Why didn't the USA annex all of Mexico?

♦By the end of 1846, the United States already held everything it had gone to war for. Texas, New Mexico, California, a Pacific coast. On paper, the Mexican-American War was over. Mexico refused to agree. To end it, the Americans would have to do something they had never done before: land an army on a hostile coast and march it hundreds of miles inland, through mountain passes and fever country, to a capital ringed by lakes and fortresses. And while they marched, voices back in Washington, including some in the president's own cabinet, began asking a much bigger question. Why stop at the north? This is the story of the campaign that decided the shape of North America. Of a stolen dispatch that changed everything, a desperate gamble across a frozen desert, and a battle both sides believed they were about to lose. Of a general who kept his enemy at the negotiating table with promises, and a diplomat who was fired and simply refused to go home. It is also the story of how close the United States came to swallowing an entire country, and why, in the end, it didn't.

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00:00 The War Was Already Won
01:12 Santa Anna Raises an Army
03:18 A New Front and the Chihuahua Expedition
06:36 The Intercepted Orders
12:10 The Battle of Buena Vista
19:47 Doniphan Takes Chihuahua
23:03 Winfield Scott Lands at Veracruz
27:29 Chaos in Mexico City
31:50 Cerro Gordo
37:26 Guerrillas and Santa Anna's Bribe
45:11 Contreras and Churubusco
50:54 Molino del Rey
53:51 The Fall of Mexico City
1:02:08 Guadalupe Hidalgo and "All Mexico"

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