John Smith’s map of Virginia, engraved by William Hole and published in 1612. Public domain.
The war with Mexico ended with the United States paying Mexico for a vast tract from the Rio Grande to the Pacific.
A soldier’s family or a poor settler was not handed that land as a farm, and the war still showed up as taxes and lost wages.
A household in the older states watched the map jump west and had to ask whether slavery would travel with it.
Holders of claims against Mexico, and men positioned to buy or grant the new public domain, stood closest to the payoff.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed in 1848, ceded California and a huge tract of the Southwest.
The United States paid Mexico fifteen million dollars and assumed American citizens’ claims against Mexico up to three and a quarter million dollars.
Congress had already fought over slavery in any land taken, in the Wilmot Proviso, which never became law.
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 9 Stat. 922 (1848); Amy S. Greenberg, A Wicked War (2012)