Texas is fickle: it seceded from two different nations in less than 30 years. Each time, Texas killed tens of thousands of men. Below is a study in Texas history. It is not heroic. Quite the opposite. If some nation were to do to us what we did to Mexico in order to gain Texas and California, we would be outraged.
Of the 79,000 American troops who took part in the Mexican-American war, 13,200 died. This creates a mortality rate of nearly 17 percent — higher than both World War I and Word War II. The vast majority were victims of diseases such as dysentery, yellow fever, malaria and smallpox. The war ended in 1848. Texas would secede from the US just sixteen years after becoming a state, and just thirteen years after the Mexican-American war, forcing an even larger casualty list upon the American people.
How did the U.S. gain Texas? Well, Americans came to Texas and Mexico as illegal aliens. Mexico had outlawed slavery and it required immigrants to convert to Catholic Faith. Americans who entered Tejas refused to give up their slaves and mostly refused to convert to Catholicism. Americans in Texas, when told to obey Mexican law, often replied, "We are Americans. We obey the Constitution." Those same illegal aliens, men and women who refused to recognize the laws of the nation whose land they inhabited, fomented insurrection against the Mexican government.
Abraham Lincoln introduced the Spot Resolutions precisely to highlight the illegal actions of the American Democrat president. Lincoln called the war outright theft. US Grant would later say the Mexican-American war was the only war he was ashamed to have participated in.
Amazing how Republicans and conservatives have switched 180 degrees in the course of a century in their attitudes towards this theft of Mexican territory.
Timeline of Mexican Independence
1492-1810: Spain owns Mexico.
1807-1808: Napoleon invades (1807) and occupies Spain (1808).
1808-1813: Guerilla war In Spain against Napoleon
1810-1821: Mexican War of Independence started by local Catholic priest who led troops under the banner of Guadalupe.
1819: The Adams-Onis treaty established the boundary of U.S. territory through the Rocky Mountains and west to the Pacific Ocean. The U.S. paid residents' claims against the Spanish government up to a total of $5,000,000 and relinquished the U.S. claims on parts of Spanish Texas west of the Sabine River and other Spanish areas.
Sept 1821: Military coup in Spain, Mexico wins independence
1822: US recognizes Mexican independence
1826: John Quincy Adams offers $1 million for Texas. Mexico says NO.
1828: Mexico and US sign Treaty of Limits. The treaty recognized the Mexico–U.S. boundary that had been established by the 1819 Adams–Onís Treaty between Spain and the U.S.
1829: Andrew Jackson offers $5 million. Mexico again says NO.
Mexico Outlaws Slavery
1810: Independence leader Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla proclaimed the abolition of slavery three months after the start of the Independence of Mexico from Spain.
1813: Independence leader José María Morelos y Pavón declares slavery abolished in Mexico in the documents Sentimientos de la Nación
1820: Ferdinand VII banned the importation of slaves.
1823: Mexico forbade the sale or purchase of slaves and required that the children of slaves be freed when they reached fourteen. All children of slaves were free at birth. Any slave brought to Texas had to be freed within six months.
1824: During the debates over the new Mexican constitution, Stephen Austin wrote to the Mexican representative Erasmo Seguín: “There are two obstacles which slow down [American] emigration to this province and the entire nation . . . One is the doubt that persists if slavery is permitted, the other is religion.” The new Mexican constitution effectively abolishes slavery by leaving the question up to the individual states, where most abolished it.
1826: In what is seen by Stephen Austin and other American settlers as a deathblow to American settlement of Texas,
the state of Coahuila-Texas began writing its constitution. In June of 1826, Austin received a letter from Baron de Bastrop, the only representative of Texas at the state congress. Bastrop warned that the congress was preparing to insert an antislavery article into the state constitution: “If I cannot succeed in removing it, or at least modifying it,” he wrote, the American settlements “will be completely ruined.” Soon, Austin would see for himself what the antislavery threat was. The proposed Article 13 of the new Coahuila-Texas constitution read: “The state prohibits absolutely and for all time slavery in all its territory, and slaves that already reside in the state will be free from the day of the publication of the constitution in this capital.”
Although it was eventually watered down to give the Texas region a six-month extension, it was obvious that slavery would soon be gone from all regions of Mexico, even Texas.
1828: Americans influence in the Mexican Congress pushed through a loophole to the anti-slavery law that allowed "work contracts" created in other countries to be honored in Texas. Slaves were then made to sign life-time enslavement contracts in the US, and then transported to Texas for work in the American settlers' Mexican cotton fields.
1829: The last slaves are freed just as the first president of partial African ancestry (Vicente Guerrero) is elected. The province of Tejas had an exemption to this anti-slavery ordinance that lasted until 1830, due entirely to the personal intervention of Stephen Austin. Due to this law, American settlers were on the brink of revolt.
