Monarchism and Liberalism in Mexico's Nineteenth Century

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"We Knew no North, no South": U.S.-Mexican War Veterans and the Construction of Public Memory in the Post-Civil War United States, 1874-1897

In 1874, American veterans of the U.S.–Mexican War 1846–1848 formed the National Association of Veterans of the Mexican War (NAVMW). Until the organization’s demise in 1897, NAVMW members crafted and celebrated a vision of their war with Mexico as a national triumph which had united Americans from all sections of the Union in a common cause. This article examines how, by promoting this particular memory of the war to the American public, NAVMW members sought to remind their countrymen of their shared national history, and so aid the process of reconciliation between North and South in the post-Civil War era

The Slave South In The Far West: California, The Pacific, And Proslavery Visions Of Empire

This dissertation rests on a relatively simple premise: America’s road to disunion ran west, and unless we account for the transcontinental and trans-Pacific ambitions of slaveholders, our understanding of the nation’s bloodiest conflict will remain incomplete. Whereas a number of important works have explored southern imperialism within the Atlantic Basin, surprisingly little has been written on the far western dimension of proslavery expansion. My work traces two interrelated initiatives – the southern campaign for a transcontinental railroad and the extension of a proslavery political order across the Far Southwest – in order to situate the struggle over slavery in a continental framework. Beginning in the 1840s and continuing to the eve of the Civil War, southern expansionists pushed tirelessly for a railway that would run from slave country all the way to California. What one railroad booster called “the great slavery road” promised to draw the Far West and the slaveholding South into a political and commercial embrace, while simultaneously providing the plantation economy with direct access to the Pacific trade. The failure of American expansionists to construct a transcontinental railroad during the antebellum era has discouraged close scholarly scrutiny of this political movement. Yet through their efforts, southern railroaders triggered some of the fiercest sectional struggles of the era, and carried the contest over slavery far beyond the Atlantic world. The second part of this dissertation reconstructs local political contests in Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and California to highlight the long reach of proslavery interests. Never a majority in the region, southern-born leaders wielded an outsized influence within western legislatures, courtrooms, and newspaper offices to effectively transform the Southwest into a political appendage of the slave South. With the fracturing of the Union in 1861, the project of southern expansion moved to the battlefields of a continental civil war, with several initially successful Confederate invasions of New Mexico. Even as the rebellion collapsed across the South, Confederate leaders continued to look west, authorizing yet another invasion of the region as late as the spring of 1865. The proslavery dream of a western empire almost outlived slavery itself

War and Foreign Debt Settlement in Early Republican Spanish America

Upon gaining independence, most Spanish American countries had accumulated a substantial external debt, and by 1829 each defaulted. It took decades for these countries to settle their debts and even longer for them to access new loans. We argue that a major factor influencing the pattern of debt service was the incidence of war. War created incentives for governments to channel scarce resources to «emergency» spending and domestic debt service, rather than to the repayment of the foreign debt. Interestingly, we detect an asymmetry between countries long in good standing with creditors and those that had only recently settled. Countries that had established a longer record of continuous debt service were far less likely to default in times of war. We also find that international wars were responsible for the largest effects.En este artículo sugerimos que un factor que determinò en buena medida la trayectoria del pago de la deuda externa de los países hispanoamericanos en las primeras décadas de su vida independiente, fue la enorme incidencia de conflictos armados en la región. Las frecuentes guerras crearon incentives para que éstos dirigieran sus escasos recursos a gastos militares y al servicio de la deuda interna en vez de a la deuda exterior. Un resultado interesante es la asimetría que se registra entre los países que llegaron a renegociar su deuda exitosamente y mantuvieron su servicio por largos períodos de tiempo, y la de aquellos que no tuvieron mayor éxito en sus renegociaciones. En el caso de estos Ultimos, las guerras registraron efectos negativos mayores. También demostramos que las guerras internacionales tuvieron los efectos más dramáticos

