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The revolutions of 1848 in the Italian state.

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The 1848 Revolutions in the Italian states, part of the wider Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, were organized revolts in the states of the Italian peninsula and Sicily, led by intellectuals and agitators who desired a liberal government. As Italian nationalists they sought to eliminate reactionary Austrian control. During this time, Italy was not a unified country, and was divided into many states, which, in Northern Italy, were ruled directly or indirectly by the Austrian Empire. A desire to be independent from foreign rule, and the conservative leadership of the Austrians, led Italian revolutionaries to stage revolution in order to drive out the Austrians. The revolution was led by the state of the Kingdom of Sardinia. Some uprisings in the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, particularly in Milan, forced the Austrian General Radetzky to retreat to the Quadrilateral fortresses.

King Charles Albert, who ruled Piedmont-Sardinia from 1831 to 1849, aspired to unite Italy with the endorsement of Pope Pius IX, head of the Papal States, which comprised a large territory in the center of the Italian peninsula. He declared war on Austria in March 1848 and launched a full-out attack on the Quadrilateral. Lacking allies, Charles Albert was no match for the Austrian army and was defeated at the Battle of Custoza on 24 July 1848. He signed a truce and withdrew his forces from Lombardy, and thus Austria remained dominant in a divided Italy until the Second Italian War of Independence.

An image of divided Italy (1815-1870)

After witnessing the liberal friendly events that were occurring in Rome, the people of other states started to demand similar treatment. It commenced on 12 January in Sicily, where the people began to demand a Provisional Government, separate from the government of the mainland. King Ferdinand II tried to resist these changes, however a full-fledged revolt erupted in Sicily, a revolt also erupted in Salerno and Naples. These revolts drove Ferdinand and his army out of Sicily, and forced him to allow a provisional government to be constituted. During those months, the constitution was quite advanced for its time in liberal democratic terms, as was the proposal of a unified Italian confederation of states. The revolt's failure was reversed 12 years later as the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies collapsed in 1860-61 with the unification of Italy.

On 11 February 1848, Leopold II of Tuscany, first cousin of Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria, granted the Constitution, with the general approval of his subjects. The Habsburg example was followed by Charles Albert of Sardinia ( Albertine Statute; later became the constitution of the unified Kingdom of Italy and remained in force, with changes, until 1948) and by Pope Pius IX (Fundamental Statute). However, only King Charles Albert maintained the statute even after the end of the riots.

Notwithstanding the events in Rome and Naples, the states still were under a conservative rule. Italians in Lombardy-Venetia could not enjoy these freedoms. The Austrian Empire of this region had tightened their grip on the people by further oppressing them with harsher taxes. Tax gatherers were sent out along with the 100,000 man army standing in place, and letting their presence be known.

These revolts in Sicily helped to spark revolts in the northern Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia. Revolutions in the Lombard city of Milan, which marked the beginning of the First Italian War of Independence, forced about 20,000 of Austrian General Radetsky's troops to withdraw from the city. Eventually General Radetsky was forced to completely withdraw his troops from the two states, however, due to his expertise, he was able to keep the Quadrilateral fortresses of Verona, Peschiera, Legnago and Mantua. Through his skillful tactics he brought his men that had been withdrawn into the key forts. Meanwhile, the Italian insurgents were encouraged when news of Prince Metternich's resignation in Vienna spread, but were unable to completely eject Radetsky's troops.

In the Quadrilateral General Radetsky and his men were plotting a counterattack in order to regain their lost ground. However, they were interrupted by Charles Albert, who had by then taken the forefront of the attack, and had launched an attack against the Quadrilateral. Charles Albert charged the fortress from all sides aided by 25,000 reinforcements, who came in assistance of the nationalist cause. While journeying to the fortress preparing for the attack, Charles Albert garnered the support of princes of other states. His fellow princes responded by sending reinforcements to his aid: Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany sent 8,000, Pope Pius contributed 10,000, and Ferdinand II sent 16,050 men on the advice of general Guglielmo Pepe. They attacked the fortresses and on 3 May 1848 succeeded in winning the Battle of Goito and capturing the fortress of Peschiera.

At that point, Pope Pius IX became nervous about defeating the Austrian Empire and withdrew his troops, citing that he could not endorse a war between two Catholic nations. King Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies also called his soldiers back. However, some of them did not comply with the order and continued on under the guidance of Generals Pepe, Durando and Giovanni until defeat at the Battle of Custoza. An armistice was agreed to, and Radetzky regained control of all of Lombardy-Venetia save Venice itself, where the Republic of San Marco was proclaimed under Daniele Manin. A year later, Charles Albert launched another attack, but, due to the lack of troops, he was defeated in the Battle of Novara.

In the Duchy of Modena and Reggio, Duke Francis V attempted to respond militarily to the first attempts at armed revolt, but faced with the approach of Bolognese volunteers to support the insurgents, in order to avoid bloodshed he preferred to leave the city promising a constitution and amnesties. On 21 March 1848 he left for Bolzano. A provisional government was established in Modena. The municipalities of Menton and Roquebrune, at the time part of the Principality of Monaco, united and obtained independence as the Free cities of Menton and Roquebrune.

Despite the fact that Pius had abandoned the war against the Austrians, many of his people had still fought alongside Charles Albert. The people of Rome rebelled against Pius' government and assassinated Pellegrino Rossi, Pius' minister. Pope Pius IX then fled to the fortress of Gaeta, under the protection of King Ferdinand II. In February 1849, he was joined by Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany who had to flee from there because of another insurrection. Piedmont was also defeated by the Austrians in 1849 and Charles Albert had to abdicate leaving his son, Victor Emmanuel II, to rule.

In Rome, the authority that did take over passed popular legislation to eliminate burdensome taxes and give work to the unemployed. Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini came to build a "Rome of the People," and the short-lived Roman Republic was proclaimed. The republic aimed to inspire the people to build an independent Italian nation. It also attempted to improve economically the lives of the underserved by giving some of the Church's large landholdings to poor peasants. It also made prison and insane asylum reforms, gave freedom to the press, provided secular education, but shied away from the " Right to Work", having seen this fail in France.

However, the many reforms instituted by the new Republic combined with its lowering of taxes brought about monetary problems which the republic then compounded by simply printing more money. Runaway price inflation doomed the economy of the republic. In addition sending troops to defend Piedmont from Austrian forces put Rome at risk of attack from Austria. Moreover, Pope Pius appealed to Louis Napoleon for help in restoring his temporal power. The French President saw this as an opportunity to gain Catholic support. The French army arrived by sea under the command of General Charles Oudinot, and, despite an early loss to Garibaldi, the French, with the help of the Austrians, eventually defeated the Roman Republic. On July 12, 1849 Pope Pius IX was escorted back into Rome and ruled under French protection until 1870.

The Five Days of Milan (1848), of which one of the symbols was the Italian tricolour

The Italian tricolour flag was a symbol of the revolutions of 1848. In March 1848, the Five Days of Milan, an armed insurrection which led to the temporary liberation of the city from Austrian rule, were characterised by a profusion of flags and Italian tricolour cockades. On 20 March, during furious fighting, with the Austrians barricaded in the Castello Sforzesco and within the defensive systems of the city walls, the patriots Luigi Torelli and Scipione Bagaggia managed to climb on the roof of the Milan Cathedral and hoist the Italian flag on the highest spire of the church, the one on which the stands. At the moment of the appearance of the Italian tricolour on the spire of the Madonnina, the crowd below greeted the event with a series of enthusiastic "Hurray!" This historic flag is kept inside the Museum of the Risorgimento in Milan. The patriot Luciano Manara then managed to hoist the Italian tricolour, amidst the Austrian artillery shots, on the top of Porta Tosa. The abandonment of the city by the Austrian troops of field marshal Josef Radetzky, on 22 March, determined the immediate establishment of the provisional government of Milan chaired by the podestà Gabrio Casati, who issued a proclamation that read:

Let's get it over with once with any foreign domination in Italy. Embrace this tricolour flag that flies over the country for your valour and swear never to let it tear again.

The process of transforming the flag of Italy into one of the Italian national symbols was completed, definitively consolidating itself, during the Milanese uprisings.

The Sicilian revolution of 1848, which was characterised by a wide use of the Italian tricolour

The following day King Charles Albert of Piedmont-Sardinia assured the provisional government of Milan that his troops, ready to come to his aid by starting the First Italian War of Independence, would use a Italian tricolour defaced with the Savoyan coat of arms superimposed on the white as a war flag. In his proclamation to the Lombard-Venetian people, Charles Albert said:

"In order to show more clearly with exterior signs the commitment to Italian unification, we want that Our troops ... have the Savoy shield placed on the Italian tricolour flag.

-  Charles Albert of Piedmont-Sardinia

As the arms, blazoned gules a cross argent, mixed with the white of the flag, it was fimbriated azure, blue being the dynastic colour, although this does not conform to the heraldic rule of tincture. The rectangular civil and state variants were adopted in 1851.

A makeshift Italian tricolour consisting of redshirts, green displays and a white sheet was hoisted on the flagpole of the ship that brought Giuseppe Garibaldi back to Italy from South America shortly after the outbreak of the First Italian War of Independence. The patriots who had gathered at the port of Genoa to welcome her return gave Anita Garibaldi, in front of 3,000 people, a Italian tricolour to be given to Giuseppe Garibaldi so that he could plant it on Lombard soil.

The Grand Duchy of Tuscany in the act of granting the constitution (17 February 1848) did not change the national banner ("The State retains its flag and its colours") but later granted the Tuscan militias, by decree, the use of a Italian tricolour scarf next to the symbols of the Grand Duchy (25 March 1848). The Grand Duke, following the pressure of the Tuscan patriots, then adopted the Italian tricolour flag also as a state banner and as a military banner for the troops sent to help Charles Albert of Piedmont-Sardinia. Similar measures were adopted by the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza and by the Duchy of Modena and Reggio.

The flag of the Constitutional Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, a white field charged with the coats of arms of Castile, Leon, Aragon, Two Sicilies, and Granada, was modified by Ferdinand II through the addition of a red and green border. This flag lasted from 3 April 1848 until 19 May 1849. The Provisional Government of Sicily, which lasted from 12 January 1848 to 15 May 1849 during the Sicilian Revolution, adopted the Italian tricolour, defaced with the trinacria, or triskelion.

The Republic of San Marco, proclaimed independent in 1848 by the Austrian Empire, also adopted the Italian tricolour. The flags that they adopted marked the link to Italian independence and unification efforts. The former, the Italian tricolour undefaced, and the latter, charged with the winged lion of St. Mark, from the flag of the Republic of Venice ( maritime republic which existed from 697 AD until 1797 AD), on a white canton. A chronicler of the time described the final moments of the subsequent capitulation of the Republic of San Marco by the Austrian troops, which took place on 22 August 1849:

The tricolour flags waved above every work, in every danger, and because the enemy balls not only tore up the silk, but broke the stick, it was immediately found who at great risk was going to replace another.

-  Chronicler witnessing the last hours of the Republic of San Marco

The Italian tricolour flag of 1848 that greeted the expulsion of the Austrians from Venice is kept in the Museum of the Risorgimento and the Venetian 19th century.

The proclamation of the Roman Republic in Piazza del Popolo (1848) in Rome among a profusion of Italian tricolour flags

In 1849, the Roman Republic, formed following the revolt against the Papal State that dethroned the Pope, adopted as its national banner a green, white and red flag with a republican Roman eagle at the tip of the pole. This lasted for four months, while the Papal States of the Church was in abeyance. The Roman Republic resisted until 4 July 1849, when it was capitulated by the French Army. The troops from beyond the Alps, as a last act, entered the municipality of Rome where the last members of the republican assembly not yet captured were barricaded. Their secretary Quirico Filopanti surrendered wearing a Italian tricolour scarf.

The Italian tricolour also flew over the barricades of the Ten Days of Brescia, a revolt of the citizens of the Lombard city against the Austrian Empire, and in many other centres such as Varese, Gallarate, Como, Melegnano, Cremona, Monza, Udine, Trento, Verona, Rovigo, Vicenza, Belluno and Padua. This spread throughout the Italian peninsula and demonstrated that the Italian tricolour flag had by then assumed a consolidated symbolism valid throughout the national territory. The iconography of the Italian flag then began to spread not only in the vexillological and military fields, but also in some everyday objects such as scarves and clothing fabrics.

Bellocchi, Ugo (2008). Bandiera madre - I tre colori della vita (in Italian). Scripta Maneant. ISBN 978-88-95847-01-6.

Busico, Augusta (2005). Il tricolore: il simbolo la storia (in Italian). Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, Dipartimento per l'informazione e l'editoria. SBN IT\ICCU\UBO\2771748.

De Mattei, Roberto. Pius IX (2004)

Ginsborg, Paul. "Peasants and Revolutionaries in Venice and the Veneto, 1848," Historical Journal, Sep 1974, Vol. 17 Issue 3, pp 503-550 in JSTOR

Ginsborg, Paul. Daniele Manin and the Venetian Revolution of 1848-49 (1979)

Maiorino, Tarquinio; Marchetti Tricamo, Giuseppe; Zagami, Andrea (2002). Il tricolore degli italiani. Storia avventurosa della nostra bandiera (in Italian). Arnoldo Mondadori Editore. ISBN 978-88-04-50946-2.

Rapport, Michael. 1848: Year of Revolution (2010) pp 79-93

Robertson, Priscilla. Revolutions of 1848: A Social History (1952) pp 311-401 ISBN 0-691-00756-X

Smith, Denis Mack. Mazzini (1996) excerpt and text search

Tarozzi, Fiorenza; Vecchio, Giorgio (1999). Gli italiani e il tricolore (in Italian). Il Mulino. ISBN 88-15-07163-6.

Villa, Claudio (2010). I simboli della Repubblica: la bandiera tricolore, il canto degli italiani, l'emblema (in Italian). Comune di Vanzago. SBN IT\ICCU\LO1\1355389.

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Revolutions of 1848 in the Italian states - Wikipedia

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The 1848 Revolutions in the Italian states, part of the wider Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, were organized revolts in the states of the Italian peninsula and Sicily, led by intellectuals and agitators who desired a liberal government. As Italian nationalists they sought to eliminate reactionary Austrian control.

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The Mexican-American War

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Mexican-American War

Clockwise from top: Battle of Resaca de la Palma, U.S. victory at Churubusco outside of Mexico City, Marines storming Chapultepec castle under a large U.S. flag, Battle of Cerro Gordo

Date

April 25, 1846 - February 2, 1848
(1 year, 9 months, 1 week and 1 day)

Location

Texas, New Mexico, California; Northern, Central, and Eastern Mexico; Mexico City

Result

American victory

Territorial
changes

Mexican Cession

Belligerents

United States
California Republic

Mexico

Commanders and leaders

Strength

73,532

82,000

Casualties and losses

1,733 killed

4,152 wounded[2]

11,550 dead from disease

695 missing

5,000 killed

20,000 wounded

10,000 missing

Including civilians killed by violence, military deaths from disease and accidental deaths, the Mexican death toll may have reached 25,000 and the American death toll exceeded 13,283.[3]

The Mexican-American War, also known in the United States as the Mexican War and in Mexico as the Intervención estadounidense en México ( United States intervention in Mexico), was an armed conflict between the United States and Mexico from 1846 to 1848. It followed the 1845 American annexation of Texas, which Mexico still considered its territory. Mexico refused to recognize the Velasco treaty, because it was signed by President Antonio López de Santa Anna while he was captured by the Texan Army during the 1836 Texas Revolution. The Republic of Texas was an independent country, but most of its Anglo-American citizens wanted to be annexed by the United States.

Sectional politics over slavery in the United States were preventing annexation because Texas would have been admitted as a slave state, upsetting the balance of power between Northern free states and Southern slave states. In the 1844 United States presidential election, Democrat James K. Polk was elected on a platform of expanding U.S. territory to Oregon, California (also a Mexican territory) and Texas; by any means, with the 1845 annexation of Texas furthering that goal. But the boundary between Texas and Mexico was disputed, with the Republic of Texas and the U.S. asserting it to be the Rio Grande and Mexico claiming it to be the more-northern Nueces River. Polk sent a diplomatic mission to Mexico in an attempt to buy the disputed territory, together with California and everything in between for US $25 million; an offer the Mexican government refused. The U.S. sent troops to the disputed Rio Grande, ignoring Mexican demands to withdraw. Mexico subsequently attacked a group of 80 soldiers on April 25, 1846, a move which Polk used to convince the Congress of the United States to declare war.

