Manifest Destinies, Second Edition

by Laura E. Gómez

  Moreover, the war’s grassroots popularity made it harder to criticize. Historian Paul Foos notes, “Leading political figures felt compelled to praise volunteers even if they opposed the Mexican War, and supporters of the president found it expedient to criticize his policies when he gave preference to regular over volunteer soldiers.”38 Ironically, the antiwar argument (made mostly by Whig congressmen in the Northeast)—that the war was unjustified and hypocritical in that it involved a republic seeking its own colonies—was undercut by the promotion of the war as one fought by volunteer soldiers who performed democracy by their act of enlisting. The preponderance of volunteers among the war’s soldiers gave it a populist cast that legitimated the war, despite the fact that it essentially was fought to further quite antidemocratic, colonialist aims.

  The Military Conquest of New Mexico

  Just a few months after the Texas skirmishes, volunteers led the invasions of New Mexico and California. Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny proceeded with seventeen hundred troops from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in June 1846 with orders to subdue New Mexico and proceed to California before winter.39 While Kearny was moving ground forces into Northern California (after the capture of New Mexico, to which we will return in a moment), General Taylor was moving American naval forces to Monterey. American ships arrived in Northern California just two days after Independence Day 1846, raising the flag without Mexican resistance. The American invasion of Southern California was more challenging because far more Mexicans lived there. The Mexicans in Los Angeles successfully resisted the Americans over the course of several months in the fall of 1846. It was not until January 1847, six months after the occupation began, that American military commanders could safely declare that they had subdued California.40

  Colonel Kearny and his troops left Kansas under presidential orders to secure New Mexico “with the least expenditure of blood and money.”41 Secretary of War William L. Marcy’s letters to Kearny were blunt about the president’s priorities: “It has been decided by the President to be of the greatest importance in the pending war with Mexico to take the earliest possession of Upper California [Mexico’s Alta California, the present-day state of California].”42 Kearny did just this, declaring New Mexico under American military rule as of August 18, 1846, when he reached Santa Fe. For his speed in occupying New Mexico, Kearny was rewarded with a promotion to brigadier general.43 In a letter to his superiors, Kearny bragged about taking New Mexico “without firing a gun or spilling a single drop of blood,” leading historian Hubert Howe Bancroft to describe Kearny’s reception by the Mexicans in New Mexico as “friendly.”44

  Writing a half century after the war, Bancroft concluded, “Thus was the capital of New Mexico occupied without the shedding of blood,” ushering in the still-dominant mythology of the bloodless conquest of New Mexico.45 Yet Bancroft’s assessment was true only inasmuch as the Mexicans did not immediately greet the Americans with armed resistance. As historian Tobias Durán has explained, however, Mexicans demonstrated their displeasure at the American invasion in other ways. For example, in a speech following Kearny’s pronouncement of American authority at Santa Fe, the acting Mexican governor of New Mexico said, “[D]o not find it strange if there has been no manifestation of joy and enthusiasm in seeing this city occupied by your military forces. To us the power of the Mexican Republic is dead. No matter what her condition, she was our mother.”46 Moreover, as the opening discussion of the Taos executions showed, Mexicans and Indians in New Mexico did not remain quiescent for long.

  As Kearny entered each successive New Mexican village—Las Vegas, Tecolote, San Miguel del Vado—on his way to Santa Fe, he addressed the native people, often from the rooftop of an adobe building.47 In these speeches, he asserted U.S. authority over the region, warned his audience not to resist or to risk death, and then made promises about how the Americans would improve the lives of the native people. Seeking to mollify resistance, especially from Mexican elites, Kearny emphasized the principle of religious freedom and said his troops would respect Catholic religious institutions.48 In what would later be used against him, he said that the Americans’ intent was to provide a government “similar to those in the United States.” The American strategy in New Mexico was dictated by President Polk, who, through Marcy, directed Kearny “to conciliate the inhabitants and to let them see that peace is within their reach the moment their rulers will consent to do us justice [by surrendering].”49 Even as Kearny bragged to his superiors about his bloodless conquest, his speeches revealed his appreciation of a more complicated and potentially dangerous reality.

