Hispanic America, Texas, and the Mexican War

By Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier

Hispanic America, Texas, and the Mexican War examines the history of the southwestern area of the United States. Topics covered include the settlement of the area that became the southwestern portion of the United States, detailing how it evolved from land settled by Native Americans, to Spanish territory, to states that were pawns between the North and South prior to the Civil War.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
• Release date: Jul 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781620645093

Christopher Collier

Christopher Collier is an author and historian. He attended Clark University and Columbia University, where he earned his PhD. He was the official Connecticut State Historian from 1984 to 2004 and is now professor of history emeritus at the University of Connecticut. He is the brother of James Lincoln Collier, with whom he has written a number of novels, most of which are based on historic events. His books have been nominated for several awards, including the Newbery Honor and the Pulitzer Prize.

Book preview

SERIES

PREFACE

OVER MANY YEARS of both teaching and writing for students at all levels, from grammar school to graduate school, it has been borne in on us that many, if not most, American history textbooks suffer from trying to include everything of any moment in the history of the nation. Students become lost in a swamp of factual information, and as a consequence lose track of how those facts fit together and why they are significant and relevant to the world today.

In this series, our effort has been to strip the vast amount of available detail down to a central core. Our aim is to draw in bold strokes, providing enough information, but no more than is necessary, to bring out the basic themes of the American story, and what they mean to us now. We believe that it is surely more important for students to grasp the underlying concepts and ideas that emerge from the movement of history, than to memorize an array of facts and figures.

The difference between this series and many standard texts lies in what has been left out. We are convinced that students will better remember the important themes if they are not buried under a heap of names, dates, and places.

In this sense, our primary goal is what might be called citizenship education. We think it is critically important for America as a nation and Americans as individuals to understand the origins and workings of the public institutions that are central to American society. We have asked ourselves again and again what is most important for citizens of our democracy to know so they can most effectively make the system work for them and the nation. For this reason, we have focused on political and institutional history, leaving social and cultural history less well developed.

This series is divided into volumes that move chronologically through the American story. Each is built around a single topic, such as the Pilgrims, the Constitutional Convention, or immigration. Each volume has been written so that it can stand alone, for students who wish to research a given topic. As a consequence, in many cases material from previous volumes is repeated, usually in abbreviated form, to set the topic in its historical context. That is to say, students of the Constitutional Convention must be given some idea of relations with England, and why the Revolution was fought, even though the material was covered in detail in a previous volume. Readers should find that each volume tells an entire story that can be read with or without reference to other volumes.

Despite our belief that it is of the first importance to outline sharply basic concepts and generalizations, we have not neglected the great dramas of American history. The stories that will hold the attention of students are here, and we believe they will help the concepts they illustrate to stick in their minds. We think, for example, that knowing of Abraham Baldwin's brave and dramatic decision to vote with the small states at the Constitutional Convention will bring alive the Connecticut Compromise, out of which grew the American Senate.

Each of these volumes has been read by esteemed specialists in its particular topic; we have benefited from their comments.

CHAPTER I: THE COMING OF THE EUROPEANS TO THE SOUTHWEST

THE SOUTHWESTERN SECTION of the United States, including the present states of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California, and parts of Nevada and Utah, has a history that is somewhat different from the rest of the nation. Most of the rest of the nation was settled by English people and their descendants, beginning in Jamestown in 1607 and Plymouth in 1620. From these first tiny settlements, these English-speaking people with English ways pushed westward, at first slowly, and then in a rush, until they occupied most of the land from the Atlantic to the Pacific. (For the story of the first English settlers see The Paradox of Jamestown and Pilgrims and Puritans, the second and third volumes in this series.) People from other countries and ethnic groups did of course come to North America—at first Irish and Germans, and then others from almost every national group elsewhere. Nonetheless, the English settled the area that later became the United States first, and American ways are still basically derived from the English ones that the first settlers brought with them, although of course they have been modified by the cultures of later arrivals.

But the first European settlers in the huge southwestern corner of the modern United States were Spanish, and a strong Hispanic influence remains in this part of the United States today.

The story of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Central America and much of South America is fascinating, and much too large for this book. To describe it briefly, once Columbus discovered the Americas in the 1490s, European explorers and adventurers set out to see what they could get out of a strange new land across three thousand miles of ocean. In particular, English, French, Portuguese and Spanish all made efforts to establish colonies on the Caribbean Islands and bordering lands. The Spanish, however, pushed deeper into the American mainland, and with very small companies of soldiers, sometimes no more than a few dozen, conquered vast empires of millions of Indians.

Of particular importance to what would become the United States was the conquest of the. Aztecs of Mexico by Hernando Cortez. The Aztecs had once been a poor tribe from Mexico's north, but during the 1400s they moved into Central Mexico and, in a sudden outburst of energy, managed to conquer many of the other Indian groups in the area. They went on to develop a civilized nation as large and populous as many European countries. Their capital city, Tenochtitlán (pronounced teh-NOCK-tea-t'lan), was rich