Death of Col. John J. Hardin: Of the 1st Regiment Illinois Volunteers. Lithograph by Nathaniel Currier, 1847. Hardin’s national reputation is indicated by the fact that the leading U.S. printmaking firm produced this image of his death at Buena Vista. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. (photo credit 8.1)
At least seven lithographs of Henry Clay’s heroic demise on the battlefield were produced by leading printmakers, most of them tastefully colored and all suitable for framing. While one popular image showed demonized Mexican soldiers bayoneting the prostrate officer, most chose instead to represent the dying Clay calmly handing the family dueling pistols to a comrade for safe return to his father while Mexican troops advanced in the background. These images highlighted the bond between father and son but also invited viewers to share in the Clay family trauma, making their private tragedy openly public. “Take these Pistols to my father,” young Clay exhorts his comrades in one image. “Tell him, I have done all I can with them, and now return them to him.”
While the media frenzy probably struck Lucretia as heartlessly invasive, her husband seems to have welcomed the public to share his grief. Zachary Taylor wrote Clay a moving letter of condolence just days after the battle. “No one ever won more rapidly upon my regard” than the “manly and honorable” Colonel Clay, he assured the father. “Under the guidance of himself and the lamented McKee, gallantly did the sons of Kentucky, in the thickest of the strife, uphold the honor of the State and of the country.… When I miss his familiar face, and those of McKee and Hardin, I can say with truth, that I feel no exultation in our success.”12 Clay allowed the letter to be published, and it appeared in newspapers across the country.
Death of Lieut. Col. Henry Clay, Jr. Butler and Lewis, 1847. At least seven prints were produced by major printmaking firms of the death of Henry Clay. Almost all highlighted Clay’s relationship with his famous father by representing the return of the family dueling pistols. The caption below this print reads, “Leave me, take care of yourselves. Take these Pistols to my father and tell him, I have done all I can with them and now return them to him.” Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. (photo credit 8.2)
Clay also allowed a New York printmaker, who sent Clay a lithograph of the Battle of Buena Vista, to quote from Clay’s thank-you note in newspaper ads for his firm. The image, Clay wrote, was “a rich and beautiful specimen of the lithographic arts.” Clay admitted that it “will constantly remind me of a sad loss which I sustained on that memorable occasion,” but he was consoled “by the consideration that my lamented son, I know, if he were to be prematurely taken away, preferred such a death as he encountered.”13 Neither printmaker nor public saw anything wrong with exploiting Clay’s grief for purposes of commerce.
As Henry and Lucretia mourned, expressions of condolence poured into Ashland from around the country. Friends wrote; but so did strangers. The wife of a lawyer in Danville, Pennsylvania, lamented the loss of “your Son your own name, your noble gallant Son … And O how like his father so self-sacrificing.” Her son was serving in Mexico as well, but she “could not partake in the rejoicing manifested by many in our town—by illuminations and other demonstrations of joy over the victory atchieved at Buena Vista” because of her sorrow over Clay’s loss. She apologized for sending her letter. “Excuse me Mr Clay for I could not refrain for attempting to write to you your life and Character are so familiar to us that I cannot deem you a Stranger.”14
The Louisville Bar Association, citing the “irreparable loss which his little orphans now sustain,” and “the tear that steals down the manly cheek of his honored father,” determined to wear mourning for thirty days. An association of Philadelphia merchants sent their condolences as well.15
And of course Clay heard from his political colleagues. His onetime opponent Martin Van Buren was one of many Democrats who sent condolences for Clay’s “severe affliction.”16 But President Polk, proving his consummate ability to hold a grudge, sent nothing. Nor did Polk see fit to record the news of Colonel Clay’s death in his diary. Polk’s war had taken a shocking toll on the Clay family, and it was not over yet.
