Amy S. Greenberg’s A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico is a comprehensive look at the war America prefers to forget. The one undertaken in 1846-47 for the sole purpose of stealing territory. The one known in the U.S. as the Mexican American War and in Mexico as “the United States’ intervention in Mexico.” It would result in the annexation of what are today the U.S. states of New Mexico, Arizona, California, Utah, Nevada, and parts of Colorado.
It would also be the impetus for the first national antiwar movement in the United States and the first of Abraham Lincoln’s speeches as a newly minted Congressman from Illinois. A Wicked War provides a comprehensive look at these events, the rationale and excuses for the invasion, the political campaigns and jealousies that affected its trajectory, and the maneuvering of President Polk and his wife to ensure it happened.
Along the way, we meet a young Abraham Lincoln; Nicholas Trist, the U.S. negotiator who disobeyed his instructions in favor of the enemy; Henry Clay in the last great action of his career; and Ulysses S. Grant, a young officer who later wrote that the conflict was one of the most unjust wars ever waged by a strong nation against a weaker one.
If you’re looking for a book that gives you both the background to and events of the Mexican American War, or just a good overview of the events during that period of U.S. history, I strongly recommend A Wicked War.
Fiction and Fact From Old New Mexico 