The occupation of Matamoros and Monterrey did not go smoothly. Captain R. A. Stewart, the minister, had hoped the American occupation of Matamoros would “make its inhabitants embrace the blessing of freedom.” But Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant recognized how unlikely that was. He wrote to his fiancée, Julia, of the “great many murders” and “weak means made use of to prevent frequent repetitions. Some of the volunteers and about all the Texans seem to think it perfectly right to impose upon the people of a conquered City to any extent, and even to murder them where the act can be covered by the dark. And how much they seem to enjoy acts of violence too! I would not pretend to guess the number of murders that have been committed upon the persons of poor Mexicans and the soldiers, since we have been here, but the number would startle you.”43
None of this should have been surprising. As youths, most of the volunteers had thrilled to tales of Texas heroism and Alamo martyrs. Even enlightened U.S. soldiers were, by modern standards, racist. They saw Mexico as an immoral nation and Mexicans themselves as an inferior race practicing a suspect religion. Many who volunteered felt deep enmity for the people of Mexico, and conflated them with Indians and African American slaves. Lacking training and discipline, with little knowledge of military codes, many ran wild. Texas Ranger Buck Berry, whose three-month term of enlistment actually expired before the battle of Monterrey, continued on with Taylor because “some of us had traveled six hundred miles to kill a Mexican and refused to accept a discharge until we got to Monterrey where a fight was waiting for our arrival.”44
Soon this was national news. On October 6, the New Orleans Picayune reported that “eight Mexicans, including two women, had been killed” a few miles outside nearby Camargo, “an old dilapidated-looking town” on the San Juan River. “The murder was attributed to some of the volunteers.” The story was picked up by other papers. The following week the Charleston Mercury broke news of atrocities in Monterrey. “As at Matamoros, murder, robbery, and rape were committed in the broad light of day, and as if desirous to signalize themselves at Monterey by some new act of atrocity, they burned many of the thatched huts of the poor peasants. It is thought that one hundred of the inhabitants were murdered in cold blood, and one … was shot dead at noon-day in the main street of the city.” This story was picked up and circulated in other papers as well. By late May, news of volunteer depradations had made it to London.45
Many Mexican citizens had fled Monterrey as soon as U.S. forces arrived, having heard news of affairs in Matamoros, while the Mexican press complained that “the volunteers, the most unprincipled and ungovernable class at home, have been let loose like blood-hounds on Mexico.” Lieutenant George Gordon Meade agreed. On October 20, he wrote his wife that the volunteers “have made themselves so terrible by their previous outrages as to have inspired the Mexicans with a perfect horror of them.”46
Even sympathetic voices admitted the truth of these stories, but they blamed the carnage on the people of Mexico. Violent volunteers were simply seeking “revenge” for the “outrages committed on the persons and property of American soldiers.” Ohio volunteer Frank Hardy, stationed in Matamoros, explained to his brother that although “for a while it was thought that many of the Mexicans were favorable to the institutions of the United States.… it is now pretty generally believed that they are almost without exception snakes in the grass, and are at heart strongly attached to their Government.… they profess friendship to the Americans merely for the purpose of being protected and making money—They are in short a treacherous race and have hearts the most of them as black as their skins.” He admitted that many of his fellow soldiers “are in favor of prosecuting the war—when hostilities shall again commence—upon different principles, and plunder, and ravage, and give them a taste of war in all its horrors, and see if that will bring them to a sense of their folly in contending with the United States.”47 It was a lesson learned over decades of Indian wars back home; when faced with a “treacherous race,” the rules of war did not apply. Vengeance, in their eyes, was justice.
