The Mexican–American War in two minutes
- Texas claimed the Rio Grande as its border, but Mexico said Texas ended at the Nueces. Mexico also refused to receive John Slidell, Polk's envoy, who carried an offer to buy California.
- Polk ordered Taylor's army to the Rio Grande in January 1846. After a clash in April, he told Congress Mexico had shed American blood on American soil, and it voted for war.
- Critics objected. Lincoln's Spot Resolutions of December 1847 asked where American blood had been shed, Thoreau went to jail in 1846 for refusing a tax, and Douglass blamed greed for land.
- American armies took northern Mexico and New Mexico, settlers and soldiers seized California, and General Winfield Scott captured Mexico City in September 1847 after landing at Veracruz in March.
- The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (February 1848) set the Rio Grande border, and Mexico ceded California and New Mexico for $15 million. The Senate struck the article protecting Mexican land grants.
- In August 1846 David Wilmot proposed banning slavery in land won from Mexico. The House passed his proviso, the Senate never did, and slavery in the Cession became a central sectional issue.
- On the exam: expect Polk's war message, Lincoln's resolutions or the Wilmot Proviso as sources, with questions on causation, such as expansion and slavery, and on how the war deepened sectional conflict.
Topic 5.3 key terms
- Battle of Chapultepec (Sept. 13, 1847)
U.S. troops under Gen. Winfield Scott stormed the hilltop castle and military academy that guarded the western approach to Mexico City. The city fell the next day.
- Training ground for the Civil War
Many of the Civil War's top commanders, Union and Confederate, learned to lead as junior officers in Mexico. Grant, Lee, Jackson, Longstreet and Pickett all served in this war.
- Mexican–American War (1846–1848)
War between the United States and Mexico that began over the Texas border. In the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded California and the rest of the Mexican Cession and accepted the Rio Grande as the Texas border.
- Spot Resolutions (1847)
Eight questions Rep. Abraham Lincoln put to President Polk on December 22, 1847, asking him to name the exact spot where American blood was shed and prove it was American soil. Polk never answered and the House never acted on them. They became a symbol of Whig doubt that Mexico started the war.
- Nueces Strip
The land between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. Under Spain and Mexico it belonged to Tamaulipas and Coahuila, but Texas claimed it after 1836. The dispute over who owned it led directly to the Mexican–American War.
- Republic of Texas (1836–1845)
Texas won independence from Mexico in 1836 and governed itself as a separate country for nine years. It claimed the Rio Grande as its southern border. Mexico refused to recognize its independence.
- Annexation of Texas (1845)
Congress added Texas to the United States by joint resolution, signed by President Tyler on March 1, 1845. Texas became the 28th state that December. Mexico broke off diplomatic relations.
- Army of Occupation
The name for Gen. Zachary Taylor's roughly 3,000 U.S. soldiers in Texas. In January 1846 Polk ordered them to the Rio Grande, onto land that both the United States and Mexico claimed.
- Fort Texas (1846)
The earthwork Taylor's army built on the north bank of the Rio Grande, facing Matamoros. Mexican guns opened fire on it on May 3, 1846. It was later renamed Fort Brown for its commander, Maj. Jacob Brown, who died of wounds from the shelling.
- Thornton Affair (April 25, 1846)
A Mexican cavalry force attacked a U.S. dragoon patrol under Capt. Seth Thornton north of the Rio Grande, near Rancho de Carricitos. At least eleven Americans were killed. Polk called it the shedding of "American blood upon the American soil."
- Civil disobedience
Openly refusing to obey a law you think unjust, and accepting the punishment. Thoreau's 1849 essay, first titled 'Resistance to Civil Government,' made the idea famous.
- Abolitionist
Someone who worked to end slavery. Douglass, who escaped slavery in 1838, began The North Star in Rochester in December 1847.
- Whigs
Party formed against Andrew Jackson. Many Northern Whigs opposed the war, suspecting it would spread slavery, but voted money for the troops.
- Whig Party
Major party (1834–1854) that opposed a strong presidency and, often, territorial expansion. Many Whigs attacked the Mexican War, yet the party won the White House in 1848 by nominating the war hero Zachary Taylor.
- Bear Flag Revolt (1846)
On June 14, 1846, American settlers in Sonoma, backed by Capt. John C. Frémont's survey party, seized the town from Mexican California and proclaimed a California Republic. It lasted about 25 days, until U.S. forces raised the American flag.
- Californios
Spanish-speaking people of Mexican California, born there, many of them from rancho-owning families. Some welcomed American rule; others fought it at Los Angeles and San Pasqual in 1846.
