Readings #1: Mexican Borderlands and Oregon, War with Mexico, Politics of Expansion PDF Fall 2024

Readings #1: Mexican Borderlands and Oregon, War with Mexico, Politics of Expansion To-Do Date: Jul 16 at 11:59pm Mexican Borderlands and Oregon Mexico faced serious problems after it became independent from Spain in 1821. After a brief flirtation with monarchy, it became a...

Readings #1: Mexican Borderlands and Oregon, War with Mexico, Politics of Expansion To-Do Date: Jul 16 at 11:59pm Mexican Borderlands and Oregon Mexico faced serious problems after it became independent from Spain in 1821. After a brief flirtation with monarchy, it became a republic, and a succession of presidents wrangled over whether the new nation should be centralist, with a strong government in Mexico City, or federalist, with considerable autonomy given to the provinces. Mexico's northern provinces, from Texas to California, were underpopulated and difficult to defend, so Mexico initially encouraged American settlement and trade. Americans were also attracted to potentially rich farmland in the Oregon Country in the early 1840s. While settlers moved into the Republic of Texas, the opening of the Oregon Trail marked the beginning of significant migration to the Pacific Northwest as well. The settlement of Texas. In the last days of colonial rule in Mexico, Spain had accepted a proposal from several American entrepreneurs to bring American settlers into Texas; Mexico renewed the agreement in 1825 with the provisions that all newcomers become Mexican citizens and accept Catholicism. Promoters of American settlement (known as empresarios by the Mexicans), such as Stephen F. Austin, did their jobs well. As many as twenty thousand Americans, along with a thousand slaves, were living in Texas by 1830, mostly southern fanners who found the land cheap and ideal for growing cotton. The growth of :  the American population, which quickly overwhelmed the group of roughly five thousand Spanish-speaking Mexicans in Texas (Tejanos), led Mexico to reverse its “open-door” policy. The Mexican Congress banned slavery in Texas and prohibited further immigration by American citizens, but settlers, both white and slave, continued to cross the border from the United States. Tensions rose as Americans demanded a greater say in their own affairs. Texas's independence. In 1834, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna seized power in Mexico, determined to exercise greater control over Texas. His attempts to enforce his centralist policies there failed, and in 1835, he led his troops north. The American Texans and Tejanos responded with a declaration of independence (March 2, 1836), but the first confrontation of the Texas Revolution was a disaster for them. Santa Anna's forces completely wiped out the defenders of the Alamo, a mission on the outskirts of San Antonio. Famed frontiersmen Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie died in the fighting. A few weeks later, Santa Anna ordered the execution of all Texas prisoners captured in the Battle of Goliad. The tide decisively turned when Sam Houston, a former governor of Tennessee who had fought with Andrew Jackson, took command of the Texas army. At the Battle of San Jacinto (April 21, 1836), he surprised the Mexican troops, captured Santa Anna, and forced the general to sign a treaty that recognized Texas's independence in return for his freedom. Although Santa Anna repudiated the treaty after he was released, as did the Mexican government, Texas had become a sovereign nation. While refusing to acknowledge Texas's independence, Mexico still simmered over the location of the border. The Mexican government had long maintained that Texas was part of the province of Coahuila, whose :  northern boundary was the Nueces River. Independent Texans, on the other hand, claimed the two-thousand-mile-long Rio Grande as their southern and western border. The enormous territory north and east of the Rio Grande remained in dispute until 1846. The Republic of Texas chose Sam Houston as its first president, created a legislature and court system, and received diplomatic recognition from the United States, Great Britain, and France. Most Texans, however, expected and wanted their independence to be short-lived. But the Republic's petition for annexation to the United States was refused in 1837, and Texas did not become a state until 1845. New Mexico and California. In 1821, Mexico opened Santa Fe, one of the oldest European settlements in North America, to U.S. trade. In just a short time, wagon trains carrying American goods were making the long trek from Independence, Missouri, to Santa Fe, along what became known as the Santa Fe Trail. While fewer settlers went to New Mexico than to Texas, the commercial ties were profitable, and more important, the establishment of the trail demonstrated that the Great Plains was not a barrier to westward expansion. Mexico also began to encourage U.S. trade with California, whose ports had been effectively off limits to foreign shipping during the period of Spanish rule (1769–1821). Agents of New England merchants established offices for the purpose of exchanging a wide variety of American-made products for California cattle hides and tallow. Many of the agents married Spanish-speaking Californians, or Californios , and converted to Catholicism. The first Americans to reach California overland were fur trappers and traders, such as Jedediah Smith (1826) and James Pattie (1828), who reached the Mexican province by way of :  Santa Fe. By the 1840s, two main routes were open to settlers—the Old Spanish Trail from Santa Fe into southern California and the California Trail, an Oregon Trail offshoot that crossed the Sierra Nevada and descended into the Sacramento River Valley. Wealthy