What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

by Daniel Walker Howe

against Mexico has been called a “rehearsal” for the Civil War that began thirteen years later.8 This is true not only in the sense that many senior officers in both Union and Confederate armies got their first experience of combat as junior officers in Mexico. In a strategic sense as well, making war on Mexico presented problems analogous to those of the Civil War. Like the Union in that later conflict, the United States needed to invade and conquer a vast country in the face of determined resistance. As in the Civil War, the U.S. Navy played a major role by blockading ports and preventing the enemy from importing munitions. Mexico, like the South later, enjoyed the benefit of interior lines of communication, which Santa Anna would exploit in the largest battle of the war, Buena Vista. Like the Confederates, the Mexicans strove to gain foreign intervention to preserve their national integrity. Finally, like the Confederacy, Mexico hoped to prolong the conflict until the