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
understandin
