ical
explanation.

Mexico had detached itself from Spain in 1826, and in 1833 the province
of Texas detached itself from Mexico. Texas was largely peopled by
immigrants from the States, and these had grievances. One of them was
that Mexico abolished slavery, but there was real misgovernment as
well, and, among other cruel incidents of the rebellion which followed,
the massacre of rebels at the Alamo stamped itself on American memory.
The Republic of Texas began to seek annexation to the United States in
1839, but there was opposition in the States and there were
difficulties with Mexico and other Governments. At last in 1845, at
the very close of his term of office, President Tyler got the
annexation pushed through in defiance of the Whigs who made him
President. Mexico broke off diplomatic relations, but peace could no
doubt have been preserved if peace had been any object with the new
President Polk or with the Southern leaders whose views he represented.
They had set their eyes upon a further acquisition, larger even than
Texas--California, and the whole of the territories, still belonging to
Mexico, to the east of it. It is not contested, and would not have
been contested then, that the motive of their policy was the Southern
desire to win further soil for cultivation by slaves. But there was no
great difficulty in gaining some popularity for their designs in the
North. Talk about "our manifest destiny" to reach the Pacific may have
been justly described by Parson Wilbur as "half on it ign'ance and
t'other half rum," but it is easy to see how readily it might be taken
up, and indeed many Northerners at that moment had a fancy of their own
for expansion in the North-West and were not over-well pleased with
Polk when, in 1846, he set the final seal upon the settlement with
Great Britain of the Oregon frontier.

When he did this Polk had already brought about his own war. The
judgment on that war expressed at the time in the first "Biglow Papers"
has seldom been questioned since, and there seldom can have been a war
so sternly condemned by soldiers--Grant amongst others--who fought in
it gallantly. The facts seem to have been just as Lincoln afterwards
recited them in Congress. The Rio Grande, which looks a reasonable
frontier on a map, was claimed by the United States as the frontier of
Texas. The territory occupied by the American settlers of Texas
reached admittedly up to and beyond the River Nueces, ea