1836: Contemporary abolitionists recognized the Texas Revolution for what it was:
During the Texas Revolution itself, the legitimacy of the rebellion was disparaged by opponents of slavery, who held that the chief purpose of the breakaway was to ensure the future of slavery in Texas (Mexico had outlawed the institution), and by others who judged it a landgrab by armed speculators.
1837: American slaves are fleeing south to Mexico and freedom.
Illegal Aliens From the United States
1829: The Mexican government asked General Manuel Mier y Teran to investigate the outcome of the 1825 colonization law in Texas. In 1829, Mier y Teran issued his report, which concluded that most Anglo Americans refused to be naturalized and tried to isolate themselves from Mexicans. He also noted that slave reforms passed by the state were being ignored.
1830: Mexico forbids further American immigration into Texas. However, due to exploding cotton prices and cheap Mexican land, the invasion could not be stopped. Between the time that Mexico forbade further American immigration in 1830 and the outbreak of the Texas Revolution in 1835, the American population more than doubled in Texas, from 10,000 to over 21,000. All of the American Protestant slave-owners who arrived were illegals.
1832: Mexico outlawed the "work contract" loophole that had allowed Americans to bring their slaves in as life-long indentured servants. Texas demands Mexico allow American immigration. Mexico refuses. Battle of Velasco takes place in June. In this year, Sam Houston also arrives in Texas, well after American immigration to Texas had already been outlawed. "One runaway named Tom ... had been enslaved by Sam Houston. Houston was a president of the Republic of Texas who’d fought in the Texas Revolution. Once Tom got across the border, he joined the Mexican military that Houston had fought against." Americans, when questioned about their slaves by Mexican authorities, asserted that they were merely indentured servants, and thus legal under color of Mexican law.
1833: Texas asks for federalist reforms, which the Mexican government rejects.
1834: The Ursuline Convent riots occurred August 11 and 12, 1834, in Charlestown, Massachusetts, near Boston, in what is now Somerville, Massachusetts. During the riot, a convent of Roman Catholic Ursuline nuns was burned down by a Protestant mob. The US is rife with anti-Catholic sentiment.
1835: Oct 2, Battle of Gonzales begins war for Texas independence.
Austin’s deep connections to cotton merchants made him the ideal figure for this work, and it would indeed be these cotton merchants who funded the Texas Revolution. They also helped to circulate newspapers throughout the South filled with sensational stories framing the Texan independence struggle as a race war, with White American settlers being pitted against the racially inferior Mexican forces of Santa Anna, who was coming to incite slave revolts and murder the White population. Such newspaper accounts led thousands of White Southern men to rush to the defense of Texas: such men would make up a full 40 percent of the Texan rebel army. These reinforcements were badly needed, for slave revolts had begun breaking out in Texas as the potential promise of freedom approached in the form of Santa Anna’s army, and many of the settlers were more occupied with preventing slave uprisings than preparing for war. In one instance, a hundred slaves suspected of planning rebellion were rounded up, and either whipped nearly to death or hung.
March, 1836: 59 people meet in Washington-on-the-Brazos and declare Texas independence. Most have been in Mexico for less than a year. Among other things, the document complained that Mexican rule was conducted by a “hostile majority in an unknown tongue”, i.e., Spanish. George C. Childress, the Nashville lawyer who produced the declaration, asserted that Mexicans were “a semi-civilized set, unfit to be free and incapable of self-government.” The group produced a new constitution.
James W. Fannin authorized the sale of his slaves in order to purchase munitions because, as he noted, “this property, and indeed any other, will not be worth owning, if we do not succeed.” The Alamo and the Battle of San Jacinto soon followed, along with Texas independence.
The Mexican armies that entered the department to put down the rebellion had explicit orders to free any slaves that they encountered, and so they did. The only person spared in the retaking of the Alamo was Joe, the personal slave of William Travis.
Slavery was immediately re-established. The Texas Constitution made it illegal for free blacks to reside in the state or for the Texas Congress to outlaw the importation of slaves.
As more slaves came into the Republic of Texas, more escaped to Mexico. Matamoros in the 1840s had a large and flourishing colony of ex-slaves from Texas and the United States. Though exact numbers do not exist, as many slaves may have escaped to Mexico as escaped through the more famous underground railway to Canada. The Mexican government, for its part, encouraged the slave runaways, often with offers of land as well as freedom.
1836: Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal was published and celebrated, giving further fuel to the anti-Catholic sentiment in the US. In April, Texas wins its independence at the battle of San Jacinto.
The "Treaty" of Velasco (May 14, 1836)
The signatories were Interim President David G. Burnet for Texas and Santa Anna for Mexico. Santa Ana signed both a public document and a secret document. Unfortunately, Santa Ana had no authority under the Mexican Constitution to make a treaty.
Neither document was ratified by the Mexican government because Santa Ana had signed the documents under coercion, as a prisoner. Mexico claimed Texas was a breakaway province, but it was too weak to attempt more military action to secure the breakaway province.
As Abraham Lincoln pointed out at the time, the documents were never called "treaties" until US President James K. Polk called them that in 1848, three years after Polk secretly tried to buy Texas from Mexico (1845).
