Race, Empire, and the Forgotten War: Why Nineteenth-Century Americans Had So Much Trouble Remembering Their 1846 War with Mexico

From a military standpoint, few U.S. wars have been more successful than the 1846 war with Mexico. The U.S. won every major engagement and took half of Mexico's territory at war's end. This was the first war the United States fought on foreign territory and one might imagine that the 1846 U.S.-Mexico War would be embraced and celebrated for “winning an empire” for the United States, for proving the martial virtues of American soldiers, and for demonstrating America's military prowess to the world. Such was not the case. With the exception of veterans of the conflict almost no Americans showed any enthusiasm for commemorating the war with Mexico in the later nineteenth century, not even when the U.S. geared up for a second war for empire in 1898. By the early twentieth century it was known as the “forgotten war”. This paper will explore the process of forgetting, and will outline the key reasons why Americans failed to commemorate their war with Mexico. At the heart of the disavowal of the war were questions of race and empire that became increasingly problematic in the aftermath of the Civil War. From the start of the war, both opponents and supporters of slavery questioned the racial implications of annexing Mexican territory. A critique of an expanding American empire that was grounded in assumptions about racial hierarchy undermined the territorial ambitions of supporters of the war. With the increase in sectionalism in the 1850s, and racial conflicts of Reconstruction, the U.S.-Mexico War fell into disfavor. By 1898, Americans had forgotten entirely that wars for race and empire don't always work out as planned.