Beyond the disputed area of Texas, U.S. forces quickly occupied the regional capital of Santa Fe de Nuevo México along the upper Rio Grande. U.S. forces also moved against the province of Alta California and then turned south. The Pacific Squadron of the U.S. Navy blockaded the Pacific coast in the lower Baja California Territory. The U.S. Army, under Major General Winfield Scott, invaded the Mexican heartland and captured the capital, Mexico City, in September 1847.

Although Mexico was defeated on the battlefield, negotiating peace was a politically fraught issue. Some Mexican factions refused to consider any recognition of its loss of territory. Although Polk formally relieved his peace envoy, Nicholas Trist, of his post as negotiator, Trist ignored the order and successfully concluded the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It ended the war, and Mexico recognized the cession of present-day California, Nevada and Utah as well as parts of present-day Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming. The U.S. agreed to pay $15 million for the physical damage of the war and assumed $3.25 million of debt already owed by the Mexican government to U.S. citizens. Mexico relinquished its claims on Texas and accepted the Rio Grande as its northern border with the United States.

The victory and territorial expansion Polk envisioned inspired patriotism among some sections of the United States, but the war and treaty drew fierce criticism for the casualties, monetary cost, and heavy-handedness. The question of how to treat the new acquisitions intensified the debate over slavery in the United States. Although the Wilmot Proviso that explicitly forbade the extension of slavery into conquered Mexican territory was not adopted by Congress, debates about it heightened sectional tensions. Some scholars see the Mexican-American War as leading to the American Civil War. Many officers who had trained at West Point gained experience in the war in Mexico and later played prominent leadership roles during the Civil War.

Mexico obtained independence from the Spanish Empire with the Treaty of Córdoba in 1821 after a decade of conflict between the royal army and insurgents for independence, with no foreign intervention. The conflict ruined the silver-mining districts of Zacatecas and Guanajuato. Mexico began as a sovereign nation with its future financial stability from its main export destroyed. Mexico briefly experimented with monarchy, but became a republic in 1824. This government was characterized by instability, and it was ill-prepared for a major international conflict when war broke out with the U.S. in 1846. Mexico had successfully resisted Spanish attempts to reconquer its former colony in the 1820s and resisted the French in the so-called Pastry War of 1838 but the secessionists' success in Texas and the Yucatan against the centralist government of Mexico showed its political weakness as the government changed hands multiple times. The Mexican military and the Catholic Church in Mexico, both privileged institutions with conservative political views, were stronger politically than the Mexican state.

The United States' 1803 Louisiana Purchase resulted in an undefined border between Spanish colonial territories and the U.S. Some of the boundary issues between the U.S. and Spain were resolved with the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1818. U.S. negotiator John Quincy Adams wanted clear possession of East Florida and establishment of U.S. claims above the 42nd parallel, while Spain sought to limit U.S. expansion into what is now the American Southwest. The U.S. sought to purchase territory from Mexico, starting in 1825, in order to settle some of these issues. U.S. President Andrew Jackson made a sustained effort to acquire northern Mexican territory, with no success.

Historian Peter Guardino states that in the war "the greatest advantage the United States had was its prosperity." With the Industrial Revolution across the Atlantic increasing the demand for cotton for textile factories, there was a large external market of a valuable commodity produced by enslaved African-American labor in the southern states. This demand helped fuel expansion into northern Mexico. Although there were political conflicts in the U.S., they were largely contained by the framework of the constitution and did not result in revolution or rebellion by 1846, but rather by sectional political conflicts. Northerners in the U.S. sought to develop the country's existing resources and expand the industrial sector without expanding the nation's territory. The existing balance of sectional interests would be disrupted by the expansion of slavery into new territory. The Democratic Party, to which President Polk belonged, in particular strongly supported expansion.

Neither colonial Mexico nor the newly sovereign Mexican state effectively controlled Mexico's far north and west. Mexico's military and diplomatic capabilities declined after it attained independence from Spain in 1821 and left the northern one-half of the country vulnerable to attacks by Comanche, Apache, and Navajo Native Americans. The Comanche, in particular, took advantage of the weakness of the Mexican state to undertake large-scale raids hundreds of miles into the country to acquire livestock for their own use and to supply an expanding market in Texas and the U.S.

Distance and hostile activity from Native Americans also made communications and trade between the heartland of Mexico and provinces such as Alta California and New Mexico difficult. As a result, New Mexico was dependent on the overland Santa Fe Trail trade with the United States at the outbreak of the war.

The Mexican government's policy of settlement of U.S. citizens in its province of Tejas was aimed at expanding control into Comanche lands, the Comancheria. But, instead of settling in the dangerous central and western parts of the province, people settled in East Texas, which held rich farmland contiguous to the southern U.S. slave states. As settlers poured in from the U.S., the Mexican government discouraged further settlement with its 1829 abolition of slavery.

U.S. President John Tyler's administration suggested a tripartite pact to settle the Oregon boundary dispute and provide for the cession of the port of San Francisco from Mexico. Lord Aberdeen declined to participate but said Britain had no objection to U.S. territorial acquisition there. The British minister in Mexico, Richard Pakenham, wrote in 1841 to Lord Palmerston urging "to establish an English population in the magnificent Territory of Upper California", saying that "no part of the World offering greater natural advantages for the establishment of an English colony ... by all means desirable ... that California, once ceasing to belong to Mexico, should not fall into the hands of any power but England ... there is some reason to believe that daring and adventurous speculators in the United States have already turned their thoughts in this direction." By the time the letter reached London, though, Sir Robert Peel's Tory government, with its Little England policy, had come to power and rejected the proposal as expensive and a potential source of conflict.

In 1842, Mexico forcibly replaced California Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado with Manuel Micheltorena. Micheltorena was sent up from lower Mexico, along with an army, that had largely been recruited from Mexico's worst jails. The Californios resented this, partly because California had previously been governed by native-born Californios, partly because Micheltorena's policies were unpopular, and also because the soldiers in Micheltorena's army got a reputation for spending much of their time stealing the local Californios' chickens. Women were not considered safe from the depredations of Micheltorena's army.

Former Governor Alvarado organized a revolt in 1845, which culminated in the Battle of Providencia in Cahuenga Pass near Los Angeles. As a result of the actions of pioneer California rancher John Marsh, Micheltorena's forces were defeated.

In 1800, Spain's colonial province of Texas (Tejas) had few inhabitants, with only about 7,000 non-native settlers. The Spanish crown developed a policy of colonization to more effectively control the territory. After independence, the Mexican government implemented the policy, granting Moses Austin, a banker from Missouri, a large tract of land in Texas. Austin died before he could bring his plan of recruiting American settlers for the land to fruition, but his son, Stephen F. Austin, brought over 300 American families into Texas. This started the steady trend of migration from the United States into the Texas frontier. Austin's colony was the most successful of several colonies authorized by the Mexican government. The Mexican government intended the new settlers to act as a buffer between the Tejano residents and the Comanches, but the non-Hispanic colonists tended to settle in areas with decent farmland and trade connections with Louisiana rather than farther west where they would have been an effective buffer against the Natives.

In 1834, Mexican conservatives seized the political initiative, and General Antonio López de Santa Anna became the centralist president of Mexico. The conservative-dominated Congress abandoned the federal system, replacing it with a unitary central government that removed power from the states. Leaving politics to those in Mexico City, General Santa Anna led the Mexican army to quash the semi-independence of Texas. He had done that in Coahuila (in 1824, Mexico had merged Texas and Coahuila into the enormous state of Coahuila y Tejas). Austin called Texians to arms and they declared independence from Mexico in 1836. After Santa Anna defeated the Texians in the Battle of the Alamo, he was defeated by the Texian Army commanded by General Sam Houston and was captured at the Battle of San Jacinto. In exchange for his life Santa Anna signed a treaty with Texas President David Burnet ending the war and recognizing Texian independence. The treaty was not ratified by the Mexican Congress as it had been signed by a captive under duress. Although Mexico refused to recognize Texian independence, Texas consolidated its status as an independent republic and received official recognition from Britain, France, and the United States, which all advised Mexico not to try to reconquer the new nation. Most Texians wanted to join the United States, but the annexation of Texas was contentious in the U.S. Congress, where Whigs and Abolitionists were largely opposed. In 1845, Texas agreed to the offer of annexation by the U.S. Congress and became the 28th state on December 29, 1845, which set the stage for the conflict with Mexico.

By the Treaties of Velasco made after Texans captured General Santa Ana after the Battle of San Jacinto, the southern border of Texas was placed at the "Rio Grande del Norte." The Texans claimed this placed the southern border at the modern Rio Grande. The Mexican government disputed this placement on two grounds: first, it rejected the idea of Texas independence; and second, it claimed that the Rio Grande in the treaty was actually the Nueces River, since the current Rio Grande has always been called "Rio Bravo" in Mexico. The latter claim belied the full name of the river in Mexico, however: "Rio Bravo del Norte." The ill-fated Texan Santa Fe Expedition of 1841 attempted to realize the claim to New Mexican territory east of the Rio Grande, but its members were captured by the Mexican Army and imprisoned. Reference to the Rio Grande boundary of Texas was omitted from the U.S. Congress's annexation resolution to help secure passage after the annexation treaty failed in the Senate. President Polk claimed the Rio Grande boundary, and when Mexico sent forces over the Rio Grande, this provoked a dispute.

In July 1845, Polk sent General Zachary Taylor to Texas, and by October, Taylor commanded 3,500 Americans on the Nueces River, ready to take by force the disputed land. Polk wanted to protect the border and also coveted for the U.S. the continent clear to the Pacific Ocean. At the same time, Polk wrote to the American consul in the Mexican territory of Alta California, disclaiming American ambitions in California but offering to support independence from Mexico or voluntary accession to the United States, and warning that the United States would oppose any European attempts to take over.

To end another war scare with the United Kingdom over the Oregon Country, Polk signed the Oregon Treaty dividing the territory, angering Northern Democrats who felt he was prioritizing Southern expansion over Northern expansion.

In the winter of 1845-46, the federally commissioned explorer John C. Frémont and a group of armed men appeared in Alta California. After telling the Mexican governor and the American Consul Larkin he was merely buying supplies on the way to Oregon, he instead went to the populated area of California and visited Santa Cruz and the Salinas Valley, explaining he had been looking for a seaside home for his mother. Mexican authorities became alarmed and ordered him to leave. Frémont responded by building a fort on Gavilan Peak and raising the American flag. Larkin sent word that Frémont's actions were counterproductive. Frémont left California in March but returned to California and took control of the California Battalion following the outbreak of the Bear Flag Revolt in Sonoma.

In November 1845, Polk sent John Slidell, a secret representative, to Mexico City with an offer to the Mexican government of $25 million for the Rio Grande border in Texas and Mexico's provinces of Alta California and Santa Fe de Nuevo México. U.S. expansionists wanted California to thwart any British interests in the area and to gain a port on the Pacific Ocean. Polk authorized Slidell to forgive the $3 million owed to U.S. citizens for damages caused by the Mexican War of Independence and pay another $25 to $30 million for the two territories.

Mexico was neither inclined nor able to negotiate. In 1846 alone, the presidency changed hands four times, the war ministry six times, and the finance ministry sixteen times. Despite that, Mexican public opinion and all political factions agreed that selling the territories to the United States would tarnish the national honor. Mexicans who opposed direct conflict with the United States, including President José Joaquín de Herrera, were viewed as traitors. Military opponents of de Herrera, supported by populist newspapers, considered Slidell's presence in Mexico City an insult. When de Herrera considered receiving Slidell to settle the problem of Texas annexation peacefully, he was accused of treason and deposed. After a more nationalistic government under General Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga came to power, it publicly reaffirmed Mexico's claim to Texas; Slidell, convinced that Mexico should be "chastised", returned to the U.S.

The Mexican Army was a weak and divided force. Only 7 of the 19 states that formed the Mexican federation sent soldiers, armament, and money for the war effort. Santa Anna said, "the leaders of the army did their best to train the rough men who volunteered, but they could do little to inspire them with patriotism for the glorious country they were honored to serve." According to the leading Mexican conservative politician, Lucas Alamán, the "money spent on arming Mexican troops merely enabled them to fight each other and 'give the illusion' that the country possessed an army for its defense." However, an officer criticized Santa Anna's training of troops, "The cavalry was drilled only in regiments. The artillery hardly ever maneuvered and never fired a blank shot. The general in command was never present on the field of maneuvers, so that he was unable to appreciate the respective qualities of the various bodies under his command ... If any meetings of the principal commanding officers were held to discuss the operations of the campaign, it was not known, nor was it known whether any plan of campaign had been formed."

At the beginning of the war, Mexican forces were divided between the permanent forces ( permanentes) and the active militiamen ( activos). The permanent forces consisted of 12 regiments of infantry (of two battalions each), three brigades of artillery, eight regiments of cavalry, one separate squadron and a brigade of dragoons. The militia amounted to nine infantry and six cavalry regiments. In the northern territories, presidial companies ( presidiales) protected the scattered settlements. Since Mexico fought the war on its home territory, a traditional support system for troops were women, known as soldaderas. They did not participate in conventional fighting on battlefields, but some soldaderas joined the battle alongside the men. These women were involved in fighting during the defense of Mexico City and Monterey. Some women such as Dos Amandes and María Josefa Zozaya would be remembered as heroes.

The Mexican army was using surplus British muskets (such as the Brown Bess), left over from the Napoleonic Wars. While at the beginning of the war most American soldiers were still equipped with the very similar Springfield 1816 flintlock muskets, more reliable caplock models gained large inroads within the rank and file as the conflict progressed. Some U.S. troops carried more modern weapons that gave them a significant advantage over their Mexican counterparts, such as the Springfield 1841 rifle of the Mississippi Rifles and the Colt Paterson revolver of the Texas Rangers. In the later stages of the war, the U.S. Mounted Rifles were issued Colt Walker revolvers, of which the U.S. Army had ordered 1,000 in 1846. Most significantly, throughout the war, the superiority of the U.S. artillery often carried the day. While technologically Mexican and American artillery operated on the same plane, U.S. army training, as well as the quality and reliability of their logistics, gave U.S. guns and cannoneers a significant edge.

In his 1885 memoirs, former U.S. President Ulysses Grant (himself a veteran of the Mexican war) attributed Mexico's defeat to the poor quality of their army, writing:

"The Mexican army of that day was hardly an organization. The private soldier was picked from the lower class of the inhabitants when wanted; his consent was not asked; he was poorly clothed, worse fed, and seldom paid. He was turned adrift when no longer wanted. The officers of the lower grades were but little superior to the men. With all this I have seen as brave stands made by some of these men as I have ever seen made by soldiers. Now Mexico has a standing army larger than the United States. They have a military school modeled after West Point. Their officers are educated and, no doubt, very brave. The Mexican war of 1846-8 would be an impossibility in this generation."

There were significant political divisions in Mexico which seriously impeded the war effort. Inside Mexico, the conservative centralistas and liberal federalists vied for power, and at times these two factions inside Mexico's military fought each other rather than the invading U.S. Army. Santa Anna bitterly remarked, "However shameful it may be to admit this, we have brought this disgraceful tragedy upon ourselves through our interminable in-fighting."

During the conflict, presidents held office for a period of months, sometimes just weeks, or even days. Just before the outbreak of the war, liberal General José Joaquín de Herrera was president (December 1844 - December 1845) and willing to engage in talks so long as he did not appear to be caving to the U.S., but he was accused by many Mexican factions of selling out his country ( vendepatria) for considering it. He was overthrown by Conservative Mariano Paredes (December 1845 - July 1846), who left the presidency to fight the invading U.S. Army and was replaced by his vice president Nicolás Bravo (July 28, 1846 - August 4, 1846). The conservative Bravo was overthrown by federalist liberals who re-established the federal Constitution of 1824. José Mariano Salas (August 6, 1846 - December 23, 1846) served as president and held elections under the restored federalist system. General Antonio López de Santa Anna won those elections, but as was his practice, he left the administration to his vice president, who was again liberal Valentín Gómez Farías (December 23, 1846 - March 21, 1847). In February 1847, conservatives rebelled against the liberal government's attempt to take Church property to fund the war effort. In the Revolt of the Polkos, the Catholic Church and conservatives paid soldiers to rise against the liberal government. Santa Anna had to leave his campaign to return to the capital to sort out the political mess.

Santa Anna briefly held the presidency again, from March 21, 1847 - April 2, 1847. His troops were deprived of support that would allow them to continue the fight. The conservatives demanded the removal of Gómez Farías, and this was accomplished by abolishing the office of vice president. Santa Anna returned to the field, replaced in the presidency by Pedro María de Anaya (April 2, 1847 - May 20, 1847). Santa Anna returned to the presidency on May 20, 1847, when Anaya left to fight the invasion, serving until September 15, 1847. Preferring the battlefield to administration, Santa Anna left office again, leaving the office to Manuel de la Peña y Peña (September 16, 1847 - November 13, 1847).

