The Annexation of Texas, California, and New Mexico by the USA
Before the end of the American Revolution in 1783 that line was still largely east of the Appalachian Mt. but by 1819 the “frontier” crossed the Mississippi River and by 1848 reached the Pacific coast. In such a way, the “natural borders” of the USA (from the ocean to the ocean) have been finally established [...]
The American Revolution or the American War of Independence against British colonial lordship started in 1775 when the Thirteen Colonies began to fight for their political independence from London. In fact, fighting began at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, in April 1775. In June the colonies’ Continental Congress created a Continental Army under General George Washington. However, despite several defeats, and the loss of New York (former New Amsterdam) in September 1776, Washington hung on, and at Christmas 1776, with the successful crossing of the Delaware, won several battles. The campaign culminated in Saratoga in 1777. The final triumph was only assured, nevertheless, with the signing of a Franco-American alliance in 1778 that was joined by Spain in 1779. Reinforced by French troops followed by direct naval support, George Washington succeeded in forcing the British troops to surrender at Yorktown on October 19th, 1781. The resulting Treaty of Versailles in 1783 recognized the Great Lakes in the north and the Mississippi in the west as the state borders of the newly-born USA. In other words, by 1783 the original Thirteen Colonies had decisively established themselves as the new United States with enlarged territory up to the Mississippi River including Indian Reserve.
The westward imperial expansion
In 1783, the new Republic of the United American States was pretty small and weak with a population of a little more than three million inhabitants. However, half of its territory was held by hostile neighbors. The westward expansion of the USA was sustained by its vast abundance of physical (natural) resources. Like the great Western European powers turned their imperial politics toward Africa and Asia, the USA did the same westward toward the Pacific. Therefore, the westward annexation policy of Washington after 1783 has to be understood as American imperialism for many of the same reasons as the imperialist policy in Western Europe but with significantly different results. The culture of native inhabitants of North America was not only conquered but in essence, it was destroyed.
In 1783 the USA was composed of an area of some 800.000 square miles, much of it rich arable land between the Atlantic coast and the Mississippi River. That huge territory was soon enlarged by other lands, even larger and more fertile – the first phase from 1803 to 1819. The Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803 (during the Napoleonic Wars) of some 827.000 square miles was a mighty windfall that dropped into the hands of an astonished US President Thomas Jefferson. The western part of Spanish Florida was occupied by force and annexed in 1812 during James Madison’s presidency followed by the annexation of East Florida in 1819 (some 60.000 square miles) by purchase but with the threat of force by the administration of President James Monroe.
The next (second) phase of making a greater USA by territorial acquisitions covered the years 1845−1853 in completing the contiguous area of the continental USA. The Texas Republic (390.000 square miles) was annexed in 1845. The negotiations for the territory of Oregon Country (285.000 square miles) were ended with a compromise in 1846. The vast Mexican Cession (529.000 square miles) was annexed in 1848 after the war with Mexico and finally, there was the Gadsen Purchase in 1853, bought from Mexico to control a promising railroad route (30.000 square miles).
The annexation of Texas in 1845
The historical importance of the annexation of Texas, the conquest of California (in fact, its northern portion as Baja California left to Mexico), and the inclusion of the Southwest into the USA from Mexico is in the fact that all of these three events finally rounded out the US domain in the (Wild) West. As a matter of fact, during only several years in the 1840s the USA succeeded in expanding its state borders over some of North America’s richest and most scenic territories. However, many scholars understood this wresting of lands from Mexico as immoral aggression. Some of them thought that the southern states of the USA, for example, wanted the territory of Texas for the only reason to have bigger pens to cram Afro-American (the Blacks) slaves in. Nonetheless, others believe that a natural and inevitable process (of Lebensraum) brought about the inclusion of Texas into the federal system of the USA. This process is well hit off by the phrase “manifest destiny”.
