# data[].attributes.headline
War Message of President James Polk May 11, 1846

# data[].attributes.subject
War Message of President James Polk May 11, 1846

# data[].attributes.headline
Col. Ethan Allen Hitchcock's Perspective 

# data[].attributes.subject
Col. Ethan Allen Hitchcock's Perspective 

# data[].attributes.body
"Orders came last evening... to move without any delay to... take up a position on the banks or near the Rio Grande, and he is to expel any armed force of Mexicans who may cross that river...
Violence leads to violence, and if this movement of ours does not lead to others and to bloodshed, I am much mistaken"

-American soldier/Commander

# data[].attributes.body
John L. Sullivan. "Annexation" The United States Magazine and Democratic Review. Vol XV11, July 1845

# data[].attributes.body
an engraving from a painting by W. H. Powell. No date.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Occupation of the Capitol of Mexico, by the American Army

# data[].attributes.subject
The Occupation of the Capitol of Mexico, by the American Army

# data[].attributes.body
from Frost's The Mexican War and Its Warriors, 1848.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
America was ready to expand westward, even if it meant going to war. Learn how and why the Mexican-American War happened.

# data[].attributes.body
of the Mexican-American War

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Video: Mexican American War | Watch Latino Americans Online | PBS Video

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Watch online: Mexican American War from Latino Americans. On demand, streaming video from PBS

# data[].attributes.headline
Abraham Lincoln (before he was president)

# data[].attributes.subject
Abraham Lincoln (before he was president)

# data[].attributes.body
"The marching an army into the midst of a peaceful Mexican settlement, frightening the inhabitants away, leaving their growing crops and other property to destruction, to you may appear perfectly amiable, peaceful, unprovoking procedure; but it does not appear so to us... But... you have constantly had our votes for all the necessary supplies"

Summary: He didn't agree with it, but also he didn't stop the government from giving money for supplies and soldiers

# data[].attributes.body
"I have said from the first that the United States are the aggressors. ... We have not one particle of right to be here... It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as it chooses... My heart is not in this business... But as a military man, I am bound to execute orders.

# data[].attributes.body
Charles Sumner, "Objections to the Mexican American War" 1847

# data[].attributes.headline
How Our Understanding of History Changes (audio)

# data[].attributes.subject
How Our Understanding of History Changes (audio)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
RENEE MONTAGNE, host:

This is the week that many Americans settled in for Thanksgiving. This traditional holiday may be a good time to remember that American history is not as settled as it seems. For the rest of this week, we're exploring the history behind many of our public political debates. Our understanding of that history changes over time.

STEVE INSKEEP, host:

And today, we'll hear the changing interpretations of how America once went to war. The interpretations come in more than a century of history textbooks studied by different generations of American students. Kyle Ward collected these different versions of America's past for a book called "History in the Making."

Professor KYLE WARD (History, Vincennes University; Author, "History in the Making"): What I've kind of come to understand is that our history textbooks are mostly socially agreed upon stories. And what I mean by that is that when they are written, the historian who's writing them - or more likely, the editorial staff who's writing them - they are being impacted by the current social, political, economic issues that are going on at that point in time.

INSKEEP: Well, let's go through one specific example that you explore in your book. It's the way that the beginning of the Mexican War is treated in different eras. And let's lay out the very bare facts here. The United States and Mexico fought a war; it was in the late 1840s. The United States won and took over what is now the Southwestern United States. Those are the basic facts.

How is that treated in the first history text that you came across?

Prof. WARD: The first history textbook - I was really lucky to come across the textbook that was written in 1849, so just on the heels of this war coming to a conclusion. And what is interesting is that at that point in time, the focus is on how the Mexicans basically caused this war, how they're the ones who started it, and the Americans were drug into fighting a war against them.

INSKEEP: So it's the Mexicans fault in 1849.

Prof. WARD: In 1849, there was just no question. Mexico started this. So in 1849, the argument is we have to go in and defend Texas from being reconquered by Mexicans.

INSKEEP: Then we jump up ahead to 1880, and I'm looking at the passage you've selected here. May I read just a little bit of this?

