Army of Manifest Destiny
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Army of Manifest Destiny

The American Soldier in the Mexican War, 1846-1848

James M. Mccaffrey

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eBook - ePub

Army of Manifest Destiny

The American Soldier in the Mexican War, 1846-1848

James M. Mccaffrey

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About This Book

James McCaffrey examines America's first foreign war, the Mexican War, through the day-to-day experiences of the American soldier in battle, in camp, and on the march. With remarkable sympathy, humor, and grace, the author fills in the historical gaps of one war while rising issues now found to be strikingly relevant to this nation's modern military concerns.

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Publisher
NYU Press
Year
1994
ISBN
9780814796436

CHAPTER 1
“War Exists by the Act of Mexico Herself
*

Seventy years after Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence the United States went to war with Mexico—our first foreign war. This war did not begin suddenly; there was no Pearl Harbor. Rather, events from many years previous had sown the seeds for this conflict. Beginning in the early 1820s, Mexico allowed Moses Austin and his son Stephen to bring large numbers of Americans into its northern province of Texas. The new Mexican republic could not get its own citizens to settle in Texas, but it needed to have the area populated as a buffer against both Indian depredations and the already-evident land hunger of the United States. During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the United States had doubled its geographic area at the expense of its Spanish-speaking neighbors by acquiring the Louisiana Territory and Florida. The Mexican government, therefore, believed that peopling its northernmost territory would make it more difficult for the United States to take this land arbitrarily.
The Americans who followed Austin and other empresarios into Texas did so primarily for land. Public land in the United States sold for $1.25 per acre, and buyers had to pay cash. The Mexican government, on the other hand, offered large tracts of land to these colonists for about a tenth of that cost, and even that was not always collected. In addition, the land grants favored families. Farm families could get 177 acres, and families who intended to ranch got 4,428 acres. The newcomers were required to embrace the Roman Catholic religion and to become Mexican citizens, but they were also exempt from customs duties for seven years and from all other taxes for ten years.
The colonists willingly accepted the conditions that the Mexican government imposed upon them. Since the central government did not provide a priest for these new settlers until about 1830, and even then he was unable to get to all the settlements on any sort of regular basis, the religious requirement posed no great burden. Most of the Anglo settlers became Catholics, but in name only. Mexican citizenship also represented a rather nebulous concept for the Americans. Since dissension and internal turmoil wracked the central government of Mexico, it had very little time to devote to its new citizens in faraway Texas. Coupled with the tax moratorium, this meant that the Anglos were free to continue living very much as they had in the United States. They set up separate communities from the Mexican towns and generally made little effort to mingle with the Tejanos.
By 1830, officials in Mexico City realized that they faced a problem in Texas. The Anglo population far exceeded the number of Mexicans there, and suddenly the buffer against American encroachment had dissolved. To halt this unexpected influx, the government passed a decree on April 6, 1830, which, among other things, forbade further American colonization.
Although this decree had little effect on the everyday lives of most of the colonists, they still resented it. In the fall of 1832 they held a convention and asked the Mexican government to repeal this odious decree and to grant them statehood status within the Mexican nation. A second convention in the spring of 1833 reiterated these demands and took the further step of preparing a state constitution. While Mexican leaders feared that the Texans’ real goal was independence, they tried to forestall this by liberalizing certain laws. They allowed a resumption of immigration and a certain amount of religious tolerance, and set up a superior court that allowed jury trials.
In April 1834, Antonio López de Santa Anna took over the Mexican government. Thought to be a friend of reform and of a federalist type of government, much like that of the United States, he quickly turned his back on liberalism. He got the Congress to void the liberal Constitution of 1824 and quickly faced dissension in several quarters. Citizens in the Mexican state of Zacatecas rebelled, only to be brutally crushed. In Coahuila, too, there was a minor revolt and again authorities quashed it; and by late 1835, the Anglo settlers in Texas were also in revolt.
