Talk:Mexican-American War

The involvement of the slave interest ought to be fronted even more than it is. The MAW, and the Texan Revolution, were a part of a greater push for the United States to expand southward rather than westward, into the Caribbean and Central America. Confederate leaders understood that the Plains and Mountain territories the nation had been acquiring were poor fits to chattel slavery. They had vast open spaces, mountains and deserts, and were peopled with Natives with no particular love for Whitey. Plantation slavery in such territory would be a non-starter for fairly obvious reasons. For its economic viability it required the cultivation of resource crops like tobacco, cotton, and sugar cane which were exported for processing elsewhere. That sort of thing could work in Cuba; it wouldn't work in Colorado or Arizona. This was the factional motivation behind US military pushes into Texas and Mexico. The slave power already realized that Texas was about as far west as slavery could be taken; what worked in Houston wouldn't even work in El Paso, much less in Colorado. Smerdis of Tlön, wekʷōm teḱs. 21:51, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

Like William Walker and his band of marauding bandits dubbed "filibusters", eh? — Oxyaena ^Harass 22:25, 28 May 2019 (UTC)