In the late fall, the New Orleans Delta reported on a “war between the Kentuckians and Mexicans” in which “not less than forty Mexicans have been killed within the last five days, fifteen of whom, it is said, were killed in one day, and within the scope of one mile.” Attempting to justify the actions of the volunteers, a correspondent to the Delta explained that “ever since the occupation of Matamoros by our troops the Mexicans have been cutting off our men … and the compliment has been invariable returned, generally two for one … in many cases the innocent is made to suffer for crimes committed by their guilty countrymen.”48
The Kentuckians may have been bad, but they were not nearly as bad as the Texans. Taylor expressed regret in a letter on June 30 for “outrages committed by the Texas volunteers on the Mexicans and others” and claimed he was unable to contain the “lawless set.” While he admitted that many in the unit were skilled, he also believed that they were “too licentious to do much good.” Reliable information reached Washington “almost daily” about “atrocities” committed by “the wild volunteers.” General Scott appealed to the secretary of war: “Our militia & volunteers, if a tenth of what is said to be true, have committed atrocities—horrors—in Mexico, sufficient to make Heaven weep, & every American, of Christian morals, blush for his country. Murder, robbery & rape of mothers & daughters, in the presence of the tied up males of the families, have been common all along the Rio Grande.” General Wool wrote to Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan that deserters had not only robbed the citizens of the region with impunity but also “ravished women, two of whom had died in consequence of their brutality.”49
General Wool and staff in the Calle Real, Saltillo. This early daguerreotype shows Brigadier General John Ellis Wool and his staff in the streets of Saltillo, Mexico, his headquarters from December 1846 to November 1847. Wool attempted to curb volunteer abuses against Mexican civilians in northeastern Mexico, but with limited success. Fully aware of fierce local opposition to the U.S. occupation, Wool was careful to travel with a large escort, as seen here, for purposes of security. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. (photo credit 6.4)
Congressman-elect Abraham Lincoln. Portrait by Nicholas H. Shepherd, 1846–47. The first picture ever taken of Abraham Lincoln reveals a well-groomed gentleman seemingly aware of his importance as a newly elected congressman. Mary Todd Lincoln also posed for a photo the same day at Shepherd’s Springfield studio. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. (photo credit 6.5)
The Philadelphia North American was just one of many newspapers at the start of the war that celebrated “the spirit of the country” where the government “can rely for its wars upon the volunteers … men abandoning a better and brighter lot for the honor of striking a blow for the land of their love.” But it also had warned that “should the lust of conquest, or the passions of revenge” rear their heads, “public opinion will fall away from” the war “as good men shrink from crime.”50 By the autumn of 1846, there were plenty of reports of crime for good men to shrink from.
On August 3, 1846, Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress. In the end, the race wasn’t even close. Lincoln surpassed his opponent by 1,511 votes, the largest margin of victory ever for a Whig congressional candidate in the district, and substantially larger than Henry Clay’s in the presidential contest two years before. He would be the only Illinois Whig in the Thirtieth Congress, which would not convene until December 6, 1847, sixteen long months after the election. Mary was thrilled, but Abraham was subdued. He admitted to his friend Joshua Speed that “being elected to Congress, though I am very grateful to our friends, for having done it, has not pleased me as much as I expected.”51
One Whig who did not congratulate Lincoln on his election was John J. Hardin. He and the rest of the Illinois volunteers were mustered into service on July 10. On a bright summer day thousands of people, including Hardin’s wife and three chil
dren, gathered at the Mississippi River port of Alton to say goodbye to the 877 members of the First Illinois Regiment. The troops looked splendid in dark blue roundabout coats trimmed with yellow, light blue pants, and blue cloth caps with glazed covers. In the panoply of state-specific volunteer uniforms, this would help the men of Illinois identify one another, and men of other states to identify the origins of heroes and cowards. Each man carried modern weaponry: a government-furnished carbine and percussion-lock pistol. The dragoons also carried sabers. Hardin’s thirteen-year-old daughter Ellen later recalled that the “glitter of the scene” and “hopefulness of the soldiers” reassured the crowd. “Tears of parting were suppressed” and “forebodings of danger were silenced.” The First Illinois Volunteers crowded onto the “great white steamer” Missouri and then were gone, borne away, it seemed to Ellen, to “some unreal world.” She never forgot the sight of the steamer, and her father, disappearing from view.52
Hardin spent August 3 in Port La Vaca on the Gulf coast of Texas, overseeing the disembarkation of his men from their ship and helping them set up camp. It was a chaotic business, and one he found taxing. Perhaps it reminded him of taking charge of the wounded on the Princeton in 1844, after the big gun “Peacemaker” exploded. He had won praise on that occasion for his leadership and calm in the face of disorder. Now those skills would be tested daily.
