Greater or Lesser Mexico is hella more likely than the Mexico what is

People tend to think of what is as what had to be. But that is not true.

The U.S.-Mexico border as-is, the place the President wants to build a wall, is a very low probability event. 

The Mexican-American war is a veritable cornucopia of counterfactuals. The United States could very easily have avoided the war. A lot had to go wrong for Clay to lose. Unchallenged vote stealing in Louisiana, dumb flip-flops on Texas annexation (see below), an idiot flirtation with nativism. The Clay campaign made more errors than the 1901 Detroit Tigers. Had 2,553 New Yorkers switched their vote in 1844, Henry Clay would have become president. 

Now, Clay was not a die-hard opponent of annexation. In fact, he wobbled on the issue, writing letters against annexation but flip-flopping during the campaign. (This cost northern votes without gaining southern ones.) That said, he insisted that annexation could only happen if there was an agreement with Mexico, which seems, well, unlikely. It is true that the annexation resolution passed in February 1845, before Clay would have taken office, but the Senate would not have taken it up had Clay been the president-elect.

But if that does not convince you, consider the legislative history of the annexation resolution. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee initially voted down the resolution. What revived it was an amendment from Senator Robert Walker (D-Mississippi) that gave the president the option of admitting Texas under the resolution or negotiating a new treaty. The amended resolution made it out of the Senate on a 27-25 vote with the expectation that President Polk would negotiate a new treaty. In a shocker, outgoing President Tyler on his last day in office invited Texas to join without a treaty. Polk kept the offer open and the rest is history. But in a history where Henry Clay becomes president, none of this happens. And as we all know, the United States of 1844 was about to be consumed by its own internal divisions: if the Clay administration survives to January 1853, then the window for annexation would close. (Clay died in 1852, but the point stands.)

Think on that one a moment. A close easily-swung election (kinda like the one in 2016) resulted in the end of the Republic of Texas and the transfer of the whole southwest into the United States. Maybe possibly the U.S. would have eventually gotten northern California, but the history would have been different and Texas would be outside the United States to this day. 

What about the other direction? As recounted, the current U.S.-Mexico border is unlikely in the extreme. Had Nicholas Trist not disobeyed orders, it would have been further south. But how much further south? This post discusses President Polk’s musings and discusses a counterfactual border. But Polk was just spitballing to the cabinet. What do we know about how much territory he would have claimed?

Well, we know two things. First, the point of expansion was to get more slave states. That means places where cotton could grow, labor was scarce, and the elite open to slavery. Second, we know that southern Senators tried to amend the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to include more Mexican territory. Their proposal can be found here, and a map is below:

It includes all of what became the Gadsen Purchase and a big chunk of northern Mexico. Not coincidentally, it is the chunk of the northern Mexico that was in fact good cotton land. (Chihuahua eventually became a good place for cotton, but it was too dry and isolated for that in the 1840s.) It is also the chunk of Mexico that tried to join the Confederacy in 1861. (1)

Here is a close up of the northeastern part. I have no idea if it would have been admitted as one or two states:

In short, once you get a Mexican-American War, it is more likely than not that northeastern Mexico winds up inside the United States: Monclova, Saltillo, Monterrey, all American cities. 

Today the border feels inevitable. But it was not. As late as 1844, the current line would have been a very unlikely outcome.

(1) Ronnie Tyler, Santiago Vidaurri and the Southern Confederacy (Austin:  Texas State Historical Association, 1973), pp. 52-53. See also “The Confederate of the Sierra Madre,” a 2011 post at the New York Times.

Comments

[J.H.]

I guess the admission of the area south of Texas as one state or two would have depended on how many other free states could be admitted up until the 1860s. On the other hand, perhaps it might have been included as a part of Texas?

[Noel Maurer]

Including the territory as part of Texas is highly unlikely. There are multiple reasons for that. In no particular order:

(1) Federal policy was already to shrink Texas;
(2) Texas had no claim on the area;
(3) Subjugating the area to Austin would anger pro-American elites in Monterrey;
(4) From the POV of Southern senators and President Polk, more slave states was the whole point of the exercise;
(5) The area had about the same population as Texas, but was ethnically distinct, even. There were maybe 20,000 Tejanos in Texas in 1850 (out of 212,000); the area south of the Rio Grande had a population of 200,000 overwhelmingly Spanish-speaking people.

(I'm currently working on a project that will, among other things, better nail down the size and characteristics of the Tejano population.)

Add those five reasons together and it seems that bringing the area in as a separate state is overdetermined. Clever northern politicking could, however, delay its admission for a while, leaving it as a territory. That would be hard, however, what with a population of 200,000 in the area.

