56 President’s Message of 1846, 26–27.
57 Ibid., 27–73. For additional background on the 115-page Kearny Code, see Bancroft, History of the Pacific States, 425–26n22. According to Bancroft, the Kearny Code was compiled by three soldiers: Colonel Doniphan (who was a trained lawyer), Captain Henry L. Waldo (a volunteer who was fluent in Spanish), and Willard P. Hall (who was elected to Congress while serving in the U.S.–Mexico War).
58 Thomas, “History of Military Government.”
59 Bent, Magoffin, and other merchants played significant roles in the invasion—so much so that historian Howard Lamar has labeled the American invasion of New Mexico “the conquest of merchants.” Lamar, Far Southwest, 52–56; see also Bancroft, History of the Pacific States, 409.
60 Ignacia Jaramillo was married to Jose Rafael Luna in 1829 and was widowed sometime in the 1830s. No church records show she married Bent, although they lived together and had children together (who were baptized under their mother’s surname, another indication she and Bent were not married). Email communication from archivist Samuel Sisneros to the author based on his review of church records at the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives, January 2007.
61 Bancroft, History of the Pacific States, 410, 415.
62 Marcy’s communications with Kearny suggest a secret plot (warning Kearny that, if the press were to learn the facts, the administration would “disavow” any knowledge of it), perhaps an allusion to Magoffin’s mission. President’s Message of 1846, 5–7; see also Bancroft, History of the Pacific States, 411–13; Durán, “‘We Come as Friends,’” 47.
63 Historian Myra Ellen Jenkins concludes that Polk’s administration knew “from the beginning that the occupation [of New Mexico] must be carried out as peaceably as possible, and the inhabitants of the region so treated that a large occupying force would not need to be left behind when the main body of troops pushed on [to California].” Jenkins, “Rebellion against America,” 2.
64 President’s Message of 1846, 7–9.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid., 24–25.
68 Durán, “‘We Come as Friends,’” 48–49; see also Twitchell, History of the Military Occupation, 122.
69 New Orleans Daily Delta, March 5, 1847.
70 Bancroft, History of the Pacific States, 430n25 (quoting Bent’s December 26, 1846, report).
71 Twitchell, History of the Military Occupation, 298, 314.
72 New Orleans Daily Delta, March 5, 1847.
73 As quoted in Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 232.
74 New Orleans Daily Picayune, June 23, 1847.
75 See González, Refusing the Favor, 50–54; Langum, “California Women.”
76 González, Refusing the Favor, 72–74, 113–14.
77 Cutts, Conquest of California, 218–20 (quoting Bent letter of January 5, 1847).
78 As an elderly woman, Scheurich gave this account of her father’s murder to L. Bradford Prince. Note that the original statement was transcribed by Prince to retain Scheurich’s colloquial pronunciation; I have adjusted the text to standard spelling and grammar. The is the only surviving written eyewitness account, despite being recorded many decades after Bent’s murder. It is, however, likely that oral histories by Mexican and Pueblo participants have been passed down through the generations, though none appear in writing to my knowledge. In addition to considering himself a historian of New Mexico, Prince served as chief justice of the territorial supreme court and governor of the territory (his career is discussed in detail in Chapter 2).
79 Report on Discovery of Conspiracy, 8–13.
80 Bancroft, History of the Pacific States, 432n28.
81 Report on Discovery of Conspiracy, 8–13.
82 Lawrence Waldo was the brother of Captain Henry Waldo, who had been a member of the team that drafted the Kearny Code. Lawrence Waldo’s son eventually served as a justice of the territorial supreme court in New Mexico. Revealing his loyalties, Twitchell dedicated his book History of the Military Occupation of the Territory of New Mexico to Lawrence L. Waldo, whom he described as “a martyr to the march of American progress and civilization.”
83 Report on Discovery of Conspiracy, 8–13.
84 New Orleans Daily Delta, April 7, 1847. At least one antiwar newspaper used the Taos uprising to criticize the Polk administration for sending troops prematurely to California while leaving others behind in New Mexico spread too thin over a vast, populated region. New York Herald, March 18, 1847.
85 Bancroft, History of the Pacific States, 432. See, generally, Jenkins, “Rebellion against America”; Twitchell, History of the Military Occupation.
86 Cutts, Conquest of California, 222–23.
87 Unless otherwise noted, I have relied on Price’s official report of February 15, 1847, which was reproduced in the U.S. Congress’s “Report on Discovery of Conspiracy by Governor Bent.” Price’s report is in the form of a letter he wrote to the Adjutant General of the Army in Washington, D.C., and posted from “Headquarters Army in New Mexico.” It begins as follows: “Sir: I have the honor to submit to you a short account of the recent revolution in this territory, and a detailed report of the operations of the forces under my command consequent upon the rebellion.” The Price report was widely reprinted in the press, including in two newspapers I have examined for their coverage of these events (New Orleans Daily Delta, April 29, 1847, and New York Herald, April 21, 1847).
