60 Fun Facts About Mexican-American War

Before joining the US, Texas had been what since 1836?

Republic. Britain, France and the United States had all recognised it, but Mexico still claimed it, and so treated the 1845 annexation as the seizure of its own territory.

In Mexico, the Mexican-American War is widely known by which of these names?

The United States intervention. Mexicans also call it the War of '47, the year American troops fought their way into Mexico City and occupied it.

James K. Polk, who led the US into war with Mexico, is remembered as the first presidential nominee of which kind?

A dark horse. Whigs jeered 'Who is James K. Polk?' all through the 1844 campaign, and the little-known Tennessean answered by winning the White House.

Weeks after war with Mexico began, Polk settled which territory's border with Britain by treaty?

Oregon. Polk's supporters had demanded all of it with the cry 'Fifty-four forty or fight', but he split the territory with Britain at the 49th parallel instead.

Mexico claimed the Texas border lay along which river, rather than the Rio Grande?

The Nueces. The US army marched into the strip between the two rivers in 1846, and the first shots fired there became the president's case for war.

How did Mexico respond as the United States moved to annex Texas?

Broke off diplomatic relations. Mexico had threatened war over Texas, yet none followed at once; when Polk then sent an envoy to buy California, its government refused to receive him.

The Mexican-American War's opening clash, a cavalry ambush of a US patrol in April 1846, is known as what?

The Thornton Affair. Captain Seth Thornton's dragoons rode into a far larger Mexican force and were killed or captured, and the news reached Washington as proof that hostilities had begun.

Polk won his declaration of war by telling Congress that Mexico had shed blood where?

On American soil. The fight had happened in a border strip that both countries claimed, yet Congress voted overwhelmingly for war within two days of hearing the president's message.

Which freshman Illinois Whig demanded Polk name the 'spot' where American blood was shed?

Abraham Lincoln. The House never acted on his 'Spot Resolutions', and an Illinois newspaper mocked the first-term congressman as 'Spotty Lincoln'.

Which former US president, by then a congressman, voted against declaring war on Mexico in 1846?

John Quincy Adams. Two years later he voted no on a measure honouring the war's officers, collapsed at his House desk moments afterwards and died in the Capitol within two days.

Which writer was jailed for refusing a tax in protest at the Mexican-American War?

Henry David Thoreau. He spent only one night in jail, because someone, most likely his aunt, paid the tax against his wishes, and he turned the episode into the essay Civil Disobedience.

Editor John O'Sullivan is credited with coining which phrase in 1845?

Manifest Destiny. The phrase drew little notice when it first appeared in an 1845 essay urging the annexation of Texas, and O'Sullivan himself did not think the words profound.

Which Democratic congressman proposed banning slavery in any territory taken from Mexico?

David Wilmot. His Wilmot Proviso twice passed the House and twice died in the Senate, and the quarrel it started over slavery in the new lands set North against South.

General Zachary Taylor, victor at Palo Alto in 1846, was known to his troops by which nickname?

Old Rough and Ready. Taylor rarely wore anything in the field to show his rank, and that homespun image helped carry the career soldier to the White House two years later.

What did the US Army call its mobile horse-drawn light guns that proved decisive at Palo Alto?

Flying artillery. Major Samuel Ringgold had trained gun crews to race light cannon around a battlefield on horseback, and he was mortally wounded at Palo Alto, the tactic's first real test.

Which Texas city grew up around the fort US troops built opposite Matamoros in 1846?

Brownsville. The fort, and later the city, took the name of Major Jacob Brown, who died of wounds received while commanding it through a Mexican bombardment.

Which Mexican general, exiled in Cuba when the Mexican-American War began, returned to lead Mexico's armies?

Antonio López de Santa Anna. He got Washington to let him through its naval blockade by promising to work for peace, then took command of Mexico's army and fought.

Which gunmaker went back into business when the US ordered 1,000 of his revolvers for the war with Mexico?

Samuel Colt. His first gun company had failed, but word of how well his revolvers had served on the Texas frontier won him the wartime order that put him back in business.

Which US general's Army of the West took Santa Fe in August 1846 without firing a shot?

Stephen W. Kearny. The governor's forces took up a position on the road to block him, then withdrew without a fight, and Kearny rode in unopposed and proclaimed a civil government for New Mexico.

The June 1846 uprising in which American settlers seized Sonoma, California, is known as what?

The Bear Flag Revolt. The settlers' republic lasted under a month before the US Navy ran up the American flag in its place, but its grizzly bear lives on in California's state flag.

Which explorer led the California Battalion in 1846?

