Volume 54, Number 15 · October 11, 2007
The Fight for Slavery in California
By James M. McPherson
The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War
by Leonard L. Richards
Knopf, 290 pp., $25.00
The annexation of Texas to the United States in 1845 and the conquest of what became the American Southwest in the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848 reduced the size of Mexico by more than half and increased the size of the United States by a third. These acquisitions also reopened the vexed question of slavery's expansion, which supposedly had been settled by the Missouri Compromise of 1820.
Review, 3198 words
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