- Taos Revolt (1847)
On January 19, 1847, New Mexicans and Taos Pueblo men killed Charles Bent, the U.S.-appointed governor, and other officials. U.S. troops crushed the uprising in early February. It shows that conquest met armed resistance.
- Martial law (General Orders No. 20)
Gen. Scott's order of Feb. 19, 1847, put Americans and Mexicans in occupied Mexico under military law. Murder, rape and robbery were tried before military commissions, not local courts.
- Mexico City campaign (1847)
Gen. Winfield Scott landed at Veracruz in March 1847 and marched inland to take the Mexican capital. It was Polk's Plan E.
- Saint Patrick's Battalion (San Patricios)
A unit of mostly Irish and other immigrant soldiers who deserted the U.S. Army and fought for Mexico in 1846-47, led by John Riley. Those captured were tried as deserters; fifty were hanged.
- Niños Héroes
Six cadets of Mexico's military college who died in the fight for Chapultepec on September 13, 1847. Mexico honors them every year on that date.
- West Point (U.S. Military Academy)
The Army's officer school on the Hudson River, founded in 1802. Its graduates led the regular Army in Mexico and, later, both armies in the Civil War.
- Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848)
The treaty that ended the Mexican–American War. Signed February 2, 1848; the U.S. Senate approved it March 10. Mexico accepted the Rio Grande as Texas's border and gave up California, New Mexico and the land between for 15 million dollars. It promised Mexicans in those lands citizenship and protection of their property.
- Mexican Cession
About 525,000 square miles Mexico gave the United States in 1848: California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. Texas was not part of it.
- Gadsden Purchase (1853)
The U.S. paid Mexico 10 million dollars for about 30,000 square miles of southern Arizona and New Mexico, mainly to get land for a southern railroad route. It also settled the border argument the 1847 treaty map had started.
- "All of Mexico" movement
A push in 1847 and 1848, mostly by expansionist Democrats, to annex the whole country of Mexico. It failed. Opponents included Whigs and Southerners like John C. Calhoun, who argued from race that Mexicans should not become fellow citizens.
- Article XI (Indian raids)
The United States promised to stop Comanche and Apache raids into Mexico. It never managed to, and the 1853 Gadsden treaty cancelled the promise.
- California Land Act (1851)
A federal law that made holders of Spanish and Mexican land grants file claims with a Board of Land Commissioners and prove their titles. Many claims were confirmed in the end, but hearings averaged 17 years, and owners lost land to legal fees and squatters.
- Foreign Miners' Tax (1850)
A California law charging every miner who was not a U.S. citizen $20 a month. It fell hardest on Mexican and Chilean miners, and thousands left the gold fields. The legislature repealed it in 1851.
- Act for the Government and Protection of Indians (1850)
A California law that, despite its title, let settlers take Native children as unpaid workers and let courts sell the labor of Native adults arrested for vagrancy. It also kept courts from convicting a white man on Native testimony.
- Wilmot Proviso (1846)
Rep. David Wilmot's amendment to ban slavery in any territory won from Mexico. The House passed it more than once and the Senate never did. It opened the fight over slavery's spread into the West.
- Free soil
The demand that slavery be barred from the western territories. Many free-soilers wanted this to protect white farmers and workers, not to end slavery where it already existed. Free soil was not abolition.
- 36°30′ line (Missouri Compromise, 1820)
The line that barred slavery north of 36°30′ in the Louisiana Purchase. It stopped at the old Mexican border and said nothing about land the United States had yet to take. After 1848 the Cession had no rule at all.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
The Castle
September 13, 1847
Key terms: Battle of Chapultepec (Sept. 13, 1847), Training ground for the Civil War, Mexican–American War (1846–1848)
September 13, 1847. American soldiers climb a hill outside Mexico City. Mexican soldiers and cadets hold the castle on top.
Lieutenant James Longstreet falls, wounded, still holding his regiment's flag. Lieutenant George Pickett takes it over the wall.
Remember these names. In 1863, at Gettysburg, Longstreet will send Pickett's men across an open field.
Three months later, in Washington, a new congressman asked a simple question. Where, exactly, did this war begin?
Spotty Lincoln
December 1847; 1836 – January 1846
Key terms: Spot Resolutions (1847), Nueces Strip, Republic of Texas (1836–1845), Annexation of Texas (1845)
December 22, 1847. Abraham Lincoln, thirty-eight, has been a congressman for just over two weeks.
In May 1846, Polk told Congress:
James K. Polk
Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil.
Abraham Lincoln
…whether the particular spot of soil on which the blood of our citizens was so shed was or was not our own soil…
He wanted Polk to name the spot. Back home, his critics gave him a name: Spotty Lincoln.
