The War with Mexico
by Justin H. Smith
Summary
Justin H. Smith spent decades after leaving his professorship at Dartmouth building this two volume account of the war Mexico and the United States fought between 1846 and 1848, working from an unusually deep base of research that later made his personal papers valuable enough for the University of Texas to acquire them for its Latin American collection. The book follows the war from its immediate cause, the disputed border after the United States annexed Texas in 1845, when Mexico held the Nueces River as the true boundary and the United States insisted on the Rio Grande farther south, through the fighting that followed the clash of American and Mexican troops in the disputed strip between the two rivers.
Smith traces the war on two fronts: Zachary Taylor's campaign into northern Mexico, opened by victories at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma in 1846, and Winfield Scott's invasion further south that ended with the capture of Mexico City and the fall of the Plaza de la Constitucion, against a Mexican defense repeatedly reorganized under Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. The book carries the story through the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war with Mexico ceding roughly half its territory, including California, Texas, New Mexico, and parts of several other future states, to the United States for fifteen million dollars.
Smith left Dartmouth specifically to give this research his full attention, and reading the book means encountering the fruit of that single minded devotion: a comprehensive military and diplomatic narrative built from years of archival work on both sides of the border. It suits a reader who wants the war given the same painstaking attention usually reserved for larger conflicts, from a historian who treated it as worth a professor's entire second career.
Historical Context & Significance
The War with Mexico won the 1920 Pulitzer Prize for History, the prize's fourth year, following the board's decision to give no award at all in 1919. It also won the Loubat Prize in 1923, a Columbia University award for the best work in English on the history of North America.
Smith had resigned his professorship at Dartmouth, where he taught modern history from 1899 to 1908, specifically to pursue the research this book required, and the two volumes remain a product of that decision: a specialist's full attention to a war then already seven decades in the past. His papers passed to the University of Texas, where they enriched the university's Latin American collection, a fitting home for a historian who spent his working retirement inside the archives of a war fought on both sides of that border.