Prof. WARD: Please do.

INSKEEP: Because the language is remarkable. You point out that this time around, in 1880, a few decades after the war, it's described as a racial conflict, a conflict between two races. And the language is amazing.

(Reading) How came the Northman and Moorish Celt here to meet and here to battle in this North American valley. Look at it. Inquire.

Prof. WARD: The strong belief - and you see this throughout the 1800s - there is a definite distinction that there are certain races. All these other people with these different languages and these odd religions are a lower race. And the thing I like to point out, too - in the 1880s, this is a test question that a teacher is going to give. And if you don't put down that the Mexicans are a different race and an inferior race, it's the wrong answer.

INSKEEP: So in the textbook from 1849, the Mexican War is started by Mexico. In a textbook from 1880, it's an inevitable conflict between the races. What happens in your next textbook from 1911?

Prof. WARD: By 1911, you start to see a little bit of a change, not a great deal here. But this time, the biggest change is that the U.S. has to go in for a preemptive strike. The U.S. has to go into Mexico and start this war because the Mexicans are obviously coming. They've been itching for a fight here.

INSKEEP: And then what happens in 1966?

Prof. WARD: In 1966, it's the first time you start to really see the historians - or the people who are putting the textbooks together - are going to start to question how this war started. And you also start getting the names of certain individuals who at that time actually questioned the war. And probably the most significant one is going to be a young congressman from Illinois by the name of Abraham Lincoln.

INSKEEP: So they're going back through the same facts and finding that there was actually opposition to the war at the time it happened. And they're quoting that?

Prof. WARD: Yes.

INSKEEP: What happened in the textbook that you found from 1995?

Prof. WARD: In 1995, the story basically changes to the fact that it says that general - or President Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to the Mexican border with the knowledge in his head that having troops that close - it would definitely probably spark a war. And that under this concept of Manifest Destiny, Polk wanted a war.

INSKEEP: What does it say that over more than a century of history, about the same event, it begins as something that Mexico started - it goes through several other explanations, and at the end, it ends exactly the opposite -America started it?

Prof. WARD: One thing it tells us is that after 1960 and 1970, the shift comes in - on the one hand because of the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, I think Watergate had a hand in this, too - where people started to question more things. And going back to the fact most of our history textbooks were written for young, white men who were going off to college or the military or something like that. And in the 1800s, you really don't want anybody sitting there questioning why the United States got into a war if you're going to send these young men off to fight in the military at some point in time.

INSKEEP: This particular example we've gone through, the Mexican War, why is that example particularly relevant to our lives today?

Prof. WARD: The current war that we're fighting, there is the question about Iraq. The argument was that weapons of mass destruction was the reason why we're going in there, and now there's been some debate. The think I'd like to point out to my students is President Polk, in the 1840s, was a Democrat. He was for Manifest Destiny. He wanted more territory. Then there was the Whig Party. And the Whigs said absolutely, positively not. They didn't want to get involved in this war, and there were people that were protesting it.

So I think it's a better understanding than just saying that we were egged on by the Mexicans into this war, we fought this war, and we get all this territory - end of story. Rather, I like to try to make some comparisons as to what's going on in the Iraq War and compare it to - we've been down this road before. What have we learned? What can we do with it?

INSKEEP: I suppose you're not surprised, then, that the interpretations of the Iraq War have changed just in a few years.

Prof. WARD: No, not in the least bit. The one thing that I have found really interesting about the Iraq War and use of history with it is if you go back and listen to the very beginning of it, those people who are in favor of this war -listen to how they talked about the war and the terms they use to put it in. There's always references to World War II. There is the axis of evil. I think President Bush at one point in time made a comment about this being a World War III. There are talks about no more Munichs. We're comparing Hitler to Saddam Hussein.

Then listen to those people who are against it. And the use of history at this point in time is you hear a lot of commentary about Vietnam. We don't want another Vietnam, not since Vietnam, or compared to Vietnam. This war has done this, that or the other thing.