The town of Gonzales, sixty miles southeast of San Antonio, was the site of the opening battle of the Texas Revolution. In early October 1835, a Mexican cavalry detachment rode out of San Antonio to take back a small cannon that the government had provided for Indian protection. The colonists told the officer in charge that if he wanted the cannon he would have to take it by force. The “battle” the next day left one Mexican dead, and the revolution had begun.
Two months later, the Texans defeated a Mexican force at San Antonio and forced the Mexicans—commanded by Santa Anna’s brother-in-law—to retreat south across the Rio Grande River. This dual blow to Santa Anna’s national pride and family honor would not go unpunished. The dictator himself led an army north to recapture San Antonio and to teach the Anglos a lesson. In the meantime, the plight of the Anglo Texans filled American newspapers and hundreds of volunteers left for Texas to help win its independence.
In late February 1836, Santa Anna’s army reached San Antonio and found 150 Americans standing firm in the old mission known as the Alamo. Texas Gen. Sam Houston had ordered Col. William B. Travis and his men to abandon the mission and fall back toward the east where most of the Anglo settlements were, but they had refused. Over the next two weeks, a small group of men managed to pierce the ring of Mexican camps and ride into the Alamo, but large-scale reinforcements were not forthcoming. Just before dawn on March 6, a massive Mexican assault was successful. All the defenders died.
The loss of the Alamo was very disheartening to the Texas rebels, but the worst had yet to happen. While Santa Anna’s troops marched toward San Antonio, another Mexican army had moved up the coast toward Goliad, where Col. James Fannin commanded about four hundred men. Like Travis, Fannin had also received orders to abandon his position and fall back. He hesitated, and when he finally decided to move it was too late. The Mexicans caught up with his men on an open prairie a few miles north of Goliad. The Texans were able to keep the enemy at bay throughout the day, but by nightfall it was evident that they could not win. Fannin therefore arranged to surrender his command under the assumption that he and his men would be accorded the traditional treatment of prisoners of war. The Mexicans marched their prisoners back to Goliad, where they imprisoned them in the presidio’s chapel. When Santa Anna got word of their capture, he ordered their immediate execution. A week after the surrender, Mexican troops marched the prisoners out of Goliad in three separate detachments. The men thought they were going to the coast to take ship for New Orleans. Instead, after they had marched a half-mile or so from the fort, the Mexican troops stopped the columns and shot the prisoners down.
The loss of these men, murdered, was even more hideous than the loss of the Alamo. A month later, with cries of “Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!” Sam Houston led his force against Santa Anna at the decisive Battle of San Jacinto. The Texans brutally avenged both the Alamo and Goliad as they shot Mexicans down even as they tried to surrender. Santa Anna was among the captured, and many of the Texans clamored for his immediate execution. Instead, however, the triumphant Texans forced the Mexican dictator to sign a treaty recognizing the independence of Texas, a treaty that Santa Anna immediately repudiated upon returning to Mexico.
Nevertheless, Texas had won its freedom and existed during the next nine years as an independent republic. They were not years without conflict, however. In the summer of 1841, three hundred Texans—merchants, soldiers, and a few diplomats—set out from Austin for the Mexican town of Santa Fe. They hoped to tap into the lucrative trade existing between that Mexican town and traders from the United States. They also planned to offer the protection of the Republic of Texas to the people living there. Instead of the citizens of Santa Fe welcoming the expedition with open arms, as some Texas visionaries had predicted, Mexican troops disarmed and captured the Texans and marched them to prison in Mexico City. Many died en route.
