The U.S.-Mexican War in James Russell Lowell's The Bigelow Papers

TL;DR: The United States of America is an ordinary country in an ordinary place, given to ordinary national ambitions, and typically violent expansionist methods as discussed by the authors, and most American historians avoid this interpretation, preferring instead to chart the politics that led up to the conflict, the progress of battles, or the internal tensions that followed it.

Abstract: O reading of the u.s.–mexican war leads to a sobering conclusion: the United States of America is an ordinary country in an ordinary place, given to ordinary national ambitions, and typically violent expansionist methods. With few exceptions, most American historians of the war avoid this interpretation, preferring instead to chart the politics that led up to the conflict, the progress of battles, or the internal tensions that followed it. Rarely do they delve into its particular and massive contradictions, an elision attesting to the persistent narrative power of American exceptionalism. In the 1840s, that political mythology framed a dubious war against a sovereign country as an act of self-defense, justified by moral obligations, and grounded in America’s putative role as a light of freedom. Many Americans of the era, infused with a surging nationalism, saw the conflict’s necessity and justice as self-evident. Jingoistic war supporters like Walt Whitman unquestioningly declared Mexico’s European anachronism to be by definition opposed to America’s globally redemptive purpose. But even before it began, contemporary politicians and writers were debating the war’s morality and justice. Dubious at best, at worst a spectacularly unprovoked aggression, the war, fought from 1846 to 1848, required an imaginative re-arrangement into the framework of exceptionalist belief because it could so obviously demonstrate that America’s national mythology could also be a veneer for greed and violence—perhaps not the redeeming enterprise of a republic dedicated to the advancement of democracy and freedom. Predictably, many writers