With U.S. forces occupying the Mexican capital and much of the heartland, negotiating a peace treaty was an exigent matter, and Peña y Peña left office to do that. Pedro María Anaya returned to the presidency on November 13, 1847 - January 8, 1848. Anaya refused to sign any treaty that ceded land to the U.S., despite the situation on the ground with Americans occupying the capital, Peña y Peña resumed the presidency January 8, 1848 - June 3, 1848, during which time the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, bringing the war to an end.

Polk had pledged to seek expanded territory in Oregon and Texas, as part of his campaign in 1844, but the regular army was not sufficiently large to sustain extended conflicts on two fronts. The Oregon dispute with Britain was settled peaceably by treaty, allowing U.S. forces to concentrate on the southern border.

The war was fought by regiments of regulars and various regiments, battalions, and companies of volunteers from the different states of the Union as well as Americans and some Mexicans in California and New Mexico. On the West Coast, the U.S. Navy fielded a battalion of sailors, in an attempt to recapture Los Angeles. Although the U.S. Army and Navy were not large at the outbreak of the war, the officers were generally well trained and the numbers of enlisted men fairly large compared to Mexico's. At the beginning of the war, the U.S. Army had eight regiments of infantry (three battalions each), four artillery regiments and three mounted regiments (two dragoons, one of mounted rifles). These regiments were supplemented by 10 new regiments (nine of infantry and one of cavalry) raised for one year of service by the act of Congress from February 11, 1847. A large portion of this fighting force consisted of recent immigrants. According to Tyler V. Johnson, foreign-born men amounted to 47 percent of General Taylor's total forces. In addition to a large contingent of Irish- and German-born soldiers, nearly all European states and principalities were represented. It is estimated that the U.S. Army further included 1,500 men from British North America, including French Canadians.

Although Polk hoped to avoid a protracted war over Texas, the extended conflict stretched regular army resources, necessitating the recruitment of volunteers with short-term enlistments. Some enlistments were for a year, but others were for 3 or 6 months. The best volunteers signed up for a year's service in the summer of 1846, with their enlistments expiring just when General Winfield Scott's campaign was poised to capture Mexico City. Many did not re-enlist, deciding that they would rather return home than place themselves in harm's way of disease, threat of death or injury on the battlefield, or in guerrilla warfare. Their patriotism was doubted by some in the U.S., but they were not counted as deserters. The volunteers were far less disciplined than the regular army, with many committing attacks on the civilian population, sometimes stemming from anti-Catholic and anti-Mexican racial bias. Soldiers' memoirs describe cases of looting and murder of Mexican civilians, mostly by volunteers. One officer's diary records: "We reached Burrita about 5 pm, many of the Louisiana volunteers were there, a lawless drunken rabble. They had driven away the inhabitants, taken possession of their houses, and were emulating each other in making beasts of themselves." John L. O'Sullivan, a vocal proponent of Manifest Destiny, later recalled "The regulars regarded the volunteers with importance and contempt ... [The volunteers] robbed Mexicans of their cattle and corn, stole their fences for firewood, got drunk, and killed several inoffensive inhabitants of the town in the streets." Many of the volunteers were unwanted and considered poor soldiers. The expression "Just like Gaines's army" came to refer to something useless, the phrase having originated when a group of untrained and unwilling Louisiana troops was rejected and sent back by General Taylor at the beginning of the war.

In his 1885 memoirs, Ulysses Grant assesses the U.S. armed forces facing Mexico more favorably.

The victories in Mexico were, in every instance, over vastly superior numbers. There were two reasons for this. Both General Scott and General Taylor had such armies as are not often got together. At the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca-de-la-Palma, General Taylor had a small army, but it was composed exclusively of regular troops, under the best of drill and discipline. Every officer, from the highest to the lowest, was educated in his profession, not at West Point necessarily, but in the camp, in garrison, and many of them in wars with Natives. The rank and file were probably inferior, as material out of which to make an army, to the volunteers that participated in all the later battles of the war; but they were brave men, and then drill and discipline brought out all there was in them. 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. The volunteers who followed were of better material, but without drill or discipline at the start. They were associated with so many disciplined men and professionally educated officers, that when they went into engagements it was with a confidence they would not have felt otherwise. They became soldiers themselves almost at once. All these conditions we would enjoy again in case of war.

The U.S. had been an independent country since the American Revolution, and it was a strongly divided country along sectional lines. Enlarging the country, particularly through armed combat against a sovereign nation, deepened sectional divisions. Polk had narrowly won the popular vote in the 1844 presidential election and decisively won the Electoral College, but with the annexation of Texas in 1845 and the outbreak of war in 1846, Polk's Democrats lost the House of Representatives to the Whig Party, which opposed the war. Unlike Mexico, which had weak formal state institutions, chaotic changes in government, and a military that regularly intervened in politics, the U.S. generally kept its political divisions within the bounds of the institutions of governance.

A few days after the Thornton Affair, the Siege of Fort Texas began on May 3, 1846. Mexican artillery at Matamoros opened fire on Fort Texas, which replied with its own guns. The bombardment continued for 160 hours and expanded as Mexican forces gradually surrounded the fort. Thirteen U.S. soldiers were injured during the bombardment, and two were killed. Among the dead was Jacob Brown, after whom the fort was later named.

On May 8, 1846, Zachary Taylor and 2,400 troops arrived to relieve the fort. However, General Arista rushed north with a force of 3,400 and intercepted him about 5 miles (8 km) north of the Rio Grande River, near modern-day Brownsville, Texas. The U.S. Army employed "flying artillery", their term for horse artillery, a mobile light artillery mounted on horse carriages with the entire crew riding horses into battle. The fast-firing artillery and highly mobile fire support had a devastating effect on the Mexican army. In contrast to the "flying artillery" of the Americans, the Mexican cannons at the Battle of Palo Alto had lower-quality gunpowder that fired at velocities slow enough to make it possible for American soldiers to dodge artillery rounds. The Mexicans replied with cavalry skirmishes and their own artillery. The U.S. flying artillery somewhat demoralized the Mexican side, and seeking terrain more to their advantage, the Mexicans retreated to the far side of a dry riverbed during the night and prepared for the next battle. It provided a natural fortification, but during the retreat, Mexican troops were scattered, making communication difficult.

During the Battle of Resaca de la Palma on May 9, 1846, the two sides engaged in fierce hand-to-hand combat. The U.S. Cavalry managed to capture the Mexican artillery, causing the Mexican side to retreat-a retreat that turned into a rout. Fighting on unfamiliar terrain, his troops fleeing in retreat, Arista found it impossible to rally his forces. Mexican casualties were significant, and the Mexicans were forced to abandon their artillery and baggage. Fort Brown inflicted additional casualties as the withdrawing troops passed by the fort, and additional Mexican soldiers drowned trying to swim across the Rio Grande. Taylor crossed the Rio Grande and began his series of battles in Mexican territory.

Polk received word of the Thornton Affair, which, added to the Mexican government's rejection of Slidell, Polk believed, constituted a casus belli. His message to Congress on May 11, 1846, claimed that "Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon American soil."

The U.S. Congress approved the declaration of war on May 13, 1846, after a few hours of debate, with southern Democrats in strong support. Sixty-seven Whigs voted against the war on a key slavery amendment, but on the final passage only 14 Whigs voted no, including Rep. John Quincy Adams. Later, a freshman Whig Congressman from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, challenged Polk's assertion that American blood had been shed on American soil, calling it "a bold falsification of history".

Regarding the beginning of the war, Ulysses S. Grant, who had opposed the war but served as an army lieutenant in Taylor's army, claims in his Personal Memoirs (1885) that the main goal of the U.S. Army's advance from Nueces River to the Rio Grande was to provoke the outbreak of war without attacking first, to debilitate any political opposition to the war.

The presence of United States troops on the edge of the disputed territory farthest from the Mexican settlements, was not sufficient to provoke hostilities. We were sent to provoke a fight, but it was essential that Mexico should commence it. It was very doubtful whether Congress would declare war; but if Mexico should attack our troops, the Executive could announce, "Whereas, war exists by the acts of, etc.," and prosecute the contest with vigor. Once initiated there were, but few public men who would have the courage to oppose it. ... Mexico showing no willingness to come to the Nueces to drive the invaders from her soil, it became necessary for the "invaders" to approach to within a convenient distance to be struck. Accordingly, preparations were begun for moving the army to the Rio Grande, to a point near Matamoras [sic]. It was desirable to occupy a position near the largest centre of population possible to reach, without absolutely invading territory to which we set up no claim whatever.

In Mexico, although President Paredes issued a manifesto on May 23, 1846, and a declaration of a defensive war on April 23, both of which are considered by some the de facto start of the war, the Mexican Congress officially declared war on July 7, 1846.

In the United States, increasingly divided by sectional rivalry, the war was a partisan issue and an essential element in the origins of the American Civil War. Most Whigs in the North and South opposed it; most Democrats supported it. Southern Democrats, animated by a popular belief in Manifest Destiny, supported it in hope of adding slave-owning territory to the South and avoiding being outnumbered by the faster-growing North. John L. O'Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, coined this phrase in its context, stating that it must be "our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions."

Northern antislavery elements feared the expansion of the Southern Slave Power; Whigs generally wanted to strengthen the economy with industrialization, not expand it with more land. Among the most vocal opposing the war in the House of Representatives was former U.S. President John Quincy Adams, a representative of Massachusetts. Adams had first voiced concerns about expanding into Mexican territory in 1836 when he opposed Texas annexation following its de facto independence from Mexico. He continued this argument in 1846 for the same reason. War with Mexico would add new slavery territory to the nation. When the question to go to war with Mexico came to a vote on May 13, 1846, Adams spoke a resounding "No!" in the chamber. Only 13 others followed his lead. Despite that opposition, he later voted for war appropriations.

Fellow Whig Abraham Lincoln contested Polk's causes for the war. Polk had said that Mexico had "shed American blood upon American soil". Lincoln submitted eight " Spot Resolutions", demanding that Polk state the exact spot where Thornton had been attacked and American blood shed, and to clarify whether that location was American soil or if it had been claimed by Spain and Mexico. Lincoln, too, did not actually stop money for men or supplies in the war effort.

Whig Senator Thomas Corwin of Ohio gave a long speech indicting presidential war in 1847. In the Senate February 11, 1847, Whig leader Robert Toombs of Georgia declared: "This war is nondescript ... We charge the President with usurping the war-making power ... with seizing a country ... which had been for centuries, and was then in the possession of the Mexicans. ... Let us put a check upon this lust of dominion. We had territory enough, Heaven knew." Democratic Representative David Wilmot introduced the Wilmot Proviso, which would prohibit slavery in new territory acquired from Mexico. Wilmot's proposal passed the House but not the Senate.

Northern abolitionists attacked the war as an attempt by slave-owners to strengthen the grip of slavery and thus ensure their continued influence in the federal government. Prominent artists and writers opposed the war, including James Russell Lowell, whose works on the subject " The Present Crisis" and the satirical The Biglow Papers were immediately popular. Transcendentalist writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson also criticized the war. Thoreau, who served jail time for refusing to pay a tax that would support the war effort, turned a lecture into an essay now known as Civil Disobedience. Emerson was succinct, predicting that, "The United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as a man who swallowed the arsenic which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us." Events proved him right, in a fashion, as arguments over the expansion of slavery in the lands seized from Mexico would fuel the drift to civil war just a dozen years later. The New England Workingmen's Association condemned the war, and some Irish and German immigrants defected from the U.S. Army and formed the Saint Patrick's Battalion to fight for Mexico.

Besides alleging that the actions of Mexican military forces within the disputed boundary lands north of the Rio Grande constituted an attack on American soil, the war's advocates viewed the territories of New Mexico and California as only nominally Mexican possessions with very tenuous ties to Mexico. They saw the territories as unsettled, ungoverned, and unprotected frontier lands, whose non-aboriginal population represented a substantial American component. Moreover, the territories were feared by Americans to be under imminent threat of acquisition by America's rival on the continent, the British.

President Polk reprised these arguments in his Third Annual Message to Congress on December 7, 1847. He scrupulously detailed his administration's position on the origins of the conflict, the measures the U.S. had taken to avoid hostilities, and the justification for declaring war. He also elaborated upon the many outstanding financial claims by American citizens against Mexico and argued that, in view of the country's insolvency, the cession of some large portion of its northern territories was the only indemnity realistically available as compensation. This helped to rally congressional Democrats to his side, ensuring passage of his war measures and bolstering support for the war in the U.S.

The coverage of the war was an important development in the U.S., with journalists as well as letter-writing soldiers giving the public in the U.S. "their first-ever independent news coverage of warfare from home or abroad." During the war, inventions such as the telegraph created new means of communication that updated people with the latest news from the reporters on the scene. The most important of these was George Wilkins Kendall, a Northerner who wrote for the New Orleans Picayune, and whose collected Dispatches from the Mexican War constitute an important primary source for the conflict. With more than a decade's experience reporting urban crime, the "penny press" realized the public's voracious demand for astounding war news. Moreover, Shelley Streetby demonstrates that the print revolution, which preceded the U.S.-Mexican War, made it possible for the distribution of cheap newspapers throughout the country. This was the first time in U.S. history that accounts by journalists instead of opinions of politicians had great influence in shaping people's opinions about and attitudes toward a war. Along with written accounts of the war, war artists provided a visual dimension to the war at the time and immediately afterward. Carl Nebel's visual depictions of the war are well known.

By getting constant reports from the battlefield, Americans became emotionally united as a community. News about the war caused extraordinary popular excitement. In the spring of 1846, news about Taylor's victory at Palo Alto brought up a large crowd that met in the cotton textile town of Lowell, Massachusetts. In Chicago, a large concourse of citizens gathered in April 1847 to celebrate the victory of Buena Vista. New York celebrated the twin victories at Veracruz and Buena Vista in May 1847. Generals Taylor and Scott became heroes for their people and later became presidential candidates. Polk had pledged to be a one-term president, but his last official act was to attend Taylor's inauguration as president.

U.S. invasions on Mexico's periphery

After the declaration of war on May 13, 1846, United States Army General Stephen W. Kearny moved southwest from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in June 1846 with about 1,700 men in his Army of the West. Kearny's orders were to secure the territories Nuevo México and Alta California.

In Santa Fe, Governor Manuel Armijo wanted to avoid battle, but on August 9, Colonel Diego Archuleta and militia officers Manuel Chaves and Miguel Pino forced him to muster a defense. Armijo set up a position in Apache Canyon, a narrow pass about 10 miles (16 km) southeast of the city. However, on August 14, before the American army was even in view, he decided not to fight. An American named James Magoffin claimed he had convinced Armijo and Archuleta to follow this course; an unverified story says he bribed Armijo. When Pino, Chaves, and some of the militiamen insisted on fighting, Armijo ordered the cannon pointed at them. The New Mexican army retreated to Santa Fe, and Armijo fled to Chihuahua.

Kearny and his troops encountered no Mexican forces when they arrived on August 15. Kearny and his force entered Santa Fe and claimed the New Mexico Territory for the United States without a shot fired. Kearny declared himself the military governor of the New Mexico Territory on August 18 and established a civilian government. American officers drew up a temporary legal system for the territory called the Kearny Code.

Kearny then took the remainder of his army west to Alta California; he left Colonel Sterling Price in command of U.S. forces in New Mexico. He appointed Charles Bent as New Mexico's first territorial governor. Following Kearny's departure, dissenters in Santa Fe plotted a Christmas uprising. When the plans were discovered by the U.S. authorities, the dissenters postponed the uprising. They attracted numerous Native allies, including Puebloans, who also wanted to push the Americans from the territory. On the morning of January 19, 1847, the insurrectionists began the revolt in Don Fernando de Taos, present-day Taos, New Mexico, which later gave it the name the Taos Revolt. They were led by Pablo Montoya, a New Mexican, and Tomás Romero, a Taos pueblo Native also known as Tomasito (Little Thomas).

Romero led a Native American force to the house of Governor Charles Bent, where they broke down the door, shot Bent with arrows, and scalped him in front of his family. They moved on, leaving Bent still alive. With his wife Ignacia and children, and the wives of friends Kit Carson and Thomas Boggs, the group escaped by digging through the adobe walls of their house into the one next door. When the insurgents discovered the party, they killed Bent but left the women and children unharmed.

