North America Divided provides a good starting point for anyone wishing to study the Mexican War in depth. In a crisp, well-written narrative Professors Faulk and Connor describe the origins, course, and results of the conflict and pay due attention to the Mexican as well as the American side. Furthermore, the authors have provided an excellent analytical bibliography with over 750 entries covering all aspects of the war.
As with any short narrative there are bound to be problems. Faulk and Connor describe the military campaigns with admirable clarity but fail to explain how the relatively untried American forces consistently defeated veteran Mexican armies. Did the Americans have superior leaders, better tactics or more efficient weapons? The authors fail to clarify this intriguing point.
The authors also verge on the traditional American problem of trying to equate national self interest with universal morality. Although observers from Machiavelli to Morgenthau have noted that the interests of the state override other ethical and religious considerations, Americans cannot or will not accept this situation and feel a compulsion to react morally to even the most successful foreign policy venture. The results of this perpetual search for rectitude are often grotesque.
The Mexican War offers a fine example of this search for vindication. A successful affair by diplomatic and military standards, the War has been denounced as an evil conspiracy by some and blamed on the Mexicans or defined as the just action of a higher Anglo-Saxon civilization against an inferior Latin culture by others.
Faulk and Connor convincingly show that the Mexican government in the 1830s and ’40s was at best weak and divided. Moreover they demonstrate that Mexico was plagued by separatist movements not only in Texas but also in Yucatán, California, and what is now northern Mexico. They also show that Mexican intransigence (they regarded Texas annexation as a causus belli) as well as American belligerance helped bring about war in 1846.
This view, however, ignores the fundamental question of American goals. If the United States was determined to extend its power to the Pacific, and Polk’s designs on California indicate that this was indeed the case, a clash with Mexico was inevitable. The Mexicans had but two choices: a graceful surrender or a fight to retain their national frontiers. Mexican weakness in no way altered the fact that they reacted to a threat to their territorial integrity. Weakness influenced Mexico’s ability but not its right to contest American expansion. By 1846 both nations had non-negotiable demands, and only the belief that the Americans would have stopped short of the Pacific would permit the assertion that greater flexibility on one or both sides could have avoided war.
From the American point of view the results of the War were good, but this does not make them morally right. To claim moral justification or conversely guilt only obscures more important aspects of the War. Faulk and Connor might have profited from a more straightforward approach to the conflict, but despite this lapse, they have produced a readable informed narrative of one of America’s more successful ventures.
