“In 1821, less than two years after the agreement between the United States and Spain, Mexico claimed and won independence, taking California with it; Spain’s presence on the North American mainland was suddenly over.
The Republic of Mexico then made a strategic mistake: In an effort to populate its territory of Texas, it encouraged white settlers to effectively emigrate from America. Before too long, the sparsely settled Texas had a white population that exceeded its Hispanic population. As the Texans were ostensibly American citizens living in a foreign land, simmering conflicts between these opportunistic expatriates and Mexico called upon the pride of American nationalism.
With numbers on their side, the Texans declared themselves an independent republic, seeking freedom from Mexico, which in turn responded with force. Seeing ongoing war with the Mexicans as futile, the Texans pleaded to join their territory with America.
Once James Polk won the election of 1844, the issue was decided: The United States annexed the Republic of Texas as the twenty-eighth state days before he took office the following year. The question then became, Where exactly did Texas end? When it was a part of Mexican territory, there hadn’t been a pressing need to so closely define a border within that republic, given that Texas was largely uninhabited. Once Texas became a part of the United States, however, this boundary needed to be defined with the utmost precision. President Polk dispatched General Zachary Taylor to establish one. The efforts started the Mexican-American War.
Nationalism, predictably, lent itself to wartime sloganeering—Americans were presented with the idea of westward expansion, starting with Texas, as “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence,” as New York’s Democratic Review put it in 1845. The American desire expanded in scope to contest Mexico’s California.
By late 1847, it was clear that Mexico had lost the war. With the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in February 1848, everything to the west, including all of California, became a part of the United States. The terms of surrender called for an American payment of $15 million for the territory, the same price tag applied to the Louisiana Purchase forty-five years prior. With it, the project for the continental United States had been completed. Destiny had unfolded in Polk’s first term, just as the campaign rhetoric of 1844 had prophesied.
At almost the exact time of the Mexican surrender, gold was discovered in a remote riverbed in northern California. And when the news of this discovery in California came to the eastern seaboard of America by the end of 1848, to the most fervent believer in God’s will in matters of war and conquest, this immense treasure must have seemed ordained proof that, yes indeed, God did love America more than any other nation in the history of humanity.”
– Bhu Srinivasan’s “Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism”
Credit: Tosin Adeoti
