History of the United States I / Unit 11 USH1 1551 review, 2 to 3 minutes
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
The idea
The treaty was signed in February eighteen forty-eight and the anchor calls it a triumph for American expansion. Its terms were these. The United States promised to grant Mexican citizens in the ceded territory United States citizenship in the future, when the territories they were living in became states. It promised to recognise the Spanish land grants to the Pueblos in New Mexico. It agreed to assume three million three hundred fifty thousand dollars worth of Mexican debts owed to United States citizens. It paid Mexico fifteen million dollars for the loss of its land. And it promised to guard the residents of the Mexican Cession from Native American raids.
In practice
A payment of fifteen million dollars for territory taken by force, the same sum paid to France for Louisiana forty-five years earlier.
Where people slip
Read the citizenship clause carefully, because it is the one that failed. Citizenship was promised in the future, conditional on statehood, which for New Mexico meant sixty-four years of waiting. The land-grant guarantee was widely ignored in practice, and Mexican landholders lost property through American courts that the treaty had promised to protect. The Pueblos were guaranteed their grants by a government that had removed the Cherokee from theirs sixteen years earlier despite a Supreme Court ruling, as Unit 10 records. A treaty obligation and an enforced right are different things, and this is the second time the course has shown the gap. Note finally the sum. Fifteen million dollars is exactly what Jefferson had paid France for Louisiana forty-five years earlier, and it bought a comparable expanse of the continent. The difference is that Louisiana was sold by a European power that had never occupied it, while this territory was taken from a neighbouring republic by invasion and paid for afterwards.
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