Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848, by diplomat Nicholas Trist and Mexican plenipotentiary representatives Luis G. Cuevas, Bernardo Couto, and Miguel Atristain, ended the war. The treaty gave the U.S. undisputed control of Texas, established the U.S.–Mexican border along the Rio Grande, and ceded to the United States the present-day states of California, Nevada, and Utah, most of New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. In return, Mexico received $15 million[233] ($545 million today) – less than half the amount the U.S. had attempted to offer Mexico for the land before the opening of hostilities[234] – and the U.S. agreed to assume $3.25 million ($118 million today) in debts that the Mexican government owed to U.S. citizens.[235] The area of domain acquired was given by the Federal Interagency Committee as 338,680,960 acres (529,189 square miles). The cost was $16,295,149 or approximately five cents per acre.[236] The area amounted to one-third of Mexico's original territory from its 1821 independence.
The treaty was ratified by the U.S. Senate by a vote of 38 to 14 on March 10 and by Mexico through a legislative vote of 51–34 and a Senate vote of 33–4, on May 19. News that New Mexico's legislative assembly had passed an act for the organization of a U.S. territorial government helped ease Mexican concern about abandoning the people of New Mexico.[237] The acquisition was a source of controversy, especially among U.S. politicians who had opposed the war from the start. A leading anti-war U.S. newspaper, the Whig National Intelligencer, sardonically concluded that "We take nothing by conquest ... Thank God."[238][239]
The acquired lands west of the Rio Grande are traditionally called the Mexican Cession in the U.S., as opposed to the Texas Annexation two years earlier, though the division of New Mexico down the middle at the Rio Grande never had any basis either in control or Mexican boundaries. Mexico never recognized the independence of Texas[240] before the war and did not cede its claim to territory north of the Rio Grande or Gila River until this treaty.
Before ratifying the treaty, the U.S. Senate made two modifications: changing the wording of Article IX (which guaranteed Mexicans living in the purchased territories the right to become U.S. citizens) and striking out Article X (which conceded the legitimacy of land grants made by the Mexican government). On May 26, 1848, when the two countries exchanged ratifications of the treaty, they further agreed to a three-article protocol (known as the Protocol of Querétaro) to explain the amendments. The first article claimed that the original Article IX of the treaty, although replaced by Article III of the Treaty of Louisiana, would still confer the rights delineated in Article IX. The second article confirmed the legitimacy of land grants under Mexican law.[241] The protocol was signed in the city of Querétaro by A. H. Sevier, Nathan Clifford, and Luis de la Rosa.[241]
Article XI offered a potential benefit to Mexico, in that the U.S. pledged to suppress the Comanche and Apache raids that had ravaged the region and pay restitution to the victims of raids it could not prevent.[242] However, the Native raids did not cease for several decades after the treaty, although a cholera epidemic in 1849 greatly reduced the numbers of the Comanche.[243] Robert Letcher, U.S. Minister to Mexico in 1850, was certain "that miserable 11th article" would lead to the financial ruin of the U.S. if it could not be released from its obligations.[244] The U.S. was released from all obligations of Article XI five years later by Article II of the Gadsden Purchase of 1853.[245]
Writing many years later, Trist's wife Virginia claimed that her husband had related to her his feelings at the time of the signing of the treaty:
Could those Mexicans have seen into my heart at that moment, they would have known that my feeling of shame as an American was far stronger than theirs could be as Mexicans. For though it would not have done for me to say so there, that was a thing for every right-minded American to be ashamed of, and I was ashamed of it, most cordially and intensely ashamed of it.[246]
Aftermath
Altered territories

Before the secession of Texas, Mexico's claimed territory comprised almost 1,700,000 sq mi (4,400,000 km2), but by 1849 it covered just under 800,000 square miles (2,100,000 km2). Another 30,000 square miles (78,000 km2) were sold to the U.S. in the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, a total reduction in Mexican claimed territory of more than 55%, or 900,000 square miles (2,300,000 km2).[247] Although the annexed territory was about the size of Western Europe, it was sparsely populated. The land contained about 14,000 non-indigenous people in Alta California[248] and about 60,000 in Nuevo México,[249] as well as large Native nations, such as the Papago, Pima, Puebloan, Navajo, Apache and many others. Although some native people relocated farther south in Mexico, the great majority remained in the U.S. territory.