Polk’s slight hardly registered in Clay’s grief. His son’s death shook him deeply and forced him to reexamine his life. Although Clay’s reputation for high-stakes gambling and drunken excess was based on behavior abandoned decades earlier, he had never been a churchgoing man, despite the entreaties of his pious wife. Now, however, he turned to religion for solace. He wrote a friend in May that he could “cease to mourn for him if consolation could be drawn from any human source,” but felt “that He only can heal the wound which has been inflicted, who permitted it, and to Him I strive to bow and submit, in meekness and humility.” Clay was baptized an Episcopalian on June 22, at Ashland. On Independence Day, as he noted in his own prayer book, he took “the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper” for the first time in the chapel of Transylvania University, in Lexington.17
Later that month, a Buena Vista survivor returned the Clay family pistols to Ashland. The nation learned that Clay was still “very much bowed down under a sense of deep affliction, brought upon him by the death of his son, the lamented Col. Clay.” The return of the pistols reopened the wound, and “the emotions of Mr. Clay were truly painful to witness.”18 Clay intended to pass the pistols on to his grandson.
On July 20, the family performed “the sad and melancholy duty” of attending Colonel Clay’s funeral. Fifteen to twenty thousand people gathered at the State Cemetery in Frankfort to honor the remains of Clay, McKee, and others whose bodies had been returned from the battlefield. The Clay family’s grief was highlighted in newspaper accounts of the proceedings, particularly the tears shed as “Mr. Clay was surrounded by the orphan children of his lamented son.” The undertaker presented Henry Clay with a “breast pin” made of his son’s hair, and gave Lucretia Clay a locket, also made of her dead son’s hair. Clay assured the man that the “delicate and touching” tributes were “more highly prized by us than ‘rubies and diamonds,’ and will be carefully preserved by us, and transmitted to his children.”19
Henry Clay’s tasteless joke about killing a Mexican was not forgotten, and New England abolitionists were quick to point out the irony, or justice, of Clay’s own loss. Theodore Parker, Boston’s leading radical abolitionist and theologian, was brutal in his assessment. “There stood one of the foremost men of America, hoping to ‘capture or slay a Mexican!’ the son of some woman that never injured him,” Parker intoned. “Alas—could he have known it—vain man, how soon is he doomed to weep at the ‘inscrutable Providence,’ by which his own son, the dear one, lies slain in battle.”
As for the supposed nobility of Colonel Clay’s death, Parker pointed out that it was “some vulgar bullet of a nameless soldier” that brought Colonel Clay down. Furthermore, it was the nameless Mexican, not young Clay, who was in the right. Clay’s killer “fought for his country, her altars and her homes, while the American volunteer fell inglorious and disgraced, a willing murderer, in that war so treacherous and so cruel.”
Parker offered no solace for “the father who had hoped to ‘slay a Mexican.’ ” Henry Clay “shall find but sad consolation kissing the cold lips of his only [sic] son.” And this, according to Parker, was due justice. “Is Providence so ‘inscrutable’?” the theologian asked. “He who would deal death upon the sons of other men—shall he not feel it in his own home?”20
The Sage of Ashland watched as Kentucky’s surviving twelve-month volunteers returned home after Buena Vista. They were feted with elaborate dinners, public barbecues, and parades. Many were physically injured, while others had less obvious injuries to their minds and spirits. The Kentucky legislature voted to build a memorial in honor of those who did not return, a towering commemorative marble monument overlooking the Kentucky River, inscribed with their names.
At the dedication ceremony, a young veteran who had fought at Buena Vista recited a poem he had written for the occasion, title
d “The Bivouac of the Dead.” Theodore O’Hara wrote specifically about the “doubtful conflict” that “raged / O’er all that stricken plain,” and about the “vengeful blood of Spain.” He mourned the men who died in Mexico. But it was his evocation of the futility of death that led both northerners and southerners to embrace “Bivouac of the Dead” a little more than a decade later in the Civil War.21
O’Hara was one of the few Kentucky volunteers who served with both Taylor and Scott, and he participated in Scott’s march to the capital. Kentucky’s hard fighting concluded at Buena Vista. This was not the case for the men from Illinois. Only two of Illinois’s four regiments fought under Hardin and returned home from northeastern Mexico. Edward Baker’s Fourth Illinois Volunteer Regiment joined Scott’s army. As they sailed off to Veracruz along with eleven thousand other U.S. soldiers, one Illinois volunteer recorded that they were “in the best of spirits as if they were going to a ball.” On March 9, they took part in the first amphibious landing in American naval history. Without any idea of the strength of the Mexican force awaiting them in the walled city, the men crowded into specially designed surf boats and stormed the beach at Veracruz, rifles held over their heads to keep them dry.22
Remarkably, they met almost no opposition. Political disorder in Mexico City and Santa Anna’s decision to fight Taylor before dealing with Scott prevented the Mexican army from sending crucial reinforcements before the invasion. This was one of the few times in the war when Mexicans would be outnumbered by their invaders. But with less than four thousand men at his command, General Juan Morales faced odds not unlike Taylor’s at Buena Vista.
