"We take nothing by conquest…Thank God," wrote the National Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser, an influential Washington newspaper, in February 1847.

The United States had just purchased 55 per cent of Mexico for US$15 million as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The pact concluded the bloody Mexican-American War, which claimed thousands of lives.

Despite the loss of life, and American ambitions to take all of Mexico, the treaty painted the whole experience as a rightful "cession" of land rather than a conquest.