88 Price’s men included Charles St. Vrain’s company of sixty-seven volunteers, seven of whom were Spanish-surnamed. See also Bancroft, History of the Pacific States, 433; Tórrez, “New Mexican ‘Revolt,’” 6.
89 One newspaper described soldiers returning from New Mexico to St. Louis as looking “more like icicles of the [N]orth [P]ole than human beings.” New Orleans Daily Delta, February 10, 1847.
90 Price reported that thirty-six of the enemy were killed. Report on Discovery of Conspiracy, 8–13.
91 New York Herald, April 8, 1847; New York Herald, April 11, 1847.
92 New Orleans Daily Delta, April 6, 1847.
93 Price reported that “many of the men were frost-bitten, and all were very much jaded with the exertion necessary to travel over unbeaten roads.” Report on Discovery of Conspiracy, 8–13.
94 Tórrez, “New Mexican ‘Revolt,’” 7.
95 Garrard, Wah-to-Yah, 187–88.
96 Price notes, in minimalist style, only that “Tomas was shot by a private while in the guard-room” at Taos. Historian Robert Tórrez writes that Romero was killed by “a nervous guard while allegedly trying to escape,” but does not provide further documentation. Tórrez, “New Mexican ‘Revolt,’” 8.
97 New York Herald, April 18, 1847; Tórrez, “New Mexican ‘Revolt,’” 8; Garrard, Wah-to-Yah, 187.
98 Tórrez, “New Mexican ‘Revolt,’” 8.
99 Tórrez puts the number of executions resulting from trials for the January attack on Bent as between fifteen and twenty-one. Tórrez, “New Mexican ‘Revolt,’” 2. The New Orleans Daily Delta, an important source of coverage of the war given Louisiana’s relative proximity to Mexico, reported at various times that eleven or twelve men were executed. New Orleans Daily Delta, May 26, 1847; New Orleans Daily Delta, June 11, 1847.
100 Frank Blair, whom Kearny had appointed U.S. district attorney for New Mexico, was the prosecutor. He reported seeking indictments against seventy-nine native men on charges of Bent’s murder and treason, twenty-nine of whom were jailed and tried in Santa Fe and fifty of whom were jailed and tried in Taos. President’s Message of 1848, 26–27.
101 The local alcaldes of the Spanish-Mexican system can be thought of as akin to local justices of the peace in the Anglo-American system. And, indeed, in the Kearny Code of laws, the Spanish word alcalde was translated as “justice of the peace.” Revised N.M. Stat. 126, chap. 21, § 14 (1865); see also Lamar, Far Southwest, 85 (noting that most of Kearny’s justice of the peace appointments were alcaldes previously serving unde
r Mexican authority). Both historically performed a diverse range of duties: adjudicating criminal and civil cases; handling formal claims as well as informal disputes among neighbors and family members; playing leadership roles such as forming militias and overseeing elections. On the historic role of justices of the peace in the United States, see Steinberg, Transformation of Criminal Justice, 254n13; Kadish, Encyclopedia of Crime and Justice, 414–15; Wunder, Inferior Courts, Superior Justice, xv, 9. Historian Howard Lamar describes the New Mexico alcaldes as acting “as a justice of the peace, a mayor, a probate judge, and sometimes as a militia captain.” Lamar, Far Southwest, 31. For additional descriptions of the alcalde system, see González, Refusing the Favor, 19–27, 36–37; Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, 100; Reichard, “‘Justice Is God’s Law.’”
102 Reichard, “‘Justice Is God’s Law,’” 8.
103 When a villager took a complaint to the alcalde, the latter called witnesses immediately and crafted a resolution on the spot. The perceived informality and case-by-case settlement of disputes engendered disdain among Euro-American merchants, who prior to the war with Mexico relied on these courts to settle commercial disputes in New Mexico and California. Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies, 159, 164–65. See also, generally, Langum, Law and Community. Regarding Gregg’s diary of his days in northern Mexico as a trader, it is difficult to draw unbiased assessments of the alcalde system given his frequent losses in the forum, his language and other cultural barriers, and his racism toward Mexicans (which is readily apparent in his diary). Writing more than a century later, Lamar’s assessment was similarly biased; he described merchant Charles Bent (later appointed civil governor by Kearny) as being wary of alcalde courts because “there was no jury system nor any common law to use as a guide in criminal or property disputes. Appeals to the governor faced the same hazards of family influence and personal caprice” (citing Bent’s 1845 note to himself). Lamar, Far Southwest, 46.
