Hi guys, welcome back to week 10 video lecture 2 on Manifest Destiny. We are going to start with PowerPoint slide 1 in the second PowerPoint set. In the next election, James K. Polk became president. Henry Clay, who had run against him, could not believe that Polk had beat him.
Clay claimed that Polk was a third-rate politician, but He'd been surprising people his whole career. Polk reminded a lot of voters of Jackson, a quasi-lawyer, a planter, a slave owner, a slave trader. His nickname became Young Hickory, comparing him to Andrew Jackson, whose nickname was Old Hickory. I know you're looking at this image and young isn't the word that springs to mind, but He was younger than Jackson anyway. Unlike Jackson, he had no charisma.
He was humorless and dogmatic. During his time as president, he worked so relentlessly that his health suffered. He would die just three months after leaving office at the age of 54. His resemblance to Jackson garnered him attention, but his plan to annex both Texas and Oregon and thus maintain the balance of slave and free states, won him the presidency.
It was a risky strategy that risked war with both England and Mexico. Unwilling to give Polk the victory of annexing Texas and initiating his dual strategy, in the final months of his presidency, John Tyler claiming that Polk's election was a mandate from the people, asked Congress to accomplish Texas annexation. Texas formally entered the United States December 29, 1845, close to nine years after their original separation from Mexico.
American expansionists were in a frenzy and began to agitate for all of Oregon or none. The territory was shared with England, but Fortunately for Polk, the British had no enthusiasm for a war with the United States when international trade with the United States was so profitable for them. When Oregon was adopted, most of the country was happy, if not distracted.
By that time, the United States was at war with Mexico. Slide three. The war centered around the fact that Mexico recognized neither the independence of Texas nor the proposed boundary at the Rio Grande.
Mexico wanted to lose no land, but if they had to lose land, they wanted to lose as little as possible and so held a dual dispute. Slide four. Polk desired a war with Mexico to solidify his expansionist aims, but also to make a name for himself as a wartime president.
According to Polk, the Mexican army attacked the United States soldiers near the Rio Grande on the American side. 11 Americans were killed, five wounded, and another number were held as prisoners. This allowed Polk to go to Congress and claim that a war with Mexico was forced upon us as a response to Mexican aggression. Polk claimed that Mexico had invaded America and shed American blood on American soil.
Slide five. Polk got his declaration of war on May 13, 1846. The North was not sold on the war or its purposes. An obscure lawyer turned politician named Abraham Lincoln.
was elected as a congressman in Illinois in 1847. When he had taken his seat in Congress, Lincoln quickly took up the allegations of Polk. He introduced something called spot resolution that asked President Polk to release the exact location where American blood had been shed on American soil. The allegation was not that Mexican and American soldiers hadn't engaged in a fight. but that American troops had been on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande when the fight happened. Hulk.
never did reveal the exact location. As it turned out, Polk had sent troops under Zachary Taylor to the Rio Grande to provoke Mexican troops. The plan worked and gave Polk his pretext.
Thus, Polk wished to avoid a conversation about exactly when, where, or how. Next slide. We covered this topic last lecture, but I wanted to place it here again.
for the clarity of your notes because this issue crosses over in content. Remember we spoke about how Henry David Thoreau believed as a romantic and transcendentalist writer that slavery was wrong and the Mexican-American war was a conflict engineered to expand slaveholding territory in the United States. In order to take some action Thoreau refused to pay his one dollar poll tax.
That would economically support the war. As a consequence, Thoreau was jailed. His aunt paid his poll tax and he was released from jail the next day.
Not a long jail sentence. From this experience, Thoreau wrote Civil Disobedience in 1849. This work proposed the concept of passive resistance in which People should oppose laws that required them to be an agent of injustice to another and accept the consequences peacefully. This philosophy influenced people such as Muhammad Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. that became civil rights champions using this concept.
Next slide. Both the United States and Mexico approached the war unprepared. In the United States...
Floods of volunteers decided to fight against Mexico without joining the military. Undisciplined volunteers without leadership and motivated by expansionism and bringing racist ideals with them stole from, raped, and murdered Mexicans that were clearly non-military civilians in substantive numbers. Mexican forces were much fewer in number. Many of the Mexican fighters were forced into battle after being conscripted from prisons. These inmate fighters often ran away rather than fight.
