Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850 (The David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History)

by Andrew J. Torget

Polk dispatched a special envoy to Mexico City during the fall of 1845—even before annexation was complete—with an offer to pay up to $25 million in exchange for the territory between Texas and California. Mexico’s leaders, deeply divided among themselves and unwilling to cede their far-northern territories to the United States, refused to receive the envoy. Polk, in response, ordered the U.S. Army to take up a position along the banks of the Río Grande, far beyond the Nueces River that Mexico considered the border of Texas. When the Mexican commander on the other side retaliated, the U.S. Congress declared war on May 13, 1846. Calls for volunteers for the U.S. Army brought a flood of eager young men into Texas, as the newest member of the United States became the staging ground for the American invasion of Mexico that began during the summer of 1846.1