"Anatomy of Mexican-American War" Topic

"On May 13, 1846, President James K. Polk went to Congress and asked it to declare war on the Mexican state. Congress responded with an emphatic "Yes" vote, House voting 174-14 and the Senate voting 40-2. The war ended with Mexico ceding just over one-third of its territory to the United States in February of 1848.

The American political scene in 1846. The Mexican-American War was fought at a time when Andrew Jackson's Democratic Party was at odds with the Whig Party, which had echoes of the old Federalist Party in it, but was mostly an anti-Jacksonian party that was popular from the 1840s-60s, when it fell apart and the GOP emerged to challenge the Democrats. At the time of Polk's request for a declaration of war, the Whigs from the northeast were vehemently anti-war, arguing that acquiring Mexican territory would create more votes in Congress for slaveholders, who voted reliably for Democrats. The war itself was unpopular at first, as it was the first war against an internationally-recognized state in 30 years (the U.S. had done plenty of fighting in between the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War, but it was against polities that went unrecognized in the international arena, like Native American confederacies, Mediterranean principalities, or southeast Asian sultanates)…."
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