The United States War on Mexico of 1846-1848 was the first U.S. war of aggression against a sovereign nation and the defining event in U.S.-Mexico relations. The ruthlessness of the U.S. invasion shocked even the European nations that had been at war with their neighbors for centuries. Ulysses S. Grant -- who served in Mexico under both Generals Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, commanded the Union forces in the American Civil War, and later became the eighteenth President of the United States -- unconditionally condemned the war in his Personal Memoirs. He denounced it "as one of the most unjust wars ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory."

The U.S. War on Mexico was the culmination of a thirty-year campaign of rapacious American imperialism in the South and Southwest. This invasion was planned and executed by the U.S. to silence Mexico's claim to Texas and to expropriate as much of the southern republic as it could seize by force of arms. It was the war on Mexico that Andrew Jackson failed to provoke in 1836. And last but not least, it was a war intended to extend the U.S. empire of slavery into Mexico. The southern U.S. slave aristocracy instigated and commanded the invasion. The U.S. President at the time, James K. Polk, was a political protégé of Andrew Jackson. Both the President and General Zachary Scott, the supreme U.S. field commander, were from slaveholding families in the South. General Taylor, who initiated the invasion of Mexico and later became U.S. president himself, actually owned a slave plantation in Mississippi. The majority of the U.S. Army officers who served in Mexico was from the American South and, if not slave owners themselves, enthusiastically supported the institution. And although the conquest of Mexico did not ultimately extend the U.S. empire of slavery, it did guarantee the survival of the institution in Texas until the U.S. Civil War.

The U.S. War on Mexico was inevitable because Mexican officials absolutely refused to sell their northern territory despite repeated offers by the United States to buy it. Once the leaders of the U.S. finally understood that the Mexican people would never sell their birthright in North America, they were committed to war and sought a pretext to justify their aggression. Although Jackson's "disputed" territory strategy failed in Texas in 1836, President Polk employed it to create a pretext for war in 1846. The "disputed" territory this time was the 145-kilometer (90 mile) wide strip of land between the Nueces River and Rio Grande in south Texas.

Historically, the Nueces, which empties into the Gulf of Mexico at Corpus Christi, was the northern border of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. President Polk urged the Republic of Texas to claim the Rio Grande, which runs south and roughly parallel to the Nueces and empties into the Gulf at Matamoros, as its southern boundary. Polk knew that Mexico would go to war over the annexation of Texas and dispatched U.S troops under the command of General Taylor to Corpus Christi on the edge of the "disputed" territory. In his PersonalMemoirs, Grant explained the mission of the U.S. Army in south Texas, "We were sent to provoke a fight, but it was essential that Mexico should commence it." The plan worked. The U.S. annexed Texas in February of 1846, and Polk immediately ordered Taylor to proceed to the Rio Grande. One of Taylor's patrols skirmished with a Mexican detachment and lost over twenty soldiers, including eleven dead, five wounded, and several captured.

Polk immediately called for war. In his bellicose message to the U.S. Congress, the President announced that "American blood had been shed upon American soil." To counter strong opposition to the war, Polk coupled his war bill to a law appropriating money to support Taylor and the soldiers who were imperiled by Mexican resistance. A "no" vote would be construed as a betrayal of the troops in the field.

Polk got his declaration of war.

Unconditional Surrender

The American strategy was to wage total war against the Mexican people that would only end with unconditional surrender. The U.S. Navy blockaded the ports of Mexico in order to isolate and weaken the nation while the Army conducted land operations. The initial invasion of the undefended northern territories of the republic was swift and Machiavellian. U.S. agents were sent ahead of the military forces to infiltrate Mexican communities and bribe key officials in order to divide and conquer. Where resistance to the invasion did occur, it was dealt with by draconian measures. To terrorize the population of New Mexico into submission, the U.S. Army shelled the ancient Pueblo de Taos, and two leaders of the local resistance were captured and summarily executed -- a guard murdered Tomás Baca, an Indian prisoner of war, before he could be brought before a military court, and Pablo Montoya, a citizen of Mexico, was illegally charged with treason to the U.S. and hanged.