Texas was a part of the Mexican Republic before the mid-1830s, a southern neighbor of the USA. It was as large as Germany, with but a few ranchers and hunters. The land early attracted many Americans (inhabitants of the USA) followed by some British citizens. Stephen F. Austin established the first Anglo-American settlement in 1821. Free lands westward from Louisiana were easily accessible to the people from the American South and, therefore, became principal bait for settlers. At the same time, the Mexican government was corrupted, inefficient, and authoritarian. The settlers in Texas rose in revolt in 1835 against the Mexican authorities and after many battles succeeded in winning the independence. From this time, probably the most striking episode was the capture by the Mexican army of the Alamo, a fort in San Antonio, where every American defender was killed.
A newly established Texan Republic attracted many fresh American settlers which caused a prosperous economic development. However, their final political goal was not independence but rather the inclusion of Texas into the USA as a new state. The government of the USA for a time refused to consider any proposal for annexing Texas for the reason not to spoil relations with Mexico. But for many reasons, the government gradually changed its mind. First, it was thought that it was a duty to expand firstly settlers and then state borders over the unpeopled and undeveloped West. Second, many felt that the Texans were kindred people whose natural place was the USA. Third, many feared that Great Britain might launch a military intervention in Texas in order to establish a protectorate over the land for the reason not to be annexed by Washington. Fourth, pocket motives were at work as well as the Northerners wished to sell farm products and manufactured goods in Texas; shipowners saw that their vessels could make profitable voyages to Galveston (coastal town and port of Southeast Texas); Yankee mill owners wanted to have cheap Texas cotton to spin. Finally, many Southerners wanted to migrate and settle in Texas but were not willing to leave the US flag. As a consequence, in the national election of 1844, a majority of the voters expressed their readiness to see Texas as a part of the USA, and early the next year the republic became annexed.
The 1846−1848 Mexican-American War
After the annexation of Texas, many US citizens were kin upon gaining control of California by the same peaceful means applied to the case of Texas, considering its peculiar position as they thought. California at that time had a population of only up to 12.000 people, clinging tightly to the coast. The Californians had no their own currency, no army, or political experience. They had more Spanish blood than the Mexican masses and regarded themselves as both physically and intellectually superior. California was, in fact, only formally dependent upon the Mexican Republic but nominally it was and politically had nothing to do with the USA. It was believed by the Americans that the Californians would have thrown off the Mexican authority altogether had it not been for their family jealousies and an old feud between the northern and southern portions of California. Mexico did not provide courts, police, regular postal service, or schools. The links and communications between California and the Mexican capital Mexico City have been irregular, rare, and even uncertain. It was an option that Mexico could sell California to Great Britain because the Mexican real control and authority over the province did not exist or was very weak. However, in the course of time, the number of American settlers in California was growing in numbers followed by their aggressiveness.
It has to be noted that the ships under the US flag had long traded on the coast of California. The US emigrants had started to cross the mountains for California in the early 1830s to settle their families in the province of good climate to make money from cattle, wine, and wheat. California up to 1846 had 12.000 foreign inhabitants who have been mostly US citizens. Many of them thought that California could join the USA by using no force. Surely, it would have happened if the Mexican War had not occurred between Mexico and the USA. The remote cause of the war was the increasing distrust between the two neighboring states but its direct cause was a dispute over the borderland of Texas. The US administration found it a short and brilliant military conflict. One US army under Zachary Taylor was sent into North Mexico and occupied the fortified city of Monterey. The same army defeated a large Mexican military detachment in the heavy battle of Buena Vista, while another US army under Winfield Scott (hero of the 1812 War) landed at Vera Cruz in the Gulf of Mexico and pushed westward over the mountains. Scott’s army after hard fighting occupied Mexico City and put the US flag over “the halls of the Montezumas” which was, in fact, the end of the war in American favor.
