ctorate on the Miskito coast. The Monroe Doctrine was never meant to be international law, however, and seemed rather to place emphasis on American perception of imperialist actions rather than on an enumeration of territorial boundaries. It would not be severely challenged until the Maximilian affair.
In the meantime, the United States was busy doing some expansion of its own. In the Mexican-American War (1846-48), the Polk administration used a border dispute in Texas as an excuse to wage a full-scale, vicious and ultimately profitable war against its southern neighbor. The United States emerged from the war a great deal larger than before, adding much of the West, including California, to its girth, and in the process severely shrinking Mexico. The war embittered many Mexicans, who viewed it as an aggressive act of greed by the United States, and even a few Americans, among the future presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, who himself fought in the Mexican war and later wrote,
To this day [I] regard the war . . . as one of the most unjust
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