From the beginning of the invasion, America's overwhelming advantage was manifest -- the U.S. possessed superior firepower that field commanders were willing to use against both military and civilian targets. The United States had been born in blood in 1776 and had been preparing for war since the U.S. Military Academy was established at West Point in 1802. After studying the results of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, the American high command realized that future conflicts would be decided by artillery and set about developing the latest in guns and tactics. The invasion of Mexico would serve as a proving ground for the new American war machine.

Superior firepower proved decisive in every major engagement of the U.S. War on Mexico. Equipped with inferior arms and insufficient supplies, Mexican forces offered spirited resistance, but long-range artillery shells battered their fortifications and barrages of shrapnel and grapeshot mowed the defenders down. Despite heavy losses, the Mexican army was able to halt the American invasion in northern Mexico. It was the siege of Veracruz that broke the spirit of the Mexican republic.

The Siege of Veracruz

With American forces checked in the north, President Polk decided to strike at the heart of Mexico. Veracruz, the primary seaport on Mexico's Gulf Coast and the gateway to Mexico City, was the initial target of General Scott's campaign in the South. In America's first major sea invasion, over 200 vessels landed more than 10,000 soldiers, three batteries of field artillery, and thousands of tons of ammunition and equipment on Mexican soil. Scott encircled the city of 15,000 people, including a garrison of 3,360 Mexican soldiers, cut off the food and water supplies, and began a devastating 21-day siege.

Unwilling to risk American lives in an infantry assault, General Scott decided to bombard Veracruz into submission with his massive artillery batteries. The cannonade commenced at 4:15 P.M. on March 22, 1847, when a barrage of 250-millimeter (10 inch) mortar shells from the shore batteries showered down on the Plaza de Armas in the center of the city. At 5:45 P.M. the U.S. assault was augmented by artillery fire from a flotilla of two steamers and four schooner-gunboats anchored safely a mile away near Point Hornos. To hasten the fall of the city, Scott had a naval battery of three 12-kilogram (32-pound) cannons and three 200-millimeter (8-inch) guns brought ashore and put into position the following day. When the battery opened fire on the morning of the 24th the effects of the heavy cannon balls could be seen at once. The walls of the fortress at Veracruz began to crumble and shrapnel from the bursting shells raked both the military and civilian population inside the city. It was a terrible sight but the worst was yet to come.

The terror of the siege increased later in the day when American rocketeers launched forty Congreve's rockets into the city in an attempt to set it on fire. On the 25th, they followed up with a barrage of ten new Hale rockets. Highly inaccurate, these experimental missiles rarely hit the intended targets but, upon impact, ricocheted randomly through the city streets causing many civilian causalities and substantial collateral damage.

The destruction and carnage inside the walls of Veracruz were extensive. Firing ceased temporarily at 5:00 P.M. on the 25th when a Mexican officer emerged under a flag of truce and delivered a proposal for the evacuation of the women and children from the city. Scott denied the request and resumed the bombardment that continued undiminished through the driving wind and rain of a particularly vicious storm that occurred during the night. On the morning of the 26th, Scott again refused a request to allow the evacuation of civilians but did begin negotiations for the capitulation of the city. He continued to demand unconditional surrender and got it on March 27.

Veracruz was in shambles. During the four-day bombardment, American shore artillery had fired 6,700 shot and shell, a total of over 173,000 kilograms (463,000 pounds) of munitions, into the city. Nearly one-third of the missiles (half of the total weight) were massive 250-millimeter (10-inch) mortar shells that impacted haphazardly or exploded in the air, showering razor-sharp shrapnel on soldiers and civilians alike. The American navy had fired another 1,800 rounds of heavy artillery at the city. The final tally of death and suffering at Veracruz was as lopsided as the battle itself. Mexican officials estimated 400 to 500 civilian and 600 military casualties inside the city -- the Americans lost thirteen men killed and fifty-four wounded.

