Mexico giving up on Texas region
The annexation of Texas by the United States was conducted in the mid-nineteenth century and this action led to Texas becoming the twenty-eighth State of America. Before the annexation occurred, Texas belonged to Mexico but there were settlers from the United States who desired to have Texas as an independent country from Mexico. In 1936, Texas gained independence and was named the Republic of Texas. The independence of the Republic of Texas existed for nine years up to 1945 after when it was annexed and became part of the United States. The annexation led to the admission of the Republic of Texas as a slave state of the United States. James K. Polk, the president during this period, termed this activity as a great territorial expansion accomplishment for the United States (Mattern, 2012).
The Texas rebellion was a war that Texas fought in a bid to gain its independence from Mexico. The war started in 1835, coming after a ten year period in which the Mexican government engaged in political as well as cultural clashes with the Texas settlers from the United States. Before then, the cost of land was low and had attracted a large population from America and Mexico, and the population in this region had therefore increased immensely. Despite the high number of Americans, Santa Anna, the then Mexican president was convinced that the settlers ought to conform to his laws and policies, but this was not the case with the Texans. These settlers did not like the laws that the then president of Mexico Santa Anna had imposed and therefore started the rebellion. In 1836, Santa Anna went on a mission to capture fort Alamo where the Texans met his soldiers, and a war erupted between them. The war yielded the capture of Santa Anna, and Texas gained independence from Mexico (Calvert, De Leon, & Cantrell, 2020).
The American war with Mexico was the first war that America engaged in on foreign land. This war, which took place for around twelve years, met Mexico unprepared as far as the military was concerned, and the political atmosphere in Mexico was also divided. The unpreparedness and political division on the Mexican side presented an easy victory for the United States. The Mexican war troops engaged with those of the United States in a bid to protect the land that the Texans had settled, with Mexico holding that the land was theirs and therefore their fight was to retain it (Calvert, De Leon, & Cantrell, 2020). On the other hand, America was not only fighting to reclaim what they believed was rightfully theirs but was also in strife to acquire more of the Northlands (Tucker, Arnold, Wiener, Pierpaoli, Cutrer, & Santoni, 2013).
The underlying issues leading to the war from the Mexican perspective are the Texas annexation which led to a border dispute between the two nations. After the annexation, there erupted disputes with the Mexicans accusing the United States of having taken more than a million square kilometres of its territories. Additionally, the annexation was in itself not acceptable legally. Mexicans viewed it as a violation of the border treaty of the year 1828. In this treaty, the Mexican government possessed the sovereignty for the Texas region and therefore, its annexation was an illegal action by the Americans (Tucker et al., 2013).
The Mexican government believed that it was justified in its action during its war with the United States. According to the Mexicans, the action by the Texans to be annexed to the United States was not welcomed since it was performed through rebellious means. Mexico still regarded the Texas region as rightfully under the Mexican government leadership. Therefore, the intrusion of the United States into the Texas region was viewed by the Mexicans as an invasion to land not rightfully theirs. Therefore, the response of the Mexican government in an attempt to curtail the American invasion was in the Mexicans’ perspective just (Tucker et al., 2013). Additionally, the United States intention to take part of northern Mexico to fulfil their “manifest destiny” belief was an illegal act to the Mexicans, and they thought that it was rightful for them to respond by getting into a war with the United States.
The aftermath of the war was Mexico giving up on Texas region, and it also released several states to the United States. Among the states that Mexico released to the United States were Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah, among others. This release was preceded by the Guadalupe Hidalgo treaty (Norton, Kamensky, Sheriff, Blight, & Chudacoff, 2014). The area that Mexico ceded to the United States amounted to more than half of its initial area while it extended the United States territories to touch the Pacific Ocean opening more ports. However, after the release of the states and the Texas region, Mexico was awarded a sum of fifteen million dollars (Tucker et al., 2013). Further, the war led to the United States considering its debts from Mexico, something that led to the reopening of slavery (Tucker et al., 2013).