Mexican War
Mexican War (1846–48).After weeks of fruitless diplomacy, the United States and the republic of Mexico declared war on each other in the spring of 1846. By the 1840s, many Americans held the view that the United States should reach from the Atlantic all the way to the Pacific Ocean. In 1844, Democrat James K. Polk of Tennessee ran for the presidency and won on a platform of expansionism, embracing the popular concept of “manifest destiny”—that God approved U.S. expansion throughout the continent. Polk opened diplomacy designed to redeem his campaign pledges to purchase California and other Mexican lands as well as to obtain the Oregon country from Britain. Considered in grand strategic terms, Polk intended to make the United States the undisputed national power on the North American continent and to obtain West Coast ports. The British agreed to an equitable treaty dividing Oregon,...
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