The next day a large armed force of approximately 500 New Mexicans and Pueblo attacked and laid siege to Simeon Turley's mill in Arroyo Hondo, several miles outside of Taos. Charles Autobees, an employee at the mill, saw the men coming. He rode to Santa Fe for help from the occupying U.S. forces. Eight to ten mountain men were left at the mill for defense. After a day-long battle, only two of the mountain men survived, John David Albert and Thomas Tate Tobin, Autobees' half-brother. Both escaped separately on foot during the night. The same day New Mexican insurgents killed seven American traders passing through the village of Mora. At most, 15 Americans were killed in both actions on January 20.

The U.S. military moved quickly to quash the revolt; Colonel Price led more than 300 U.S. troops from Santa Fe to Taos, together with 65 volunteers, including a few New Mexicans, organized by Ceran St. Vrain, the business partner of William and Charles Bent. Along the way, the combined forces beat back a force of some 1,500 New Mexicans and Pueblo at Santa Cruz de la Cañada and at Embudo Pass. The insurgents retreated to Taos Pueblo, where they took refuge in the thick-walled adobe church. During the ensuing battle, the U.S. breached a wall of the church and directed cannon fire into the interior, inflicting many casualties and killing about 150 rebels. They captured 400 more men after close hand-to-hand fighting. Only seven Americans died in the battle.

A separate force of U.S. troops under captains Israel R. Hendley and Jesse I. Morin campaigned against the rebels in Mora. The First Battle of Mora ended in a New Mexican victory. The Americans attacked again in the Second Battle of Mora and won, which ended their operations against Mora. New Mexican rebels engaged U.S. forces three more times in the following months. The actions are known as the Battle of Red River Canyon, the Battle of Las Vegas, and the Battle of Cienega Creek. After the U.S. forces won each battle, the New Mexicans and Natives ended open warfare.

Word of Congress' declaration of war reached California by August 1846. American consul Thomas O. Larkin, stationed in Monterey, worked successfully during the events in that vicinity to avoid bloodshed between Americans and the Mexican military garrison commanded by General José Castro, the senior military officer in California.

Captain John C. Frémont, leading a U.S. Army topographical expedition to survey the Great Basin, entered Sacramento Valley in December 1845. Frémont's party was at Upper Klamath Lake in the Oregon Territory when it received word that war between Mexico and the U.S. was imminent; the party then returned to California.

Mexico had issued a proclamation that unnaturalized foreigners were no longer permitted to have land in California and were subject to expulsion. With rumors swirling that General Castro was massing an army against them, American settlers in the Sacramento Valley banded together to meet the threat. On June 14, 1846, 34 American settlers seized control of the undefended Mexican government outpost of Sonoma to forestall Castro's plans. One settler created the Bear Flag and raised it over Sonoma Plaza. Within a week, 70 more volunteers joined the rebels' force, which grew to nearly 300 in early July. This event, led by William B. Ide, became known as the Bear Flag Revolt.

On June 25, Frémont's party arrived to assist in an expected military confrontation. San Francisco, then called Yerba Buena, was occupied by the Bear Flaggers on July 2. On July 5, Frémont's California Battalion was formed by combining his forces with many of the rebels.

Commodore John D. Sloat, commander of the U.S. Navy's Pacific Squadron, near Mazatlan, Mexico, had received orders to seize San Francisco Bay and blockade California ports when he was positive that war had begun. Sloat set sail for Monterey, reaching it on July 1. Sloat, upon hearing of the events in Sonoma and Frémont's involvement, erroneously believed Frémont to be acting on orders from Washington and ordered his forces to occupy Monterey on July 7 and raise the U.S. flag. On July 9, 70 sailors and Marines landed at Yerba Buena and raised the American flag. Later that day in Sonoma, the Bear Flag was lowered, and the American flag was raised in its place.

On Sloat's orders, Frémont brought 160 volunteers to Monterey, in addition to the California Battalion. On July 15, Sloat transferred his command of the Pacific Squadron to Commodore Robert F. Stockton, who was more militarily aggressive. He mustered the willing members of the California Battalion into military service with Frémont in command. Stockton ordered Frémont to San Diego to prepare to move northward to Los Angeles. As Frémont landed, Stockton's 360 men arrived in San Pedro. General Castro and Governor Pío Pico wrote farewells and fled separately to the Mexican state of Sonora.

Stockton's army entered Los Angeles unopposed on August 13, whereupon he sent a report to the secretary of state that "California is entirely free from Mexican dominion." Stockton, however, left a tyrannical officer in charge of Los Angeles with a small force. The Californios under the leadership of José María Flores, acting on their own and without federal help from Mexico, in the Siege of Los Angeles, forced the American garrison to retreat on September 29. They also forced small U.S. garrisons in San Diego and Santa Barbara to flee.

Captain William Mervine landed 350 sailors and Marines at San Pedro on October 7. They were ambushed and repulsed at the Battle of Dominguez Rancho by Flores' forces in less than an hour. Four Americans died, with 8 severely injured. Stockton arrived with reinforcements at San Pedro, which increased the American forces there to 800. He and Mervine then set up a base of operations at San Diego.

Meanwhile, Kearny and his force of about 115 men, who had performed a grueling march across the Sonoran Desert, crossed the Colorado River in late November 1846. Stockton sent a 35-man patrol from San Diego to meet them. On December 7, 100 lancers under General Andrés Pico (brother of the governor), tipped off and lying in wait, fought Kearny's army of about 150 at the Battle of San Pasqual, where 22 of Kearny's men (one of whom later died of wounds), including three officers, were killed in 30 minutes of fighting. The wounded Kearny and his bloodied force pushed on until they had to establish a defensive position on "Mule Hill". However, General Pico kept the hill under siege for four days until a 215-man American relief force arrived.

Frémont and the 428-man California Battalion arrived in San Luis Obispo on December 14 and Santa Barbara on December 27. On December 28, a 600-man American force under Kearny began a 150-mile march to Los Angeles. Flores then moved his ill-equipped 500-man force to a 50-foot-high bluff above the San Gabriel River. On January 8, 1847, the Stockton-Kearny army defeated the Californio force in the two-hour Battle of Rio San Gabriel. That same day, Frémont's force arrived at San Fernando. The next day, January 9, the Stockton-Kearny forces fought and won the Battle of La Mesa. On January 10, the U.S. Army entered Los Angeles to no resistance.

On January 12, Frémont and two of Pico's officers agreed to terms for a surrender. Articles of Capitulation were signed on January 13 by Frémont, Andrés Pico and six others at a ranch at Cahuenga Pass (modern-day North Hollywood). This became known as the Treaty of Cahuenga, which marked the end of armed resistance in California.

Entering the Gulf of California, Independence, , and seized La Paz, then captured and burned the small Mexican fleet at Guaymas on October 19, 1847. Within a month, they cleared the gulf of hostile ships, destroying or capturing 30 vessels. Later, their sailors and Marines captured the port of Mazatlán on November 11, 1847. After upper California was secure, most of the Pacific Squadron proceeded down the California coast, capturing all major cities of the Baja California Territory and capturing or destroying nearly all Mexican vessels in the Gulf of California.

A Mexican campaign under Manuel Pineda Muñoz to retake the various captured ports resulted in several small clashes and two sieges in which the Pacific Squadron ships provided artillery support. U.S. garrisons remained in control of the ports. Following reinforcement, Lt. Col. Henry S. Burton marched out. His forces rescued captured Americans, captured Pineda, and on March 31 defeated and dispersed remaining Mexican forces at the Skirmish of Todos Santos, unaware that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had been signed in February 1848 and a truce agreed to on March 6. When the U.S. garrisons were evacuated to Monterey following the treaty ratification, many Mexicans went with them: those who had supported the U.S. cause and had thought Lower California would also be annexed along with Upper California.

Led by Zachary Taylor, 2,300 U.S. troops crossed the Rio Grande after some initial difficulties in obtaining river transport. His soldiers occupied the city of Matamoros, then Camargo (where the soldiery suffered the first of many problems with disease) and then proceeded south and besieged the city of Monterrey, Nuevo León. The hard-fought Battle of Monterrey resulted in serious losses on both sides. The U.S. light artillery was ineffective against the stone fortifications of the city, as the American forces attacked in frontal assaults. The Mexican forces under General Pedro de Ampudia repulsed Taylor's best infantry division at Fort Teneria.

American soldiers, including many West Point graduates, had never engaged in urban warfare before, and they marched straight down the open streets, where they were annihilated by Mexican defenders well-hidden in Monterrey's thick adobe homes. They quickly learned, and two days later, they changed their urban warfare tactics. Texan soldiers had fought in a Mexican city before (the Siege of Béxar in December 1835) and advised Taylor's generals that the Americans needed to " mouse hole" through the city's homes. They needed to punch holes in the side or roofs of the homes and fight hand to hand inside the structures. Mexicans called the Texas soldiers the Diabólicos Tejanos (the Devil Texans). This method proved successful. Eventually, these actions drove and trapped Ampudia's men into the city's central plaza, where howitzer shelling forced Ampudia to negotiate. Taylor agreed to allow the Mexican Army to evacuate and to an eight-week armistice in return for the surrender of the city. Taylor broke the armistice and occupied the city of Saltillo, southwest of Monterrey. Santa Anna blamed the loss of Monterrey and Saltillo on Ampudia and demoted him to command a small artillery battalion. Similarly, Polk blamed Taylor both for suffering heavy losses and failing to imprison Ampudia's entire force. Taylor's army was subsequently stripped of most of its troops in order to support the coming coastal operations by Scott against Veracruz and the Mexican heartland.

On February 22, 1847, having heard of this weakness from the written orders found on an ambushed U.S. scout, Santa Anna seized the initiative and marched Mexico's entire army north to fight Taylor with 20,000 men, hoping to win a smashing victory before Scott could invade from the sea. The two armies met and fought the largest battle of the war at the Battle of Buena Vista. Taylor, with 4,600 men, had entrenched at a mountain pass called La Angostura, or "the narrows", several miles south of Buena Vista ranch. Santa Anna, having little logistics to supply his army, suffered desertions all the long march north and arrived with only 15,000 men in a tired state.

Initial reports of the battle, as well as propaganda from the Santanistas, credited the victory to the Mexicans, much to the joy of the Mexican populace, but rather than attack the next day and finish the battle, Santa Anna retreated, losing men along the way, having heard word of rebellion and upheaval in Mexico City. Taylor was left in control of part of northern Mexico, and Santa Anna later faced criticism for his withdrawal. Mexican and American military historians alike agree that the U.S. Army could likely have been defeated if Santa Anna had fought the battle to its finish.

Polk mistrusted Taylor, who he felt had shown incompetence in the Battle of Monterrey by agreeing to the armistice. Taylor later used the Battle of Buena Vista as the centerpiece of his successful 1848 presidential campaign.

Northwestern Mexico was essentially tribal Native territory, but on November 21, 1846, the Bear Springs Treaty was signed, ending a large-scale insurrection by the Ute, Zuni, Moquis, and Navajo tribes. In December 1846, after the successful conquest of New Mexico, part of Kearney's Army of the West, the First Missouri Mounted Volunteers, moved into modern-day northwest Mexico. They were led by Alexander W. Doniphan, continuing what ended up being a year-long 5,500 mile campaign. It was described as rivaling Xenophon's march across Anatolia during the Greco-Persian Wars.

On Christmas day, they won the Battle of El Brazito, outside the modern-day El Paso, Texas. On March 1, 1847, Doniphan occupied Chihuahua City. British consul John Potts did not want to allow Doniphan to search Governor Trías's mansion and unsuccessfully asserted it was under British protection. American merchants in Chihuahua wanted the American force to stay in order to protect their business. Major William Gilpin advocated a march on Mexico City and convinced a majority of officers, but Doniphan subverted this plan. Then in late April, Taylor ordered the First Missouri Mounted Volunteers to leave Chihuahua and join him at Saltillo. The American merchants either followed or returned to Santa Fe. Along the way, the townspeople of Parras enlisted Doniphan's aid against a Native raiding party that had taken children, horses, mules, and money. The Missouri Volunteers finally made their way to Matamoros, from which they returned to Missouri by water.

Southern Mexico had a large indigenous population and was geographically distant from the capital, over which the central government had weak control. Yucatán in particular had closer ties to Cuba and to the United States than it did to central Mexico. On a number of occasions in the early era of the Mexican Republic, Yucatán seceded from the federation. There were also rivalries between regional elites, with one faction based in Mérida and the other in Campeche. These issues factored into the Mexican-American War, as the U. S. had designs on this part of the coast.

The U.S. Navy contributed to the war by controlling the coast and clearing the way for U.S. troops and supplies, especially to Mexico's main port of Veracruz. Even before hostilities began in the disputed northern region, the U.S. Navy created a blockade. Given the shallow waters of that portion of the coast, the U.S. Navy needed ships with a shallow draft rather than large frigates. Since the Mexican Navy was almost non-existent, the U.S. Navy could operate unimpeded in gulf waters. The U.S. fought two battles in Tabasco in October 1846 and in June 1847.

Scott's invasion of Mexico's heartland

Rather than reinforce Taylor's army for a continued advance, President Polk sent a second army under General Winfield Scott. Polk had decided that the way to bring the war to an end was to invade the Mexican heartland from the coast. General Scott's army was transported to the port of Veracruz by sea to begin an invasion to take the Mexican capital. On March 9, 1847, Scott performed the first major amphibious landing in U.S. history in preparation for a siege. A group of 12,000 volunteer and regular soldiers successfully offloaded supplies, weapons, and horses near the walled city using specially designed landing crafts. Included in the invading force were several future generals: Robert E. Lee, George Meade, Ulysses S. Grant, James Longstreet, and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson.

Veracruz was defended by Mexican General Juan Morales with 3,400 men. Mortars and naval guns under Commodore Matthew C. Perry were used to reduce the city walls and harass defenders. The bombardment on March 24, 1847, opened in the walls of Veracruz a thirty-foot gap. The defenders in the city replied with their own artillery, but the extended barrage broke the will of the Mexicans, who faced a numerically superior force, and they surrendered the city after 12 days under siege. U.S. troops suffered 80 casualties, while the Mexicans had around 180 killed and wounded, with hundreds of civilians killed. During the siege, the U.S. soldiers began to fall victim to yellow fever.

Santa Anna allowed Scott's army to march inland, counting on yellow fever and other tropical diseases to take their toll before Santa Anna chose a place to engage the enemy. Mexico had used this tactic before, including when Spain attempted to reconquer Mexico in 1829. Disease could be a decisive factor in the war. Santa Anna was from Veracruz, so he was on his home territory, knew the terrain, and had a network of allies. He could draw on local resources to feed his hungry army and gain intelligence on the enemy's movements. From his experience in the northern battles on open terrain, Santa Anna sought to negate the U.S. Army's primary advantage, its use of artillery.

Santa Anna chose Cerro Gordo as the place to engage the U.S. troops, calculating the terrain would offer the maximum advantage for the Mexican forces. Scott marched westward on April 2, 1847, toward Mexico City with 8,500 initially healthy troops, while Santa Anna set up a defensive position in a canyon around the main road and prepared fortifications. Santa Anna had entrenched with what the U.S. Army believed were 12,000 troops but in fact was around 9,000. He had artillery trained on the road where he expected Scott to appear. However, Scott had sent 2,600 mounted dragoons ahead, and they reached the pass on April 12. The Mexican artillery prematurely fired on them and therefore revealed their positions, beginning the skirmish.

Instead of taking the main road, Scott's troops trekked through the rough terrain to the north, setting up his artillery on the high ground and quietly flanking the Mexicans. Although by then aware of the positions of U.S. troops, Santa Anna and his troops were unprepared for the onslaught that followed. In the battle fought on April 18, the Mexican army was routed. The U.S. Army suffered 400 casualties, while the Mexicans suffered over 1,000 casualties with 3,000 taken prisoner. In August 1847, Captain Kirby Smith, of Scott's 3rd Infantry, reflected on the resistance of the Mexican army:

They can do nothing and their continued defeats should convince them of it. They have lost six great battles; we have captured six hundred and eight cannon, nearly one hundred thousand stands of arms, made twenty thousand prisoners, have the greatest portion of their country and are fast advancing on their Capital which must be ours,-yet they refuse to treat [i.e., negotiate terms]!

The U.S. Army had expected a quick collapse of the Mexican forces. Santa Anna, however, was determined to fight to the end, and Mexican soldiers continued to regroup after battles to fight yet again.