Mexico had also procured black powder from France, but the shipments were faulty. The powder was so weak that American fighters could easily dodge cannonballs that fell short without power. and bounced along the ground.
In terms of war scale, Polk wanted a war just large enough to acquire land and make a name for himself as a war president, not large enough to make military reputations of fighting men known to the public. Unfortunately for Polk, preventing war heroes It wasn't an easy task. General Zachary Taylor led major victories against the Mexican forces, gaining him national attention and popularity. The media started referring to Taylor as the commander of the conquest of Mexico.
The title reveals a lot. The war was still ongoing, but the media saw Taylor, not Polk. as the commander of the victory of Mexico that they already assumed would be. Polk determined that Taylor might emerge as a political threat after the war.
Polk decided to invite Zachary Taylor to the White House to casually inquire as to if Taylor desired a political career long term. Taylor claimed that he had no interest in politics. he belonged fighting with his men. The answer satisfied Polk, who came to believe that Taylor wasn't a political threat to him. On June 14, 1846, the United States declared California a free republic after rigging a fraudulent election in the region to declare independence.
The Republic of California was represented by a hastily drawn flag that you see here. Most people ridiculed the flag, calling California the Pig Flag Republic. Of course, that's supposed to be a bear.
California would not have to wait like Texas to be annexed. California was annexed in one month. Next slide.
On another aspect of the Mexican-American War, Polk was fooled. Santa Ana had been forced out of power in Mexico in 1845 and had been exiled to Cuba. Santa Ana sent a letter to President Polk expressing the idea that if Polk helped him get back to Mexico, he would persuade Mexican leaders to settle the war in favor of the United States. Polk did help Santa Anna to enter back into Mexico by allowing him to pass through the American blockade. Once Santa Anna was back in Mexico, he did not negotiate an end to the war.
Rather, he regained power as president and military commander. Even with Santa Ana in the lead, the United States military had too much momentum. Next slide. On September 13, 1847, General Winfield Scott led an invasion of Mexico City and raised the American flag on the Mexican Capitol building. Next slide.
In the American media, the victory in Mexico. led to expansionist fever. John O. Sullivan, a famous journalist at the time, published an article titled, More, More, More, Why Not Take All of Mexico?
The answer was that the Mexican nation had a population of millions of people that did not want to be American. It was one thing to take French Northern Territory and another... to try to force a whole nation to be dissolved. Still, Mexico was vulnerable. At the end of the war, Santa Anna resigned as president and military commander and left the nation.
February 2nd, 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed. In the treaty, Mexico gave up all claims to Texas, California, and New Mexico. Internationally, there was pressure for the United States to pay Mexico for California and New Mexico because those territories had not been originally included in the war aims.
The United States did agree to pay Mexico $15 million, and the treaty was formally ratified on March 10, 1848. Next slide. The Mexican-American War was a traditionally limited war, and the length of the war shows that, only 17 months. A limited war is a war where the aims are very clear.
Generally, limited wars focus on property, like Texas. We'll talk about total wars when we talk about the Civil War, and extensively next semester when we talk about the World Wars. The United States had 1,733 men die in battle.
4,152 men suffer serious wounds. Over 11,500 men died of disease. A huge death toll from disease. This is the most deadly war in American history by percentage of combatants killed.
110 per thousand or 11%. The next deadliest American war would be the Civil War with 65 of every thousand or 6.5%. As a result of the war, the United States gained half a million square miles of land, over a million if you count Texas. Next slide.
The Mexican-American War was the first offensive war for the United States. a war where the United States invaded another nation. It was the first time the United States had captured another nation's capital.
Initially, there was a wave of national pride at the victorious conclusion of the war in the United States. The war conquest did expand American lands. However, wars have a way of breeding other wars.
Wars have a way of breeding other wars. We'll discuss the complications that the Mexican-American war caused in the United States in our next lecture series. For now, you may complete multiple choice quiz and critical thinking assignment.
If you haven't started completing any of the four required memes, consider starting to work on that. If you have questions or comments, feel free to email me. Otherwise, I will see you next week.