A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico

by Amy S. Greenberg

  Indeed, Hardin was proved wrong the very day he wrote to Sarah. Through a stroke of luck, General Santa Anna’s troops had intercepted a letter from General Scott to Taylor revealing the transfer of troops from one commander to the other, as well as details of the proposed invasion of Veracruz. Santa Anna could have concentrated his troops in Veracruz and prepared for the American onslaught of central Mexico. But instead he envisioned a singular opportunity to wipe out Taylor and his remaining forces when the invaders were at their weakest. On February 2, the commander marched out of the great mining center of San Luis Potosí, three hundred miles northwest of Mexico City, with an army of twenty thousand men.

  Samuel Chamberlain, Rackensackers on the Rampage. Samuel Chamberlain of the Second Illinois Volunteers witnessed the massacre of unarmed civilians by the Arkansas Volunteers on February 10, 1847. His painting of the gruesome scene highlights the violence of the volunteers, who appear deaf to the pleas of women and children. A company of U.S. dragoons at the mouth of the cave has arrived to end the slaughter. Courtesy San Jacinto Museum of History. (photo credit 7.4)

  The Mexican army suffered incredible deprivation during the three-week, two-hundred-mile march to Buena Vista. The winter weather was brutal, the desert terrain unyielding. Food, sleep, and water were in short supply. On February 21, Taylor received confirmation that Santa Anna and his army were just sixty miles to the south. He directed General Wool to lay out defenses at La Angostura between a high plateau laced with ravines on the left and a network of gullies on the right. Santa Anna arrived later that day to offer Taylor the chance to surrender. The American forces were vastly outnumbered, Santa Anna told Taylor; surely he recognized the untenable nature of his position. Taylor declined.

  The American forces left under Taylor’s command, almost all volunteer, numbered less than five thousand. Santa Anna’s army of twenty thousand had been weakened by the forced march. Perhaps a quarter of his men, a shocking percentage, had died along the route. But the odds were still daunting. Hardin’s regiment, along with a Pennsylvania battery, was stationed in the pass, a mile in front of the other troops. On the frosty morning of February 22, the Mexican forces came into view. Taylor informed Hardin that unless he held the pass, the battle would be lost. Hardin’s moment had arrived. He addressed his men: “Soldiers: you have never met an enemy, but you are now in front. I know the 1st Illinois will never fail. I will see no man to go where I will not lead. This is Washington’s Birthday—let us celebrate it as becomes true soldiers who love the memory of the Father of their Country.” It was a false alarm. The irregular fire that occurred that day did not involve the volunteers from Illinois. Santa Anna gave a moving speech to his troops in the evening, and the strains of his band could be heard clearly by Hardin and his men.57

  The American troops woke on the morning of the twenty-third to the astounding sight of the Mexican army celebrating a pre-battle mass. “Twenty thousand men, clad in new uniforms, belts as white as snow, brases and arms burnished until they glittered in the sunbeams like gold and silver,” marveled Illinois volunteer Samuel Chamberlain. It was obvious that the Americans were vastly outnumbered. Santa Anna attacked immediately after mass, and his forces quickly pushed back the U.S. troops and threatened to surround them. By nine that morning Taylor’s small army was in desperate trouble, but America’s light artillery, vastly superior to the Mexican cannon, staved off defeat. The American guns “poured a storm of lead into their serried ranks which literally strewed the ground with the dead and dying,” according to one eyewitness. The Pennsylvania battery deployed alongside Hardin’s regiment held off five thousand troops with artillery, but several thousand more Mexican infantry attempted to flank their position. Hardin took five of his companies and, “himself always in front,” advanced under cover of a hill, shouting, “Remember Illinois! Give them Blizzard, boys!” The infantry was driven back. His soldiers later claimed that that charge saved both the First Illinois and Clay’s Second Kentucky regiment from being flanked.58

  A fierce charge by the Mississippi troops, led by Jefferson Davis, combined with the ceaseless efforts of the artillery, drove the Mexicans back by the early afternoon. At 4:00 p.m. Taylor attempted to seize the initiative. He ordered the Illinois men and the Second Kentucky to advance. “This, like all of Hardin’s moves, was quickly made,” and approximately a thousand men pushed ahead, triple-speed, over broken ground in the face of a heavy fire of grape from a Mexican battery. In a frenzy of optimism, Hardin brashly announced, “We will take that battery.” He drew his sword with a shout, and the men of Illinois charged the battery directly behind their fearless colonel.