The spot mattered because of two rivers. Under Spain, then Mexico, Texas ended at the Nueces.
When Texas broke away in 1836, it claimed everything to the Rio Grande. Even Santa Fe, a city it never ruled.
Mexico never recognized Texas's independence, and warned that annexation would mean war.
In 1845 the United States annexed Texas, claim and all. Polk also wanted California.
Plan A: buy it. Polk's envoy, John Slidell, carried an offer of up to twenty-five million dollars. Mexico wouldn't even receive him.
Plan B. In January 1846, Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor's troops to the Rio Grande.
Their official name was the Army of Occupation.
The Strip
March – May 1846
Key terms: Army of Occupation, Fort Texas (1846), Thornton Affair (April 25, 1846)
In March 1846, about three thousand soldiers marched 150 miles south, across grassland with almost nobody in it.
Ulysses S. Grant
Mexico showing no willingness to come to the Nueces to drive the invaders from her soil,
Ulysses S. Grant
it became necessary for the "invaders" to approach to within a convenient distance to be struck.
They dug a fort on the riverbank, facing the Mexican city of Matamoros. Its guns pointed across the water.
Lincoln's resolutions asked eight questions about this ground. Go and find the answers.
The news reached Washington on the evening of May 9. Two days later Polk's war message went to Congress.
American Blood
May 1846 – January 1848
Key terms: Mexican–American War (1846–1848), Civil disobedience, Abolitionist, Whigs
The war bill opened with a claim: war existed 'by the act of the Republic of Mexico.'
Many Whigs doubted that. But the same bill paid for the troops. The House passed it 174 to 14, the Senate 40 to 2.
Mexican writers gave their answer in 1848.
Ramón Alcaraz and the Mexican writers of the Apuntes
…the true origin of the war… the insatiable ambition of the United States, favored by our weakness, caused it.
In July 1846, Concord jailed Henry David Thoreau for one night. He had stopped paying his poll tax to protest slavery.
Henry David Thoreau
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
Someone paid the tax. Next morning he led a huckleberry party up a hill.
In Rochester, Douglass's North Star called Polk 'our slaveholding President.'
Frederick Douglass
Mexico seems a doomed victim to Anglo Saxon cupidity and love of dominion.
Frederick Douglass
If any oppose the President's demands, it is not because they hate the war, but for want of information…
Lincoln questioned how the war began. He still voted to pay the soldiers.
On January 3, 1848, Whig George Ashmun amended a vote of thanks to General Taylor's army:
…in a war unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States.
It passed by a few votes. Lincoln voted yes.
Lincoln attacked how the war began. Douglass attacked why it was fought.
Polk's Plans
May 1846 – April 1847
Key terms: Whig Party, Bear Flag Revolt (1846), Californios, Taos Revolt (1847), Martial law (General Orders No. 20)
Plan C: take Mexico's north, and Mexico will sell. Taylor won in May and took Monterrey in September.
Taylor, a Whig, became the war's first hero. Polk, a Democrat, noticed.
James K. Polk
He is evidently a weak man and has been made giddy with the idea of the Presidency.
Taylor won the presidency in 1848.
In the West, General Kearny took Santa Fe in August without a fight.
In California, American settlers raised a homemade grizzly-bear flag at Sonoma. They jailed Mariano Vallejo, a Californio general who had welcomed American rule.
Californios fought back. They retook Los Angeles, then beat Kearny's dragoons at San Pasqual.
In January 1847, New Mexicans and Taos Pueblo men killed the new American governor, Charles Bent. Cannon broke the revolt at the pueblo's church. About 150 defenders died.
Plan C failed. Mexico still would not sell.
Plan D: send Santa Anna home. Mexico's exiled general had let Polk's agents think he wanted peace. The Navy let him through its blockade. He took command and fought.
Before Veracruz, General Winfield Scott put his own army under martial law. His volunteers had been robbing and killing Mexican civilians.
Plan E: take the capital. In March 1847, Scott landed about ten thousand men at Veracruz in a single day.
Scott's guns shelled Veracruz for four days, and the city surrendered. Civilians died in the shelling. Estimates run into the hundreds.
At Cerro Gordo in April, an engineer captain named Robert E. Lee found a path around Santa Anna's lines.
Santa Anna escaped so fast he left his artificial leg in his carriage. Soldiers from Illinois took it home. It's still in Springfield.
Grasshopper Hill
August – September 1847
Key terms: Mexico City campaign (1847), Saint Patrick's Battalion (San Patricios), Niños Héroes, West Point (U.S. Military Academy)
By August 1847, Scott's army had reached the Valley of Mexico.
