December 5, 2006
The Mexican Cession Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:15 AM EST I wrote in my previous post that I would discuss the Mexican Cession, which Professor Eric Foner regarded in a recent Washington Post op-ed piece as egregious imperialism. Under the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War in 1848, Mexico ceded most of what is now the southwest quarter of the United States, including all of California, Nevada, and Utah, most of Arizona, and large areas of Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico. It also abandoned all claims to Texas east of the Rio Grande River. It amounted to a territorial acquisition of 529,017 square miles, about 14 percent of current U.S. territory. In exchange, the United States paid Mexico $15,000,000 and assumed the claims of U.S. citizens against the Mexican government amounting to $3,250,000. It was, to be sure, a fabulous bargain, some of the most beautiful, fertile, and resource-rich land on the planet for $34 a square mile. It is quite impossible to imagine the present United States without it: No Hollywood, no Grand Canyon, no Las Vegas, no Yosemite. But was it imperialism? To be sure, we were able to make the bargain because we had militarily defeated Mexico in a war that an expansionist United States had in large measure initiated. Mexico didn’t have much choice. But that, in itself, doesn’t make it imperialism if that term is defined as one nation assuming political hegemony over another. Had the United States followed the wishes of Secretary of State James Buchanan and many others, we would have taken all of Mexico. That would have been imperialism with a capital I. The territory that we did acquire was largely unpopulated by Mexicans. Except for the California missions and a few settlements in New Mexico, such as Taos and Santa Fe, it was empty. (Like the people of the 1840s, Mexicans and Americans alike, I am, of course, ignoring the Indian population. That, I think, is best treated as a separate issue.) The total Mexican population of the Mexican Cession was about 15,000 people. Few if any decided to leave after the United States acquired the territory, which would indicate that their ties to Mexico were as weak as the Mexican hold on the land. The area we acquired from Mexico was “Mexican” because that country had inherited Spain’s claim to the territory. But that was all it was, a claim. It is a settled principle of international law that claims to territory have little validity unless backed by occupation. No one thinks that England violated Spanish sovereignty in settling the east coast of North America, despite Spain’s claim to the whole of the New World except Brazil. In effect, we bought Mexico’s claim to this territory for a considerable sum (about what we had paid for Louisiana, a far larger area, four decades earlier, and twice what we would pay for Alaska, slightly larger, two decades hence). Over the next 60 years the United States proceeded to do what Spain and Mexico had not, occupy the territory and make it its own. Compare this with Britain’s acquisition of Quebec in 1763 after victory in the Seven Years’ War. It took it by right of conquest, and nearly two and half centuries later, the divide between English- and French-speaking Canadians is still the principle fault line in that country’s politics. Or consider the German acquisition of Alsace-Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian War. That, perhaps the stupidest single act of international politics in world history, caused deep, bitter resentment in France (the figurative statue of Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde in Paris was draped in mourning until 1918) and was a prime cause of the First World War, because it made impossible the resumption of friendly relations between Germany and France. But there has never been a serious irredentist movement in Mexico regarding the Mexican Cession. Indeed, when in 1853, it seemed that a railroad to California from the Eastern United States would need to take a southern route, Mexico, no longer under the gun of military defeat and occupation, agreed to sell the United States an additional 29,640 square miles of what is now southern Arizona and New Mexico, the so-called Gadsden Purchase. That would have been a very strange action for a country that felt it had been territorially raped.
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