INSKEEP: Do we construct our future by selecting which history we want to follow?

Prof. WARD: I definitely think so. I think history is one of the best tools you can use if you want to try to make your point at any point in time by saying, you know, look back. This is what we've done. This is who we are, or maybe who we think we are.

INSKEEP: Is it also a dangerous tool?

Prof. WARD: It definitely can be. We were in Germany doing some research, and we discovered over there that was one of the first things that the Nazis did, is they went into the high school history classes and wanted the history textbooks rewritten. They wanted to show a specific course in history that made more sense with their ideology at the time.

INSKEEP: Kyle Ward is the author of History in the Making.

Thanks very much.

Prof. WARD: Thank you, Steve.

INSKEEP: And this is the first of our discussions on our shifting history. We will continue all week. Tomorrow, how different generations look back on the Roman Empire and see reflections of themselves.

Copyright © 2006 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How the Understanding of U.S. History Changes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Historian Kyle Ward speaks with Steve Inskeep about his book, History in the Making. It chronicles the ways that U.S. history textbooks change over time in their portrayal of events like the Mexican-American War. This is the first in a series of conversations about history.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The United States Army had several advantages, but the most decisive was the professionalism instilled at West Point

smithsonian.com

Chapultepec Castle is not, by Mexican standards, particularly old. Though the 12th-century Toltecs named the 200-foot-high outcrop on which the castle stands the "hill of the grasshopper"- chapoltepec in Nahuatl, probably for the huge numbers of the insects found there-the castle itself wasn't built until 1775, as a residence for Spain's viceroy. It was converted to a military academy in 1833, which was the extent of its martial history until September 13, 1847, when two armies faced off there in the climactic battle of the Mexican-American War.

After more than a year and a dozen engagements on land and sea, the U.S. had yet to suffer a defeat. General Zachary Taylor had crossed the Rio Grande with an expeditionary force of a little more than 2,000 men and defeated much larger Mexican armies at Monterrey and Buena Vista. Winfield Scott, America's most senior general and the hero of the War of 1812, had taken Veracruz with a brilliant amphibious assault and siege, and defeated Mexico's caudillo and president Antonio López de Santa Anna at Cerro Gordo. Then he had taken Puebla, Mexico's second-largest city, without firing a shot.

There are any number of reasons why the Americans dominated the fighting. They had better artillery in front of them (rockets, siege weapons and highly mobile horse-drawn howitzers that could fire canister-20 or more lead balls packed in sawdust and cased in tin, which turned the American six-pounder cannons into giant shotguns). They also had a stronger government behind them (in 1846 alone, the Mexican presidency changed hands four times). However, the decisive American advantage was not in technology or political stability, but in military professionalism. The United States had West Point.

Though neither Scott nor Taylor nor their division commanders learned the military art at the U.S. Military Academy, virtually every junior officer in the Mexican campaign-more than five hundred of them-had. Under Sylvanus Thayer, who became superintendent in 1817, and his protégé Dennis Hart Mahan, the academy became more than just a fine engineering school. In accord with legislation Congress passed in 1812, the course of studies at West Point required cadets to master all the skills not only of an officer, but of a private and a noncommissioned officer as well.

It made for a revolution in military education. Mahan, an advocate for turning the military into a profession equal to that of physicians or attorneys, had completed a fundamental study of the art of war, which he would publish in 1847. The first American professional military journals-the Army and Navy Chronicle, the Military and Naval Magazine and the Military Magazine -all started publication between 1835 and 1839.

This environment produced the staff and line officers who accompanied Taylor across the Rio Grande and Scott from Veracruz to Chapultepec. One of them, Ulysses S. Grant (USMA Class of 1843), wrote, "A better army, man for man, probably never faced an enemy than the one commanded by General Taylor in the earliest two engagements of the Mexican War." Scott shared his "fixed opinion that but for our graduated cadets the war between the United States and Mexico might, and probably would, have lasted some four or five years with, in its first half, more defeats than victories falling to our share, whereas in two campaigns we conquered a great country and a peace without the loss of a single battle or skirmish."

