THE SPOILS OF THE MEXICAN WAR
It has been remarked often that it was a mere accident that gave North America to the Nordics instead of to the King of Spain, when Columbus turned from his course to follow a flock of birds and thus sighted the West Indies instead of the mainland, but several other incidents played an equally important part in giving this empire to the British. The defeat of the Invincible Armada by the captains of Elizabeth stopped the expansion of Spain and thus gave the British an opportunity to begin their colonization, and the Louisiana Purchase by Thomas Jefferson's administration virtually made certain that by far the larger part of the North American continent should belong to British stock, rather than to French or Spanish. Jefferson himself, who believed that the Purchase was illegal, saw its tremendous possibilities, but no one in his day could realize just what this action would mean in extending a Nordic civilization to the Pacific Ocean.
The settlement of the Louisiana Purchase by Americans made certain the conquest of Texas, which was extraordinarily aided by the fact that in the period after the War of 1812 there were not many more than 5000 Mexicans in that vast territory. The great Plains stretched southward as a wide-open domain, inviting settlement by those who were far-sighted and aggressive enough to possess themselves of it.
The beginning of the American settlement of Texas is always dated from 1820, when the Connecticut Yankee, Moses Austin, started his colonization scheme. Austin himself had lived for some years in Missouri, but most of his settlers, like most of the other early pioneers of Texas, came from the lower Mississippi Valley or from Tennessee and Kentucky, with a sprinkling of adventurers from the Central and New England States and even from Europe.
By 1835, when the Americans so outnumbered the Mexicans that the throwing off of the Mexican yoke was inevitable, there were 30,000 or 35,000 Nordics settled in the territory. The original background of these can easily be remembered from what has been said before in these pages about the settlement of their respective States. They were overwhelmingly English and Scotch and pre-dominantly from the trans-Appalachian part of the United States.
The idea that most of these settlers went to Texas as a deliberate plan to acquire this region for the extension of the slave-holding States seems to have little basis. Most of them went, just as most of them or their fathers had gone to Tennessee or to Louisiana a few decades previously, in search of better and cheaper land, freer opportunities, and a possible fortune. It was the accident of geographical location that gave to Texas its importance as slave-holding territory, and that led indirectly to the war with Mexico.
On technical grounds there was little justification for a declaration of war in 1846, but from a larger point of view it was one of the most important and most beneficial acts ever taken by the American Government, in spite of the feeling of the Abolitionists, because it formed the final procedure in the spread of American sovereignty to the Pacific Ocean.