  Over the next five weeks, before departing for California with most of his troops, Kearny fortified the American military presence in New Mexico by constructing a permanent fort (which he named Fort Marcy, in honor of his superior).50 But he spent most of his time during those weeks implementing the president’s orders to establish a civil government under American authority.51 Kearny already had reappointed a number of local officials, having, in his initial speeches to native New Mexicans, asked local officeholders to “take an oath of allegiance to the United States” in order to continue in their posts.52 A month later, on September 22, Kearny went further, invoking the president’s orders to appoint a civil government for what he termed “New Mexico, a Territory of the United States.”53 In so doing, Kearny overstepped his role as military commander: only Congress could establish new territories. Indeed, when word of Kearny’s actions reached Washington four weeks later, several members of Congress reacted with swift criticism of the administration, and Congress voted to launch an investigation.54 Although the president distanced himself from Kearny, the correspondence between Marcy and Kearny suggests Kearny was executing the president’s orders. None of this, however, was known in New Mexico. By the time Kearny received word of the controversy in late December, he was in California.55

  Meanwhile, Kearny’s new civilian appointees, most of whom had no prior governing experience, set out to oversee what they incorrectly assumed was a newly organized American territory. Of course, the real power remained in the hands of the military commander, now Colonel Sterling Price. Of the nine appointments Kearny made in September 1846, seven were of Euro-American merchants. Kearny appointed a “superior court” consisting of three judges.56 He ordered drafted and then promulgated a code of laws drawn from those of the Missouri Territory, Texas, and Mexico. Revealing again his overreach, the opening sentence read, “The government of the United States of America ordains and establishes the following organic law for the Territory of New Mexico, which has become a Territory of said government.”57 Although Kearny submitted the so-called Kearny Code, Congress refused to authorize it, signaling its disapproval of the Polk administration and its failure to reign in military officers—disapproval that, once again, was largely unknown in New Mexico.58

  Kearny’s relationship with the man he appointed as civil governor was sealed at Bent’s Fort, a trading post on the Arkansas River that Charles Bent owned with his brother George. Kearny’s forces camped there in August 1846 on their way to Santa Fe so that Kearny could enlist Bent’s help in the invasion of New Mexico.59 Bent had been actively trading in New Mexico since 1829, making him one of the best-known Euro-Americans in northern New Mexico. Bent also lived with a Mexican woman, Ignacia Jaramillo, whom many mistakenly assumed was his wife; in fact, Kearny referred to Bent’s “marriage” to a native woman in his announcement of Bent’s appointment.60 From the base at Bent’s Fort, Kearny sent out two advance parties, each led by merchants, to ascertain Mexicans’ likely resistance and to enlist Mexican merchants in the American invasion. Bent’s spy party went to Taos and returned to inform Kearny to expect heavy resistance from the Mexicans.61 The second spy party, led by trader James Magoffin, who was fluent in Spanish and married to a Mexican, reportedly bribed the New Mexico governor in exchange for an agreement not to resist the Americans.62

  The American military strategy was to conserve military resources in New Mex
ico in order to hold them in reserve for later battles in California and, especially, central Mexico.63 The Americans hoped not to have to waste manpower in taking control of New Mexico. Instead, they planned to exploit what they perceived as divisions in Mexican society. That understanding—one shared even by President Polk and his cabinet—was in every way racial, paralleling in important respects racial dynamics in the United States. Letters from Marcy to Kearny spoke of racial and class divisions among the Mexicans that might provide a wedge for the American invaders. In a letter of July 9, 1846, for example, Marcy described Mexico as a country “so divided into races, classes, and parties” that it provided “great room” for “inducing them to wish success to an [American] invasion.”64 In the letter, Marcy highlighted the racial division “between the Spaniards, who monopolize the wealth and power of the country, and the mixed Indian race, who bear[s] its burdens.”65 Here, Marcy sought to educate Kearny about the difference between elite Mexicans, who perhaps claimed Spanish ancestry, and the vast majority of Mexicans, who had far more Indian than Spanish ancestry. Later in the same letter, Marcy also spoke about the division between Mexicans and “the Indians,” by whom he meant not “Indian Mexicans,” but the diverse nomadic and seminomadic tribes whose territory included New Mexico. As to these Indians, Marcy advised pacifying them by “increas[ing] your supply for goods to be distributed as presents” to them.66