The US Attempts to Buy "US Territory"
1838: The U.S. and Texas signed an 1838 treaty confirming the northern boundary from the Treaty of Limits. But was the Texas southern boundary the Rio Grande or the Neuces Rivers? The Mexicans claimed the “Rio Grande del Norte” in the documents Santa Ana signed was the Neuces River, the Texans claimed it was what they called the Rio Grande but what the Mexicans called the Rio Bravo.
1840: Mexico had other problems. Both the Republic of Rio Grande and Yucatan proclaim secession. Yucatan mostly reunites by 1848, but fighting in the Yucatan continues through the early 1900s.
Feb 28, 1845: Congress votes Texas admission as slave state, but doesn’t mention the southern border dispute in the Congressional debate.
Nov 10, 1845: Polk secretly sends Slidell to offer a settlement of all U.S. claims against Mexico, in exchange for recognition of the Rio Grande as the boundary between the two nations. In addition, Polk instructed Slidell to try and buy California for $25 million. Mexico immediately rejected the offer. Why is Polk trying to buy territory from Mexico if Mexico no longer owns it?
Dec 29, 1845: Texas accepts statehood. Mexico refuses to recognize either Texas independence or its annexation.
Polk's War And More $$$
January 1846: Polk sends troops to disputed southern boundary territory. U.S. forces led by Gen. Zachary Taylor advanced to the Rio Bravo. This was an open transgression on the territorial integrity of Mexico; Mexico considered the Nueces River the southern border of Texas. In response, Mexico sends troops to the Rio Grande.
April 1846: Mexican troops cross Rio Grande, kill 11 US troops at the Battle of Palo Alto, and capture the rest.
May 11 1846: President Polk (D) now begins to insist Mexico “invaded our territory and shed American blood upon American soil.” That is, Mexico shed blood on soil that the US tried, and failed, to buy from Mexico just six months previously.
May 13, 1846: Mexican-American War begins.
May 18, 1846: Troops enter Matamoros in Mexico proper, blockade ports of Veracruz and Tampico. "Ulysses S. Grant, then a young lieutenant, would later describe in his memoirs that among those gathered along the Rio Grande in the spring of 1846, “the officers of the army were indifferent whether the annexation 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 nation 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 territories.”"
June 14, 1846: Fremont assists in Bear Flag Revolt.
June 15, 1846: Polk signs Oregon Treaty, settling dispute with Britain
July 1846: the Mexican congress adopts a resolution for the national defense. By then U.S. occupation of New Mexico had begun and U.S. naval forces had taken strategic positions in California.
8 August 1846: President Polk asks for an appropriation of $2 million to buy the territory in dispute, as well as California and New Mexico. When Mexico hears about Polk’s bill, the newspaper El Republicano comments that the statements made by the U.S. government were proof that the real goal was to take more territory from Mexico. A war initiated with that intent was unjust and barbarous; its promoters should be considered enemies of humanity.
The Mexicans saw this war as a fight for their territorial integrity and their national security against the unjust territorial expansion of the United States. Mexican resistance was also a defense of Catholic and Latin culture against Anglo-Saxon Protestant war-mongers. Finally, from a legal point of view, Mexicans saw Mexico as having defended the principles of international law against a U.S. invasion, a war of conquest.
Many Americans agreed with them.
Opposition to the Mexican-American War
Abraham Lincoln's Eight "Spot" Resolutions (Dec 22, 1847)
One: "whether the spot on which the blood of our citizens was shed, as in his messages declared, was or was not within the territory of Spain, at least after the treaty of 1819, until the Mexican revolution."
Two: "whether that spot is or is not within the territory which was wrested from Spain by the revolutionary Government of Mexico."
The other six resolutions extended the analysis to determine whether the territory on which the casualties occurred was ever under the government or laws of Texas or of the United States (it wasn’t).
May 25, 1846: John Quincy Adams’ speech in the House said it was waged primarily to expand slavery. John Quincy Adams will join Lincoln and fourteen other Whigs in voting against the American invasion of Mexico. Though they lost the vote in the House by a wide margin, the Senate only approved the war by a single vote.
July 23, 1846: Henry David Thoreau is jailed for refusal to pay taxes to support the war, he will write “Civil Disobedience” to explain his opposition to the American-initiated violence.
February 21, 1848: In the act of protesting the U.S.-Mexican War, John Quincy suffered a second stroke, fell to the floor of the House and died two days later in the Capitol building.
Taking Mexico's Gold
Jan 24, 1848: James W. Marshall found gold at Sutter’s Mill, California. At this point, since no peace treaty had yet been signed, California is still technically Mexican territory.
Feb 2, 1848: The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo is signed and ratified by both the Mexican and US governments, thus placing 55% of Mexican territory, including California and Sutter's Mill, in the hands of the United States.
April 1848: Polk petitions Congress to admit the Yucatan as a state, but Congress declines when news reaches the Congress that the Yucatan had formally rejoined Mexico.
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