- Historic Sites The Taking Of California A low comedy for high
stakes: February 1973 | Volume 24, Issue 2 However aggressive in
tone, all this saber rattling was at first designed to frighten
Mexico into abandoning her claims to the country of the Rio
Grande and negotiating for the outright sale of New Mexico and
California; Polk had no special desire for war—not inJune, at
any rate. But by November, when he sent John Slidell to Mexico
City with the authority to offer as much as fifteen million
dollars for New Mexico and another twentyfive million for
California, he may well have changed his mind. Slidell’s mission
was hopeless. The unstable government of Mexico was in no
position to bargain for the cession of so much territory; had it
done so, the outcry of national protest would have obliterated
it overnight. There is evidence to suggest that Polk was fully
aware of this; a few months earlier Duff Green, a man familiar
with the permutations of Mexican governance, had outlined the
situation to him, and it i