The year following the Santa Fe Expedition, Mexican soldiers mounted two different retaliatory raids into Texas. Each got as far as San Antonio before retiring south of the Rio Grande. While these sorties were temporarily disruptive, they did not pose any serious threat to the young republic. After the second such force had returned to Mexico, a party of Texans attempted to capture the Mexican village of Mier, just south of the Rio Grande. After a day-long battle, an overwhelming number of Mexican soldiers forced them to surrender and began marching them to Mexico City. As the prisoners headed deeper and deeper into Mexico, they realized that they might never again return to their loved ones, and they therefore determined to escape at the first opportunity. When the chance presented itself the Texans overpowered their guards and escaped northward in small groups. The rugged Mexican terrain made travel difficult, and most of the escapees soon found themselves back in captivity. Santa Anna was incensed that his prisoners should have tried to escape, and he ordered them to draw lots so that every tenth man might face a firing squad. The Texans drew beans out of a jar to determine their fate. Most of them drew white beans, signifying that they would live, but seventeen drew black beans and faced execution. While the Mier Expedition represented the last instance of open warfare between Mexico and its lost province to the north, things were far from amicable between the two.
Immediately following their successful revolution, Texans actively sought annexation by the United States and, in case that did not occur, diplomatic recognition as an independent nation. Hopes for annexation, however, ran into serious opposition from northern congressmen. They feared that the admission of Texas as a slave state would not only disrupt the balance of power between free and slave states in the U.S. Senate but would also allow the further expansion of slavery into the Southwest. While the debate over annexation continued, President Andrew Jackson, as one of his last official acts, recognized Texas’s independence on March 3, 1837. Over the next three years, France, Belgium, England, and the Netherlands followed suit, but annexation always remained on the Texans’ agenda. Finally, in the face of Mexican protests that such a measure would represent an act of war, the United States annexed Texas as the twenty-eighth state in 1845. Compounding the situation in Mexican eyes was the fact that the United States recognized Texas’s claim to the Rio Grande as its southern boundary when, as a Mexican province, the Texas border had always been the Nueces River, 125 miles to the north.
President James K. Polk placed the American army on alert, and in the summer of 1845, Gen. Zachary Taylor proceeded to Corpus Christi, Texas, on the north bank of the Nueces, with a force of about four thousand men, representing nearly half of the U.S. Army. General Taylor dubbed his force “the Army of Observation” and ordered it to be on the lookout for any Mexican military activity in the area.
As the two nations edged ever closer to war, President Polk still held some hope for a peaceful settlement. He hoped to use the unpaid damage claims of American citizens against the Mexican government as a bargaining tool to negotiate the Texas boundary peacefully. The claims had arisen over a period of years and stemmed from the losses of Americans in Mexico due to various revolutions there. In 1842 an international tribunal had mediated the claims and awarded the U.S. government, on behalf of the actual claimants, slightly more than two million dollars. Mexico agreed to pay the damages over a five-year period but was unable to continue payments beyond the first year.
When Polk learned in the fall of 1845 that the Mexican government was willing to negotiate payment of these claims he sent John Slidell to Mexico City. By this time Polk, as well as many other Americans, had begun to cast covetous glances toward Mexican California. Because of this, Slidel’s instructions encompassed not only the settlement of damage claims but also the possible purchase of California and New Mexico. He was to offer the Mexican government a release from their claims debt in exchange for its agreement to recognize the Rio Grande as the border of Texas. This border would also enclose eastern New Mexico. He was then to offer to pay five million dollars for the rest of New Mexico and as much as forty million dollars for California, although Polk privately expressed the belief that the United States could get California and New Mexico for as little as fifteen million dollars. Polk’s audacity outraged Mexican officials. They had agreed to discuss only the damage claims. They certainly had no intention of giving up New Mexico and California, and refused to allow Slidell to remain in the Mexican capital.
With the failure of Slidell’s mission, and after Texas had formally accepted the terms of annexation, General Taylor moved his force out of Corpus Christi and south of the Nueces in early 1846 to the banks of the Rio Grande opposite the Mexican village of Matamoros. The members of his force—now designated by the more ominous-sounding term “Army of Occupation”—must have known by this time that negotiations must soon give way to war. Young Lt. George G. Meade, who later saw all the action he could have wanted during the Civil War, was very open about his feelings. In a letter to his wife before the actual commencement of hostilities he wrote, “I hope for a war and a speedy battle, and I think one good fight will settle the business; and really, after coming so far and staying so long, it would hardly be the thing to come back without some laurels.”1