  No Longer a Bloodless Conquest

  As Kearny prepared to head west to California, military intelligence reported that New Mexico and its natives were “contented” and “perfectly tranquil.”67 Within months, however, the Americans realized how wrong they were, as a widespread anti-American rebellion took shape. According to some, most of the high-status Mexican families had members among the leaders of the resistance, which was based in Santa Fe but spread across many northern New Mexico communities.68 No written documents survive that describe the rebellion from the point of view of its Mexican proponents, but we can piece together a partial account from the official reports by the American military and civil authorities, as well as from American newspaper accounts. José María Sánchez, one of the alleged opposition leaders, was captured and in his confession to American soldiers described an elaborate series of secret meetings held at various private homes over many weeks, the election of resistance officers, and the drafting of proclamations to be carried to villages around New Mexico.69 Similarly, Bent reported a well-organized resistance that had been sending representatives to “the different towns to incite the lower classes of Mexicans and [P]ueblo Indians.”70

  The uprising was to have begun with a Christmas Eve attack, the idea being that the American officers would be occupied with festivities, inebriated, and otherwise less mindful of their weapons. According to Bent’s report, less than a week before Christmas, an unnamed woman notified military officials of the rebellion plan.71 All but two of the resisters were caught and arrested, but none were punished because they confessed and promised to cooperate with the Americans in the future. The official reports provide little information about the female turncoat (not even her name), but contemporary accounts arose about her identity and motives for cooperating with the Americans. These stories took on a life of their own, appearing in various newspapers, likely more fiction than truth, but the fiction too suggests the dynamics of gender and sexuality that permeated the U.S.–Mexico War. In a New Orleans newspaper account, she was portrayed as a virtuous Mexican woman of mixed indigenous and African descent, while American soldiers were praised for “winning the hearts” of native women like her.72

  If masculinity was defined in part by “winning the hearts” of females, in New Mexico this meant Mexican and Indian women. One way for Euro-American men to challenge Mexican men was to portray “their” women as voluntarily choosing loyalty to the Americans over the Mexicans, as the New Orleans newspaper account suggested. A poem published in a Boston newspaper shortly before the outbreak of the U.S.–Mexico War, titled “They Wait for Us,” conveys the presumption that Mexican women would gladly choose American over Mexican men, portrayed by the author as lazy and undeserving of feminine attention.

  The Spanish maid, with eye of fire,

  At balmy evening turns her lyre

  And, looking to the Eastern sky,

  Awaits our Yankee chivalry

  Whose purer blood and valiant arms

  Are fit to clasp her budding charms.

  The man, her mate, is sunk in sloth—

  To love, his senseless heart is loth:

  The pipe and glass and tinkling lute,

  A sofa, a dish of fruit;

  A nap, some dozen times by day;

  Somber and sad, and never gay.73

  At a broader level, the larger war implicated gender roles in American popular culture, with the United States gendered as male and potent and Mexico feminized as weak and vulnerable.

  American attitudes toward Mexican women oscillated between the view that they were prizes to be won from the feckless Mexican men and the view that they were, literally, “contaminating” American soldiers.74 Often Mexican women were described by Euro-American travelers as being sexually promiscuous, a racial stereotype that persists today.75 There were undoubtedly native women who were prostitutes, including some who made successful careers serving American soldiers. To what extent did they freely choose prostitution or feel they had no alternative to survive? Keep in mind that there were only a handful of Euro-American women living in all of New Mexico during the war. Native women had a variety of relationships with Euro-American men. Consider the relatively affluent Jaramillo sisters of Taos, for example, who married or lived with Kit Carson and Charles Bent, two of the earliest American immigrants to New Mexico. In 1843 Josefa Jaramillo married Carson, who had converted to Catholicism and become a Mexican citizen prior to the marriage. Her sister, Ignacia, became a widow at a young age, and, perhaps sometime in the late 1830s or early 1840s, established a household with Bent. (We can only speculate, but one reason they did not marry may have been his unwillingness to convert to Catholicism.) Historian Deena González has shown that marriages between Euro-American men and Mexican women never involved more than a tiny percentage of Mexican women, although we know little about less formal relationships.76