He wrote his wife, Sarah, that evening, exhausted and somewhat homesick. A great adventure lay before him, but his mind was still back in Jacksonville with his family, horses, and fields. “It is late Monday night, and election day in Illinois,” Hardin mused. “I should like to know how you are all getting along at home. You seem to be a long way off.”53 Perhaps Hardin regretted missing an election that might have been his. If he did, those feelings didn’t last for long. The First Illinois wasn’t yet in Mexico, but each of the volunteers believed personal glory was on the horizon. And they were right. It would take longer than any of them expected, but they would ultimately take part in a battle that tame, spiritless fellows couldn’t possibly imagine.
7
Buena Vista
COLONEL JOHN HARDIN was tired of Texas, tired of marching, and tired of drills. It had been only a month since he had assumed command of the First Illinois Volunteers. Since then, Brigadier General John Ellis Wool, the commanding officer of the Central Division, or the Army of Chihuahua, had taken note of Hardin’s ability to lead, and immediately after his arrival in August had given him the command of the Second Illinois as well as the First. After a 160-mile march from the coast, Hardin’s Illinois regiments reached Camp Crockett, outside San Antonio. The once-lively city was decaying and nearly deserted. Hardin wrote his sister that he felt as though he had landed in “the most out of the way place in the world.”1
There the Illinois volunteers waited, along with regiments from Kentucky and Arkansas, for orders to move to the front. “There is much monotony in camp life,” Hardin admitted in a letter home to Sarah. The food was bad, the weather worse, and his men were growing antsy. The nearby ruins of the Alamo beckoned, but pilgrimages to the most holy site of the Texas Revolution only stoked the men’s desire to meet their enemy.2
San Antonio was a desolate place, but it offered every temptation for a young man to get into trouble. Hardin, a temperance advocate with no more taste for cards than for whiskey, had “trouble stopping drinking and gambling” among his men, but his vision of himself as a great leader did not extend to dealing with the endless squabbles and differences that seemed to plague the “wild young men” of his regiment. “I get along with my command as well as I could expect, considering the incongruous materials of which it is composed,” he wrote his wife from camp, “but still I have more difficulty in settling other peoples troubles than with anything else.” Reports of unruliness among Hardin’s volunteers had already appeared in newspapers in Boston and Milwaukee.3
GENERAL TAYLOR AND COLONEL JOHN J. HARDIN IN TEXAS AND MEXICO (photo credit 7.m1)
They sat at Camp Crockett just long enough to miss the excitement in Monterrey. Hardin was livid and blamed his commanding officer. General Wool, a New Yorker and veteran of the War of 1812, appeared to Hardin to lack the needed vigor for the job at hand. “Expect nothing great or striking from this column of the army—it moves with too much of the pomp & circumstance of war & far to stately to overtake Mexicans,” he fumed to his law partner. But Wool was waiting for instructions from Taylor, who himself was waiting for instructions from Polk. Those instructions failed to materialize. Taylor, already overwhelmed by the “lawless” volunteers from Mississippi and Texas, was in no hurry for Wool to bring more to the front. In August, he expressed the idle wish that the two Illinois regiments in Texas “be sent to some other” place.4
Hardin’s daughter Ellen, who had trouble imagining Mexico when her father first departed, now repeatedly saw it in her sleep. She wrote him that August, “Last night I dreamed that you and all your men came back but were raving mad because you did not get to fight the Mexicans.” The eldest of the Hardin children, Ellen understood her father quite well. At the end of September, they finally received orders to march to Mexico. “I start to seek my destiny beyond the Rio Grande,” Hardin rejoiced. “What it may be is uncertain, but I would like to help to form it myself.”5
On the first of October, Hardin and his men began their arduous march to Mexico. Each man carried a knapsack full of food, a tin cup and plate, a spoon, a small table, and a “bread board” to sit upon. They also carried two blankets that would provide their bedding during the march; one blanket served as a mattress, the other as a covering. Each company had a mule-drawn wagon carrying equipment. In addition, the officers had servants to carry their knapsacks.6 Personal servants were considered invaluable for maintaining the respect due officers, who were, by law, gentlemen. The federal government reimbursed officers for servant hire and provided them a clothing allowance and extra rations. The army also specified how many servants each officer class was entitled to bring with them. Generals Taylor and Scott were each entitled to four servants, and each brought four. Colonels were entitled to two, but John Hardin brought only one.