The train of events that led more immediately to open hostilities began in early April 1846, when Mexican Maj. Gen. Pedro Ampudia notified General Taylor that he must immediately retire to the north side of the Nueces River, since Mexico claimed the land south of that river. Taylor, honoring the American claim that extended south all the way to the Rio Grande, refused. Tensions in the area heightened until April 25, when a large force of Mexican cavalry surrounded a small force of American dragoons led by Capt. Seth B. Thornton. The Americans fought gamely, but they faced overwhelming numbers. When the dust had cleared Thornton had lost sixteen men in killed and wounded, and all the rest were prisoners of the Mexicans. These were not the first American lives lost—bandits had occasionally picked off soldiers who had wandered from camp—but it was the first real encounter with Mexican soldiers.
General Taylor immediately dispatched news of this clash to Washington. President Polk received Taylor’s message as he was already contemplating asking Congress for a declaration of war. The existence of American casualties erased any doubt in his mind regarding the course to take. On May 11, 1846, President Polk informed Congress that “Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil. She has proclaimed that hostilities have commenced, and that the two nations are now at war.”2
Congress passed a declaration of war on May 13, and now it had to address the business of waging war. The size of the army was not adequate for extensive campaigning and had to be greatly enlarged as soon as possible. Drawing upon a popular perception of the effectiveness of temporary volunteers, the Polk administration called for only a modest increase in the size of the regular army and fifty thousand volunteers.3
Unknown to President Polk and other government leaders in Washington was the fact that the level of hostilities along the Rio Grande had already intensified considerably. On April 30, Maj. Gen. Mariano Arista’s main force began crossing the Rio Grande a dozen miles below Taylor’s position. The American commander hastily strengthened the earthen fort—Fort Texas—across from Matamoros, and started for Point Isabel for supplies with most of his men on May 1. After marching until midnight, the tired American soldiers pushed on early the next morning and finally reached their destination by about noon. They immediately set to work fortifying their position and preparing for a Mexican attack.
Due to delays in crossing the river, General Arista had been unable to intercept the Americans before they reached their supply base, so he changed his plans. While he kept a wary eye on Taylor with the bulk of his force, he detached General Ampudia’s brigade and sent it back to help the Matamoros garrison take Fort Texas and the five hundred enemy troops within. The bombardment of the fort began early on the morning of May 3. The American artillery immediately responded. It soon became evident, however, that the Americans would not be driven out of their little fort without some cost. The Mexican cannons were unable to breach the fort’s walls, and an infantry attack would result in unacceptable casualties. General Ampudia apparently decided to starve the fort into submission with a classic siege.
Meanwhile, General Taylor had strengthened his supply base and felt it was secure enough to allow him to march to the relief of the beleaguered garrison of Fort Texas. He issued marching orders for the next day, in which he expressed utmost confidence in his small army. He knew that General Arista would very likely engage him in battle, and he reminded his infantrymen that “their main dependence must be in the bayonet.” On the afternoon of May 7, he led his force of slightly over twenty-two hundred men, accompanied by two hundred supply wagons, out of Point Isabel. As soon as General Arista learned of Taylor’s departure he recalled Ampudia’s brigade and hurried to interpose his force across Taylor’s line of march.4
Near the middle of the next day, the American advanced guard discovered the Mexican troops near a place called Palo Alto. The scouts immediately halted and refilled their canteens as they waited for the rest of the army to catch up with them. The day was very warm. Many of the men had removed their wool jackets, and some had donned straw hats. As the American army moved slowly through the dense chaparral, Mexican artillery opened up at a range of about a half-mile. One American wrote that “the balls were constantly hissing over our heads or mowing their way through the tall grass, and it was astonishing how few struck our ranks.” American cannons quickly began a counterbattery fire in reply as General Taylor hastily formed his men into a line of battle.5
General Arista’s battle plan was to a...

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