RIO BRAVO, TREATY OF THE, the instrument signed in 1848 closing the brief war between the Commonwealth and Mexico (q.v.) of the two years preceding, and fixing the river of that name as the settled boundary between the two republics from its mouth to the higher country beyond El Paso. Its terms were, by the standards of a peace concluded after a war one party had plainly won, unusually modest: the Commonwealth confirmed a boundary its own surveyors had claimed before the fighting began, paid the Mexican government a settlement this contributor's own examination of the treaty text finds framed less as an indemnity for the war than as a purchase price for the disputed territory, and acquired no further concession beyond the river line itself.
The negotiation was conducted, on the Commonwealth's side, by commissioners under instruction to conclude a settlement quickly rather than to press whatever further advantage the fighting's outcome might have supported, an instruction this contributor's colleagues in the diplomatic service attribute to the Senate's own evident want of appetite for administering territory considerably more populous, and considerably less easily absorbed into the Commonwealth's existing provincial arrangements, than the sparsely settled Louisiana purchase had been. The treaty has held its line, without material dispute on either side, for the six decades since, and this contributor, whose own professional attention lies rather more with the chancelleries of Europe than with a boundary settlement neither government has found much occasion to revisit, records it here chiefly for completeness. (H. LeF.)