With guerrillas harassing his line of communications back to Veracruz, Scott decided not to weaken his army to defend Puebla but, leaving only a garrison at Puebla to protect the sick and injured recovering there, advanced on Mexico City on August 7 with his remaining force. The capital was laid open in a series of battles around the right flank of the city defenses, the Battle of Contreras and Battle of Churubusco. After Churubusco, fighting halted for an armistice and peace negotiations, which broke down on September 6, 1847. With the subsequent battles of Molino del Rey and of Chapultepec, and the storming of the city gates, the capital was occupied. Scott became military governor of occupied Mexico City. His victories in this campaign made him an American national hero.

The Battle of Chapultepec in September 1847 was a siege on the castle of Chapultepec, built on a hill in Mexico City in the colonial era. At this time, this castle was a renowned military school in the capital. After the battle, which ended in a victory for the U.S., the legend of "Los Niños Héroes" was born. Although not confirmed by historians, six military cadets between the ages of 13 and 17 stayed in the school instead of evacuating. They decided to stay and fight for Mexico. These Niños Héroes (boy heroes) became icons in Mexico's patriotic pantheon. Rather than surrender to the U.S. Army, some military cadets leaped from the castle walls. A cadet named Juan Escutia wrapped himself in the Mexican flag and jumped to his death.

In late September 1847, Santa Anna made one last attempt to defeat the U.S. Army, by cutting them off from the coast. General Joaquín Rea began the Siege of Puebla, soon joined by Santa Anna. Scott had left some 2,400 soldiers in Puebla, of whom around 400 were fit. After the fall of Mexico City, Santa Anna hoped to rally Puebla's civilian population against the U.S. soldiers under siege and subject to guerrilla attacks. Before the Mexican army could wipe out the Americans in Puebla, more troops landed in Veracruz under the command of Brigadier General Joseph Lane. At Puebla, they sacked the town. Santa Anna was not able to provision his troops, who effectively dissolved as a fighting force to forage for food. Puebla was relieved by Lane on October 12, following his defeat of Santa Anna at the Battle of Huamantla on October 9. The battle was Santa Anna's last. Following the defeat, the new Mexican government led by Manuel de la Peña y Peña asked Santa Anna to turn over command of the army to General José Joaquín de Herrera.

Following the capture of the capital, the Mexican government moved to the temporary capital at Querétaro. In Mexico City, U.S. forces became an army of occupation and subject to stealth attacks from the urban population. Conventional warfare gave way to guerrilla warfare by Mexicans defending their homeland. They inflicted significant casualties on the U.S. Army, particularly on soldiers slow to keep up.

General Scott sent about a quarter of his strength to secure his line of communications to Veracruz from the Light Corps of General Rea and other Mexican guerrilla forces that had made stealth attacks since May. Mexican guerrillas often tortured and mutilated the bodies of the U.S. troops, as revenge and warning. Americans interpreted these acts not as Mexicans' defense of their patria, but as evidence of Mexicans' brutality as racial inferiors. For their part, U.S. soldiers took revenge on Mexicans for the attacks, whether or not they were individually suspected of guerrilla acts.

Scott viewed guerrilla attacks as contrary to the "laws of war" and threatened the property of populations that appeared to harbor the guerrillas. Captured guerrillas were to be shot, including helpless prisoners, with the reasoning that the Mexicans did the same. Historian Peter Guardino contends that the U.S. Army command was complicit in the attacks against Mexican civilians. By threatening the civilian populations' homes, property, and families with burning whole villages, looting, and raping women, the U.S. Army separated guerrillas from their base. "Guerrillas cost the Americans dearly, but indirectly cost Mexican civilians more."

Scott strengthened the garrison of Puebla and by November had added a 1,200-man garrison at Jalapa, established 750-man posts along the main route between the port of Veracruz and the capital, at the pass between Mexico City and Puebla at Rio Frio, at Perote and San Juan on the road between Jalapa and Puebla, and at Puente Nacional between Jalapa and Veracruz. He had also detailed an anti-guerrilla brigade under Lane to carry the war to the Light Corps and other guerrillas. He ordered that convoys would travel with at least 1,300-man escorts. Victories by Lane over the Light Corps at Atlixco (October 18, 1847), at Izúcar de Matamoros (November 23, 1847), and at Galaxara Pass (November 24, 1847) weakened General Rea's forces.

Later a raid against the guerrillas of Padre Jarauta at Zacualtipan (February 25, 1848) further reduced guerrilla raids on the American line of communications. After the two governments concluded a truce to await ratification of the peace treaty, on March 6, 1848, formal hostilities ceased. However, some bands continued in defiance of the Mexican government until the U.S. Army's evacuation in August. Some were suppressed by the Mexican Army or, like Padre Jarauta, executed.

Desertion was a major problem for both armies. In the Mexican Army, desertions depleted forces on the eve of battle. Most soldiers were peasants who had a loyalty to their village and family but not to the generals who had conscripted them. Often hungry and ill, underequipped, only partially trained, and under-paid, the soldiers were held in contempt by their officers and had little reason to fight the Americans. Looking for their opportunity, many slipped away from camp to find their way back to their home village.

Hundreds of U.S. deserters went over to the Mexican side. Nearly all were recent immigrants from Europe with weak ties to the U.S. The Mexicans issued broadsides and leaflets enticing U.S. soldiers with promises of money, land bounties, and officers' commissions. Mexican guerrillas shadowed the U.S. Army and captured men who took unauthorized leave or fell out of the ranks. The guerrillas coerced these men to join the Mexican ranks. The generous promises proved illusory for most deserters, who risked execution if captured by U.S. forces.

The most famous group of deserters from the U. S. Army, was the Saint Patrick's Battalion or ( San Patricios), composed primarily of several hundred immigrant soldiers, the majority Catholic Irish and German immigrants, who deserted the U.S. Army because of ill-treatment or sympathetic leanings to fellow Mexican Catholics and joined the Mexican army. The battalion also included Canadians, English, French, Italians, Poles, Scots, Spaniards, Swiss, and Mexican people, many of whom were members of the Catholic Church.

Most of the battalion were killed in the Battle of Churubusco; about 100 were captured by the U.S., and roughly half of the San Patricios were tried and were hanged as deserters following their capture at Churubusco in August 1847. The leader, John Riley, was branded. A bust of John Riley and a plaque on the façade of a building in Plaza San Jacinto, San Angel commemorates the place where they were hanged.

End of war, terms of peace

The U.S. forces had gone from being an army of conquest on the periphery for territory it desired to incorporate, to an invading force in central Mexico, potentially making it an army of long-term occupation. Mexico did not necessarily have to sign a peace treaty but could have continued with long-term guerrilla warfare against the U.S. Army. However, it could not expel the invaders, so negotiating a treaty became more necessary. Polk's wish for a short war of conquest against a perceived weak enemy with no will to fight had turned into a long and bloody conflict in Mexico's heartland. Negotiating a treaty was in the best interest of the United States. It was not easy to achieve. Polk lost confidence in his negotiator Nicholas Trist and dismissed him as peace negotiations dragged on. Trist ignored the fact that he no longer had the authorization to act for the United States. When Trist managed to get yet another Mexican government to sign the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Polk was presented with an accomplished fact and decided to take it to Congress for ratification. Ratification was fraught, since the Democrats had lost the elections of 1846, and Whigs opposed to the war were now in ascendance.

Having won a decisive victory, the U.S. was divided on what the peace should entail. Now that the U.S. had gone far beyond the territorial gains it initially envisioned by invading central Mexico with its dense population, the question was raised whether to annex the entirety of Mexico. After the Wilmot Proviso, there was a lessening of fervor for the idea, but the taking of Mexico City had revived enthusiasm. There were fierce objections in Congress to that on racial grounds. South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun argued that absorbing Mexico would threaten U.S. institutions and the character of the country. "We have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race-the free white race. To incorporate Mexico, would be the first instance of the kind, of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race.... We are anxious to force free government on all; and I see that it has been urged ... that it is the mission of this country to spread civil and religious liberty over all the world, and especially over this continent. It is a great mistake."

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848, by diplomat Nicholas Trist and Mexican plenipotentiary representatives Luis G. Cuevas, Bernardo Couto, and Miguel Atristain, ended the war. The treaty gave the U.S. undisputed control of Texas, established the U.S.-Mexican border along the Rio Grande, and ceded to the United States the present-day states of California, Nevada, and Utah, most of New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. In return, Mexico received $ 15 million ($470 million today) - less than half the amount the U.S. had attempted to offer Mexico for the land before the opening of hostilities - and the U.S. agreed to assume $3.25 million ($102 million today) in debts that the Mexican government owed to U.S. citizens. The area of domain acquired was given by the Federal Interagency Committee as 338,680,960 acres. The cost was $16,295,149 or approximately 5 cents per acre. The area amounted to one-third of Mexico's original territory from its 1821 independence.

The treaty was ratified by the U.S. Senate by a vote of 38 to 14 on March 10 and by Mexico through a legislative vote of 51-34 and a Senate vote of 33-4, on May 19. News that New Mexico's legislative assembly had passed an act for the organization of a U.S. territorial government helped ease Mexican concern about abandoning the people of New Mexico. The acquisition was a source of controversy, especially among U.S. politicians who had opposed the war from the start. A leading anti-war U.S. newspaper, the Whig National Intelligencer, sardonically concluded that "We take nothing by conquest ... Thank God."

The acquired lands west of the Rio Grande are traditionally called the Mexican Cession in the U.S., as opposed to the Texas Annexation two years earlier, though the division of New Mexico down the middle at the Rio Grande never had any basis either in control or Mexican boundaries. Mexico never recognized the independence of Texas before the war and did not cede its claim to territory north of the Rio Grande or Gila River until this treaty.

Before ratifying the treaty, the U.S. Senate made two modifications: changing the wording of Article IX (which guaranteed Mexicans living in the purchased territories the right to become U.S. citizens) and striking out Article X (which conceded the legitimacy of land grants made by the Mexican government). On May 26, 1848, when the two countries exchanged ratifications of the treaty, they further agreed to a three-article protocol (known as the Protocol of Querétaro) to explain the amendments. The first article claimed that the original Article IX of the treaty, although replaced by Article III of the Treaty of Louisiana, would still confer the rights delineated in Article IX. The second article confirmed the legitimacy of land grants under Mexican law. The protocol was signed in the city of Querétaro by A. H. Sevier, Nathan Clifford, and Luis de la Rosa.

Article XI offered a potential benefit to Mexico, in that the U.S. pledged to suppress the Comanche and Apache raids that had ravaged the region and pay restitution to the victims of raids it could not prevent. However, the Native raids did not cease for several decades after the treaty, although a cholera epidemic in 1849 greatly reduced the numbers of the Comanche. Robert Letcher, U.S. Minister to Mexico in 1850, was certain "that miserable 11th article" would lead to the financial ruin of the U.S. if it could not be released from its obligations. The U.S. was released from all obligations of Article XI five years later by Article II of the Gadsden Purchase of 1853.

Before the secession of Texas, Mexico comprised almost 1,700,000 sq mi (4,400,000 km ²), but by 1849 it was just under 800,000 square miles (2,100,000 km ²). Another 30,000 square miles (78,000 km ²) were sold to the U.S. in the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, so the total reduction of Mexican territory was more than 55%, or 900,000 square miles (2,300,000 km ²). Although the annexed territory was about the size of Western Europe, it was sparsely populated. The land contained about 14,000 non-indigenous people in Alta California and about 60,000 in Nuevo México, as well as large Native nations, such as the Papago, Pima, Puebloan, Navajo, Apache and many others. Although some native people relocated farther south in Mexico, the great majority remained in the U.S. territory.

The U.S. settlers surging into the newly conquered Southwest replaced Mexican law (a civil law system based on the law of Spain), which, in the Law of April 6, 1830, forbade any further immigration. However, they recognized the value of a few aspects of Mexican law and carried them over into their new legal systems. For example, most of the Southwestern states adopted community property marital property systems, as well as water law.

Mexicans and Natives in the annexed territories faced a loss of civil and political rights. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promised U.S. citizenship to all former Mexican citizens living in the territories, however, the U.S. government did not grant full citizenship to Native Americans in the Southwest until the 1930s, even though they were Mexican citizens. The California Constitution of 1849 gave voting rights only to white male citizens (Article II), and the number of senators was proportioned only "according to the number of white inhabitants" (Article IV).

In much of the United States, victory and the acquisition of new land brought a surge of patriotism. Victory seemed to fulfill Democrats' belief in their country's Manifest Destiny. Although the Whigs had opposed the war, they made Zachary Taylor their presidential candidate in the election of 1848, praising his military performance while muting their criticism of the war.

Has the Mexican War terminated yet, and how? Are we beaten? Do you know of any nation about to besiege South Hadley [Massachusetts]? If so, do inform me of it, for I would be glad of a chance to escape, if we are to be stormed. I suppose [our teacher] Miss [Mary] Lyon [founder of Mount Holyoke College] would furnish us all with daggers and order us to fight for our lives ...

A month before the end of the war, Polk was criticized in a United States House of Representatives amendment to a bill praising Taylor for "a war unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States." This criticism, in which Congressman Abraham Lincoln played an important role with his Spot Resolutions, followed congressional scrutiny of the war's beginnings, including factual challenges to claims made by President Polk. The vote followed party lines, with all Whigs supporting the amendment. Lincoln's attack won lukewarm support from fellow Whigs in Illinois but was harshly counter-attacked by Democrats, who rallied pro-war sentiments in Illinois; Lincoln's Spot Resolutions haunted his future campaigns in the heavily Democratic state of Illinois and were cited by his rivals well into his presidency.

While Whig Ralph Waldo Emerson rejected war "as a means of achieving America's destiny," toward the end of the war he wrote: "The United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us." He later accepted that "most of the great results of history are brought about by discreditable means." Civil War historian James M. McPherson dedicates an entire chapter of his Pulitzer winning Civil War history to the Mexican-American war, entitled "Mexico Will Poison Us". McPherson argues that the Mexican-American War and its aftermath was a key territorial event in the leadup to the Civil War.

Following the signing of the 1848 treaty, Polk sought to send troops to Yucatan, where there was a civil war between secessionists and those supporting the Mexican government. The U.S. Congress refused his request. The Mexican War was supposed to be short and nearly bloodless. It was neither. Congress did not support more foreign conflict.

Many of the military leaders on both sides of the American Civil War of 1861-1865 had trained at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and had fought as junior officers in Mexico. This list includes military men fighting for the Union: Ulysses S. Grant, George B. McClellan, William T. Sherman, George Meade, and Ambrose Burnside. Military men who joined the Southern secessionists of the Confederacy included Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, Stonewall Jackson, James Longstreet, Joseph E. Johnston, Braxton Bragg, Sterling Price, and the future Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Both sides had leaders with significant experience in active combat, strategy, and tactics.

For Grant, who went on to lead Union forces in the Civil War and later was elected president, "it also tutored him in the manifold ways wars are shot through with political calculations." Grant had served in Mexico under General Zachary Taylor and was appointed acting assistant quartermaster for Taylor's army, a post he tried to decline since it took him away from the battlefield. However, "The appointment was actually a godsend for Grant, turning him into a complete soldier, adept at every facet of army life, especially logistics... This provided invaluable training for the Civil War when Grant would need to sustain gigantic armies in the field, distant from northern supply depots." Grant saw considerable combat and demonstrated his coolness under fire. In the Battle of Chapultepec, he and his men hoisted a howitzer into a church belfry that had a commanding view of the San Cosme gate. The action brought him the honorary rank of brevet captain, for "gallant and meritorious conduct in the battle of Chapultepec."

Grant later recalled in his , published in 1885, that "Generally, the officers of the army were indifferent whether the annexation [of Texas] was consummated or not; but not so all of them. For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust 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." Grant also expressed the view that the war against Mexico had brought punishment on the United States in the form of the American Civil War. "The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times."

Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate forces through the end of the Civil War, began building his reputation as a military officer in America's war against Mexico. At the start of the Mexican-American War, Captain Lee invaded Mexico with General Wool's engineering department from the North. By early 1847, he helped take the Mexican cities of Vera Cruz, Cerro Gordo, Contreras, Churubusco, Molino del Rey, and Chapultepec. Lee was wounded in Chapultepec. General Scott described Robert E. Lee as "gallant and indefatigable", saying that Lee had displayed the "greatest feat of physical and moral courage performed by any individual in [his] knowledge during the campaign". Grant gained insight into Robert E. Lee, as his memoir states, "I had known him personally, and knew that he was mortal; and it was just as well that I felt this."

In 1861, General Scott advised Abraham Lincoln to ask Lee to command U.S. forces. Lee declined and later recounted "I declined the offer he made me to take command of the army that was brought into the field, stating candidly and as courteously as I could that though opposed to secession and deprecating war, I could take no part in the invasion of the southern states."

