Description
The Mexican War was a collision of two Manifest Destinies—one rising, one faltering. Mexico’s northern frontier was vast but nearly empty, home to only about 80,000 settlers and lightly governed. The United States, expanding rapidly in the 1840s, faced a region Mexico could not defend. The war shifted sovereignty more than population and marked America’s emergence as a continental power. Today’s border debates project modern assumptions onto a nineteenth‑century landscape that never resembled them.
