Mexican War
The Mexican-American War was the first American military conflict fought entirely on foreign soil and the first to be closely chronicled by the press.The war ended with American victory and a treaty that increased the nation's population by 1/2 a million square miles . The next diplomatic settlement of a controversy over the boundaries of the Oregon Territory added another quarter million square miles . Creating a coast-to-coast
nation-state. This rapid expansion of the nation's land area, coupled with
dramatic military successes and developments in transportation and communication,
fueled with ideas of Anglo-Saxon supremacy that fused with national pride to
produce Manifest Destiny, the conviction that white Americans were divinely
ordained to dominate the continent, from sea to shining sea.
America's rapid gaining of the old Mexican Southwest and the Oregon Territory seemed to mark the spectacular gratification of President James K. Polk's expansionistic campaign promises. Yet the issues that began with the acquisition of western lands, particularly in the Southwest, reawakened the sleeping giant of American politics: the disagreement between North and South over slavery that most U.S. political leaders had spent a lifetime attempting to suppress. From the end of Polk's administration until the Civil War, a series of controversial compromises would follow, as the nation struggled to organize its newly acquired lands without inflaming the members of either slavery or elimination.