At Churubusco, some of the fiercest defenders were U.S. Army deserters.
Many were Irish Catholic immigrants. Mexico was Catholic, and it offered deserters land.
The U.S. Army hanged fifty of them. On the morning of September 13, thirty stood on wagons at Mixcoac, facing the castle.
Colonel William Harney made them wait until the American flag rose over Chapultepec.
The castle held Mexico's military college, and some of its defenders were teenage cadets.
Ramón Alcaraz and the Mexican writers of the Apuntes
…some of the students still fired, and who were the last defenders of that Mexican flag which was quickly replaced by the American.
Six cadets died. Mexico remembers them as the Niños Héroes, the boy heroes.
That afternoon · the San Cosme gate
Lieutenant Grant had a small cannon carried up a church bell tower. It worked so well his general offered a second.
Ulysses S. Grant
I could not tell the General that there was not room enough in the steeple for another gun, because he probably would have looked upon such a statement as a contradiction from a second lieutenant.
General Worth's messenger was Lieutenant John Pemberton. In 1863, Pemberton surrendered Vicksburg to Grant.
The city fell the next day. Years later, Scott credited West Point:
Gen. Winfield Scott
…but for our graduated cadets, the war… might, and probably would, have lasted some four or five years…
The next time those graduates fought a war, they fought each other.
The Man Who Wouldn't Go Home
October 1847 – March 1848
Key terms: Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), Mexican Cession, Gadsden Purchase (1853), "All of Mexico" movement, Article XI (Indian raids)
Plan F. Polk recalled his negotiator, Nicholas Trist, chief clerk of the State Department. Trist ignored the order, stayed, and sent Washington sixty-five pages explaining why.
Polk's diary, January 15, 1848:
James K. Polk
His despatch proves that he is destitute of honour or principle…
On February 2, 1848, in the town of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the fired negotiator signed a peace treaty.
Mexico accepted the Rio Grande as the border and gave up California, New Mexico and the land between. The United States paid fifteen million dollars.
Counting Texas, Mexico lost more than half its territory.
Nine days before the signing, gold was found at Sutter's Mill. Nobody at the table knew.
Polk sent Trist's treaty to the Senate. That same week he wrote in his diary:
James K. Polk
Trist has proved himself to be an impudent and unqualified scoundrel.
Some Democrats had wanted to take all of Mexico. Senator John C. Calhoun objected, because of who lived there.
Sen. John C. Calhoun
Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race.
The treaty promised Mexicans who stayed citizenship, in time, and protection for their property.
The Senate struck out Article Ten, which protected their land grants.
Whose Soil?
1848 – 1859
Key terms: Californios, California Land Act (1851), Foreign Miners' Tax (1850), Act for the Government and Protection of Indians (1850)
The border moved. The people didn't. About 80,000 Mexicans, and far more Native people, now lived inside the United States.
Mariano Vallejo, jailed by the Bear Flaggers, sat in California's first state senate. Then came the Land Act of 1851.
Californios had to prove their titles in federal hearings. The average claim took seventeen years.
Lawyers took land as fees, and squatters took the rest. Vallejo lost most of his.
For California's Native peoples, the Gold Rush was a catastrophe.
A state law let settlers hold Native people, even children, as unpaid laborers. California paid militias to raid Native villages.
Peter H. Burnett
That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected.
Historians estimate 150,000 Native people lived in California in 1846. By 1870, about 30,000 were left.
Juan Cortina's family had ranched the Rio Grande since Spanish times. In 1859 he rode into Brownsville, Texas, with armed men. Five people died.
Juan Nepomuceno Cortina
…a multitude of lawyers, a secret conclave… for the sole purpose of despoiling the Mexicans of the lands and usurp them afterwards.
Put them side by side. Both say American newcomers took Mexican land that wasn't theirs.
Vallejo worked through the courts and legislature. Cortina took up arms, yet claimed his rights as an American citizen.
Mexico Will Poison Us
1846 – 1885
Key terms: Wilmot Proviso (1846), Free soil, 36°30′ line (Missouri Compromise, 1820)
In August 1846, Congressman David Wilmot proposed a rule: no slavery in any land taken from Mexico.
The House passed it more than once. The Senate never did.
Rep. David Wilmot
I plead the cause and the rights of white freemen.
Wilmot wanted the West for white workers. Douglass wanted slavery ended everywhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic, which brings him down in turn.
“Mexico will poison us.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Mexico will poison us.
Every acre of the Cession now asked one question. Slave soil, or free?
Ulysses S. Grant
The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war.