The territorial acquisitions in 1848
According to the Mexican-American Peace Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the US was given California followed by the vast area between it and Texas known at that time as New Mexico, which included the present states of Utah and Nevada (including Texas, the US gained in 1848 from Mexico some 918.000 square miles). However, the Americans also gained a “treasure house” as soon as the treaty of peace was ratified gold was discovered in the hills of California which became known as the Golden State. The mountains of California became filled with new settlers and camps. San Francisco overnight became a little metropolis, full of vice, luxury, and energy. California was converted very quickly from a sleepy even romantic community of Spanish-American ranchers into a hustling and numerous community of Anglo-Saxons. Californian inhabitants were growing in numbers so fast that already in 1850 it became a new state within the USA (the minimum number of people was 20.000 so that the territory would become a new state of the USA).
The acquisition of the vast territory from Louisiana to the Pacific Ocean (Texas, New Mexico, and California), nonetheless, forced Washington to deal with newly emerged challenges and problems as the Caribbean area, the Pacific area, an isthmian canal, and above all problems the issue of slavery, which now threatened to expand into the whole area of the Wild West. Before 1776, the Americans were not so kin to settle the interior (westward from the Appalachian Mt.) which they called the “back-country”. However, after 1803, the “back-country” was renamed “frontier” and the line of settlement advanced westward with great speed. Before the end of the American Revolution in 1783 that line was still largely east of the Appalachian Mt. but by 1819 the “frontier” crossed the Mississippi River and by 1848 reached the Pacific coast. In such a way, the “natural borders” of the USA (from the ocean to the ocean) have been finally established.
Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirovic
Ex-University Professor
Research Fellow at Centre for Geostrategic Studies
Personal disclaimer: The author writes for this publication in a private capacity which is unrepresentative of anyone or any organization except for his own personal views. Nothing written by the author should ever be conflated with the editorial views or official positions of any other media outlet or institution.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter (X), Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/LegalStatement!
DonatetoSupportUs
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that “Al Qaeda” is not really a terrorist group but a database of international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Courtesy of World Affairs, a journal based in New Delhi, WMR can bring you an important excerpt from an Apr.-Jun. 2004 article by Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence.“I first heard about Al-Qaida while I was attending the Command and Staff course in Jordan. I was a French ...
Belarus is a land known also as Belorussia (White Russia, Weißrussland) in East Europe which was for centuries occupied by a Polish-Lithuanian common state until it became included in Tsarist Russia in the late 18th century.[1] Belarus is facing many identity problems but the most important is the ethnolinguistic challenge to a separate Belarussian[2] national feature.National identityA common national identity is a focal element for the creation of a national state as without a common identity that is based on a fundamental element of group’s identity a psychological sense of common solidarity cannot be developed. However, such solidarity is a ...
The present-day Republic of Turkey is a legal successor state of the former Ottoman Empire (Sultanate). The Republic was founded and proclaimed by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on October 29th, 1923 as a result of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the lost WWI. A republican Turkey originally was based on the following six principles:Republicanism – Republic instead of a monarchical sultanate.Nationalism - An aggressive anti-minority policy within the state especially against the Kurds.Populism – It was attended in the atmosphere of the absence of a multiparty democracy to gather as much as popular support for the one-party political system.Statism ...
The recent declassification of over 3800 documents by the Central Intelligence Agency provides detailed proof that since 1953 the CIA operated two major programs intent on not only destabilizing Ukraine but Nazifying it with followers of the World War II Ukrainian Nazi leader Stepan Bandera.The CIA programs spanned some four decades. Starting as a paramilitary operation that provided funding and equipment for such anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance groups as the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (UHVR); its affiliates, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), all Nazi Banderists. The CIA also provided support to a relatively anti-Bandera faction ...
A scholar shares the true story of two men who stood up and spoke out against the murder of American Indians, and how they are celebrated today. Native American tribal members pay their respects at the headstone of Union Officer, Capt. Silas Soule, at the Riverside Cemetery Dec. 03, 2014 in honor of the 150th Anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre.Every Thanksgiving weekend for the past 17 years, Arapaho and Cheyenne youth lead a 180-mile relay from the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site to Denver.The annual Sand Creek Massacre Spiritual Healing Run opens at the site of the Sand ...
