under the dictation of a petty military tyrant, to every caprice of whose will I must yield implicit obedience. No sir-ee!… Human butchery has had its day.… And the time is rapidly approaching when the professional soldier will be placed on the same level as a bandit, the Bedouin, and the Thug.
There were extravagant promises and outright lies to build up the volunteer units. A man who wrote a history of the New York Volunteers declared: “Many enlisted for the sake of their families, having no employment, and having been offered ‘three months’ advance,’ and were promised that they could leave part of their pay for their families to draw in their absence.… I boldly pronounce, that the whole Regiment was got up by fraud.”
By late 1846, recruitment was falling off, so physical requirements were lowered, and anyone bringing in acceptable recruits would get two dollars a head. Even this didn’t work. Congress in early 1847 authorized ten new regiments of regulars, to serve for the duration of the war, promising them one hundred acres of public land upon honorable discharge. But dissatisfaction continued.
And soon, the reality of battle came in upon the glory and the promises. On the Rio Grande before Matamoros, as a Mexican army of five thousand under General Arista faced Taylor’s army of three thousand, the shells began to fly, and artilleryman Samuel French saw his first death in battle. John Weems describes it: “He happened to be staring at a man on horseback nearby when he saw a shot rip off the pommel of the saddle, tear through the man’s body, and burst out with a crimson gush on the other side.”
When the battle was over, five hundred Mexicans were dead or wounded. There were perhaps fifty American casualties. Weems describes the aftermath: “Night blanketed weary men who fell asleep where they dropped on the trampled prairie grass, while around them other prostrate men from both armies screamed and groaned in agony from wounds. By the eerie light of torches the surgeon’s saw was going the livelong night.”
Away from the battlefield, in the army camps, the romance of the recruiting posters was quickly forgotten. The Second Regiment of Mississippi Rifles, moving into New Orleans, was stricken by cold and sickness. The regimental surgeon reported: “Six months after our regiment had entered the service we had sustained a loss of 167 by death, and 134 by discharges.” The regiment was packed into the holds of transports, eight hundred men into three ships. The surgeon continued:
The dark cloud of disease still hovered over us. The holds of the ships…were soon crowded with the sick. The effluvia was intolerable.… The sea became rough.… Through the long dark night the rolling ship would dash the sick man from side to side bruising his flesh upon the rough corners of his berth. The wild screams of the delirious, the lamentations of the sick, and the melancholy groans of the dying, kept up one continual scene of confusion.… Four weeks we were confined to the loathsome ships and before we had landed at the Brasos, we consigned twenty-eight of our men to the dark waves.
Meanwhile, by land and by sea, Anglo-American forces were moving into California. A young naval officer, after the long voyage around the southern cape of South America, and up the coast to Monterey in California, wrote in his diary:
Asia…will be brought to our very doors. Population will flow into the fertile regions of California. The resources of the entire country…will be developed.… The public lands lying along the route [of railroads] will be changed from deserts into gardens, and a large population will be settled.…
It was a separate war that went on in California, where Anglo-Americans raided Spanish settlements, stole horses, and declared California separated from Mexico—the “Bear Flag Republic.” Indians lived there, and naval officer Revere gathered the Indian chiefs and spoke to them (as he later recalled):
I have called you together to have a talk with you. The country you inhabit no longer belongs to Mexico, but to a mighty nation whose territory extends from the great ocean you have all seen or heard of, to another great ocean thousands of miles toward the rising sun.… Our armies are now in Mexico, and will soon conquer the whole country. But you have nothing to fear from us, if you do what is right…if you are faithful to your new rulers.… I hope you will alter your habits, and be industrious and frugal, and give up all the low vices which you practice…. We shall watch over you, and give you true liberty; but beware of sedition, lawlessness, and all other crimes, for the army which shields can assuredly punish, and it will reach you in your most retired hiding places.
General Kearney moved easily into New Mexico, and Santa Fe was taken without battle. An American staff officer described the reaction of the Mexican population to the U.S. army’s entrance into the capital city:
Our march into the city…was extremely warlike, with drawn sabres, and daggers in every look.… As the American flag was raised, and the cannon boomed its glorious national salute from the hill, the pent-up emotions of many of the women could be suppressed no longer…as the wail of grief arose above the din of our horses’ tread, and reached our ears from the depth of the gloomy-looking buildings on every hand.
That was in August. In December, Mexicans in Taos, New Mexico, rebelled against American rule. The revolt was put down and arrests were made. But many of the rebels fled and carried on sporadic attacks, killing a number of Americans, then hiding in the mountains. The American army pursued, and in a final desperate battle, in which six to seven hundred rebels were engaged, 150 were killed, and it seemed the rebellion was now over.
In Los Angeles, too, there was a revolt. Mexicans forced the American garrison there to surrender in September 1846. The United States did not retake Los Angeles until January, after a bloody battle.
General Taylor had moved across the Rio Grande, occupied Matamoros, and now moved southward through Mexico. But his volunteers became more unruly on Mexican territory. Mexican villages were pillaged by drunken troops. Cases of rape began to multiply.
As the soldiers moved up the Rio Grande to Camargo, the heat became unbearable, the water impure, and sickness grew—diarrhea, dysentery, and other maladies—until a thousand were dead. At first the dead were buried to the sounds of the “Dead March” played by a military band. Then the number of dead was too great, and formal military funerals ceased. Southward to Monterey and another battle, where men and horses died in agony, and one officer described the ground as “slippery with…foam and blood.”
The U.S. Navy bombarded Vera Cruz in an indiscriminate killing of civilians. One of the navy’s shells hit the post office, another a surgical hospital. In two days, thirteen hundred shells were fired into the city, until it surrendered. A reporter for the New Orleans Delta wrote: “The Mexicans variously estimate their loss at from 500 to 1000 killed and wounded, but all agree that the loss among the soldiery is comparatively small and the destruction among the women and children is very great.”
Colonel Hitchcock, coming into the city, wrote: “I shall never forget the horrible fire of our mortars…going with dreadful certainty…often in the centre of private dwellings—it was awful. I shudder to think of it.” Still, Hitchcock, the dutiful soldier, wrote for General Scott “a sort of address to the Mexican people” which was then printed in English and Spanish by the tens of thousands saying “we have not a particle of ill-will towards you…we are here for no earthly purpose except the hope of obtaining a peace.”
It was a war of the American elite against the Mexican elite, each side exhorting, using, killing its own population as well as the other. The Mexican commander Santa Anna had crushed rebellion after rebellion, his troops also raping and plundering after victory. When Col. Hitchcock and Gen. Winfield Scott moved into Santa Anna’s estate, they found its walls full of ornate paintings. But half his army was dead or wounded.
General Scott moved toward the last battle—for Mexico City—with ten thousand soldiers. They were not anxious for battle. Three days’ march from