Captain Robert E. Lee, a young American artillery officer who would later command the Confederate forces during the American Civil War, participated in the siege of Veracruz and recorded his memories of the event:

The shells thrown from our battery were constant and regular discharges, so beautiful in their flight and so destructive in their fall. It was awful! My heart bled for the inhabitants. The soldiers I did not care so much for, but it was terrible to think of the women and children.


Captain Lee was not the only one horrified by the siege of Veracruz. The nations of Western Europe condemned both the savagery of the siege and the naked imperialism of the United States. But the U.S. wasn't deterred by international outrage; the invasion immediately headed inland towards the heart of Mexico.

To The Halls of Montezuma: The Fall of Mexico City

After the fall of Veracruz, Scott directed his massive invasion force toward Mexico City. Mexican defenders engaged the American invaders at various points along the march but were always out-gunned and unable to stop the advance. Constant guerrilla harassment delayed Scott's forces, but could not prevent the assault on the capital of the Mexican republic.

The fate of Mexico City was decided at Chapultepec castle, located 3 kilometers (2 miles) west of the city gates. In order to demoralize the Mexican defenders and terrorize the inhabitants of the nearby capital, Scott moved four artillery batteries into position and bombarded Chapultepec throughout the day of September 12, 1847. The ground assault began the next morning with a concentrated two-hour shelling of the castle, followed by a storm of grape, canister, and shrapnel aimed at the Mexican soldiers stationed outside the walls. Units from four U.S. Army divisions participated in the attack on the citadel that was defended by only 832 infantrymen plus some artillerymen and engineers and a handful of teenaged military college cadets. The castle fell on September 13th after a fierce hand-to-hand battle. Mexican causalities included many wounded whose throats were cut by the Americans and six youthful cadets of the military college at Chapultepec -- Francisco Márquez, Agustín Melgar, Juan Escutia, Fernando Montes de Oca, Vicente Suárez, and Juan de la Barrera -- who fought the good fight and leapt to their deaths from the tower of the citadel rather than surrender to the Americans. They became known as the legendary LosNiños Héroes, martyrs of the unrighteous war.

LosNiños were not the only martyrs to the Mexican cause who died at Chapultpec. At 9:30 A.M. on the last day of the siege, at the very moment that the American stars and stripes replaced the Mexican tri-color over the castle, U.S. Colonel William Selby Harney gave the order to hang thirty Irish-Americans and Irish immigrants of the Batallón deSan Patricio who had deserted from the U.S. Army to fight on the Mexican side and had been captured at the Battle of Churubusco. The bodies of these men, who had been kept waiting on the gallows in full view of the castle with nooses around their necks since dawn, were later cut down and buried by other San Patricios who had been flogged and branded. A marble plaque honoring these Irish- American soldiers overlooks the San Jacinto Plaza in the Mexico City suburb of San Angel.

After the fall of Chapultepec, Scott moved his forces to the gates of Mexico City proper where American artillery again won the day. Scott's campaign of shock and terror worked -- the citizens of Mexico City realized that they were at the mercy of an enemy who didn't believe in mercy. On September 14th, in order to spare the city the fate of Veracruz and Chapultepec, Mexican authorities persuaded General Santa Anna to withdraw the Mexican army and appealed to the American general for favorable terms of capitulation. Scott, with his mighty guns aimed at the heart of Mexico, demanded unconditional surrender. Fully informed of the tragedy at Veracruz, and with the carnage of Chapultepec smoldering within sight, the Mexican officials yielded.