  The official story of the December uprising was that it had been stopped in its tracks. It became at once a cautionary tale for the Mexicans and, at least briefly, an opportunity for the military and civil governments to brag to Washington. Bent, as civil governor, and Price, as military commander, both took credit for stopping the coup, and both were confident that there would be no future rebellions. Two weeks before he was assassinated, Bent penned a conciliatory, if also hortatory, letter “to the inhabitants” of New Mexico, signing it “your best friend.” The letter referred to the Mexican rebels as “anarchists” and ambitious men who sought to control the masses, whom Bent urged to embrace democracy: “you [New Mexicans] compose a part of the Union, the cradle of liberty.”77 But Bent seriously misjudged the mood of New Mexico’s natives.

  His false confidence prompted him to leave his well-guarded Santa Fe lodgings to return home to Taos, where, within a month of the arrests in the Santa Fe rebellion, he was murdered by rebels. Teresina Bent Scheurich, who was around five years old in 1847, later recalled the attack on her father:

  We were in bed when the Mexicans and Indians came to the house breaking the doors and some of them were on the top of the house tearing the roof. So we got up and father stepped to the porch asking them what they wanted, and they answered him: “We want your head gringo; we do not want for any of you gringos to govern us, as we have come to kill you.”78

  According to Price’s report, Bent’s attackers scalped and beheaded him.79 They also killed five others that January morning, including two other Euro-American officials (the sheriff and the district attorney), a young man who was the son of one of the judges Kearny had appointed, Ignacia Jaramillo’s brother, and a Mexican justice of t
he peace who had pledged loyalty to the Americans.80

  In his official report, the military commander concluded, “It appeared to be the object of the insurrectionists to put to death every American and every Mexican who had accepted office under the American government.”81 Whether or not they were coordinated, events at Taos appear to have triggered other anti-American attacks. Later that same day, eight Euro-Americans (including at least one Englishman) were killed at Turley’s Mill, a distillery owned by an American in the village of Arroyo Hondo, north of Taos. Two other Americans were also killed that day in Rio Colorado. Within a few days of Bent’s assassination, Lawrence Waldo’s eight-man trading party was killed near the village of Mora.82 Price reported contemporaneously that the rebellion was gaining supporters from each village along the way.83

  Little in the existing historical record allows us to conclude definitively that the December plot and the Taos uprising were connected. Indeed, several contemporary accounts by Euro-Americans go out of their way to claim that the two rebellions were unrelated and quite different in their origins and style—suggesting the Santa Fe plot was carried out by Mexican elites, while the Taos uprising was the work of peasants—but they do so based on little evidence. When news of the Taos uprising finally reached the American public two months later, the press portrayed the Taos rebels as “greasers,” “loafers,” and “rabble.”84 Yet at least one elderly man from a prominent Mexican family eventually was convicted of treason and sentenced to die (though he was never executed). Over time, the Santa Fe plot came to be associated with Mexicans alone, although the scant evidence suggests Pueblo Indians also were part of the conspiracy, if not in leadership roles. The Taos “massacre” came to be portrayed as the work of “savage” Indians, despite the fact that all contemporary accounts of the attack on Bent described the rebels as both Indians and Mexicans.85 For example, an 1847 Euro-American account presented the Taos rebellion as one exclusively committed by “the Pueblos of Taos [who] were accounted the most warlike and the bravest race in Mexico” and emphasized the “extreme brutality” and “savage barbarity” of the attack on Bent.86 These characterizations also fed into the racist current of the time that portrayed Indians as more brutal than Mexicans, even as they buttressed the stereotype of Mexicans as lazy and inefficient (the explanation given for the failed December plot).