Guadalupe‐Hidalgo, Treaty of

Guadalupe‐Hidalgo, Treaty of (1848).The treaty that ended the Mexican War with the United States was signed in Guadalupe‐Hidalgo, a suburb of Mexico City, on 2 February 1848. President James K. Polk had already discharged negotiator Nicholas P. Trist, but the U.S. envoy used his imminent departure to persuade a fragile Mexican provisional government to consent to a substantial loss of territory rather than continuing a disastrous war or risking a more draconian peace. U.S. forces already controlled the capital, the major ports, and the northern half of Mexico. Polk, facing a fractious Congress and fearing the costs of an open‐ended occupation, reluctantly accepted Trist's handiwork.

The U.S. agreed to pay Mexico $15 million and assume adjusted claims of U.S. citizens of $3 million. The territorial settlement—a Río Grande boundary for Texas, and the annexation by the United States of Mexico's northern provinces—New Mexico and Alta California—was the most important and durable legacy of the treaty. The pact's most controversial provisions were those that assured political and religious liberty and the security of property to Mexicans who remained in the transferred territories. During the ratification process, the U.S. Senate modified Article IX, which had originally promised U.S. citizenship to these people “as soon as possible,” and struck out entirely Article X, which had guaranteed Mexican land grants in all of its former territories, including Texas. The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty (38 to 14) on 10 March 1848.

Although U.S. emissaries sought to reassure Mexico through the “Protocol of Querétaro”—signed in that city when the two countries exchanged ratifications of the treaty in May 1848—that civil and property rights were not threatened by the Senate's modifications, these presumed privileges were in fact sharply circumscribed in the decades following the war.
[See also Mexican War.]

Bibliography

David M. Pletcher , The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War, 1973.
Richard Griswold del Castillo , The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict, 1990.

James E. Crisp