John C. Frémont. After the conquest he refused to give up the governorship of California to a superior officer, was court-martialled for mutiny and resigned from the army.

Which mounted volunteers scouted for the US army in northern Mexico and were feared by Mexicans as 'devils'?

Texas Rangers. They became the army's eyes and ears, and were so ruthless against guerrillas that Mexicans named them 'los Diablos Tejanos', the Texan Devils.

Winfield Scott lost the 1852 presidential election to which Democrat, a general in his own army in Mexico?

Franklin Pierce. Whigs revived the taunt 'Fainting Frank' over a fall from his horse in Mexico, yet he carried all but four states against his old commander.

Which future Confederate leader commanded the Mississippi Rifles, whose stand helped save the US line at Buena Vista?

Jefferson Davis. He was fighting under his former father-in-law, the army's commanding general, and came home wounded and a national hero to a seat in the US Senate.

Where on Mexico's Gulf coast did Winfield Scott land his army by sea in March 1847 to march on the capital?

Veracruz. Navy surfboats ferried the army onto the beach, and after a bombardment by army and navy guns the walled port surrendered within three weeks.

Commodore Matthew Perry, who commanded US warships off Mexico in 1847, later forced which country to open its ports?

Japan. Six years after his squadron's guns helped the army besiege a Mexican port, Perry steamed into Edo Bay and pressed Japan to end more than two centuries of isolation.

Which future Confederate general made his name as an engineer scouting routes for Winfield Scott's army in Mexico?

Robert E. Lee. At Cerro Gordo he found a way around the Mexican flank over ground thought impassable, and he finished the war with three promotions for gallantry.

Fear of which disease made Winfield Scott hurry his army inland from Mexico's Gulf coast in spring 1847?

Yellow fever. Its season on the coast set the timing of his whole campaign, and across the war disease killed about seven US soldiers for each one killed in action.

Which famous phrase recalls the storming of Chapultepec Castle in 1847?

The Halls of Montezuma. The Marines' Hymn takes poetic licence: the castle the Marines helped storm was begun by a Spanish viceroy in 1785, centuries after the Aztec emperor.

Legend says cadet Juan Escutia leapt to his death from Chapultepec Castle in 1847 wrapped in what?

The Mexican flag. In the legend he jumped so that the Americans could not capture it, and Mexico still honours him and his fellow cadets as the Niños Héroes, the boy heroes.

The San Patricios, a mostly Irish battalion that fought for Mexico, were largely men who had done what?

Deserted the US Army. Thirty captured San Patricios were hanged in sight of Chapultepec Castle, timed for the moment the American flag replaced the Mexican one on its walls.

Which religious group raised a battalion of about 500 men that marched nearly 2,000 miles to California for the US Army?

The Mormons. The men's army pay helped fund their church's migration to the Salt Lake Valley, and the only fight of the whole march was with a herd of wild bulls.

In which city did Mexico's congress ratify the 1848 peace treaty?

Querétaro. With American troops occupying Mexico City, congress and the president met there instead, and it was there that the two countries exchanged ratifications that May.

Which US diplomat negotiated the peace treaty with Mexico even after Polk had recalled him?

Nicholas Trist. He ignored the recall because he believed a deal was within reach, and Polk still sent the finished treaty to the Senate rather than prolong the war.

The treaty that ended the Mexican-American War in February 1848 takes its name from which place?

Guadalupe Hidalgo. Signed in what is now a northern district of Mexico City, the treaty handed the United States more than 525,000 square miles of today's American Southwest.

The $15 million the US paid Mexico in 1848 matched the agreed price of which earlier purchase?

Louisiana. That sum had doubled the size of the country in 1803; Mexico accepted it in 1848 after turning away a larger American offer before the war.

Which famous frontiersman was turned around mid-journey in 1846 to guide a US Army column across the desert to California?

Kit Carson. He was riding east with dispatches for Washington when the general he met on the trail handed them to another courier and made Carson the column's guide.

Which of these present-day US states was carved entirely from land Mexico gave up in 1848?

Nevada. A silver strike at the Comstock Lode in 1859 set off a population boom there, and the former Mexican territory was a state by 1864.

Which 1853 land deal freed the US from its duty to suppress Comanche and Apache raids into Mexico?

The Gadsden Purchase. Washington paid $10 million for a strip of desert it wanted for a southern railroad to the Pacific, and Mexico released it from the promise to stop the raids.

Which deal tried to settle slavery in the lands won from Mexico by admitting California as a free state?

The Compromise of 1850. It left Utah and New Mexico to decide on slavery for themselves and gave the South a tough Fugitive Slave Act, which stirred a strong reaction across the North.