Most of the servants taken to Mexico were African American. Although the army excluded all black men from service in the 1840s (the navy imposed a 5 percent quota), and militia companies also forbade the membership of black men, servants were part of every American army unit, a fact that received no publicity at the time. Officers in Mexico hailing from the South brought their slaves with them, and many northerners either hired freed slaves or attempted to obtain Mexican help once across the border. When Lieutenant Ulysses Grant was ordered to the Rio Grande with Taylor in 1845, he wrote his fiancée, Julia, “I have a black boy to take along as my servant who has been to Mexico.” Colonel Robert Hunter, a Louisiana state senator who volunteered in May despite promising his wife, Sarah Jane, in April that he would never “serve the people” again unless it was “for money and not for honor,” brought his slave Milly with him to Matamoros. Sarah Jane Hunter told Milly to take “good care” of her husband before she sent her to Mexico. Like other servants, Milly shopped and cooked for Hunter, cared for his horses, cleaned his clothes, and ministered to him when he was ill.7
While there is anecdotal evidence of black soldiers following volunteer units and fighting in battles alongside whites, it more frequently happened that black servants took up arms out of necessity. One of Taylor’s slaves told a historian some years later that he saved the general’s life at Monterrey. “A Mexican was aiming at the General a deadly blow, when he sprang in … and slew the Mexican, but received a deep wound from a lance.”8
John Hardin’s servant was most likely a slave from Kentucky named Benjamin, who was around twenty-one years of age. Hardin purchased Benjamin, described as a light-skinned “mulatto boy,” as a personal servant from Mary Todd’s Kentucky relatives in 1833. He was offered Benjamin’s entire family but chose instead to separate Benjamin, described at the time as �
�too small to ride … far on horseback,” from his mother and siblings. Benjamin was one of several African Americans working in the Hardins’ Jacksonville mansion at the start of the war. The Hardins brought slaves with them when they moved from Kentucky in 1831 after their marriage, and others were left to the couple when Sarah’s mother died. Although they lived north of the Mason-Dixon Line, the legal status of these African Americans was far from clear.9
Illinois was, of course, a free state. It was formed out of territory designated free in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. But particularly in southern Illinois, slavery was very much a reality. According to law, adult slaves became free when they moved to the state. Those under age passed through a period of indenture before earning their freedom. In reality, however, a form of indenture not unlike slavery was the norm in southern Illinois among adults as well as young people. African Americans in Illinois were usually coerced into signing indenture contracts for years at a time. They could not leave the service of their master, could be whipped if disobedient, and were even referred to in legal statutes as “slaves.” Many of these individuals were sold back into permanent slavery before their indentures expired.10
There is little evidence of African Americans in Illinois becoming free after their period of indenture was up, but there is evidence that African Americans with the legal status of slaves were still living in the state at the beginning of the U.S.-Mexican War. The 1818 state constitution outlawed the importation of slaves into Illinois but did not free the slaves already there; in 1840 there were still 331 listed in the federal census. The Hardins purchased an eight-year-old girl named Dolly in the mid-1840s, around the same time that the Illinois State Supreme Court declared that slaves could no longer reside in the state. Dolly signed her mark to a ten-year indenture contract, but she was still working for Sarah Hardin decades later. She was, in fact, buried with the family.11
A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico Page 18