To celebrate the capture of Mexico City, Scott staged a triumphant military parade to the Grand Plaza the following day. When Mexican resistance fighters sniped at U.S. troops headed to the plaza, American artillerymen shelled the houses from which the fire originated with a 200-millimeter (8-inch) howitzer. Sporadic sniper fire against the invaders in the city continued until September 17th when the last resisters were rooted out and killed. Again, American artillery had prevailed -- in the battle for the heart of Mexico the U.S. lost only 130 men compared to the deaths of over 3,000 Mexican defenders.

The war was essentially over, but resistance continued after the fall of the capital. Mopping-up activities took several more months and claimed more Mexican lives. In Puebla, four thousand guerillas attacked the U.S. garrison and kept it under siege for twenty-eight days -- but again the contest was decided by American firepower. Widespread acts of resistance continued but were ruthlessly suppressed. Throughout the entire U.S. campaign in Mexico, guerrilla actions against the invaders met tough measures -- initially Scott had issued standing orders that local Mexican officials be held responsible for the apprehension and delivery to American forces of any and all Mexicans who killed or wounded Americans. If the guilty parties were not delivered, a $300 fine was levied on the personal property of the nearest mayor. After the fall of Mexico City, Scott toughened his policy against resistance even more. American soldiers were ordered to show no quarter -- captured guerrilla suspects were to be put to death with "due solemnity" after a mock trial by three U.S. Army officers. These summary executions took place all over Mexico and helped extinguish the last flames of resistance.

Scott's ruthless campaign that began in Veracruz and penetrated the Valley of Mexico to the Halls of Montezuma won the war. The Americans inflicted more than 7,000 casualties on the Mexican army and took over 3,700 prisoners. In addition, the invading army seized at least 75 cannon and 20,000 small arms, effectively disarming the young Mexican republic. American historians who chronicle the conquest do not offer estimates of the number of civilian casualties or the extent of the collateral damage of the U.S. War on Mexico.

Los Diablos Tejanos
No history of the U.S. conquest of Mexico is complete without an account of the atrocities committed by the notorious Texas Ranger companies, dubbed Los Diablos Tejanos by the Mexicans they terrorized. These paramilitary gangs conducted a campaign of death and destruction in the Mexican countryside that left a legacy of hate that survives to this day. The vast majority of the 700 Rangers who volunteered for service in Mexico were jobless desperados from the Texas frontier who would do anything for money. They were recruited and led by Texans who were seeking revenge for what they considered wrongs committed by Mexicans at the Alamo, Goliad, Santa Fe, and Mier.

Los Diablos killed and pillaged indiscriminately. Armed with the latest rifles and revolvers, and wielding vicious Bowie knives, the Rangers operated beyond the control of the U.S. Army from the day they reported for duty. Dispatched as scouts in northern Mexico by General Taylor, the Texas mercenaries roamed the countryside, raiding villages, plundering farms, and shooting or hanging unarmed Mexican citizens.

On July 9, 1846, George Gordon Meade, a young army officer who, like Grant and Lee, served as a general during the U.S. Civil War, wrote a scathing report on Ranger misconduct in his area of responsibility:

They have killed five or six innocent people walking in the street, for no other object than their own amusement. . . . They rob and steal the cattle and corn of the poor farmers, and in fact act more like a body of hostile Indians than civilized Whites. Their officers have no command or control over them.
The Corpus Christi Company of Texas Rangers under the command of "Mustang" Gray, the man who murdered Agapito De Léon at Victoria, was among the worst of Los Diablos. Dr. S. Compton Smith, an outspoken critic of the Texas Rangers, was unsparing in his denunciation of Gray and his company:

Texas Rangers…were mostly made up of adventurers and vagabonds. . . . The gang of miscreants under the leadership of Mustang Gray were of this description. This party, in cold-blood, murdered almost the entire male population of the rancho of Guadalupe, where not a single weapon, offensive or defensive, could be found! Their only object was plunder!
When General Taylor learned of the massacre at the rancho Guadalupe and other atrocities committed by the Rangers, he tried to rein in the Texas volunteers by threatening to arrest all 700 of them. The Rangers, to a man, ignored the general, and he backed off. After all, the reign of terror conducted by Los Diablos Tejanos against the Mexican people helped paralyze resistance to the invasion and aided in the conquest of Mexico.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