Which senator opposed annexing all of Mexico, saying 'ours, sir, is the Government of a white race'?

John C. Calhoun. Though the South's leading champion of slavery, he had opposed the war from the start, warning that conquest would turn the republic into an empire.

Which news agency was born in 1846 when New York papers pooled the cost of covering the Mexican War?

The Associated Press. By its own account, the papers paid for a pony express route through Alabama that brought war news north faster than the Post Office could deliver it.

Which poet, then editing the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, cheered on the war with Mexico in his 1846 editorials?

Walt Whitman. His editorials demanded that Mexico be punished, yet within two years the paper sacked him for backing the anti-slavery Free Soil movement.

How did the presidency of Mexican-American War hero Zachary Taylor end just 16 months after it began?

He died in office. Taylor fell ill after Fourth of July ceremonies and was dead within five days, leaving the fight over slavery in the conquered lands to Millard Fillmore.

Ulysses S. Grant, a lieutenant in the war, later wrote that US troops were sent to the Rio Grande to do what?

Provoke a fight. 'It was essential that Mexico should commence it,' Grant wrote in his memoirs, which call the war 'one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation'.

The Treaty of Cahuenga, which ended the fighting in California in 1847, was signed in which modern city?

Los Angeles. Andrés Pico's Californios gave up their artillery there and were allowed to ride home in peace, which ended the fighting in California a year before the war itself was over.

Which American writer predicted that the US would conquer Mexico but that 'Mexico will poison us'?

Ralph Waldo Emerson. He likened the conquest to a man swallowing arsenic, and the quarrel over slavery in the captured lands did help bring on the Civil War in 1861.

Which fortified Mexican city did Zachary Taylor's army storm in September 1846, fighting from house to house?

Monterrey. Texans showed the regulars how to break through house walls instead of advancing down open streets, and Taylor then granted a truce that an angry Polk repudiated.

Illinois volunteers at Cerro Gordo captured the artificial leg of Mexico's commander, who had lost the real one fighting which country?

France. He lost the leg in 1838, in a brief clash remembered as the Pastry War, and the cork replacement became a war trophy held by Illinois's state military museum.

What do Marines call the red trouser trim said to honour NCOs and officers lost at Chapultepec?

The blood stripe. The tale is Corps legend rather than record: Marines had been wearing trouser stripes, an Army fashion, for about a decade before the war.

US troops stormed Molino del Rey in 1847 because Winfield Scott believed the old mill was being used for what?

Casting cannon. Ulysses S. Grant, who fought there, wrote that this 'proved to be a mistake': the costly assault turned up grain and only a few gun moulds.

Which nickname for American infantrymen is thought to date from the war with Mexico?

Doughboy. Famous as the name for the Americans who fought in the First World War, the word turns up in soldiers' accounts of the war with Mexico seventy years earlier, and nobody is sure where it came from.

Which artillery captain at Buena Vista inspired the legend of Taylor's 'a little more grape' order?

Braxton Bragg. The order is probably legend, but the story of his guns breaking the Mexican attack made the gunner a national hero long before he led a Confederate army.

Which prominent anti-war statesman lost his third son at the Battle of Buena Vista?

Henry Clay. Henry Clay Jr. fell leading Kentucky volunteers; his father kept denouncing the war, then lost his party's 1848 nomination to the general who had commanded at that very battle.

James K. Polk, having won the war with Mexico, kept which promise he had made before taking office?

Serve only one term. Polk stepped down in 1849 as promised, handing the White House to a Whig general the war had made a hero, and was dead about three months later.

Under the peace treaty, Mexicans who stayed in the ceded lands for a year without declaring a choice became what?

US citizens. The Senate softened that promise before ratifying, though: instead of 'as soon as possible', their full rights would come 'at the proper time', as judged by Congress.

Before ratifying the peace treaty, the Senate struck out an article protecting what?

Mexican land grants. With Article X gone, California's rancheros had to prove their titles before a US commission, and many lost their land paying for the lawyers.

Nine days before Mexico signed away California, what was discovered there at Sutter's Mill?

Gold. A carpenter, James Marshall, spotted the flakes in a streambed, and though he and his employer, John Sutter, tried to keep the find a secret, the news soon got out.

Many of the US Army's captains and lieutenants in the war were graduates of which academy?

West Point. Its graduates came home with a string of battlefield promotions, and their record in Mexico confirmed the academy's place in American life.

Which US president laid a wreath at Mexico's Niños Héroes monument a century after the war?

Harry S. Truman. He stood in silence at the cadets' memorial during a state visit, the same week he told Mexico's president the two neighbours had learned the hard way that peace is best.