Despite initial objections from the Whigs and from abolitionists, the Mexican war nevertheless united the U.S. in a common cause and was fought almost entirely by volunteers. The United States Army swelled from just over 6,000 to more than 115,000. The majority of 12-month volunteers in Scott's army decided that a year's fighting was enough and returned to the U.S.

Anti-slavery elements fought for the exclusion of slavery from any territory absorbed by the U.S. In 1847, the House of Representatives passed the Wilmot Proviso, stipulating that none of the territory acquired should be open to slavery. If successful, the Wilmot Proviso would have effectively cancelled out the 1820 Missouri Compromise, since it would have prohibited slavery in an area below the parallel 36°30′ north. The Senate avoided the issue, and a late attempt to add it to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was defeated because Southern Senators had the votes to prevent its addition. The House of Representatives is apportioned by population, and the North's was growing, allowing it to win the majority of the House in the 1846 elections; but the Senate representation is two per state and Southerners had enough votes to block the addition.

The war proved a decisive event for the U.S., marking a significant turning point for the nation as a growing military power. It is also a milestone in the U.S. narrative of Manifest Destiny. The war did not resolve the issue of slavery in the U.S. but rather in many ways inflamed it, as potential westward expansion of the institution became an increasingly central and heated theme in national debates preceding the American Civil War. By extending the territory of the United States to the Pacific Ocean, the end of the Mexican-American War marked a new step in the huge migrations of Americans to the West, which culminated in transcontinental railroads and the Indian wars later in the same century.

Following the Civil War, veterans of the Mexican war began to organize themselves as veterans regardless of rank and lobbied for their service. Initially they sought to create a soldiers' home for aged and ailing veterans, but then began pushing for pensions in 1874. There was resistance in Congress since veterans had received warrants for up to 160 acres of land for their service; pensions would have put a fiscal strain on the government. The politics were complicated since so many veterans of the Mexican war fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Republican Congressmen accused them of attempting to give federal aid to former Confederates. This led to a thirteen-year Congressional debate over the loyalty of the veterans and their worthiness to receive federal assistance in their declining years.

At the beginning of the war, U.S. troops under the command of Zachary Taylor adhered to the rules of war for the most part, under the watchful eye of Taylor, and almost exclusively engaged with enemy soldiers. This gained them some popularity with Mexican civilians, who held the occupying Americans in a degree of high regard compared to the Mexican Army who left their wounded to be captured by the enemy as they retreated from the area. In June 1846, the situation changed when American reinforcements entered the area and began raiding local farms. Many soldiers on garrison duty began committing crimes against civilians, such as robbery, rape and murder in order to alleviate their boredom. This wave of wanton crime resulted in American soldiers murdering at least 20 civilians during the first month of occupation. Taylor initially showed little concern with the crimes the soldiers were committing and failed to discipline the soldiers responsible for them or devise ways to prevent crimes. This led to public opinion turning against the U.S. troops, and resulted in many Mexicans taking up arms and forming guerrilla bands which attacked patrols of U.S soldiers. The attacks continued to get more prevalent, especially after the Battle of Monterrey.

The most infamous incident occurred on October 9, 1847 after Captain Samuel Hamilton Walker and 12 others were killed in a skirmish, brigadier general Joseph Lane ordered his men to avenge the dead Texas Rangers by sacking the town of Huamantla. The soldiers quickly became drunk after raiding a liquor store and began targeting the townspeople, raping and killing dozens of Mexican civilians while indiscriminately burning their homes. However, these reports of an American rampage were overshadowed by the news of Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna's resignation after the Huamantla attack, leading to no repercussions against Lane or any of the soldiers involved in the atrocities.

Throughout the course of the war, a number of U.S. troops who had become disillusioned with the war and defected to the Mexican Army and joined the Saint Patrick's Battalion led by John Riley to fight for the Mexicans against the U.S. forces. The great majority of those made up the Saint Patrick's Battalion were recent immigrants who had arrived at northeastern U.S. from Ireland. Many defected due to mistreatment by nativist soldiers and senior officers, brutal military discipline, or because they were not allowed to practice their Catholic religion. Thousands of other U.S. soldiers simply deserted.

For Mexico, the war had remained a painful historical event for the country, losing territory and highlighting the domestic political conflicts that were to continue for another 20 years. The Reform War between liberals and conservatives in 1857 was followed by the Second French Intervention, which set up the Second Mexican Empire. The war caused Mexico to enter "a period of self-examination ... as its leaders sought to identify and address the reasons that had led to such a debacle." In the immediate aftermath of the war, a group of Mexican writers including Ignacio Ramírez, Guillermo Prieto, José María Iglesias, and Francisco Urquidi compiled a self-serving assessment of the reasons for the war and Mexico's defeat, edited by Mexican army officer Ramón Alcaraz. Denying that Mexican claims to Texas had anything to do with the war, they instead wrote that for "the true origin of the war, it is sufficient to say that the insatiable ambition of the United States, favored by our weakness, caused it." The work was noticed and translated to English by Colonel Albert Ramsey, a veteran of the Mexican-American War, and published in the United States in 1850 as a curiosity.

Despite his being denounced and held to account for Mexico's loss in the war, Santa Anna took to power for one last term as president. After he sold the Mesilla Valley in 1853 to the U.S., (the Gadsden Purchase) that allowed construction of a transcontinental railway on a better route, he was ousted and went into a lengthy exile. In exile he drafted his version of events, which were not published until much later.

Once the French were expelled in 1867 and the liberal republic re-established, Mexico began reckoning with the legacy of the war. The story of the Niños Héroes became the narrative that helped Mexicans to come to terms with the war. Boy cadets sacrificing themselves for the patria as martyrs in the Battle of Chapultepec was inspiring, but their sacrifice was not commemorated until 1881, when surviving cadets formed an organization to support the Military Academy of Mexico. One of the cadets taken prisoner designed the monument, a small cenotaph was erected at the base of Chapultepec hill on which the castle is built.

Annual commemorations at the cenotaph were attended by General Porfirio Díaz, who saw the opportunity to build his relationship with the Federal Army. Even during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), the commemoration was continued and attended by contemporary presidents. After the end of the military phase, the Mexican government renewed the narrative of the boy heroes as the embodiment of sacrifice for the patria. Plans were drawn up for a much larger commemoration of their sacrifice, which was built at the entrance to Mexico City's Chapultepec Park. The Monument to the Heroic Cadets was inaugurated in 1952. By then, the relations between the U.S. and Mexico had improved so much that they had been allies in World War II and their postwar economies became increasingly intertwined. Some war trophies taken by the U.S., such as Mexican battle flags, were returned to Mexico with considerable ceremony, but captured U.S. flags remain in Mexico.

In 1981, the Mexican government established the Museo Nacional de las Intervenciones (National Museum of Interventions) in a former convent that was the site of the Battle of Churubusco. It chronicles the attempts by the Spanish to reconquer Mexico after its independence as well as the French interventions. The museum has an exhibition on the Intervención norteamericana de 1846-1848, which chronicles the Anglo-American settlement of Texas and their rebellion after characterizing themselves as victims of Mexican oppression. It goes on to blame the war on Polk and Santa Anna. "The [museum's] interpretation concedes U.S. military superiority in arms and commanders while disparaging General Santa Anna's costly mistakes and retreat from the capital city."

In the U.S. the war was almost forgotten after the cataclysm of the Civil War. However, one of the first monuments was erected on the State House grounds in South Carolina in 1858, celebrating the Palmetto Regiment. As veterans of the Civil War saw the scale of commemorations of that war, Mexican war veterans sought remembrance for their service. In 1885, a tableau of the U.S. Army's entry into Mexico City was painted in the U.S. Capitol Building by Filippo Constaggini. The Marine Corps Hymn, which includes the phrase "From the Halls of Montezuma" is an acknowledgment of the war, but there are no major monuments or memorials.

1. ^ White, Ronald Cedric (2017). American Ulysses: a life of Ulysses S. Grant (Random House trade paperback ed.). New York: Random House. p. 96. ISBN 9780812981254. OCLC 988947112. The Mexican War of 1846-1848, largely forgotten today, was the second costliest war in American history in terms of the percentage of soldiers who died. Of the 78, 718 American soldiers who served, 13,283 died, constituting a casualty rate of 16.87 percent. By comparison, the casualty rate was 2.5 percent in World War I and World War II, 0.1 percent in Korea and Vietnam, and 21 percent for the Civil War. Of the casualties, 11,562 died of illness, disease, and accidents.

2. ^ Landis, Michael Todd (October 2, 2014). Northern Men with Southern Loyalties. Cornell University Press. doi:10.7591/cornell/9780801453267.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-8014-5326-7.

3. Stenberg, Richard R. (1935). "The Failure of Polk's Mexican War Intrigue of 1845". Pacific Historical Review. 4 (1): 39-68. doi:10.2307/3633243. JSTOR 3633243.

4. Alcaraz, Ramón; et al., eds. (1850). The Other Side: or Notes for the History of the War between Mexico and the United States. Translated by Albert C. Ramsey. New York: John Wiley. pp. 1-2. OCLC 1540860.

5. ^ Ralph A. Smith (1963). "Indians in American-Mexican Relations before the War of 1846". The Hispanic American Historical Review. 43 (1): 34-64. doi:10.2307/2510435. ISSN 0018-2168. JSTOR 2510435. Indian raids multiplied Mexico's problems, in the generation before her war with the United States, to a degree not generally realized today. They upset her agricultural, commercial, mineral, and ranch life over hundreds of thousands of square miles. Consequently, the country's capacity for defense declined at a time when centralism, clericalism, militarism, and American imperialism were debilitating the nation. The chief offending mountain tribes were Apache, Navajo, and Ute; and the most troublesome plains Natives were Comanche and Kiowa.

6. ^ "The Borderlands on the Eve of War" Archived August 31, 2017, at the Wayback Machine. The U.S.-Mexican War. PBS.

7. ^ Engelson, Lester G. (1939). "Proposals for the Colonization of California by England: In Connection with the Mexican Debt to British Bondholders 1837-1846". California Historical Society Quarterly. 18 (2): 136-48. doi:10.2307/25139106. ISSN 0008-1175. JSTOR 25139106.

8. ^ Howard Zinn (1995) [1980]. A People's History of the United States, 1492-Present (1st Perennial ed.). New York: Harper Perennial. p. 675. ISBN 0-06-092643-0.

9. See ^ "Republic of Texas". June 15, 2010. Archived from the original on April 29, 2009.

10. ^ Chartrand, Rene (March 25, 2004). René Chartrand, Santa Anna's Mexican Army 1821-48, Illustrated by Bill Younghusband, Osprey Publishing, 2004, ISBN 1-84176-667-4, ISBN 978-1-84176-667-6. ISBN 9781841766676.

11. ^ Lacroix, Patrick (2020). "Canadian-Born Soldiers in the Mexican-American War (1846-48): An Opportunity for Migration Studies". International Journal of Canadian Studies. 57: 27-46. doi:10.3138/ijcs.57.x.27. S2CID 225452642.

12. ^ Bauer, K. Jack (Karl Jack), 1926- (1993) [1974]. The Mexican War, 1846-1848 (Bison books ed.). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 0-8032-6107-1. OCLC 25746154.

13. ^ Smith, Justin Harvey (1919). "The Preliminaries of the Conflict". The War with Mexico. Vol. 1. New York: Macmillan. p. 150. ISBN 9781508654759. Here lay a casus belli amply endorsed by international law, the practice of civilized powers, and the general opinion of the world. It was a ground, too, that Polk himself, as we have seen, felt entirely satisfied to stand upon [...].

14. ^ "Message of President Polk, May 11, 1846". Archived from the original on July 25, 2008. Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil. She has proclaimed that hostilities have commenced, and that the two nations are now at war.

15. ^ Ángel Miranda Basurto (2002) [1987]. La Evolución de México [The Evolution of Mexico] (in Spanish) (6th ed.). Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa. p. 358. ISBN 970-07-3678-4.

16. See O'Sullivan's 1845 article ^ "Annexation" Archived November 25, 2005, at the Wayback Machine, United States Magazine and Democratic Review.

17. ^ Reilly, Tom (June 1, 1977). "Newspaper Suppression During the Mexican War, 1846-48". Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. 54 (2): 262-349. doi:10.1177/107769907705400205. S2CID 143779590. Archived from the original on December 15, 2018.

18. Editorial, ^ Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1846, quoted in Loveman, Brian. No Higher Law: American Foreign Policy and the Western Hemisphere since 1776. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2010, p. 65.

19. ^ Streetby, Shellby (2001). "American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War". American Literary History. 13:1: 2.

20. Garrard, Lewis H. (1850). ^ Wah-to-yah and the Taos Trail; or Prairie Travel and Scalp Dances, with a Look at Los Rancheros from Muleback and the Rocky Mountain Camp-fire Archived June 3, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, pp. 214-215; reprint, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1955.

21. Diseño Web y Desarrollo de Aplicaciones por Webtopia, Retrieved May 8, 2014.

22. ^ Miller, Robert Ryal (1989). Shamrock and Sword, The Saint Patrick's Battalion in the US-Mexican War. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press. pp. 188-192. ISBN 978-0-8061-2964-8.

23. ^ Zinn, Howard (2003). "Chapter 8: We take nothing by conquest, Thank God". A People's History of the United States. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. p. 169.

24. ^ Franzius, Andrea. "California Gold - Migrating to California: Overland, around the Horn and via Panama". Archived from the original on June 22, 2012.

25. Griswold el Castillo, Richard ^ War's End: Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo Archived February 13, 2010, at the Wayback Machine PBS, 2006.

26. ^ Mexican-American War description from the Republican Campaign Textbook Archived May 4, 2016, at the Wayback Machine.

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Fowler, Will. Santa Anna of Mexico (2007) 527pp; a major scholarly study

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Hamilton, Holman, Zachary Taylor: Soldier of the Republic, (1941).

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Martinez, Orlando. The Great Landgrab. Quartet Books (London, 1975)

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Beveridge, Albert J. Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1858. Volume: 1. 1928.

Brack, Gene M. Mexico Views Manifest Destiny, 1821-1846: An Essay on the Origins of the Mexican War (1975).

Fowler, Will. Tornel and Santa Anna: The Writer and the Caudillo, Mexico, 1795-1853 (2000).

Fowler, Will. Santa Anna of Mexico (2007) 527pp; the major scholarly study excerpt and text search

Graebner, Norman A. Empire on the Pacific: A Study in American Continental Expansion. (1955).

Graebner, Norman A. (1978). "Lessons of the Mexican War". Pacific Historical Review. 47 (3): 325-42. doi:10.2307/3637470. ISSN 1533-8584. JSTOR 3637470.

Graebner, Norman A. (1980). "The Mexican War: A Study in Causation". Pacific Historical Review. 49 (3): 405-26. doi:10.2307/3638563. ISSN 1533-8584. JSTOR 3638563.

Greenberg, Amy. A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln and the 1846 Invasion of Mexico. New York: Knopf 2012.

Henderson, Timothy J. A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States (2007), survey

Krauze, Enrique. Mexico: Biography of Power, (1997), textbook.

Pinheiro, John C. Manifest Ambition: James K. Polk and Civil-Military Relations during the Mexican War (2007).

Pletcher David M. The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War. University of Missouri Press, 1973.

Price, Glenn W. Origins of the War with Mexico: The Polk-Stockton Intrigue. University of Texas Press, 1967.

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Reilly, Tom. War with Mexico! America's Reporters Cover the Battlefront. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press 2010.

Rives, George Lockhart (1913). The United States and Mexico, 1821-1848: a history of the relations between the two countries from the independence of Mexico to the close of the war with the United States. Vol. 2. New York: C. Scribner's Sons.

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Santoni, Pedro. Mexicans at Arms: Puro Federalists and the Politics of War, 1845-1848. Fort Worth: Texas Christian Press 1996.

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Sellers Charles G. James K. Polk: Continentalist, 1843-1846 (1966), the standard biography vol 1 and 2 are online at ACLS e-books

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Mexican-American War

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Google Map of The Mexican-American War of 1846-1848

John H. Hewitt wrote the song "The Fall of Mexico" in 1847

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Mexican-American War Clockwise from top: Battle of Resaca de la Palma, U.S. victory at Churubusco outside of Mexico City, Marines storming Chapultepec castle under a large U.S.

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The treaty of Lima, Peru in 1848

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Treaty of Lima (1865), was two treaties, the Treaty of Union and Defensive Alliance and the Treaty for the Preservation of Peace, both agreed to by representatives from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Venezuela and Peru. They were signed but never ratified.

