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This chapter rehearses the myriad ways in which the U.S. Mexican War brought about a new awareness of the Caribbean on the part of Southern combatants, who crossed its waters and experienced its cultures, which seemed both strange and familiar. U.S. concepts of Mexico - many of them drawn from Prescott’s monumental The Conquest of Mexico - are examined, alongside a portrayal of the ways in which the doctrine of manifest destiny shaped and influenced both the conduct of the war and modes of describing it. Mention is made of many of the writers who wrote about the war, many of whom never went to Mexico. The chapter builds to a reading of two military memories by Raphael Semmes and Arthur Manigualt, and concludes with a presentation of Colonel William C. Falkner’s sensationist novel, The Spanish Heroine, which influenced the Colonel’s great-grandson, William Faulkner. The concept of the “tropical sublime” receives a full illustration here.

This epilogue details events following the annexation of Texas to the United States. Topics covered include President James K. Polk's efforts to wrest California from Mexico—and all the lucrative trade opportunities that would come with it—for the United States; Congress' declaration of war against Mexico on May 13, 1846; the three waves of migration that transformed the shared edges of the United States and Mexico; how the US-Mexican War remade both nations; and the unprecedented arrival of thousands Americans in Texas following annexation and the close of the U.S.-Mexican War, and with it massive forced migration of enslaved men and women, who were brought into the region to toil on the farms and plantations.

Although the Second Seminole War marked the effective end of the Gulf South as a borderland, encounters instigated by imperialism in the Southwest continued to affect the pursuit of knowledge in America. The rise of the Smithsonian Institution and the extension of U.S. governance into the West were interrelated processes: territorial expansion influenced the Smithsonian’s foundational mandate and early activities, while the Smithsonian organized, facilitated, and patronized an array of expansion-promoting scientific projects in collaboration with federal officials. The relationship between the conquest of the Southwest and the emergence of the Smithsonian reflects that violence, competition, exchange, and encounters with the environment and history were still inextricable from knowledge production at both the local and imperial levels.

The darkly humorous mode of antiwar critique in Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and the satirical newspaper The Onion: America’s Finest News Source has been a prevalent trope of oppositional politics in America over the past decade. However, this practice dates back 200 years ago, when The Cynick and The Tickler employed satire to express their dissatisfaction with the War of 1812. This chapter examines the crucial role played in both eras by American antiwar satirists, dubbed “laughing doves” in reference to the hawk/dove terminology first coined in 1812. It provides a valuable historical frame for political discourse in the public sphere by focusing on three wars: the War of 1812 (–1815), the U.S.-Mexican War (1846–1848), and the U.S.-Philippine War (1899–1913). It looks at a number of forgotten American antiwar satirists, as well as several Americans who are remembered for everything but their antiwar satire, from Abraham Lincoln to Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Finally, it argues that antiwar satirists navigate between the “twin accusations of triviality and treason”.

This chapter maps sympathy’s place in the emplotment of what became known as the “New Southwest” after the U.S.–Mexican War. The chapter reads sympathy in the work of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, who opposed U.S. settlers plotting out the American West. In Life Among the Piutes, Hopkins countered the proposals that would eventually become the Dawes Act of 1887, which prescribed allotment (parceling land for tribesmembers’ individual ownership) and severalty (stripping Native Americans of tribal citizenship). She guides Anglo readers in understanding “love thy neighbor as thyself” as a principle best expressed from far away. After Gwin’s Land Law of 1851, de Burton lost a fortune defending her family’s rancho against U.S. squatters. In The Squatter and the Don, she inverts the stock character of the “sad” Mexicano to associate U.S. Americans with tears and grief through the figures of the white railroad baron, corrupt lawyer, and settler citizen.

The U.S.-Mexican War propelled Stephen Douglas and Jefferson Davis to the pinnacles of power but triggered a new round of sectional conflict that shook the Democratic Party to its core. Davis’s celebrated military service won him a seat in the U.S. Senate, where he fought to protect slaveholders’ property rights throughout the nation’s massive new western domain. Douglas joined him in the Senate as the self-appointed spokesman for a vast western constituency stretching from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean. As they attempted to govern the Mexican Cession and the Oregon Territory, Davis and Douglas grappled with portentous questions about democracy, property rights, and the Union. Douglas embraced popular sovereignty as a means to preserve white men’s self-government, but Davis denounced it as a cloaked free soil doctrine and demanded positive federal protection for property in human beings. Their conflict escalated until Douglas helped broker the Compromise of 1850. Douglas hailed the compromise as a permanent basis for sectional peace, while Davis’s dogged resistance to the measure briefly upended his career.

This book has explored the work of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and its missionaries as part of their attempt to bring about the conversion of the world in the early republic. It has shown how American missionaries linked civilization with Christianity and were committed to a kind of Christian imperialism that they thought would make the world a better place. It has also discussed the missionary understanding of moral politics and how the missionary relationship to government plagued the mission movement throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book concludes by reflecting on a global vision of the Board, this time chronologically focused on the year 1848, as the U.S.–Mexican War ended.