  They almost made it. When they were only a few yards from the battery, “some fifty yards to our right their whole reserve—some six or seven thousand infantry, opened fire.” Hardin had unknowingly rushed into the path of Santa Anna’s final assault. Ten thousand men, including several thousand fresh troops, emerged from a ravine armed and ready to crush the American advance. They advanced across a plateau in a blaze of fire. Many who were there later recalled that “no man but Hardin would have attempted to fight with such odds as 15 to 1.” The men could hear the colonel’s voice above the din, shouting, “Boys, remember the Sucker State; we must never dishonor it! Give them Blizzard! They fall every crack!”59

  Hardin’s bluster could not disguise the fact that both he and Taylor had badly misjudged the situation. Because of his ill-considered charge, Hardin’s troops were now beyond supporting distance and were surrounded on all sides by Mexican infantry. His position was untenable. The Second Illinois and Henry Clay’s Second Kentucky pushed forward to support Hardin, and the regiments became the focus of the Mexican attack. “The Mexicans, with a suddenness that was almost magical, rallied and returned upon us,” a participant reported. “We were but a handful to oppose the frightful masses which were hurled upon us, and could as easily have resisted an avalanche of thunderbolts.”60

  Taylor called for Hardin to retreat.

  “Now came a desperate time,” remembered a survivor of the battle. The men sought shelter in a gorge and had to retreat down a “deep ravine—rocky and broken—in which no order could be kept.” All semblance of discipline evaporated as each man fought for himself. “There were infantry a few yards above us on each side of the ravine, and several thousand lancers had cut off our retreat at its foot.” To the retreating men it appeared that the entire edge of the gorge was darkened by a great mass of Mexican soldiers firing down on them. At this point, “every voice appeared to be hushed but Col. Hardin’s—we could distinctly hear him shout … ‘Remember Illinois and give them Blizzard, boys!’ ” Twenty Mexican lancers charged at Hardin, firing at the same time. A private in his regiment reported that “Hardin fell, wounded; with his holster pistol he fired and killed one lancer—and I think he drew, or attempted to draw, his sword—but in the melee I could not be sure, for as many lancers as could approach him, surrounded, and threw their lances in him—and thus perished an officer, than whom none was ever more beloved.”61

  The charge decimated the First and Second Illinois, as well as the Second Kentucky. The three units accounted for 45 percent of the fatalities that day, with ninety-one Illinois men and forty-four Kentuckians killed, and greater numbers injured. At two the following morning, the surgeon attached to the Second Kentucky wrote home to his family that he had “just finished dressing the wounds of my regiment. I have been in blood to my shoulders since 9.00 this morning.”62

  In total, more than seven hundred Americans were either killed or injured, including a number of officers, some of whom, like Hardin, had national reputations. Rackensacker commander Colonel Archibald Yell was killed while attempting to counter a Mexican charge in the morning. Colonel William McKee, commander of Clay’s regiment, was also killed in the retreat down the ravine. A sudden rainstorm in the late evening brought the fighting to a close. A rainbow followed. Taylor’s forces had maintained their defensive position, but it was far from clea
r whether they could continue to do so. Neither commander could claim a victory that night, but the numerical superiority of the Mexican forces argued in their favor come the following morning. Taylor’s little army was far from optimistic at the end of the bloody day of battle. They shivered during the frosty night as coyotes feasted on the bodies strewn across the field.