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The leaders of the revolutions in the year 1848

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Part of the Age of Revolution

Date

12 January 1848 - 4 October 1849
(1 year, 8 months, 3 weeks and 1 day)

Location

Western, Northern, and Central Europe

Also known as

Springtime of Nations, Springtime of the Peoples,
Year of Revolution

Participants

People of Ireland, France, the German states, the Austrian Empire, Hungary, the Italian states, Denmark, Moldavia, Wallachia, Poland, and others

Outcome

See Events by country or region

Political change in a few countries

Significant social and cultural change

The Revolutions of 1848, known in some countries as the Springtime of the Peoples or the Springtime of Nations, were a series of political upheavals throughout Europe starting in 1848. It remains the most widespread revolutionary wave in European history to date.

The revolutions were essentially democratic and liberal in nature, with the aim of removing the old monarchical structures and creating independent nation-states, as envisioned by romantic nationalism. The revolutions spread across Europe after an initial revolution began in France in February. Over 50 countries were affected, but with no significant coordination or cooperation among their respective revolutionaries. Some of the major contributing factors were widespread dissatisfaction with political leadership, demands for more participation in government and democracy, demands for freedom of the press, other demands made by the working class for economic rights, the upsurge of nationalism, the regrouping of established government forces, and the European Potato Failure, which triggered mass starvation, migration, and civil unrest.

The uprisings were led by temporary coalitions of reformers, the middle classes (the bourgeoisie) and workers; however, the coalitions did not hold together for long. Many of the revolutions were quickly suppressed, as tens of thousands of people were killed, and many more were forced into exile. Significant lasting reforms included the abolition of serfdom in Austria and Hungary, the end of absolute monarchy in Denmark, and the introduction of representative democracy in the Netherlands. The revolutions were most important in France, the Netherlands, Italy, the Austrian Empire, and the states of the German Confederation that would make up the German Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The revolutions arose from such a wide variety of causes that it is difficult to view them as resulting from a coherent movement or set of social phenomena. Numerous changes had been taking place in European society throughout the first half of the 19th century. Both liberal reformers and radical politicians were reshaping national governments.

Technological change was revolutionizing the life of the working classes. A popular press extended political awareness, and new values and ideas such as popular liberalism, nationalism and socialism began to emerge. Some historians emphasize the serious crop failures, particularly those of 1846, that produced hardship among peasants and the working urban poor.

Large swaths of the nobility were discontented with royal absolutism or near-absolutism. In 1846, there had been an uprising of Polish nobility in Austrian Galicia, which was only countered when peasants, in turn, rose up against the nobles. Additionally, an uprising by democratic forces against Prussia, planned but not actually carried out, occurred in Greater Poland.

The middle and working classes thus shared a desire for reform, and agreed on many of the specific aims. Their participation in the revolutions, however, differed. While much of the impetus came from the middle classes, the physical backbone of the movement came from the lower classes. The revolts first erupted in the cities.

The population in French rural areas had risen rapidly, causing many peasants to seek a living in the cities. Many in the bourgeoisie feared and distanced themselves from the working poor. Many unskilled laborers toiled from 12 to 15 hours per day when they had work, living in squalid, disease-ridden slums. Traditional artisans felt the pressure of industrialization, having lost their guilds.

The liberalization of trade laws and the growth of factories had increased the gulf between master tradesmen, and journeymen and apprentices, whose numbers increased disproportionately by 93% from 1815 to 1848 in Germany. Significant proletarian unrest had occurred in Lyon in 1831 and 1834, and Prague in 1844. Jonathan Sperber has suggested that in the period after 1825, poorer urban workers (particularly day laborers, factory workers and artisans) saw their purchasing power decline relatively steeply: urban meat consumption in Belgium, France and Germany stagnated or declined after 1830, despite growing populations. The economic Panic of 1847 increased urban unemployment: 10,000 Viennese factory workers lost jobs, and 128 Hamburg firms went bankrupt over the course of 1847. With the exception of the Netherlands, there was a strong correlation among the countries that were most deeply affected by the industrial shock of 1847 and those that underwent a revolution in 1848.

The situation in the German states was similar. Parts of Prussia were beginning to industrialize. During the decade of the 1840s, mechanized production in the textile industry brought about inexpensive clothing that undercut the handmade products of German tailors. Reforms ameliorated the most unpopular features of rural feudalism, but industrial workers remained dissatisfied with these reforms and pressed for greater change.

Urban workers had no choice but to spend half of their income on food, which consisted mostly of bread and potatoes. As a result of harvest failures, food prices soared and the demand for manufactured goods decreased, causing an increase in unemployment. During the revolution, to address the problem of unemployment, workshops were organized for men interested in construction work. Officials also set up workshops for women when they felt they were excluded. Artisans and unemployed workers destroyed industrial machines when they threatened to give employers more power over them.

Rural population growth had led to food shortages, land pressure, and migration, both within and from Europe, especially to the Americas. Peasant discontent in the 1840s grew in intensity: peasant occupations of lost communal land increased in many areas: those convicted of wood theft in the Rhenish Palatinate increased from 100,000 in 1829-30 to 185,000 in 1846-47. In the years 1845 and 1846, a potato blight caused a subsistence crisis in Northern Europe, and encouraged the raiding of manorial potato stocks in Silesia in 1847. The effects of the blight were most severely manifested in the Great Irish Famine, but also caused famine-like conditions in the Scottish Highlands and throughout continental Europe. Harvests of rye in the Rhineland were 20% of previous levels, while the Czech potato harvest was reduced by half. These reduced harvests were accompanied by a steep rise in prices (the cost of wheat more than doubled in France and Habsburg Italy). There were 400 French food riots during 1846 to 1847, while German socio-economic protests increased from 28 during 1830 to 1839, to 103 during 1840 to 1847. Central to long-term peasant grievances were the loss of communal lands, forest restrictions (such as the French Forest Code of 1827), and remaining feudal structures, notably the robot (labor obligations) that existed among the serfs and oppressed peasantry of the Habsburg lands.

Aristocratic wealth (and corresponding power) was synonymous with the ownership of farm lands and effective control over the peasants. Peasant grievances exploded during the revolutionary year of 1848, yet were often disconnected from urban revolutionary movements: the revolutionary Sándor Petőfi's popular nationalist rhetoric in Budapest did not translate into any success with the Magyar peasantry, while the Viennese democrat Hans Kudlich reported that his efforts to galvanize the Austrian peasantry had "disappeared in the great sea of indifference and phlegm".

Despite forceful and often violent efforts of established and reactionary powers to keep them down, disruptive ideas gained popularity: democracy, liberalism, radicalism, nationalism, and socialism. They demanded a constitution, universal manhood suffrage, press freedom, freedom of expression and other democratic rights, the establishment of civilian militia, liberation of peasants, liberalization of the economy, abolition of tariff barriers and the abolition of monarchical power structures in favour of the establishment of republican states, or at least the restriction of the prince power in the form of constitutional monarchies.

In the language of the 1840s, 'democracy' meant replacing an electorate of property-owners with universal male suffrage. 'Liberalism' fundamentally meant consent of the governed, restriction of church and state power, republican government, freedom of the press and the individual. The 1840s had seen the emergence of radical liberal publications such as Rheinische Zeitung (1842); Le National and La Réforme (1843) in France; Ignaz Kuranda's Grenzboten (1841) in Austria; Lajos Kossuth's Pesti Hírlap (1841) in Hungary, as well as the increased popularity of the older Morgenbladet in Norway and the Aftonbladet in Sweden.

'Nationalism' believed in uniting people bound by (some mix of) common languages, culture, religion, shared history, and of course immediate geography; there were also irredentist movements. Nationalism had developed a broader appeal during the pre-1848 period, as seen in the František Palacký's 1836 History of the Czech Nation, which emphasised a national lineage of conflict with the Germans, or the popular patriotic Liederkranz (song-circles) that were held across Germany: patriotic and belligerent songs about Schleswig had dominated the Würzburg national song festival in 1845.

'Socialism' in the 1840s was a term without a consensus definition, meaning different things to different people, but was typically used within a context of more power for workers in a system based on worker ownership of the means of production.

These concepts together - democracy, liberalism, nationalism and socialism, in the sense described above - came to be encapsulated in the political term radicalism.

Every country had a distinctive timing, but the general pattern showed very sharp cycles as reform moved up then down.

In France, bloody street battles exploded between the middle class reformers and the working class radicals. German reformers argued endlessly without finalizing their results.

Caught off guard at first, the aristocracy and their allies plot a return to power.

1849-1851: Overthrow of revolutionary regimes

The revolutions suffer a series of defeats in summer 1849. Reactionaries returned to power and many leaders of the revolution went into exile. Some social reforms proved permanent, and years later nationalists in Germany, Italy, and Hungary gained their objectives.

Although few noticed at the time, the first major outbreak came in Palermo, Sicily, starting in January 1848. There had been several previous revolts against Bourbon rule; this one produced an independent state that lasted only 16 months before the Bourbons came back. During those months, the constitution was quite advanced for its time in liberal democratic terms, as was the proposal of an Italian confederation of states. The revolt's failure was reversed 12 years later as the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies collapsed in 1860-61 with the Risorgimento.

The "February Revolution" in France was sparked by the suppression of the campagne des banquets. This revolution was driven by nationalist and republican ideals among the French general public, who believed the people should rule themselves. It ended the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe, and led to the creation of the French Second Republic. After an interim period, Louis-Napoleon, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, was elected as president. In 1852, he staged a coup d'état and established himself as a dictatorial emperor of the Second French Empire.

Alexis de Tocqueville remarked in his Recollections of the period, "society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common envy, and those who had anything united in common terror."

The "March Revolution" in the German states took place in the south and the west of Germany, with large popular assemblies and mass demonstrations. Led by well-educated students and intellectuals, they demanded German national unity, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly. The uprisings were poorly coordinated, but had in common a rejection of traditional, autocratic political structures in the 39 independent states of the German Confederation. The middle-class and working-class components of the Revolution split, and in the end, the conservative aristocracy defeated it, forcing many liberal Forty-Eighters into exile.

Denmark had been governed by a system of absolute monarchy ( King's Law) since the 17th century. King Christian VIII, a moderate reformer but still an absolutist, died in January 1848 during a period of rising opposition from farmers and liberals. The demands for constitutional monarchy, led by the National Liberals, ended with a popular march to Christiansborg on 21 March. The new king, Frederick VII, met the liberals' demands and installed a new Cabinet that included prominent leaders of the National Liberal Party.

The national-liberal movement wanted to abolish absolutism, but retain a strongly centralized state. The king accepted a new constitution agreeing to share power with a bicameral parliament called the Rigsdag. It is said that the Danish king's first words after signing away his absolute power were, "that was nice, now I can sleep in the mornings". Although army officers were dissatisfied, they accepted the new arrangement which, in contrast to the rest of Europe, was not overturned by reactionaries. The liberal constitution did not extend to Schleswig, leaving the Schleswig-Holstein Question unanswered.

The Duchy of Schleswig, a region containing both Danes (a North Germanic population) and Germans (a West Germanic population), was a part of the Danish monarchy, but remained a duchy separate from the Kingdom of Denmark. Spurred by pan-German sentiment, the Germans of Schleswig took up arms in protest at a new policy announced by Denmark's National Liberal government which would have fully integrated the duchy into Denmark.

The German population in Schleswig and Holstein revolted, inspired by the Protestant clergy. The German states sent in an army, but Danish victories in 1849 led to the Treaty of Berlin (1850) and the London Protocol (1852). They reaffirmed the sovereignty of the King of Denmark, while prohibiting union with Denmark. The violation of the latter provision led to renewed warfare in 1863 and the Prussian victory in 1864.

From March 1848 through July 1849, the Habsburg Austrian Empire was threatened by revolutionary movements, which often had a nationalist character. The empire, ruled from Vienna, included Austrians, Hungarians, Slovenes, Poles, Czechs, Croats, Slovaks, Ukrainians/ Ruthenians, Romanians, Serbs and Italians, all of whom attempted in the course of the revolution to achieve either autonomy, independence, or even hegemony over other nationalities. The nationalist picture was further complicated by the simultaneous events in the German states, which moved toward greater German national unity.

The Hungarian revolution of 1848 was the longest in Europe, crushed in August 1849 by Austrian and Russian armies. Nevertheless, it had a major effect in freeing the serfs. It started on 15 March 1848, when Hungarian patriots organized mass demonstrations in Pest and Buda (today Budapest) which forced the imperial governor to accept their 12 points of demands, which included the demand for freedom of press, an independent Hungarian ministry residing in Buda-Pest and responsible to a popularly elected parliament, the formation of a National Guard, complete civil and religious equality, trial by jury, a national bank, a Hungarian army, the withdrawal of foreign (Austrian) troops from Hungary, the freeing of political prisoners, and the union with Transylvania. On that morning, the demands were read aloud along with poetry by Sándor Petőfi with the simple lines of "We swear by the God of the Hungarians. We swear, we shall be slaves no more". Lajos Kossuth and some other liberal nobility that made up the Diet appealed to the Habsburg court with demands for representative government and civil liberties. These events resulted in Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian prince and foreign minister, resigning. The demands of the Diet were agreed upon on 18 March by Emperor Ferdinand. Although Hungary would remain part of the monarchy through personal union with the emperor, a constitutional government would be founded. The Diet then passed the April laws that established equality before the law, a legislature, a hereditary constitutional monarchy, and an end to the transfer and restrictions of land use.

The revolution grew into a war for independence from the Habsburg monarchy when Josip Jelačić, Ban of Croatia, crossed the border to restore their control. The new government, led by Lajos Kossuth, was initially successful against the Habsburg forces. Although Hungary took a national united stand for its freedom, some minorities of the Kingdom of Hungary, including the Serbs of Vojvodina, the Romanians of Transylvania and some Slovaks of Upper Hungary supported the Habsburg Emperor and fought against the Hungarian Revolutionary Army. Eventually, after one and a half years of fighting, the revolution was crushed when Russian Tsar Nicholas I marched into Hungary with over 300,000 troops. As result of the defeat, Hungary was thus placed under brutal martial law. The leading rebels like Kossuth fled into exile or were executed. In the long run, the passive resistance following the revolution, along with the crushing Austrian defeat in the 1866 Austro-Prussian War, led to the Austro-Hungarian Compromise (1867), which marked the birth of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

During 18-19 March, a series of riots known as the March Unrest ( Marsoroligheterna) took place in the Swedish capital of Stockholm. Declarations with demands of political reform were spread in the city and a crowd was dispersed by the military, leading to 18 casualties.

Switzerland, already an alliance of republics, also saw an internal struggle. The attempted secession of seven Catholic cantons to form an alliance known as the Sonderbund ("separate alliance") in 1845 led to a short civil conflict in November 1847 in which around 100 people were killed. The Sonderbund was decisively defeated by the Protestant cantons, which had a larger population. A new constitution of 1848 ended the almost-complete independence of the cantons, transforming Switzerland into a federal state.

Polish people mounted a military insurrection against the Prussians in the Grand Duchy of Posen (or the Greater Poland region), a part of Prussia since its annexation in 1815. The Poles tried to establish a Polish political entity, but refused to cooperate with the Germans and the Jews. The Germans decided they were better off with the status quo, so they assisted the Prussian governments in recapturing control. In the long-term, the uprising stimulated nationalism among both the Poles and the Germans and brought civil equality to the Jews.

A Romanian liberal and Romantic nationalist uprising began in June in the principality of Wallachia. Its goals were administrative autonomy, abolition of serfdom, and popular self-determination. It was closely connected with the 1848 unsuccessful revolt in Moldavia, it sought to overturn the administration imposed by Imperial Russian authorities under the Regulamentul Organic regime, and, through many of its leaders, demanded the abolition of boyar privilege. Led by a group of young intellectuals and officers in the Wallachian military forces, the movement succeeded in toppling the ruling Prince Gheorghe Bibescu, whom it replaced with a provisional government and a regency, and in passing a series of major liberal reforms, first announced in the Proclamation of Islaz.

A number of small local riots broke out, concentrated in the sillon industriel industrial region of the provinces of Liège and Hainaut.

The most serious threat of revolutionary contagion, however, was posed by Belgian émigré groups from France. In 1830 the Belgian Revolution had broken out inspired by the revolution occurring in France, and Belgian authorities feared that a similar 'copycat' phenomenon might occur in 1848. Shortly after the revolution in France, Belgian migrant workers living in Paris were encouraged to return to Belgium to overthrow the monarchy and establish a republic. Belgian authorities expelled Karl Marx himself from Brussels in early March on accusations of having used part of his inheritance to arm Belgian revolutionaries.

