The Marais des Cygnes Massacre of 19 May 1858 was one of the worst single acts of violence in Bleeding Kansas. Charles Hamilton and his Missouri raiders lined up 11 unarmed free-state settlers in a ravine and shot them at close range, killing 5 and wounding 5. The event inspired John Greenleaf Whittier's poem 'Le Marais du Cygne.' The massacre demonstrated that despite the apparent easing of tensions in 1857, pro-slavery violence in Kansas had not ended.
The Mexican-American War (1846–1848) grew from the annexation of Texas (1845) and a disputed border between Texas and Mexico at the Rio Grande. President James K. Polk ordered US troops under General Zachary Taylor into the contested zone; after a skirmish that killed American soldiers, Congress declared war in May 1846. US forces won a series of engagements — Palo Alto, Monterrey, Buena Vista — before General Winfield Scott led an amphibious landing at Veracruz and an overland campaign to Mexico City, which fell in September 1847. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (February 1848) transferred California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming to the United States in exchange for $15 million and assumption of $3.25 million in claims — roughly 525,000 square miles, a 67 percent expansion of US territory. The war's outcome immediately reopened the slavery question: the Wilmot Proviso, debated throughout the war, proposed banning slavery from any territory acquired from Mexico, foreshadowing the sectional crisis of the 1850s.
5 free-state settlers killed; 5 wounded; 1 escaped
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