Californios and a small number of early American settlers acquired vast estates known as ranchos after Mexico secularized the lands of the Catholic missions in 1834. Dissatisfaction with the remote Mexican government grew in California throughout the 1830s. A rapid turnover of provincial governors, most of whom knew little about California, exacerbated the negative feelings. By 1845, a native governor, Pio Pico, who was based in Los Angeles, and the Mexican military commandant in Monterey were battling over power. Under these frustrating conditions, many people in California, including the seven hundred or so Americans there, concluded that it was time for a complete break with Mexico, either through independence or by annexation to the United States. The Oregon Country. American claims to the Oregon Country dated back to Captain Robert Gray's discovery of the Columbia River in 1792 and were reinforced by the expedition of Lewis and Clark to the Pacific (1804–06). The official joint occupation of the territory by the United States and Great Britain worked well until the 1840s, when “Oregon fever” gripped many Americans. Wagon trains, organized in the spring in Independence or St. Joseph, Missouri, transported chiefly young families from the Midwest, who traveled northwest for six months over the Oregon Trail, parts of which had long been in use by trappers and early explorers. These pioneer families traveled along the Platte River, crossed through the South Pass of the Rocky Mountains, and then turned north to follow the Snake and Columbia Rivers to the Willamette :  Valley. Between 1841 and 1845, an estimated five thousand Americans settled in the Oregon Country, by far the largest number of people to have traveled to the Far West. War with Mexico When Congress approved the annexation of the Republic of Texas, Mexico broke off diplomatic relations with the United States. Polk responded by ordering U.S. troops under the command of General Zachary Taylor into the new American state. He also sent his personal emissary, John Slidell, to Mexico City with a proposal to purchase New Mexico and California and fix the boundary of Texas at the Rio Grande. By March 1846, however, the Mexican government had been overthrown, the new Mexican president had reaffirmed Mexico's claims to all of Texas, Slidell's mission had failed, and Taylor's forces had advanced to the Rio Grande. Fighting began around Matamoros in April. When the news reached Washington a month later, Polk did not hesitate to send a war message to Congress, stating “Mexico has … shed American blood on American soil.” The fact that hostilities had broken out in still-disputed territory was not considered particularly relevant. President Polk signed the declaration of war against Mexico on May 13, 1846. The war in California and New Mexico. If Texas provided the spark for war, California provided the motive. The United States had long been interested in California, primarily because San Francisco had the finest natural harbor on the Pacific coast. In 1842, American naval forces, mistakenly believing that war had broken out between the United States and Mexico, landed at Monterey. Polk had confidential agents in place by 1844 to encourage American settlers in California to push for :  either annexation or independence under U.S. protection. On June 14, 1846, a small group of Americans in the Sacramento Valley ran a homemade flag up a pole and declared California an independent nation. The so-called Bear Flag Revolt, which was supported by Captain John C. Frémont, was short-lived. When the Mexican War actually did begin, Polk lost little time in sending the Pacific fleet under Commodore John Sloat to California, with orders to claim the province as occupied territory. Sloat landed at Monterey in early July and declared California part of the United States. Mexican resistance to the American takeover was over by January 1847. Virtually no fighting took place in New Mexico. Colonel Stephen Kearny arrived in Santa Fe in August 1846 with the “Army of the West,” a force of about seventeen hundred men, and simply proclaimed that New Mexico was new American territory. He established a temporary territorial government before moving on to California. The war in Mexico. Polk had achieved his most important expansionist goals by the summer of 1846, but righting with Mexico continued for another two years. Taylor won important battles at Palo Alto and Monterrey in northern Mexico, making him a national hero. President Polk agreed to let Santa Anna, then in exile in Cuba, back into Mexico only if he promised to help negotiate a settlement. Santa Anna instead took command of the government and pledged continued resistance against the American invasion. Severely outnumbered, Santa Anna's forces were defeated by Taylor's troops at the Battle of Buena Vista (February 1847). The main theater of the war then shifted to the heart of Mexico. General Winfield Scott landed near Veracruz on March 29 and spent the spring and summer pressing the campaign toward Mexico City. The fall of the :  Mexican capital in September ended the war. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Nicholas Trist, an official in the State Department, opened negotiations with Mexico in January 1848. The resulting Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was ratified by Mexico in February and by the Senate in March. Under its terms, Mexico relinquished all claims to Texas north of the Rio Grande and ceded New Mexico and California to the United States. The lands of the Mexican Cession also encompassed Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. The United States agreed to pay $ 15 million for the new territory and an additional $3 million to assume the debt owed by Mexico to American citizens for past claims. Politics of Expansion American politics in the 1820s and 1830s had been dominated by domestic issues: the banks, tariffs, and internal improvements. In the 1840s, foreign policy— “American expansion,” more accurately—took center stage. The shift was due in part to the political opportunism of John Tyler, William Henry Harrison's vice president. A former Democrat who had broken with Jackson over nullification, Tyler became president when Harrison died after just a month in office. Tyler really did not support the Whig program; his vetoing of bills that would have reestablished the Bank of the United States and raised tariffs led to the wholesale resignation of his cabinet (except Secretary of State Daniel Webster) and lost him what little support the Whig party had earlier given him. :  Tyler's foreign policy. Having created so many political enemies with his domestic policy, Tyler turned to foreign affairs. The successful negotiation of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty convinced him to call for the annexation of Texas. Secret negotiations with the Republic of Texas began in 1843, and a treaty to formalize annexation was sent to the Senate in April 1844. Tyler claimed that if the United States did not take Texas, Great Britain would. Despite his arguments, opposition to the treaty was strong from both Whigs and Democrats; many saw the annexation as a plot to scrap the Missouri Compromise and extend slavery, while others feared war with Mexico. The treaty was rejected handily. Defeat was not the end of the matter, however. The election of Democrat James Polk in November 1844 on an expansionist platform suggested that the public mood had changed. Rather than quickly reintroduce the treaty, which had to be ratified by two thirds of the Senate, Tyler was able to accomplish annexation through a joint resolution of Congress, which required only simple majorities in both houses to pass. The joint resolution was approved and signed by Tyler as one of his last acts in office (March 1, 1845). The election of 1844. The front runners for the presidency in 1844 were Henry Clay for the Whigs and Martin Van Buren for the Democrats. Before the parties' nominating conventions, the two men met and agreed to keep the issues of expansion and slavery out of the campaign. Both men published lengthy letters in the national press opposing the immediate annexation of Texas. Clay easily won the Whig nomination, but the Democrats deadlocked because Van Buren's stand on Texas cost him votes. In the end, he could not hurdle the party's rule that required a candidate to win two thirds of the vote of the convention :  for nomination. James Polk of Tennessee, a former Speaker of the House, was chosen on the ninth ballot. The Democratic platform called for the “reannexation” of Texas and the “reoccupation” of Oregon; in fact, one of the party's most effective slogans was “Fifty-four Forty or Fight !,” a reference to the northernmost boundary of the Oregon Country. Clay was on the defensive from the beginning, but he eventually came out with a qualified endorsement for the annexation of Texas. His strategy backfired. Whigs in New York had switched to the anti-slavery Liberty party in enough numbers to cost Clay the state. Had Clay taken New York, he would have won the presidency by seven electoral votes. Only thirty-eight thousand popular votes separated the candidates, but the margin for Polk in the Electoral College was 170 to Clay's 105. Settling the Oregon question. Despite the rhetoric of the presidential campaign, Polk was not ready to go to war with Great Britain over Oregon. Joint occupation, however, was becoming meaningless as more and more American settlers moved into the territory. The practical reality was that Americans far outnumbered the British fur trappers, and the fur trade was in decline in any event. While the British initially rebuffed an American offer to negotiate, both countries ultimately agreed to settle their differences peacefully in 1846. The solution was to extend the Webster-Ashburton Treaty line (the forty-ninth parallel) to the Pacific, making some twists and turns in Puget Sound so that all of Vancouver Island went to Great Britain. That accomplished, Polk remained dissatisfied with his obtaining American control over most of the disputed part of Oregon and his bringing Texas into the Union (December 1845); he wanted New Mexico and California as well and this time was prepared to go to war, if necessary. :  The rise of manifest destiny. Polk's vision of a country that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific was not a new idea, but soon after his election, Americans received a well-phrased rationale to justify expansion. In 1845, John L. O'Sullivan, publisher of the Democratic Review, wrote that it was the nation's “manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.” The two words “manifest destiny” quickly caught on, soon coming to mean that those who favored expansion had God on their side and were engaged in the noble task of spreading democracy. Despite the fact that the expansionist doctrine was based partly on the notion of racial superiority—O'Sullivan referred to the “superior vigor of the Anglo-Saxon race”—it appealed both to supporters of slavery, who wanted Texas annexed, and to antislavery advocates, who favored adding California and Oregon to the Union. Proponents of manifest destiny claimed that a continental United States would benefit from trade with Asia, from the commercial advantages of San Francisco Bay and Puget Sound, and from lower tariffs. Sea-to-sea expansion would also safeguard democracy, give the nation room to grow, and preserve the essential character of the country as an agricultural nation in the Jeffersonian tradition. :