There was still the matter of the walled city to penetrate, however. The venerable and elegant city of fifteen thousand was surrounded by high walls of coral and brick cemented with lime, forming a hexagon approximately one-quarter by one-half mile in size. It presented an imposing appearance. Scott spent a week building fortifications on the beach and establishing a tactical plan. It was imperative that U.S. forces move on to the healthier altitudes near Mexico City quickly; the swampy lowlands of Veracruz were full of mosquitoes, and yellow fever was already weakening his forces.
Scott decided to bomb the city into submission. They sealed the route out of town and cut off the water supply, communications, and rail network into the city. On March 22, Scott informed the residents of Veracruz that they had no choice but to surrender. Confident that help from Mexico City was on its way, they refused to comply.
Then Scott’s army received the emotional news of Buena Vista. John Hardin’s loss, not surprisingly, “cast a gloom over every man in the Illinois Regiment.” Colonel Edward Baker had succeeded Hardin in Congress, and the two men had known each other for over a decade. He was “deeply affected” by the news and issued a regimental order that “a life of such unsullied honor, and a death of such proud distinction has given his name immortal renown.”23
The men of the Fourth Illinois, like the rest of the troops gathered on the beach of Veracruz, realized they had missed the greatest battle of the war. They determined to earn as much glory as those they had left behind at Buena Vista. “We are going down on Vera Cruz like a tornado,” one Wisconsin soldier wrote home. “Not only the eyes of America but all Europe are looking on this greatest conflict that has occurred in modern times.… We cannot fail, we will not fail, we shall not FAIL.”24
They didn’t fail, but neither did they match the glory of the Buena Vista dead.
When the Mexican army refused to surrender, Scott ordered his artillery to fire. For forty-eight straight hours shells descended on the people of Veracruz, smashing homes, churches, and schools indiscriminately. On March 24, foreign consuls stationed in Veracruz appealed to Scott for mercy. They asked that the women and children of the city be allowed to evacuate. Scott refused their request and stated that there would be no truce without surrender. The general intensified his bombing the following day, and, as Scott expected, the demoralized army came to terms. The civilians who left the city were in a pathetic state. “They were nearly starved to death when they surrendered,” a twenty-one-year-old volunteer from South Carolina wrote his family; “they had got to eating their donkeys.” It was a sobering vision for many of the soldiers. “To see the Mother with her infant on her back and with what little clothing she could carry toddleing along to seek a home unknown” made one Pennsylvania volunteer wonder how it would feel to be in her place. “There was not much sport made of them as would be supposed.”25
The following bright and cloudless day the soldiers in Veracruz marched out of the walled town and surrendered their arms. As U.S. soldiers marched in, both volunteers and regulars had their first opportunity to see the effects of the 463,000 pounds of shot and shell that had rained into the city over the past four days. Their pleasure at witnessing “our flag planted on one of the best fortified castles in the wourld” was somewhat decreased by the scene inside the walls of the city. As a twenty-nine-gun salute rang out, the soldiers looked out on a city that was “virtually in ruins. Some buildings were set afire and nothing remains but blackened walls. Others are shattered and scattered in fragments. Street pavements are torn up from end to end.” Those houses that were not destroyed flew flags “of some neutral nation,” the residents fearing that “the voluntarios would break into them.”26
The casualties were staggering. Mexico estimated that up to 500 civilians and 600 soldiers were killed in the bombardment. The U.S. estimate of Mexican casualties was 100 civilians and 80 soldiers. U.S. forces lost only 13. General Scott clearly chose civilian deaths over U.S. casualties or any delay in his plans. This was not the first time he had made such a choice. In 1838 he presided over the forced removal of the Cherokee in Georgia. Although the tribe offered no violent resistance, over a quarter of the Cherokee died on the Trail of Tears while under Scott’s supervision. When Santa Anna heard news of Veracruz, he concluded that the people of Mexico had brought “this disastrous misfortune upon ourselves,” the result of “interminable discords.” He called on his fellow citizens to “die fighting” and promised to do the same himself. Stationed in Veracruz in the week after the siege, Ethan Allen Hitchcock found the “stench” of the dead “intolerable.” He moved his tent out to the “suburbs” in order to get away from the smell.27
Scott’s official report of the victory was on its way back to the United States that same day, carried on the steamship Princeton.28 Abel Upshur would have been proud. Before he met his death aboard the vessel, in an explosion not unlike those that destroyed Veracruz, he had dreamed that the Princeton would prove America’s might to the world.