The U.S. settlers surging into the newly conquered Southwest replaced Mexican law (a civil law system based on the law of Spain), which, in the Law of April 6, 1830, forbade any further immigration. However, they recognized the value of a few aspects of Mexican law and carried them over into their new legal systems. For example, most of the Southwestern states adopted community property marital property systems, as well as water law.[citation needed]
Many Mexicans, including mestizos, Afro-Mexicans, and indigenous peoples in the annexed territories, experienced a loss of civil and political rights. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promised U.S. citizenship to all former Mexican citizens living in the territories. However, the United States gave ceded states the authority to establish citizenship policy, and within a year, states were passing laws that banned all Mexicans in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas from U.S. citizenship, except white male Mexicans. Furthermore, non-white Mexicans lost certain citizenship rights, such as the right to practice law, vote or hold certain government positions. Indigenous peoples lost land rights and were exterminated as in the California genocide or forced into reservations. Mexico lost part of its northern territories in Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming that included few if any Mexicans, and many indigenous groups.[250]
Furthermore, the U.S. government did not grant full citizenship to Native Americans in the Southwest until the 1930s, even though they were Mexican citizens.[251] The California Constitution of 1849 conferred voting rights only to white male citizens (Article II, Section 1), and the number of senators was proportioned only "according to the number of white inhabitants" (Article IV, Section 29).[252]
Effect on the United States
In much of the United States, victory and the acquisition of new land brought a surge of patriotism. Victory seemed to fulfill Democrats' belief in their country's Manifest Destiny. Although the Whigs had opposed the war, they made Zachary Taylor their presidential candidate in the election of 1848, praising his military performance while muting their criticism of the war.
Has the Mexican War terminated yet, and how? Are we beaten? Do you know of any nation about to besiege South Hadley [Massachusetts]? If so, do inform me of it, for I would be glad of a chance to escape, if we are to be stormed. I suppose [our teacher] Miss [Mary] Lyon [founder of Mount Holyoke College] would furnish us all with daggers and order us to fight for our lives ...
— The sixteen-year-old Emily Dickinson, writing to her older brother, Austin in the fall of 1847, shortly after the Battle of Chapultepec[253]
A month before the end of the war, Polk was criticized in a United States House of Representatives amendment to a bill praising Taylor for "a war unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States." This criticism, in which Congressman Abraham Lincoln played an important role with his Spot Resolutions, followed congressional scrutiny of the war's beginnings, including factual challenges to claims made by President Polk.[254][255] The vote followed party lines, with all Whigs supporting the amendment. Lincoln's attack won lukewarm support from fellow Whigs in Illinois but was harshly counter attacked by Democrats, who rallied pro-war sentiments in Illinois; Lincoln's Spot Resolutions haunted his future campaigns in the heavily Democratic state of Illinois and were cited by his rivals well into his presidency.[256]
While the Whig Emerson rejected war "as a means of achieving America's destiny," toward the end of the war he wrote: "The United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us."[257] He later accepted that "most of the great results of history are brought about by discreditable means."[258] Civil War historian James M. McPherson dedicates an entire chapter of his Pulitzer winning Civil War history to the Mexican–American war, entitled "Mexico Will Poison Us". McPherson argues that the Mexican–American War and its aftermath was a key territorial event in the leadup to the Civil War.[259]
Veterans of the war were often broken men. "As the sick and wounded from Taylor's and Scott's campaigns made their way back from Mexico to the United States, their condition shocked the folks at home. Husbands, sons, and brothers returned in broken health, some with missing limbs."[260] The 1880 "Republican Campaign Textbook" by the Republican Congressional Committee[261] describes the war as "Feculent, reeking Corruption" and "one of the darkest scenes in our history—a war forced upon our and the Mexican people by the high-handed usurpations of Pres't Polk in pursuit of territorial aggrandizement of the slave oligarchy."
Following the signing of the 1848 treaty, Polk sought to send troops to Yucatan, where there was a civil war between secessionists and those supporting the Mexican government. The U.S. Congress refused his request. The Mexican War was supposed to be short and nearly bloodless. It was neither. Congress did not support more foreign conflict.[262]
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