Preface The European Union (the EU) is characterized by a purposeful diffusion of political authority between supranational and intergovernmental institutions. Based on the idea of shared leadership, it relies on a delicate institutional balance guarding declared equality between its ever more diverse members and managing potential and real tensions between the more and less populated states. Such tensions are present in any federal construct and have been a key concern since the ‘original six’ founded the (West) European Coal and Steel Community (the ECSC) in 1951 (the Benelux, West Germany, France, and Italy).The formal facts and official EU’s propaganda about ...
GR Editor’s NoteThe following article by professor Eric Waddell was first published twelve years ago by Global Research in December 2003 in the immediate wake of the invasion and occupation of Iraq by US and British forces, with a postscript added in 2007. The article provides an incisive historical perspective on America’s “long war” against humanity, which is being carried out under a fake humanitarian mandate. Let us be under no illusions as to the intent of the US and its allies. We are dealing with World Conquest under the disguise of a “Global War on Terrorism”. Michel Chossudovsky, December 24, ...
Let us Commemorate Martin Luther King Day, January 15 2018. This article was first published by GR on September 5, 2016"For one bright moment back in the late 1960s, we actually believed that we could change our country. We had identified the enemy. We saw it up close, we had its measure, and we were very hopeful that we would prevail. The enemy was hollow where we had substance. All of that substance was destroyed by an assassin’s bullet". – William Pepper (page 15, The Plot to Kill King)The revelations are stunning. The media indifference is predictable.Thanks to the nearly ...
What a fine race it has become! Both Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump are competing in it as a who is the ‘tougher guy/gal’ in what could be easily described as a 21st Century Tarantino-style (or Scorsese-style) political pulp fiction gore.What they both utter, may often sound like some staged bluff: “Are you talking to me? Hey, there’s nobody else here… Are you talking to me?”But just think for a moment what would really happen if one of them sticks to his or her ‘promises’ and ‘principles’, after getting elected! (The bullets would be flying, the nukes exploding, and millions ...
Joe Biden is an American president and politician with extensive experience. He has been a long year member of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In his political career so far, he has not had a good opinion about Russia, and the same was with other Slavic states in Eastern Europe, which have cultivated close relations with Russia.After the collapse of the USSR, his most significant engagement was in the Balkans. During the 1990, he often visited the Balkans. In his biography, Biden describes himself as a leading figure in defining the US policy in the Balkans, as he helped ...
The ongoing crisis in Ukraine and unseemly role of Poland in its instigation and development makes us take another look at the historical context of the Polish-Ukrainian relations. We will focus on dramatic repressions of the Ukrainian minorities in Eastern Poland in 1921-1939 at the territories annexed by Jozef Piłsudski’s government from the Soviet Russia according to Peace of Riga 1921, which eventually triggered ultra-Nationalist Ukrainian terror against the Poles during the WWII (culminating in massacres in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943-1944).Poland, which used to be a part of the Russian Empire, emerged at the European political map in November ...
The bleak truth is that a careful review of the activities of the CIA and the organizations from which it sprang reveals an intense preoccupation with the development of techniques of behavior control, brainwashing, and covert medical and psychic experimentation on unwitting subjects including religious sects, ethnic minorities, prisoners, mental patients, soldiers and the terminally ill. The rationale for such activities, the techniques and indeed the human subjects chosen show an extraordinary and chilling similarity to Nazi experiments.This similarity becomes less surprising when we trace the determined and often successful efforts of US intelligence officers to acquire the records of ...