But also winding their way back to the United States were reports of a different sort: accounts by embedded journalists from half a dozen American papers of the carnage in Veracruz. The correspondent for the New Orleans Picayune decried the “deplorable” effects of the bombing. “Hardly a house had escaped, and a large portion of them were ruined. The shells had fallen through the roofs and had exploded inside, tearing everything into pieces—bursting through the partitions and blowing out the windows.” William Tobey, a Pennsylvania volunteer who wrote under the pen name “John of York,” told the Philadelphia North American that if the people of Pennsylvania could “know, see and feel” the carnage, “you would all turn Quakers.” Just “one glance” at the population leaving the city “would show how grossly wrong” it was to direct a war at the people. A correspondent for the New Orleans Delta agreed. “Women and children, old men and lame ones, hobbling off … and although they are, and should be, the enemies of every American, my heart bled for them. Their treachery and cruelty to our people was lost sight of in their humiliated looks.… On my soul I could not help pitying them.”29
Scene in Vera Cruz During the Bombardment. E. B. and E. C. Kellogg, 1847. This lithograph of the bombing of Veracruz, produced by a Hartford, Connecticut, firm, is one of the few American-made images of the war that visually represented the suffering of Mexican civilians. This vision of
the widespread destruction of the city by American artillery and the deaths of women and children was most likely based on reports by soldiers and embedded journalists that appeared in American newspapers after the battle. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. (photo credit 8.3)
The journalists also reported that U.S. troops rioted immediately after entering Veracruz, setting fire to a nearby settlement, Boca Rio, after robbing and raping the inhabitants. Scott resorted to the public hanging of a rapist and issued an order establishing military courts to try Americans for crimes against Mexicans. His actions restored order, but not before the American people realized that American atrocities would not be limited to northern Mexico.
Veracruz was the most widely reported battle of the war, and the most negatively reported. The carnage within the walls of the city, and the disorder outside it, led the press to issue open criticism of the American government for the first time during the war. After contemplating the “hideous corpses, staring the living in the face” in Veracruz, many of the entrenched journalists began to question when “the war fiend” would be “tired of his sport, or sated with blood,” and how many “thousands of human lives” would yet “be sacrificed to the ambitious aspirations of man, or the just or unjust requirements of nations.” The public might not trust everything they read in the papers, but they couldn’t help but notice the new skepticism of the embedded reporters.30
The criticism hurt Polk. Democrats had fared badly in the elections of 1846, and Polk’s plan to invade central Mexico was forged in the hopes that it might bring an increasingly unpopular war to a speedy end. But Veracruz had hardly appeased his critics. Unlike Henry Clay, however, Polk never questioned providence. He belonged to no church, but his purpose in life was clear. He was the agent of Manifest Destiny. He ignored the naysayers who wondered out loud why Mexico hadn’t yet capitulated. He left unanswered reports from his commanding officers about atrocities on the front. The mounting death toll among American troops seems to have made no impression on him. When Santa Anna betrayed him and fought like a good patriot, Polk simply moved on and redoubled his efforts to win the war through sheer will and unending labor.
A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico Page 22