk by saying that the war was “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the President.� In the same breath Lincoln continued:

But if, when the war had begun, and had become the cause of the country, the giving of our money and blood, in common with yours, was support of the war, then it is not true that we [Whigs] have always opposed the war. With few individual exceptions, you have constantly had our votes here for all the necessary supplies (Zinn, 153).

As Zinn puts it, “[the Whigs] were not so powerfully against the military action that they would stop it by denying men and money for the operation. They did not want to risk the accusation that they were putting American soldiers in peril by depriving them of the materials necessary to fight� (153).

There were also protests against the war outside of the political arena. Henry David Thoreau is perhaps the best-known member of this anti-war movement. In 1846, Thoreau protested the war by refusing to pay his poll tax. This act of civil disobedience led to his arrest and imprisonment. Without his knowledge and against his will, Thoreau’s friends paid his tax and Thoreau was released after one night in jail. However, the experience led him to write “Civil Disobedience� which later inspired fi gures like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Thoreau’s friend Ralph Waldo Emerson also opposed to the war, but he did little to protest it. Legend has it that Emerson visited Thoreau in prison and asked, “what are you doing in there?� Thoreau purportedly responded, “What are you doing out there?� (Zinn 156).

Abolitionists protested the war because of the slavery issue. One intrepid article in the Liberator went so far as to wish defeat on the Americans:

Every lover of Freedom and humanity, throughout the world, must wish them [the Mexicans] the most triumphant success . . . We only hope that, if blood has to fl ow, that it has been that of the Americans, and that the next news we shall hear will be that General Scott and his army are in the hands of the Mexicans . . . We wish him and his troops no bodily harm, but the most utter defeat and disgrace. Zinn, 157 However, being an abolitionist didn’t necessarily mean advocating an egalitarian society where people of different races were free to mingle and marry. Often abolitionists had more practical reasons, as Sam Haynes uncovers in an article in Cobblestones: “Northerners also opposed the expansion of slavery for economic reasons. The rise of slavery in the West, they believed, would eliminate economic opportunities for northern farmers who might wish to settle in the area but could not compete with slave labor [Italics added]� (Haynes).

Interestingly, manifest destiny was an idea that found considerable support in both the pro-war and anti-war movements. The difference was that anti-war protesters thought that ideas and commerce should fuel the engine of expansion, not war. Even Emerson wrote that America was “a last effort of Divine Providence in behalf of the human race� (Stephenson, 53). Reverend Theodore Parker, an anti-war Unitarian minister, thought that the United States would “possess the whole of the Continent . . . but this may be had fairly; with no injustice to any one; by the steady advance of a superior race, with superior ideas and a better civilization; by commerce, trade, arts; by being better than Mexico, wiser, humaner, more free and manly� (Stephenson, 54).

Parker’s reference to a “superior race� illustrates another interesting component of Manifest Destiny. Stephanson writes, “In fact, by the 1840s virtually all destinarian thought entailed implicit or explicit references to ‘race’ “ (Stephanson, 55). Stephanson argues that the increasing role of race in manifest destiny had two important implications. First, many abolitionists in the north began to push for recolonization schemes as a method of preserving the racial integrity of the American people. Even some Democrats were opposed to the war with Mexico because they thought that Americans would mix with the Mexicans who they considered a lesser race. Second, Stephanson shows that the increasing attention paid to race had the effect of producing a hierarchical classification of the white races, with the Anglo- Saxon race being regarded as the most “advanced and vigorous� (Stephanson, 55). A frequent explanation of the Anglo-Saxon superiority was that the Anglo-Saxons had been on a westward march for well over 1,000 years and the American Anglo-Saxons were superior to the British Anglo-Saxons because they “recovered the original Anglo-Saxon liberties in their Revolution� (Stephanson, 55).

Outcome

In A People’s History of the United States, historian Howard Zinn entitles his chapter on the Mexican war “We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God.� Zinn culled this line from an 1848 article in the Whig Intelligencer. The article claimed that the United States didn’t take anything by conquest because the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had the United States fork over $15 million to Mexico. Never mind that Polk was willing to offer almost three times that amount before he incited a war that left more than 60,000 dead. No, “we take nothing by conquest...Thank God.� (Zinn, 169)

This may have been the view of many people after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed. Today however, it is difficult to see the American-Mexican war as anything but a war of conquest. By provoking the war, the United States finagled it’s way onto the deed of over half of the Mexican territory. In an article in the New York Times Upfront, Tim Weiner reports that in Mexico the American-Mexican war is still known as “the Mutilation.� It is a war that “almost no one in the U.S. remembers . . .[but in] Mexico, almost no one has forgotten.�

Weiner reports that the American-Mexican war is the underlying cause of tension between the two countries. For instance, the Spanish names of many southern U.S. cities shock Mexicans who cross the border into the United States. Weiner quotes Alfredo Hernandez Murillo, director of Mexico City’s National Museum of Interventions as saying, “It’s a symbol of Mexico’s weakness throughout history in confronting the United States� (Weiner).

Interestingly, I noted that some of the Smithsonian, and some other sources I used claimed that conditions improved for inhabitants of the annexed regions. However, this seems to be naive attempts at justifying a war of conquest. Zinn and Stephanson, for example, point out that American conquest resulted in the usual extermination of Indians. Weiner also reports that the United States stripped Mexicans in the acquired territory of their rights to own land and “live as they pleased.�

My grade school teachers taught me that the name for the war with Mexico war was the “Mexican War.� However, that doesn’t seem quite right. The Americans provoked the war, the Americans invaded Mexico and killed tens of thousands of civilians, and the Americans ended up with more than half of the country! The “Mexican-American war� is a more appropriate name because it accounts for American involvement. Actually, since the Americans were the aggressors, they really deserve the dubious honor of heading up the name. Thus, the most suitable title for Polk’s war of 1846 is the American -Mexican War.�

Works Consulted

Anderson, Stephanson. Manifest Destiny, American Expansionism and the Empire of the Right. New York: Hill and Wing, 1995.

Foote, Timothy. 1846, the way we were - and the way we went. (Americans moved westward over the Oregon trail, a war was fought, the sewing machine was invented, the Smithsonian Institution was born, and the Mormons were persecuted) Smithsonian. Apr., 1996: v27 n1 p38(12).

Gadsden Purchase. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976. Reproduced in History Resource Center. Haynes, Sam W. Signs of opposition. (to the US-Mexican war because of concerns about the expansion of slavery) Cobblestones. Dec., 2000: v21 i9 p10.

Paterson, Thomas G. et al. American Foreign Policy, A History to 1914. 3rd ed. Lexinton, Heath, 1988

Johnson, Paul. A History of the American People. New York: HarperCollins, 1997 Tolson, Jay. Mexican Adventure. (US- Mexican War, 1846-48)� U.S. News & World Report. Feb. 25, 2002: p50.

Weiner, Tim. War & remembrance, the U.S. and Mexico share a long, sometimes-troubled history that goes back to the Mexican-American War—which still resonates on both sides of the border. New York Times Upfront. Apr. 5, 2004: v136 i12 p10(7).

Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.