Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126
Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127
When it comes to presenting the Mexican-American War the biggest debate surrounding the war is what is left out of the established narrative, which labels it a glorious and justifiable war? For many years, historians such as Robert W. Johannsen, believed the decision to go to war with Mexico war was reluctantly taken by President Polk and his cabinet. Once word was received of the ambush of an American unit north of the Rio Grande in which several lives were lost a gave them a reasonable excuses enough to call for a state of war. As a result whatever doubts remained were now removed when Polk sent his war message to Congress, and two days later both houses approved a war bill by overwhelming majorities [1]. However, that is not what histories of today see the war.
Today several histories seek to argue that even though that the Mexican-American War was the second war Congress ever declared it caused a firestorm of controversy among Congressional party members who called into question was the the war really necessary. Historians like Michael A. Morrison argue that committed to a program of controlled, peaceful expansion, Whigs were especially disturbed by Polk’s method of acquiring California and the borderlands of the Southwest and the fruits of the war- land hunger, greed, and a widely dispersed population-promised to destroy the social and economic conditions necessary to a virtuous [2]. While other historians like Nicholas Lawrence, believes that the enthusiasm for the United States’ military action in Mexico saturated e national discourse and political figures at all levels of government, along with a virtual armada of newspaper writers and literary authors, responded, argue that even popular writers such to the war as a galvanizing moment. However, writers like Henry David Thoreau criticized the war as being “the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool [3].”
What is also missing in the grand narrative of the Mexican-American War is the lack of sources form the Mexican side of the conflict. Which sites up another debate as to if we are going to discuss or write about the Mexican-American should we include Mexican sources and narratives. To which one should argue that yes, they are needed to tell the complete story of the war and break with older traditional narratives. Fortunately, historians like Lisbeth Haas, who seeks to uncover the unexplored accounts of the Californios who have been largely forgotten form the war’s narrative. As such, she argues Californios had a long fought to create and protect their political autonomy in territorial affairs and would not allow either Mexico or the United States to erode their sovereignty without significant resistance. Even those who sympathized with the United States’ republican system and democratic ideals would express a strong sense of having been deceived by Americans whose race ideas were pervasively expressed against them during the war and occupation [4]. By combing all these new narratives with their sources can we gain an understanding as how we must accurately understand the Mexican-American War.
[1] Robert Walter Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 8.[2] Michael A. Morrison, “New Territory versus No Territory: The Whig Party and the Politics of Western Expansion, 1846-1848,” Western Historical Quarterly 23, no. 1 (February 1992): 28.
[3] Nicholas Lawrence, ““This boa-constrictor appetite of swallowing states and provinces:” Anti-Imperialist Opposition to the U.S./Mexican War,” South Central Review 30, no. 1 (2013): 55-56.
[4] Lisbeth Haas, “War in California, 1846-1848,” California History 76, no. 2/3 (1997): 336-337.