Around 6,000 armed émigrés of the " Belgian Legion" attempted to cross the Belgian frontier. There were two divisions which were formed. The first group, travelling by train, were stopped and quickly disarmed at Quiévrain on 26 March 1848. The second group crossed the border on 29 March and headed for Brussels. They were confronted by Belgian troops at the hamlet of Risquons-Tout and defeated. Several smaller groups managed to infiltrate Belgium, but the reinforced Belgian border troops succeeded and the defeat at Risquons-Tout effectively ended the revolutionary threat to Belgium.

The situation in Belgium began to recover that summer after a good harvest, and fresh elections returned a strong majority to the governing party.

A tendency common in the revolutionary movements of 1848 was a perception that the liberal monarchies set up in the 1830s, despite formally being representative parliamentary democracies, were too oligarchical and/or corrupt to respond to the urgent needs of the people, and were therefore in need of drastic democratic overhaul or, failing that, separatism to build a democratic state from scratch. This was the process that occurred in Ireland between 1801 and 1848.

Previously a separate kingdom, Ireland was incorporated into the United Kingdom in 1801. Although its population was made up largely of Catholics, and sociologically of agricultural workers, tensions arose from the political over-representation, in positions of power, of landowners of Protestant background who were loyal to the United Kingdom. From the 1810s a conservative-liberal movement led by Daniel O'Connell had sought to secure equal political rights for Catholics within the British political system, successful in the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829. But as in other European states, a current inspired by Radicalism criticized the conservative-liberals for pursuing the aim of democratic equality with excessive compromise and gradualism.

In Ireland a current of nationalist, egalitarian and Radical republicanism, inspired by the French Revolution, had been present since the 1790s - being expressed initially in the Irish Rebellion of 1798. This tendency grew into a movement for social, cultural and political reform during the 1830s, and in 1839 was realized into a political association called Young Ireland. It was initially not well received, but grew more popular with the Great Famine of 1845-1849, an event that brought catastrophic social effects and which threw into light the inadequate response of authorities.

In response, the Young Ireland Party launched its rebellion in July 1848, gathering landlords and tenants to its cause.

But its first major engagement against police, in the village of Ballingarry, South Tipperary, was a failure. A long gunfight with around 50 armed police ended when police reinforcements arrived. After the arrest of the Young Ireland leaders, the rebellion collapsed, though intermittent fighting continued for the next year,

It is sometimes called the Famine Rebellion (since it took place during the Great Famine).

While no revolution occurred in Spain in the year 1848, a similar phenomenon occurred. During this year, the country was going through the Second Carlist War. The European revolutions erupted at a moment when the political regime in Spain faced great criticism from within one of its two main parties, and by 1854 a radical-liberal revolution and a conservative-liberal counter-revolution had both occurred.

Since 1833, Spain had been governed by a conservative-liberal parliamentary monarchy similar to and modelled on the July Monarchy in France. In order to exclude absolute monarchists from government, power had alternated between two liberal parties: the center-left Progressive Party, and the center-right Moderate Party. But a decade of rule by the center-right Moderates had recently produced a constitutional reform (1845), prompting fears that the Moderates sought to reach out to Absolutists and permanently exclude the Progressives. The left-wing of the Progressive Party, which had historical links to Jacobinism and Radicalism, began to push for root-and-branch reforms to the constitutional monarchy, notably universal male suffrage and parliamentary sovereignty.

The European Revolutions of 1848 and particularly the French Second Republic prompted the Spanish radical movement to adopt positions incompatible with the existing constitutional regime, notably republicanism. This ultimately led the Radicals to exit the Progressive Party to form the Democratic Party in 1849.

Over the next years, two revolutions occurred. In 1854, the conservatives of the Moderate Party were ousted after a decade in power by an alliance of Radicals, Liberals and liberal Conservatives led by Generals Espartero and O'Donnell. In 1856, the more conservative half of this alliance launched a second revolution to oust the republican Radicals, leading to a new 10-year period of government by conservative-liberal monarchists.

Taken together, the two revolutions can be thought of as echoing aspects of the French Second Republic: the Spanish Revolution of 1854, as a revolt by Radicals and Liberals against the oligarchical, conservative-liberal parliamentary monarchy of the 1830s, mirrored the French Revolution of 1848; while the Spanish Revolution of 1856, as a counter-revolution of conservative-liberals under a military strongman, had echoes of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte's coup against the French Second Republic.

The Island of Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, the Russian Empire (including Poland and Finland), and the Ottoman Empire did not encounter major national or Radical revolutions in 1848. Sweden and Norway were also little affected. Serbia, though formally unaffected by the revolt as it was a part of the Ottoman state, actively supported Serbian revolutionaries in the Habsburg Empire.

Russia's relative stability was attributed to the revolutionary groups' inability to communicate with each other.

In some countries, uprisings had already occurred demanding similar reforms to the Revolutions of 1848, but little success. This was the case for the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which had seen a series of uprisings before or after but not during 1848: the November Uprising of 1830-31; the Kraków Uprising of 1846 (notable for being quelled by the anti-revolutionary Galician slaughter), and later on the January Uprising of 1863-65.

In other countries, the relative calm could be attributed to the fact that they had already gone through revolutions or civil wars in the preceding years, and therefore already enjoyed many of the reforms which Radicals elsewhere were demanding in 1848. This was largely the case for Belgium (the Belgian Revolution in 1830-1); Portugal (the large Liberal Wars of 1828-1834, and the minor civil war of Patuleia in 1846-1847); and Switzerland (the Sonderbund War of 1847)

In yet other countries, the absence of unrest was partly due to governments taking action to prevent revolutionary unrest, and pre-emptively grant some of the reforms demanded by revolutionaries elsewhere. This was notably the case for the Netherlands, where King William II decided to alter the Dutch constitution to reform elections and voluntarily reduce the power of the monarchy. The same might be said of Switzerland, where a new constitutional regime was introduced in 1848: the Swiss Federal Constitution was a revolution of sorts, laying the foundation of Swiss society as it is today.

While no major political upheavals occurred in the Ottoman Empire as such, political unrest did occur in some of its vassal states. In Serbia, feudalism was abolished and the power of the Serbian prince was reduced with the Constitution of Serbia in 1838.

In Britain, while the middle classes had been pacified by their inclusion in the extension of the franchise in the Reform Act 1832, the consequential agitations, violence, and petitions of the Chartist movement came to a head with their peaceful petition to Parliament of 1848. The repeal in 1846 of the protectionist agricultural tariffs - called the " Corn Laws" - had defused some proletarian fervour.

In the United States, opinions were polarized, with Democrats and reformers in favour, although they were distressed at the degree of violence involved. Opposition came from conservative elements, especially Whigs, southern slaveholders, orthodox Calvinists, and Catholics. About 4,000 German exiles arrived and some became fervent Republicans in the 1850s, such as Carl Schurz. Kossuth toured America and won great applause, but no volunteers or diplomatic or financial help.

Following rebellions in 1837 and 1838, 1848 in Canada saw the establishment of responsible government in Nova Scotia and The Canadas, the first such governments in the British Empire outside Great Britain. John Ralston Saul has argued that this development is tied to the revolutions in Europe, but described the Canadian approach to the revolutionary year of 1848 as "talking their way...out of the empire's control system and into a new democratic model", a stable democratic system which has lasted to the present day. Tory and Orange Order in Canada opposition to responsible government came to a head in riots triggered by the Rebellion Losses Bill in 1849. They succeeded in the burning of the Parliament Buildings in Montreal, but, unlike their counterrevolutionary counterparts in Europe, they were ultimately unsuccessful.

In Spanish Latin America, the Revolution of 1848 appeared in New Granada, where Colombian students, liberals, and intellectuals demanded the election of General José Hilario López. He took power in 1849 and launched major reforms, abolishing slavery and the death penalty, and providing freedom of the press and of religion. The resulting turmoil in Colombia lasted three decades; from 1851 to 1885, the country was ravaged by four general civil wars and 50 local revolutions.

In Chile, the 1848 revolutions inspired the 1851 Chilean Revolution.

In Brazil, the Praieira Revolt, a movement in Pernambuco, lasted from November 1848 to 1852. Unresolved conflicts from the period of the regency and local resistance to the consolidation of the Brazilian Empire that had been proclaimed in 1822 helped to plant the seeds of the revolution.

In Mexico, the conservative government led by Santa Anna lost California and half of the territory to the United States in the Mexican-American War of 1845-1848. Derived from this catastrophe and chronic stability problems, the Liberal Party started a reformist movement. This movement, via elections, led liberals to formulate the Plan of Ayutla. The Plan written in 1854 aimed at removing conservative, centralist President Antonio López de Santa Anna from control of Mexico during the Second Federal Republic of Mexico period. Initially, it seemed little different from other political plans of the era, but it is considered the first act of the Liberal Reform in Mexico. It was the catalyst for revolts in many parts of Mexico, which led to the resignation of Santa Anna from the presidency, never to vie for office again. The next Presidents of Mexico were the liberals, Juan Álvarez, Ignacio Comonfort, and Benito Juárez. The new regime would then proclaim the 1857 Mexican Constitution, which implemented a variety of liberal reforms. Among other things, these reforms confiscated religious property, aimed to promote economic development and to stabilize a nascent republican government. The reforms led directly to the so-called Three Years War or Reform War of 1857. The liberals won this war but the conservatives solicited the French Government of Napoleon III for a European, conservative Monarch, deriving into the Second French intervention in Mexico. Under the puppet Habsburg government of Maximilian I of Mexico, the country became a client state of France (1863-1867).

"We have been beaten and humiliated ... scattered, imprisoned, disarmed and gagged. The fate of European democracy has slipped from our hands."

Historian Priscilla Robertson posits that many goals were achieved by the 1870s, but the credit primarily goes to the enemies of the 1848 revolutionaries, commenting: "Most of what the men of 1848 fought for was brought about within a quarter of a century, and the men who accomplished it were most of them specific enemies of the 1848 movement. Thiers ushered in a third French Republic, Bismarck united Germany, and Cavour, Italy. Deák won autonomy for Hungary within a dual monarchy; a Russian czar freed the serfs; and the British manufacturing classes moved toward the freedoms of the People's Charter."

Liberal democrats looked to 1848 as a democratic revolution, which in the long run ensured liberty, equality, and fraternity. For nationalists, 1848 was the springtime of hope, when newly emerging nationalities rejected the old multinational empires, but the end results were not as comprehensive as many had hoped. Communists denounced 1848 as a betrayal of working-class ideals by a bourgeoisie indifferent to the legitimate demands of the proletariat. The view of the Revolutions of 1848 as a bourgeois revolution is also common in non- Marxist scholarship. Middle-class anxiety and different approaches between bourgeois revolutionaries and radicals led to the failure of revolutions. Many governments engaged in a partial reversal of the revolutionary reforms of 1848-1849 as well as heightened repression and censorship. The Hanoverian nobility successfully appealed to the Confederal Diet in 1851 over the loss of their noble privileges, while the Prussian Junkers recovered their manorial police powers from 1852 to 1855. In the Austrian Empire, the Sylvester Patents (1851) discarded Franz Stadion's constitution and the Statute of Basic Rights, while the number of arrests in Habsburg territories increased from 70,000 in 1850 to one million by 1854. Nicholas I's rule in Russia after 1848 was particularly repressive, marked by an expansion of the secret police (the Tretiye Otdeleniye) and stricter censorship; there were more Russians working for censorship organs than actual books published in the period immediately after 1848. In France, the works of Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon were confiscated.

In the post-revolutionary decade after 1848, little had visibly changed, and many historians considered the revolutions a failure, given the seeming lack of permanent structural changes. More recently, Christopher Clark has characterised the period that followed 1848 as one dominated by a revolution in government. Karl Marx expressed disappointment at the bourgeois character of the revolutions. Marx elaborated in his 1850 "Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League" a theory of permanent revolution according to which the proletariat should strengthen democratic bourgeois revolutionary forces until the proletariat itself is ready to seize power.

The Prussian Prime Minister Otto von Manteuffel declared that the state could no longer be run like the landed estate of a nobleman. In Prussia, August von Bethmann-Hollweg's Preußisches Wochenblatt newspaper (founded 1851) acted as a popular outlet for modernising Prussian conservative statesmen and journalists against the reactionary Kreuzzeitung faction. The Revolutions of 1848 were followed by new centrist coalitions dominated by liberals nervous of the threat of working-class socialism, as seen in the Piedmontese Connubio under Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour.

Governments after 1848 were forced into managing the public sphere and popular sphere with more effectiveness, resulting in the increased prominence of the Prussian Zentralstelle für Pressangelegenheiten (Central Press Agency, established 1850), the Austrian Zensur-und polizeihofstelle, and the French Direction Générale de la Librairie (1856). Nevertheless, there were a few immediate successes for some revolutionary movements, notably in the Habsburg lands. Austria and Prussia eliminated feudalism by 1850, improving the lot of the peasants. European middle classes made political and economic gains over the next 20 years; France retained universal male suffrage. Russia would later free the serfs on 19 February 1861. The Habsburgs finally had to give the Hungarians more self-determination in the of 1867. The revolutions inspired lasting reform in Denmark as well as the Netherlands. Reinhard Rürup has described the 1848 Revolutions as a turning point in the development of modern antisemitism through the development of conspiracies that presented Jews as representative both of the forces of social revolution (apparently typified in Joseph Goldmark and Adolf Fischhof of Vienna) and of international capital, as seen in the 1848 report from Eduard von Müller-Tellering, the Viennese correspondent of Marx's Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which declared that "tyranny comes from money and the money belongs to the Jews".

About 4,000 exiles came to the United States fleeing the reactionary purges. Of these, 100 went to the Texas Hill Country as German Texans. More widely, many disillusioned and persecuted revolutionaries, in particular (though not exclusively) those from Germany and the Austrian Empire, left their homelands for foreign exile in the New World or in the more liberal European nations; these emigrants were known as the Forty-Eighters.

Steven Brust and Emma Bull's 1997 epistolary novel Freedom & Necessity is set in England in the aftermath of the Revolutions of 1848.

Breunig, Charles (1977), The Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1789-1850 (ISBN 0-393-09143-0)

Chastain, James, ed. (2005) Encyclopedia of Revolutions of 1848 online from Ohio State U.

Dowe, Dieter, ed. Europe in 1848: Revolution and Reform (Berghahn Books, 2000)

Evans, R. J. W., and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, eds. The Revolutions in Europe, 1848-1849: From Reform to Reaction (2000), 10 essays by scholars excerpt and text search

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Langer, William. The Revolutions of 1848 (Harper, 1971), standard overview

Political and social upheaval, 1832-1852 (1969), standard overview online

Namier, Lewis. 1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals (Doubleday Anchor Books, 1964), first published by the British Academy in 1944.

Rapport, Mike (2009), 1848: Year of Revolution ISBN 978-0-465-01436-1 online review, a standard survey

Robertson, Priscilla (1952), Revolutions of 1848: A Social History (ISBN 0-691-00756-X), despite the subtitle this is a traditional political narrative

Sperber, Jonathan. The European revolutions, 1848-1851 (1994) online edition

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Merriman, John M. The Agony of the Republic: The Repression of the Left in Revolutionary France, 1848-1851 (Yale UP, 1978).

Deak, Istvan. The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848-1849 (1979)

Hahs, Hans J. The 1848 Revolutions in German-speaking Europe (2001)

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Hewitson, Mark. "'The Old Forms are Breaking Up, ... Our New Germany is Rebuilding Itself': Constitutionalism, Nationalism and the Creation of a German Polity during the Revolutions of 1848-49," English Historical Review, Oct 2010, Vol. 125 Issue 516, pp. 1173-1214 online

Macartney, C. A. "1848 in the Habsburg Monarchy," European Studies Review, 1977, Vol. 7 Issue 3, pp. 285-309 online

O'Boyle Lenore. "The Democratic Left in Germany, 1848," Journal of Modern History Vol. 33, No. 4 (Dec. 1961), pp. 374-83 in JSTOR

Robertson, Priscilla. Revolutions of 1848: A Social History (1952), pp 105-85 on Germany, pp. 187-307 on Austria

Sked, Alan. The Survival of the Habsburg Empire: Radetzky, the Imperial Army and the Class War, 1848 (1979)

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Part of the Age of Revolution Date 12 January 1848 - 4 October 1849(1 year, 8 months, 3 weeks and 1 day) Location Western, Northern, and Central Europe Also known as Springtime of Nations, Springtime of the Peoples, Year of Revolution Participants People of Ireland, France, the German states, the

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Impressionism

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Realism

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Romanicism