Mexico ultimately lost the war because of the ruthless application of superior firepower against both military and civilian targets by U.S. Army and Navy forces. It began as a war of attrition that American field commanders were willing to escalate into a war of annihilation. Hostilities officially ceased in late October of 1847, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848, formally ended the conflict. The U.S. War on Mexico secured Texas as part of the southern empire of slavery and took nearly half of the original territory of the Republic of Mexico as spoils of war. Mexico was forced to cede Upper California and the territory of New Mexico (later to become the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming) to the U.S. -- a total land area of 1,370,154 square kilometers (529,017 square miles). Including the land of the Spanish cession and the annexation of Texas, by 1848 the U.S. had expropriated a total of 2,567,111 square kilometers (almost one million square miles) of land from its southern neighbor.

Lost to Mexico were the fertile coastal plains of Texas and California and the bountiful high plains of the Edwards and Colorado plateaus and the Llano Estacado, vast areas that have produced enormous wealth in minerals, oil, beef, cotton, corn, sugar, and other agricultural commodities. Gone were the fecund Central Valley in California, Gila River Valley in Arizona, the Mesilla Valley in New Mexico, and Rio Grande Valley in Texas, cornucopias that would come to feed so much of the U.S. population. Stolen from the Mexican people were the treasures of the Sierra Nevada, the lower Rocky Mountains, and the upper portions of Sonora and Chihuahua that have produced copious amounts of gold, silver, copper, and other minerals. Expropriated were the important rivers and abundant forests of the American Southwest. Annexed to the U.S. were the key seaports of California and Texas -- San Francisco, San Pedro, San Diego, Port Isabel, Corpus Christi, and Galveston -- all destined to become thriving centers of commerce and industry. Denied to Mexico were the important trade centers of Sonoma, Santa Clara, San Juan Bautista, Monterey, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, San Fernando, Los Angeles, La Mesa, San Gabriel, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, El Paso, San Antonio, and Laredo -- the Spanish names protest the theft.

And, for some Americans, half of Mexico was not enough. President Polk himself was disappointed in the final terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. He wanted to partition Mexico along the 26th parallel due west from the mouth of Rio Grande all the way to the Pacific Ocean, an annexation plan that would have included almost all of the current Mexican states of Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora (with its important seaport of Guaymas), and most of Baja California. Additionally, he wanted that area of Mexico lying east of the Sierra Madre Oriental down to, and including, the port of Tampico (the present Mexican states of Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas). Polk considered the coastal plains of Tamaulipas to be fertile ground for slave plantations. All in all, the U.S President coveted, and almost secured, another 886,000 square kilometers (336,000 square miles) of Mexico as spoils of war.

There were many North Americans who wanted even more than that. A powerful faction of U.S. politicians, land speculators, and northern capitalists called for the annexation and enslavement of all Mexico. On November 10, 1847 the Whig Party in the U.S. published its program for the defeated republic:

It is, therefore, declared, for the peace and quiet of this land, [Mexico] for the happiness of these people, and to end the effusion of human blood, that the United States, from this day forward, ends the war -- assumes the entire conquest of Mexico -- annexes it to the United States, and the people are required to repair to their respective homes, and there await the call of the proper authorities of their different States to organize their several State Constitutions, which, if Republican, will be accepted into the Union. . . . All in default, acting contrary to this manifesto, be traitors, whose lives and property will be confiscated.
Many of the American field commanders who participated in the invasion of Mexico supported total annexation. Brigadier General William J. Worth, a rabid expansionist and racist, was quite explicit:

That our race is finally destined to overrun the whole continent is too obvious to need proof. . . . After much reflection I have arrived at the conclusion that it is our decided policy to hold the whole of Mexico -- The details of occupation are comparatively unimportant -- I mean by occupation, permanent conquest and future annexation. . . .
However, internal contradictions in the United States stymied the movement for the annexation of all Mexico. The issue of slavery continued to dog the U.S. Free soil advocates were afraid that the conquered nation would become slave territory and vehemently opposed annexation. Land speculators and northern capitalists were anxious to acquire all of Mexico and sell it for a profit as they had the American Midwest and South and sided with the annexationists. Slaveholders were split on the issue -- some advocated unfettered expansion, while others feared that if all Mexico were annexed, it might be as free soil. The result was a bitter political struggle in the U.S. Senate. In the end, the expansion of slavery, which initially drove U.S. imperialism in the South and Southwest, was the issue that tipped the balance against the annexation of all Mexico.

The U.S. War on Mexico proved to be devastating enough without total annexation. The thirty-five year campaign against Spain and Mexico brought to a climax in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo guaranteed slavery in Texas and expanded the United States from the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. Americans like to dress up the land-grab and call it "Manifest Destiny," but history shows it for what it really was -- naked aggression by a superior power that robbed the Mexican people of their birthright in North America and crippled the future of their young republic.

The Fate of the Conquered

The struggle for the ownership of the land in the stolen territories did not end with the conclusion of the war. Although the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo recognized the legitimacy of Spanish and Mexican land grants and offered the Mexican inhabitants in the ceded territories American citizenship, the influx of land-hungry and ruthless whites resulted in widespread oppression that sparked mass exile and repatriation. The exile of Mexican citizens from Texas that began after the Anglo takeover of 1836 intensified after the war in 1848. Besieged refugees abandoned their farms and ranches and moved across the Rio Grande to the old Mexican towns of Paso del Norte, Guerrero, Mier, Camargo, Reynosa, and Matamoros and established the new towns of Nuevo Laredo, Mesilla, and Guadalupe.

The Spanish-speaking population fared no better in post-war California. Descendents of the original Spanish settlers, known as Californios, faced problems similar to those of their compatriots in Texas and additional pressure from the gold rush of 1849 which attracted over 100,000 newcomers to the territory, including more than 80,000 whites from the U.S., 8,000 Mexicans from the state of Sonora, and 5,000 South Americans, mostly miners from Chile.

Much trouble in the goldfields of California stemmed from the fact that both the Sonorans and the Chileans were better miners than the whites and became targets of resentment and persecution. The Foreign Miners' Tax Law of 1850, passed by the California legislature, required foreigners to buy mining permits for $20 a month (a huge sum of money in those days). The legislation was intended to make the Mexicans and Chileans abandon their claims and reduce them to the status of wage laborers. The law, however, proved to be unenforceable and the work of disenfranchisement had to be completed by white lynch mobs and gangs of gunmen. Several of the local and regional leaders of these gangs knew how to get the job done -- they had been Rangers in Texas or the War on Mexico before joining the California gold rush.

Anglos in California denounced the Mexicans who fought back as bandits. The intensity of the local conflict is reflected in the legend of the bandit Joaquín Murieta, who created havoc in the Anglo community in revenge for the murder of his wife and brother and theft of his gold mine by Anglo claim jumpers. Whether or not Joaquín Murieta actually existed is not important -- the historical cases of Juan Flores and Tiburcio Vásquez, bandidos caught and hanged by white vigilantes, are testimony to the desperation and rage of the dispossessed Mexicans in California.

Within a decade, most Chileans and many Mexicans in California were repatriated. The Mexican population that stayed in California, followed by their descendants and succeeding generations of new immigrants from Mexico, provided the labor power to develop the state's wealth much as their compatriots in Texas did.

