Taylor held off determined attacks by a Mexican army about three times as large as his own and won the Battle of Buena Vista in February 1847. The next month the third prong of the U.S. offensive was launched when General Winfield Scott landed at Veracruz. Five months later he had fought his way to Mexico City. As happened in much of the war, the Mexican army was larger and fought bravely, but the Mexican government and high command were divided and often incompetent, and the Americans were better armed and better led. In particular, the Mexicans had no answer to American artillery. After a series of bloody battles in September 1847, Scott's army occupied Mexico City, and the war was over. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 ceded Texas , California, and New Mexico to the United States, which agreed to pay Mexico $15 million. The Mexican Cession gave the United States present-day west Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, most of Colorado, and part of Wyoming. The northern third of Mexico had become the southwestern quarter of the United States. The Mexican War was a straightforward land-grab. The ease with which the United States won and the arrogance with which it behaved created a distrustful and sometimes violent southern border area for the country. More immediately, the lands ceded by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo became the object of contest and resentment between the slave and free states-a conflict that would widen into the American Civil War 13 years later. The regions of the United States that argued about the Mexican War and its aftermath had grown in divergent ways since agreeing to be a nation in 1788. The North had experienced a market revolution based on commercial agriculture and the growth of cities and industry.
The South, on the other hand, remained tied to a plantation system that depended on slave labor and international markets. The plantation system enslaved the one-third of all Southerners who were black and excluded more and more poor whites. The Market Revolution in the North By the 1820s, farmers no longer produced mainly for themselves and their neighbors, selling any excess production on international markets. Most Northern farms had become business operations. They specialized in a small range of marketable crops and sold the food they produced to an internal market made up of Americans who had moved to towns, cities, and industrial villages. In turn, these urbanized and industrialized Northerners provided farmers with finished goods that had previously been made in rural households and neighborhoods or imported from Europe. With this self-sustaining internal market, the North stepped out of the old colonial relationship in which America produced food and raw materials for Europe in exchange for foreign finished goods.
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