The academy graduates proved extraordinary in Mexico (and even more so in their subsequent careers in a far more bloody conflict). When Scott landed at Veracruz, his junior officers included not only Grant, but also Robert E. Lee (USMA 1829; commanding general, Army of Northern Virginia, 1862).Captain Lee led his division through the "impassible ravines" to the north of the Mexican position at Cerro Gordo and turned the enemy's left flank. The path to Mexico City, over the 10,000-foot pass of Río Frío, was mapped by First Lieutenant P.G.T. Beauregard (USMA 1838; general, Army of the Mississippi, 1861) and First Lieutenant George Gordon Meade (USMA 1835; commanding general, Army of the Potomac, 1863). Captain (soon enough Major) Lee found the best route to the relatively undefended southwestern corner of Mexico City, through a huge lava field known as the pedregal that was thought to be impassible; American engineers-accompanied by First Lieutenant George McClellan (USMA 1846; commanding general, U.S. Army, 1861)-improved it into a military road in two days, under regular artillery fire. The Molino del Rey, a mill that Scott mistakenly thought was being converted into a cannon foundry during a cease-fire, was occupied, after some of the bloodiest fighting of the war, by Lieutenant Grant and First Lieutenant Robert Anderson (USMA 1825).

So it's scarcely surprising that when the final attack on Chapultepec Castle began on that September morning in 1847, one of the columns was led by Lieutenant Colonel Joe Johnston (USMA 1829; commanding general, Army of Tennessee, 1863). Or that, when the Americans were pinned down after they'd fought to the top of the hill, Second Lieutenant Thomas J. Jackson (USMA 1846; lieutenant general and corps commander, Army of Northern Virginia, 1862), commanding two six-pounder cannon at the far left of the American line, rushed forward in support. As he did so, a storming party of 250 men reached the base of the castle wall and threw scaling ladders against the 12-foot-high fortification. There, Captain Lewis A. Armistead (USMA, 1838, though he never graduated; brigadier general, Army of Northern Virginia, 1863) was wounded; so was the officer carrying the regimental colors of the 8th Infantry, First Lieutenant James Longstreet (USMA 1842; lieutenant general, Army of Northern Virginia, 1862), which were then taken by Second Lieutenant George E. Pickett (USMA 1846; major general, Army of Northern Virginia, 1862). In an hour, the castle was taken.

And, in less than a day, so was Mexico's capital. Jackson, who had been under fire for more than 12 hours, chased more than 1,500 Mexicans down the causeway that led into the capital "for about a mile.... It was splendid!" Grant, commanding a platoon-sized detachment, dragged a six-pound howitzer to the top of a church belfry, three hundred yards from the main gate to the city at San Cosmé, and put a withering fire on the Mexican defenses until he ran out of ammunition. A day later, Scott rode into the Grand Plaza of Mexico City at the head of his army. Though the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo would not be signed until February of 1848, the battles of the Mexican-American War were over.

Not, however, the battle over the war's narrative: its rationale, conduct and consequences. Los Niños Heroes-six cadets who from the Chapultepec military academy who refused to retreat from the castle, five of them dying at their posts and the sixth throwing himself from the castle wrapped in the Mexican flag-synthesize the Mexican memory of the war: brave Mexicans sacrificed by poor leadership in a war of aggression by a neighbor who, in one analysis, "offered to us the hand of treachery, to have soon the audacity to say that our obstinacy and arrogance were the real causes of the war."

The enlargement of the United States of America by some 500,000 square miles, plus Texas, was certainly a valuable objective, but it's uncertain that achieving it required a war, any more than the 800,000 square miles of the Louisiana Purchase did. Grant himself opined that the Mexican war was "the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation." Even more uncertain is the argument, voiced by Grant, among others, the American Civil War "was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican War." The sectional conflict over the expansion of slavery might have been different without Monterrey, Cerro Gordo and Chapultepec, but no less pointed, and the Civil War no less likely-or less bloody.