  Remarkably enough, the Mexican army chose not to fight another day. Santa Anna instead decided to retreat under cover of darkness, later claiming that he had been called back to Mexico City to quell a political uprising. In fact, he received no such order. He was almost back to Mexico City when he learned that five national guard battalions, supported by clerics tired of paying for the war, had rebelled against the liberal government.63 Santa Anna had simply had enough. He had stopped the Americans, and his forces had suffered horrific casualties, with more than thirty-five hundred killed, wounded, or missing. But during the day’s battle they captured flags and artillery, and those Santa Anna carried with him back to central Mexico as proof of Mexico’s victory.

  Americans, of course, viewed Santa Anna’s retreat differently. Despite being outnumbered and without the help of the veteran troops, they had miraculously prevailed. When news of the victory arrived in the United States, spontaneous celebrations occurred across the nation, in small towns and great cities. When news reached Illinois, church bells pealed and cannon were fired. There were bonfires and parades from New Orleans to Boston. “Flags are flying from all the public buildings, and one universal spirit of joy and gladness pervades all patriotic hearts at the success of old ‘Rough and Ready,’ ” a reporter in New York gushed.64 Printmakers immediately prepared images of the battle for sale, many of which emphasized the intimate and seemingly heroic hand-to-hand nature of the combat.

  The Battle of Buena Vista became the signature victory of the war, proof that a small band of brave American volunteers could outfight a Mexican army four times its size. It was immediately conceded that there could be no higher “aspirations of military fame” than to say of a “fellow-citizen, he was at Buena Vista.” From his post as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Walt Whitman proclaimed that the victory “will live … in the enduring records of our republic,” and that “whatever may be said about the evil moral effects of war,” victory at Buena Vista “must elevate the true self-respect of the American people.” Caroline Kirkland, the editor of a new literary magazine, admitted that even those such as herself who found war “abhorrent and revolting” couldn’t help but feel “pride” for the “gallant self-devotion” of the troops.65

  Battle of Buena Vista. Lithograph by Nathaniel Currier, 1847. This popular representation of the American victory at Buena Vista highlights the hand-to-hand combat of the battle. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. (photo credit 7.5)

  It was the battle that the volunteers and American public had longed for. Then the casualty lists began to roll in.

  8

  Inscrutable Providence

  ON MARCH 29, Henry Clay returned to Ashland after a four-month absence. Despite the “very bad” weather in New Orleans, it had been a good winter. His health had been fair, and he had enjoyed the parade of politicians and businessmen who sought his counsel at Dr. Mercer’s. But it was delightful to be home. Flowers were blooming, the air was fresh, and the “bright sun shine beaming all around” reflected Clay’s own joy at being reunited with his family. For the moment he forgot about the “anxious suspense” he had felt since news of “hard fighting” in Mexico made its way to New Orleans two weeks earlier.1

  Clay’s joy was short-lived. The following day his son James burst into the room during dinner “with grief depicted in his countenance,” and announced that Colonel Henry Clay had been killed at the Battle of Buena Vista.2

  Colonel Clay was shot through the thigh just before John Hardin’s death, when the Illinois and Kentucky volunteers attempted their retreat down the deep ravine. Badly wounded, Clay handed his father’s dueling pistols to one of his men for safe return, and ordered his regiment of Kentucky volunteers to retreat without him in the face of the advancing enemy. Then, brandishing his sword to the last, he succumbed to an onslaught of bayonet-wielding Mexicans. Clay’s body was rescued by two unfree black men serving the company. Joel, an enslaved body servant and son of a prominent Lexington barber well known to the Clay family, was himself injured in the process. “No man ever fell more nobly, or more deeply regretted by his brother soldiers,” a fellow soldier wrote to the senior Clay. He sent a lock of his son’s hair shorn immediately after death.3