I'd like to drag some of my academic colleagues here to chime in, but I've rarely had luck with that ...

[Randy McDonald]

Hmm. With delayed statehood, would New Mexico be a relevant model for northeastern Mexico?

[Noel Maurer]

With a caveat, yes, I think it would.

New Leon (or perhaps "Rio Grande") would be a lot more populous than New Mexico. New Mexico didn't reach 200,000 people until a bit after 1900; New Leon would be starting with about that many in 1848. In addition, the upper class of New Leon was rather more prosperous than their New Mexico counterparts.

New Mexico saw widespread land fraud by Anglos and fairly large intermarriage between Anglo men and Hispano women, whose children appear to have married mostly Anglos. The combination meant that Anglos rapidly became the elite.

That process would be slower in New Leon and would probably not go quite as far. The Hispano upper class in New Mexico never disappeared, of course! But the equivalent group in New Leon would remain relatively more prominent in the state's public life and private economy.

Still, that said, New Mexico isn't a terrible model.

[J.H.]

But would New Leon/Rio Grande be admitted with 200,000 even though it wasn't mainly Anglo settlers? Or would admission be delayed for perhaps a decade or two until you got more Anglos living there?

[Randy McDonald]

Would you necessarily get substantial numbers of Anglo-American settlers in a territory with a solidly Hispanic population? Anglo settlement in New Mexico seems to have been minimized by virtue of the presence of a surviving Hispanic settler community.

[Noel Maurer]

J.H.: It comes down to political skills. Southerners will want a new slave state. Northerners will not and will take any excuse to prevent it.

Let's say Polk replaces Trist with a more compliant negotiator. If Polk is smart, the treaty will write into it that the new territory is to enter the Union as a state. It would be very hard for Congress to vote against such a treaty; plenty of northern Senators would flip. The South couldn't get the Senate to re-write an existing treaty proposal, but approving a more expansive one is a much easier row to hoe.

In that world, New Leon is in as a state. An additional slave state means that the Compromise of 1850 as we know it won't happen. The South will have to give up something to swing Northerners in the face of two additional slave Senate seats ... and that something will get the Southerners to fight harder for Kansas later on. So the Civil War will likely happen on schedule.

But what if Polk's negotiator blows including statehood language in the treaty and leaves it up to Congress? (This is extremely plausible.) Now things get trickier. NM statehood was delayed because slavery never took hold in the state. That wouldn't hold for New Leon, where there were plenty of cotton lands. Slaveholders will start flooding in. And northerners will know this.

Let's think about the Compromise of 1850, which passed as five separate bills. TheThe bill organizing New Mexico passed the House by only 108-97. The prospect (or reality) of a slave NL/RG could easily flip six Northern representatives to "no."

So what does that mean?

Northerners, I imagine, would insist that keeping NL/RG away from statehood will be part of the cost of shepherding the Compromise through Congress. I imagine that the south would agree, informally, as long as NL/RG was a slave territory. Southerners would hope that as slaveowners flooded in, the pressure to admit it as a state would eventually become overwhelming. That pressure, however, would be unlikely to break before 1860 ... which means, absent unpredictable changes, the Civil War happens on schedule with NL/RG as a territory.

Randy: I don't know! I wish I did. (Anyone?) But I'm not sure it's relevant. It would be hard to keep NL/RG away from statehood indefinitely, if only because the state would likely develop a powerful Democratic machine and therefore promise secure Senate and electoral college votes. That puts statehood as part of the great American tragedy that ended Reconstruction. Which seems disgustingly plausible: the U.S. gets a Spanish-speaking state as part of the settlement that disenfranchises black Americans for a century.

Thoughts?

[Noel Maurer]

Randy: actually, I can give a better answer. New Leon had a lot of unclaimed land; the terrenos baldíos. Americans with access to capital -- to buy land and slaves -- would have come in the approval of the territorial government to claim the land. More revenue for the elites in Monterrey, more connection to the South for the Americans.

A migration of elite Southerners seems inevitable; how many other Anglo settlers would follow is what I don't know.

[J.H.]

But....would greater migration of Southern/Anglo elites and settlers to NL result in less Anglo settlement in areas that were historically taken from Mexico? How would that affect those areas? Would New Mexico territory have remained even more Hispanic than it was historically?

[Noel Maurer]

JH: you're asking if opening New Leon would have led to fewer white settler in NM? My guess is no. This was an era of unrestricted immigration. Opportunities in New Leon would have found settlers to take them. The ethnic make-up of white New Mexicans might change, but you'd have to know more about the source of migration into that territory than I do to reasonably opine on the counterfactual.