However, it would have been conducted very differently, since the men who fought it were so clearly marked by Mexico. It was there they learned the tactics that would dominate from 1861 to 1865. And it was there they learned to think of themselves as masters of the art of war. That, of course, was a bit of a delusion: The Mexican army was no match for them. They would prove, tragically, a match for one another.
Sources
What the Mexican War created, more than territory or myth, was men. More than a dozen future Civil War generals stood in front of Chapultepec Castle in 1847-not just the ones already named, but First Lieutenant Simon Bolivar Bruckner (USMA 1844; brigadier general, Army of Central Kentucky, 1862), who fought alongside Grant at Molino del Rey and would surrender Fort Donelson to him in 1862; Second Lieutenant Richard H. Anderson (USMA 1842; lieutenant general, Army of Northern Virginia 1863); Major John Sedgwick (USMA 1837; major general, Army of the Potomac 1863), the highest-ranking Union Army officer killed during the Civil War; Major George B. Crittenden (USMA 1832; major general, Army of Central Kentucky, 1862); Second Lieutenant A.P. Hill (USMA 1846; lieutenant general, Army of Northern Virginia, 1863); and Major John C. Pemberton, (USMA 1837; lieutenant general, Army of Mississippi, 1862), who joined Grant in the steeple of the church at San Cosmé and defended Vicksburg against him 16 years later.

The Duke of Wellington spent his life denying he had ever said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. Much more apt to say that the Battle of Chapultepec was won on the parade grounds of West Point, and that the Battles of Shiloh, Antietam and Gettysburg were won-and lost-in the same place.

Alexander, J. H. (1999). The Battle History of the U.S. Marines. New York: Harper Collins.

Coffman, E. M. (1986). The Old Army: A Portrait of the Army in Peacetime, 1784-1898. New York: Oxford University Press.

Cullum, G. W. (1891). Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates of the United States Military Academy (3 volumes). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Dufour, C. L. (1968). The Mexican War: A Compact History. New York: Hawthorn Books.

Elliott, C. W. (1939). Winfield Scott: The Soldier and the Man. New York: Macmillan.

Freeman, D. S. (1991). Lee: An Abridgment by Richard Harwell of the Pulitzer-Prize Winning 4-Volume Biography. New York: Scribners.

Grant, U. (1990). Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant. NY: Library of America.

Jones, W. L. (2004). Generals in Blue and Gray, Volume II. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books.

McDermott, J. D. (1997). Were They Really Rogues? Desertion in the Nineteenth Century US Army. Nebraska History , 78, 165-174.

McFeely, W. S. (1981). Grant. New York: W.W. Norton.

Millett, A. R. (1991). Semper Fidelis: The History of the United States Marine Corps. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Ramsey, A. C. (1850). The Other Side: Or Notes for the History of the War Between Mexico and the United States . New York: John Wiley.

Robertson, J. I. (1997). Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend. New York: Macmillan.

Rohter, L. (1987, Dec 18). Chapultepec Park: Mexico in Microcosm. New York Times .

Smith, J. E. (2001). Grant. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Stevens, D. F. (1991). Origins of Instability in Early Republican Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Thomas, E. M. (1995). Robert E. Lee: A Bioography. NY: W.W. Norton.

Weigley, R. (1967). History of the United States Army. NY: Macmillan.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Brainpower and Brawn in the Mexican-American War

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
smithsonian.com Chapultepec Castle is not, by Mexican standards, particularly old. Though the 12th-century Toltecs named the 200-foot-high outcrop on which the castle stands the "hill of the grasshopper"- chapoltepec in Nahuatl, probably for the huge numbers of the insects found there-the castle itself wasn't built until 1775, as a residence for Spain's viceroy.

# data[].attributes.headline
College: Teaching Mexican-American History... or not?

# data[].attributes.subject
College: Teaching Mexican-American History... or not?

# data[].attributes.body
This is a dissertation-- grad students write these in order to get their PhD. This is just the abstract-- the summary of all of their research.

