The war between the United States and Mexico was decades in the making.
Although Texas was an independent republic from 1836 to 1845, Texans
retained an affiliation with the United States that virtually assured
annexation at some point. Mexico's reluctance to give up Texas put it on
a collision course with the United States.
The Mexican War receives scant treatment in books. Most historians
approach the conflict as if it were a mere prelude to the Civil War. The
Mexican cession of 1848, however, rivaled the Louisiana Purchase in
importance for the sheer amount of territory acquired by the United
States. The dispute over slavery-which had been rendered largely
academic by the Missouri Compromise-burst forth anew as Americans now
faced the realization that they must make a decision over the
institution's future. The political battle over the status of slavery in
these new territories was the direct cause of the Crisis of 1850 and
ignited sectional differences in the decade that followed.
In Crisis in the Southwest: The United States, Mexico, and the Struggle
over Texas, Richard Bruce Winders provides a concise, accessible
overview of the Mexican War and argues that the Mexican War led directly
to the Civil War by creating a political and societal crisis that drove
a wedge between the North and the South. While on the surface the enemy
was Mexico, in reality Americans were at odds with one another over the
future of the nation, as the issue of annexation threatened to upset the
balance between free and slave states.
Winders also explains the military connections between the Mexican War
and Civil War, since virtually every important commander in the Civil
War-including Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Grant, McClellan, and
Longstreet-gained his introduction to combat in Mexico. These
connections are enormously significant to the way in which these
generals waged war, since it was in the Mexican War that they learned
their trade.
Crisis in the Southwest provides readers with a clear understanding of
the Mexican War and its relationship to the chain of events that
ultimately led to the Civil War.