At first, the future of the Mexican population in the territory of New Mexico looked bright. Numerical superiority, representational government, and the rights guaranteed in The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo initially offered Mexicans the possibility to hold on to their land, but ultimately the Anglo ranchers, land speculators, and eastern and foreign capitalists won out. After two decades of lynching, land wars, and lawsuits, most native New Mexicans, like their compatriots in Texas and California, found themselves displaced and landless.

The Gadsden Purchase: Back For More

Not satisfied with the vast territorial concessions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the U.S. demanded more land from Mexico in 1852. The discovery of gold in California renewed American interest in what remained of Mexican territory in the Southwest. Knowing that silver and gold are often found near deposits of common metals, American capitalists and speculators set their sights on the northern states of Sonora and Chihuahua which both had rich deposits of copper. The boundary set by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had left Mexico in possession of the Santa Rita copper mine in upper Chihuahua and other known copper deposits across northern Sonora. In addition, the flat land south of the Gila River would provide an easy route for a southern U.S. trans-continental railroad. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, like the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, stood in the way of American profiteers and had to be broken.

U.S. President Franklin Pierce appointed James Gadsden, a wealthy railroad tycoon from the South, as Minister to Mexico and sent him to negotiate armed with a carrot and a sword. The carrot included a purchase offer of up to $25 million for the land and a $200,000 bribe for Santa Anna, then president of the prostrate republic. The sword was the threat of another invasion.

The sword was poised to strike. Again, the U.S. employed the strategy that had proven so successful in Florida and Texas -- Anglo immigrants had been infiltrating across the Rio Grande and settling in the Mesilla Valley in the state of Chihuahua since the end of the war. Before Gadsden began negotiations, American soldiers were moved upstream from El Paso to a strategic position where they could quickly cross the river to "protect American lives." Santa Anna was aware of the situation in the Mesilla Valley. Knowing the ruthlessness of the Anglos and not immune to personal bribes, he took the money and instructed his ministers to sign whatever terms that the American Minister offered.

Gadsden returned to Washington with a treaty that cut deeply into remaining Mexican territory. This new treaty moved the international boundary from the Gila River approximately 200 kilometers (125 miles) south to its present location. This radical surgery cut off the tops of the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora, transferring another 78,000 square kilometers (30,000 square miles) of the Mexican republic to the United States. The U.S. ended up paying only fifty-three cents an acre for the land that became part of the states of New Mexico and Arizona. Santa Anna's sell-out so enraged the citizens of Mexico that he was ousted from office and had to spend the next twenty years of his life in exile.

As in the case of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, there were many powerful Americans who wanted to exploit the weakness of Mexico to take more. Gadsden had compelled the Mexican government to sign three drafts of the treaty. The first draft, the one that Gadsden and his rich cronies lobbied for, set the international boundary on the 30th parallel from a point in the middle of the Rio Grande 50 kilometers (31 miles) north of the present Ojinaga-Presidio river crossing due west to the Gulf of California. This draft also ceded all of Baja California to the U.S. and would have swallowed up approximately 341,000 square kilometers (132,000 square miles) more than the draft that was finally adopted. The same issue that had foiled the annexation of all of Mexico likewise defeated the most onerous draft of the Gadsden Treaty -- the expansion of the southern empire of slavery in the U.S.

The Gadsden Treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1854 completed the American land grab in the American Southwest. By the end of the thirty-five-year campaign against Spain and Mexico, the United States had dismembered her sister republic to the south, stealing more than 2.6 million square kilometers (over one million square miles) of land. In modern context, the final damage assessment to Mexico is staggering -- over one third (33.8 percent) of the land area of the lower forty-eight U.S. states is former Mexican or Spanish territory. Subtracting the land ceded by Spain still leaves over 31 percent of the land of the lower forty-eight U.S. states originally belonging to Mexico.

The Gadsden Treaty ended the great American land-grab but did not end the exploitation of Mexico. From the end of the war in 1848 to the present day, the U.S. has used its dominant position to systematically plunder the resources of its southern neighbor and exploit the labor power of the Mexican people.

To be continued...