Abstract
Mexican American students have a long and proud history of enrolling in colleges and universities across the
state of California for nearly 160 years, since shortly after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Yet,
inexplicably, historians of higher education have virtually ignored the Mexican American experience in
California higher education. Based on the examination of primary sources such as the diary of Californio Jesús
María Estudillo, the records of the University of California, and the college student-led Mexican American
Movement’s newspaper, The Mexican Voice, this study reconstructs the history of the Mexican American
experience in California higher education from not long after statehood through World War II. The children of
Californios (wealthy landholders who stressed their “Spanish” heritage) attended Santa Clara College and the
College of Notre Dame from the early 1850s to mid 1870s, and Mexicans and Californios also took part in the
preparatory program known as the Fifth Class at the University of California in the early 1870s. These
members of the Mexican community participated in higher education in order to acquire the skills (such as
mastering the English language) that best equipped them to maintain their station near the top of California
society. By the 1930s, the sons and daughters of Mexican immigrants attended colleges and universities across
California in numbers large enough to form student organizations such as the Mexican American Movement
(MAM). This new generation of Mexicans viewed a college education as a means to have a better life for
themselves, their family, and their community

# data[].attributes.body
174 people in the government voted to go to war.

14 voted not to.

They only had a very short amount of time to discuss it.

(Zinn "We Get Nothing From Conquest, Thank God")

# data[].attributes.body
"Our manifest destiny to overspread the continent [given by God] for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions"
-
John O' Sullivan 1845
Newspaper Editor

# data[].attributes.body
"All that was needed... was a military incident to begin the war that Polk wanted... It came in April, when General Taylor's quartermaster, Colonel Cross, while riding up the Rio Grande, disappeared. His body was found eleven days later, his skull smashed by a heavy blow. It was assumed he had been killed by Mexican guerillas crossing the river.. The Mexicans had fired the first shot. But they had done what the American government wanted"

-Howard Zinn, modern historian

# data[].attributes.body
"We must march from ocean to ocean... We must march from Texas straight to the Pacific ocean... It is the destiny of the white race, it is the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race..."

-The Congressional Globe, February 11, 1847

# data[].attributes.body
"On the Rio Grande before Matamoros, as a Mexican army of 5000 under General Arista faced Taylor's army of 3000... when the battle was over, 500 Mexicans were dead or wounded. There were perhaps 50 American casualties"

(Zinn, "We Get Nothing By Conquest, Thank God")

# data[].attributes.body
Many were sick with disease

Many deserted (9,207)

The soldiers started to become out of control, raping and pillaging (stealing) - although the Mexican side was also doing this.

(Zinn "We Take Nothing By Conquest, Thank God")

# data[].attributes.body
Mexico surrendered. There were calls among Americans to take all of Mexico. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed February 1848.

They took half of Mexico-- The Texas boundary was now the Rio Grande, and they got New Mexico and California.

The US paid Mexico 15 million for it (half of what they offered the first time)

(Zinn "We Take Nothing By Conquest, Thank God")

# data[].attributes.headline
What words were used? How does that reveal our perspective and biases?

# data[].attributes.subject
What words were used? How does that reveal our perspective and biases?

# data[].attributes.headline
Whose perspectives have been left out of the history?

# data[].attributes.subject
Whose perspectives have been left out of the history?

# data[].attributes.headline
Who benefits from the way the story is told?

# data[].attributes.subject
Who benefits from the way the story is told?

# data[].attributes.headline
Who is telling the story and how does that affect how we see the history?

# data[].attributes.subject
Who is telling the story and how does that affect how we see the history?

# data[].attributes.headline
The Mental Floss History of the United States

# data[].attributes.subject
The Mental Floss History of the United States

# data[].attributes.body
Mexico had the area because Coronado (Spanish conquistador) claimed it for Spain-- just as he had done with Mexico. "Mexico never really 'did' anything with the place."

1821 Texas: 2500 Mexicans
1821 California, Utah, Arizona, Nevada: 3270 Mexicans

1836 Texas: 30,000  Anglos (white Americans) vs. 3500 Mexicans
1850 California: 60,000 Anglos vs. 7000 Mexicans