Many innocent civilians were killed in American military interventions around the world – from Vietnam and Serbia to Iran and Afghanistan, because of the alleged “errors” or “collateral damage” – without consequences for civil and military leadership. In addition to political, military and every other power, Americans secured itself with legal mechanisms.Twenty-two civilians, wounded and doctors, among them three children, were killed in the American bombing of a hospital in the Afghan city of Kunduz. Americans acknowledged the error and apologized. The President of the United States expressed his condolences, the military leadership announced three independent investigations. “Doctors without borders” ...
March 16, 2017, was the 49th anniversary of the My Lai Massacre, located in Quang Ngai Province, Vietnam. It was Saturday morning, March 16, 1968, when approximately 115 U.S. Army soldiers of the Americal Division’s Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, landed in helicopters just outside the village of My Lai 4. Over the course of the next four hours, these American soldiers, and their Military High Command, who were flying overhead in helicopters observing the massacre, took part in a horror show far beyond the human imagination. They took the term, “War Crimes,” and added a butcher shop to ...
Editor’s note:This article was written and originally published in January 2015. „God is our objective, the Quran is our Constitution, the Prophet is our leader, struggle is our way, and death for sake of God is the highest of our aspirations“Jihadi credoWest Europe before the 2014 Christmas became once again a target of several mini-terrorist acts by the radical Islamists among whom the Wahabbies are the most active and dangerous. On Tuesday, December 23rd, Germany’s security service warn of the highest terrorist threat in decades as the German participation in the anti-ISIS struggle became the reason for potential terrorism. ...
The 13th report of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on the human rights situation in Ukraine between 16 November 2015 and 15 February 2016, when the Minsk Agreements were in force, has come as a shock to Kiev.According to the UN, more than three million people live in the areas directly affected by the conflict. The exact number of people who have left Ukraine-controlled territory is still unknown, although rough estimates range from 800,000 to 1,000,000 people. The Ukrainian government has estimated that more than a million people have left southeast Ukraine for Russia, Belarus and Europe. This ...
My work documenting how the law was lost began about a quarter of a century ago. A close friend and distinguished attorney, Dean Booth, first brought to my attention the erosion of the legal principles on which rests the rule of law in the United States. My columns on the subject got the attention of an educational institution that invited me to give a lecture on the subject. Subsequently, I was invited to give a lecture on “How The Law Was Lost” at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law in New York City.The work coalesced into a book, The Tyranny Of ...
The problem is America’s global hegemony comes with insistence on maintaining military and economic dominance right in China’s backyard.To avoid a violent militaristic clash with China, or another cold war rivalry, the United States should pursue a simple solution: give up its empire.Americans fear that China’s rapid economic growth will slowly translate into a more expansive and assertive foreign policy that will inevitably result in a war with the US. Harvard Professor Graham Allison has found: “in 12 of 16 cases in the past 500 years when a rising power challenged a ruling power, the outcome was war.” Chicago University scholar John ...
The U.S. government’s plan to conquer Russia is based upon a belief in, and the fundamental plan to establish, “Nuclear Primacy” against Russia — an American ability to win a nuclear war against, and so conquer, Russia.This concept became respectable in U.S. academic and governmental policymaking circles when virtually simultaneously in 2006 a short-form and a long-form version of an article endorsing the concept, which the article’s two co-authors there named “nuclear primacy,” were published respectively in the world’s two most influential journals of international affairs, Foreign Affairs from the Council on Foreign Relations, and International Security from Harvard. (CFR got the more popular ...
The main church of the Serbian Orthodox Patriarchate in Kosovo in PećThe series of long-scale Christian national movements in the Balkans, triggered off by 1804 Serbian revolution, decided more than in the earlier centuries, the fate of Serbs and made ethnic Albanians (about 70% of whom were Muslims) the main guardians of Turkish order in the European provinces of Ottoman Empire. At a time when the Eastern question was again being raised, particularly in the final quarter of the 19th and the first decade of the 20th century, Islamic Albanians were the chief instrument of Turkey’s policy in crushing the ...
