their enlistment times up, the reality of battle and disease too much for them.
On the outskirts of Mexico City, at Churubusco, Mexican and American armies clashed for three hours and thousands died on both sides. Among the Mexicans taken prisoner were sixty-nine U.S. Army deserters.
As often in war, battles were fought without point. After one such engagement near Mexico City, with terrible casualties, a marine lieutenant blamed Gen. Scott: “He had originated it in error and caused it to be fought, with inadequate forces, for an object that had no existence.”
In the final battle for Mexico City, Anglo-American troops took the height of Chapultepec and entered the city of 200,000 people, General Santa Anna having moved northward. This was September 1847. A Mexican merchant wrote to a friend about the bombardment of the city: “In some cases whole blocks were destroyed and a great number of men, women and children killed and wounded.”
General Santa Anna fled to Huamantla, where another battle was fought, and he had to flee again. An American infantry lieutenant wrote to his parents what happened after an officer named Walker was killed in battle:
General Lane…told us to “avenge the death of the gallant Walker.… Grog shops were broken open first, and then, maddened with liquor, every species of outrage was committed. Old women and girls were stripped of their clothing—and many suffered still greater outrages. Men were shot by dozens…their property, churches, stores and dwelling houses ransacked…. It made me for the first time ashamed of my country.
One Pennsylvania volunteer, stationed at Matamoros late in the war, wrote:
We are under very strict discipline here. Some of our officers are very good men but the balance of them are very tyrannical and brutal toward the men.… [T]onight on drill an officer laid a soldier’s skull open with his sword.… But the time may come and that soon when officers and men will stand on equal footing.… A soldier’s life is very disgusting.
On the night of August 15, 1847, volunteer regiments from Virginia, Mississippi, and North Carolina rebelled in northern Mexico against Col. Robert Treat Paine. Paine killed a mutineer, but two of his lieutenants refused to help him quell the mutiny. The rebels were ultimately exonerated in an attempt to keep the peace.
Desertion grew. In March 1847 the army reported over a thousand deserters. The total number of deserters during the war was 9,207 (5,331 regulars and 3,876 volunteers). Those who did not desert became harder and harder to manage. General Cushing referred to sixty-five such men in the First Regiment of the Massachusetts Infantry as “incorrigibly mutinous and insubordinate.”
The glory of the victory was for the president and the generals, not the deserters, the dead, the wounded. The Massachusetts Volunteers had started with 630 men. They came home with three hundred dead, mostly from disease, and at the reception dinner on their return their commander, General Cushing, was hissed by his men.
As the veterans returned home, speculators immediately showed up to buy the land warrants given by the government. Many of the soldiers, desperate for money, sold their 160 acres for less than fifty dollars.
Mexico surrendered. There were calls among Americans to take all of Mexico. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed February 1848, just took half. The Texas boundary was set at the Rio Grande; New Mexico and California were ceded. The United States paid Mexico $15 million, which led the Whig Intelligencer to conclude that “we take nothing by conquest.… Thank God.”
Exercises
1. When did Mexico achieve independence from Spain?
When did Texas become independent from Mexico?
When did Texas become a state of the United States?
When did the Mexican-American War begin?
2. Before President Polk’s term, which river had the U.S. government recognized as the border between Mexico and Texas? Which river did Texas claim as its border with Mexico? Which river did Polk choose as the border? How did Polk’s choice of the border allow the United States to provoke a war with Mexico?
3. What were the arguments that the news media used to support a war with Mexico?
4. What were Colonel Hitchcock’s private thoughts concerning the war with Mexico? Why might he have not shared those thoughts with fellow officers and enlisted men?
5. By 1848, did Congressman Lincoln end up supporting the war?
6. Walt Whitman wrote that Mexico must be soundly punished. What did Mexico do that persuaded Whitman to demand that Mexico be “crushed”?
7. What role did race play in both the promotion of and opposition to the war?
8. The New York Herald believed that, in conquering Mexico, the United States would “civilize” it. What exactly do you think the Herald meant by “civilize”? What data lead you to your hypothesis?
a. building factories and transform farmers into workers
b. convert Mexican Catholics into Protestants
c. teach the Mexican better table manners
d. importing slavery-based plantations
e. dividing Mexican provinces into states subjected to the rules laid down by the U.S. Constitution (those rules are as follows: each state has a constitutional convention to create a state constitution that must be submitted and accepted by the U.S. Congress before the state is admitted to the Union—can elect and send representatives to Congress)
f. having Mexicans of mixed Spanish/Indian descent ruled by Anglo-Saxon Protestants whose government would be more efficient and less corrupt than the Mexican government was in 1845
9. Who were the opponents of the war? How did they manifest (in word and deed) their opposition to the war? To what degree were their tactics effective? How could they have been more effective (what were the obstacles in the way of their success)?
10. How can the division over the Mexican-American War (1846–48) be seen as a prelude to the Civil War (1861–65)?
11. Apart from an increase in pay, why might an Irish-American soldier desert the U.S. Army and join the Mexican army?
12. Why did many of the American soldiers wish to stop fighting?
13. How strong was the Mexican/Indian resistance to U.S. military advances at each of the following points of contact: Santa Fe, Taos, Los Angeles, Camargo, Vera Cruz, Churubusca, Mexico City, Huatmantla? To what can you attribute the degree of strength or weakness of the resistance?
14. What evidence does Zinn provide to determine how widespread desertion was among American soldiers?
15. Many soldiers signed up to go to war in hopes of acquiring land. Why then did these same soldiers sell their hard-won 160-acre land warrants to land speculators?
16. What percentage of Mexico did the United States take/buy/acquire in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo? Was this a better or worse bargain than the Louisiana Purchase?
17. Draw a map that includes the following: the Mexican Cession; the state borders of California, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas; Mexico; the Rio Grande; the Nueces River; Washington, D.C.; the Louisiana Purchase; the Oregon