Overrun All This Country... Two New Mexican Lives Through the Nineteenth Century

This thesis reconstructs the lives of two elite Hispanic New Mexican men who grappled with upheavals on the North American continent during the nineteenth century. Union army officers and influential patrones Nicolás Pino (1820-1896) and José Francisco Chavez (1833-1904) serve as the center of this paper’s narrative chronological historical analysis. Intensive primary source work in the New Mexico State Archives reveals their footprints in the military, political, and legal spheres before, during, and after the war. The biographies of Chavez and Pino serve as a microcosm of the changes and continuities in Nuevo Mexicano social, cultural, and military practices during these turbulent years, revealing historical moments as they were lived by individuals. Their responses to American Indian conflicts, shifting borders, fluid borderlands identities, two international wars, and the penetration of Anglo-Americans into the territory reveal how two members of the elite Hispanic New Mexican community worked to maintain their elite status in the face of massive change

States’ Rights, Southern Hypocrisy, and the Crisis of the Union

This article explores the arguments used by southern secessionists to explain why they left the Union. The article demonstrates that support for states\u27 rights was not the main reason for secession, and that on the contrary, most of the slave states left the Union because the free states were exercising their states\u27 rights in opposing slavery. The main reason for secession, as this essay shows, was the desire to protect slavery and to create a new nation, self-consciously based on slavery and white supremacy. This article began as part of an AALS legal history section program in 2010 and is part of a symposium based on the papers given at that session

The Effect of Religious Opposition on the Mexican-American War (1846-1848)

The Effect of Religious Opposition on the Mexican-American War, 1846-1848 By April Pickens, History Major James Madison University The Mexican-American War began in dubious circumstances, and some Americans disagreed with “Polk’s War” from the beginning. But it was the united efforts of three Protestant denominations—the Congregationalists, the Unitarians, and the Quakers—that finally turned a large segment of the populace against the war. They were able to do this with their multiplying publications, which wielded significant influence in the religiously aware society that existed in America after the Second Great Awakening. When sufficient numbers of ordinary citizens and politicians began voicing their disapproval of the war, Polk and his administration realized they had to accept a fairly lenient peace treaty with Mexico. If the President had rejected the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (which fulfilled all of his original terms), he would have alienated the majority of the American public and doomed his own and his party’s political careers

From Revolution to Rejection: Tejanos and the Road to the Civil War

The relationship between white Anglo-Southerner settlers and Mexican people in Texas directly impacted the participation of Mexican Americans in the American Civil War. This relationship was one of equal participation in the Texas Revolution; afterward, the racist discrimination of Anglo settlers led to Mexican people withdrawing from military service during the Mexican-American War, though they held important roles in the Texas Republic. During the Civil War, Mexican people largely fought for the Confederacy in an effort to earn respect and equality and avoid the Anglo settlers’ racism and violence. The race-based class system brought from the United States by the Anglo settlers created exclusionary and discriminatory conditions against the Mexican people in Texas, generating the conditions that led to the choice of Mexican Americans fighting for the Confederacy

FRIENDS OF THE OPPRESSED: AN INVESTIGATION OF THE KANE COUNTY ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY

By examining the original minutes of the Kane County Anti-Slavery Society (1842-1845), a profile of local abolitionists was created and conclusions were drawn about the motivations of antislavery men and women in Illinois. Instead of following the lead of the New England antislavery groups and splitting into separate sects, the Illinois abolitionists developed their own approach to fighting slavery by combining strategies of moral suasion, politics, and economic concerns. The men and women of the KCASS proved to bte a diverse group of people in terms of age and wealth, but were similar regarding place of origin and religion. They used various arguments to reason that slavery should be abolished, including: abiding by God\u27s Divine Law, staying true to the Declaration of Independence, and keeping the west free from slavery. Instead of promoting antislavery on a single platform, such as within the church, the northern Illinois abolitionists used various routes to motivate more people into action. Politically, abolitionists joined the Liberty Party and vowed only to vote for antislavery candidates. Morally, they gave harsh criticism to those clergy who were not openly opposed to slavery. Many northern Illinois abolitionists also aided slaves directly, via the Underground Railroad. In addition, antislavery men and women worked together within the antislavery societies to devise strategies to end slavery and promote racial equality