  Colonel Clay had always stood out in the large Clay brood. He had graduated second in his class at West Point and had, his father imagined, a fine political future ahead of him. The senior Clay loved Henry deeply, but he also placed huge expectations on the son he considered most likely to succeed. All six of Clay’s daughters had met early and tragic deaths, but this new loss he found almost insurmountable. “I find it extremely difficult to sustain myself under this heavy calamity,” he wrote to William Mercer. “I was greatly attached to him, and he had high qualities, well known to me, entitling him to my warmest affection.” In a life “full of domestic afflictions,” Clay found that “this last is the severest among them.”4

  The soldier left behind three young children, whose mother, Julia, had died in 1840. The oldest was just thirteen. It was all “excruciatingly painful” to the family’s patriarch, particularly since normally stoic Lucretia “bears the affliction with less than her usual fortitude.” The couple was particularly “tortured by account after account” of “the manner of his death, and the possible outrages committed upon his body by the enemy.”5 Clay’s body had been stripped of its clothes and repeatedly bayoneted. He was just thirty-five when Polk’s war took his life, a little more than a year younger than John Hardin and only two years younger than Abraham Lincoln.

  Newspaper accounts of the battle highlighted the martyr-like deaths of John Hardin and Henry Clay Jr.; as one report had it, “the representatives of each state seemed to vie with each other in the honorable ambition of doing the best service for their country.” Readers learned the details of how “the noble Hardin met his death gloriously while conducting the last terrible charge.… Lieutenant Colonel Clay was cut down at almost the same moment with Hardin and McKee, while giving his men the most brilliant example of noble daring and lofty chivalry.”6

  If there was any consolation to gain from his son’s death, Clay repeatedly stated, it was that “if he were to die, I know that he preferred to meet death on the field of battle, in the service of his Country.” But the thought failed to provide solace. “That consolation would be greater,” he admitted to one friend, “if I did not believe that this Mexican War was unnecessary and of an aggressive character.” But Colonel Clay had seen things differently. “My poor son did not however stop to enquire into the causes of the War. It was sufficient for him that it existed in fact, and that he thought the Nation was entitled to his services.”7

  Because of the fame of his father and the drama of his passing, Colonel Clay’s death became a media spectacle, with the elder Clay playing a leading role. It was widely reported that Colonel Clay’s last words before his death were to his father. With the enemy bearing down, the injured officer handed over the family pistols and gasped, “Tell him that I used these to the last! They were his gift.” Clay’s heroic demise, as one association of young Whigs in New York concluded, was equal to “that of the last of the heroes of the age of Chivalry.” There could be no higher subject for the “poets and historians and artists of our country” than the “events and scene of our young hero’s fall.”8 The outpouring of celebration over victory at Buena Vista was heightened by the heroic demise of Clay, Hardin, Clay’s commanding officer McKee, and Archibald Yell. Colonel Clay, in particular, was inevitably mentioned in the many poems written about Buena Vista, and almost always linked with John Hardin. Albert Pike’s epic and widely reprinted “Buena Vista” was written dire
ctly after the battle.

  Ho! Hardin breasts it bravely!… the Foe swarm ten to one:

  Hardin is slain; McKee and Clay the last time see the sun.9

  In Horace Hoskins Houghton’s “Battle of Buena Vista”:

  Mercy Trembled at the sight

  And came from heaven, sad change to tell—

  When Clay, and Yell, and Hardin fell;

  And, weeping at the piteous sight,

  Drew down the curtains of the night—10

  Newspaper reports lauded the fallen:

  Clay—the young, the brave, the chivalrous—foremost in the fight, the soul of every lofty sentiment—devoted to his friends and generous to his enemies. He fell in the flower of his age and usefulness, and has left no worthier name behind him. If he was not the “noblest Roman of them all,” few will deny that in him—

  Were the elements

  So mixed, that Nature might stand up and say

  To all the world—THIS WAS A MAN.11

  Americans also clamored for visual representations of the deaths of the Buena Vista martyrs. Hardin’s national fame was indicated by the fact that the preeminent lithographers of the era, Currier and Ives, produced a hand-colored print in his honor.