104 As Lawrence Friedman reminds us in his epic history of American criminal justice, we must remain mindful of the myriad diversity of the criminal courts, which varied not only from state to state, but also according to the nature of the crime and the level of court. At the same time, “The roles of judge and jury, the rhythm of witness and cross-examination—these have remained fundamentally unaltered. There were, no doubt, some local variations, local trial customs, local differences in codes of criminal procedure, nuances of selecting and charging a jury, and in carrying on a trial. The details tend to be, as we said, obscure.” Friedman, Crime and Punishment, 235–37.
105 For example, in New York County in 1900, an average of 300 people were indicted monthly by the grand jury of twenty-three men. Over the course of that year, the twelve grand juries returned indictments on 3,674 cases out of 4,473 people arrested. Friedman, Crime and Punishment, 242.
106 For example, under a later enacted New Mexico statute, it was the jury’s prerogative to assess punishment after it reached a guilty verdict (sometimes choosing from among legislatively enacted options). Revised N.M. Stat. Chap. 52, § 14 (1865).
107 Friedman, Crime and Punishment, 242 (discussing petit jurors specifically). In my research on San Miguel County, New Mexico, some thirty years after the initial American occupation, however, I found that Mexican jurors outnumbered Euro-American jurors four to one; Mexican men were 80 percent of grand jurors and 86 percent of petit jurors. Wealthier Mexicans were more likely to serve as grand jurors, while laborers served regularly on petit juries as a form of political patronage. Gómez, “Race, Colonialism, and Criminal Law,” 1165–66, 1168–71. Preliminary research on two other New Mexico counties—Taos and Doña Ana—shows that Mexican men dominated grand and petit juries in the 1860s and 1870s.
108 Friedman, Crime and Punishment, 245. No state provided indigent defendants with free lawyers until the late nineteenth century. Ibid.
109 Friedman and Percival, Roots of Justice, 40.
110 Friedman, Crime and Punishment, 245. In one New Mexico jurisdiction in the 1880s, the length of trials, from jury selection to a jury verdict, ranged from a few hours to several days. See, generally, Gómez, “Race, Colonialism, and Criminal Law.”
111 Friedman, Crime and Punishment, 256. Although we do not have any systematic data from which to draw conclusions, the limited data on nineteenth-century appeals tell us that appellate courts were much more likely to reverse convictions than they are today. For example, in 1893 the Texas appellate court reversed 61 cases and affirmed 110 convictions. Friedman, Crime and Punishment, 257.
112 Friedman, Crime and Punishment, 248–49; see also ibid., 245–47.
113 Santa Fe Weekly Press, November 26, 1870.
114 Grassham, “Charles H. Beaubien.”
115 Lamar, Far Southwest, 57.
116 One of the names is illegible, but there were several Spanish-surnamed grand jurors, including the surnames Ortíz, Martínez, Sánchez, Martín, Vigil, Cordova, Romero, Medina, and Váldez. One of the grand jurors was the brother of Father Antonio José Martínez, one of the most influential men in the region who appears in Chapter 3. Weber, On the Edge of Empire, 77.
117 Garrard, Wah-to-Yah, 181.
118 Ibid.
119 Under the legal theory of accomplice liability, one is liable for a crime when one assists the person who actually commits the crime. The liability of the accomplice is “derivative in nature,” stemming from the legal responsibility of the person who committed the offense. Dressler, Understanding Criminal Law, 460. The problem in the Taos trials for the prosecutor seeking to apply this crime theory to Bent’s murder is that the actual killer (or killers) was not known.
120 In court records, the presiding judge and clerk referred to these defendants as “the five Indians.” Since Pueblo Indians had long been baptized with Spanish names, it is not possible to know which defendants were Taos Pueblo or Mexican, unless there were specific references such as this in the record.
121 See, generally, Cheetham, “First Term of the American Court.”
122 Garrard, Wah-to-Yah, 172.
123 Cheetham, “First Term of the American Court,” 24.
124 Garrard, Wah-to-Yah, 172.
125 Thomas, “History of Military Government,” 122.
126 President’s Message of 1848.
127 Tórrez, “New Mexican ‘Revolt,’” 10.
128 Sentence of Antonio Maria Trujillo, History File 166, Taos Treason File, New Mexico State Records Center and Archives; see also Tórrez, “New Mexican ‘Revolt,’” 9.
129 See President’s Message of 1848.
130 Tórrez, “New Mexican ‘Revolt,’” 10.
131 President’s Message of 1848, 24–25.
132 Ibid., 31–33; see also New Orleans Daily Delta, June 11, 1847.
133 For a sampling of congressional criticism, see Thomas, “History of Military Government,” 106–12.
134 Fleming v. Page, 50 U.S. 603 (1850).
135 Ibid., 615–16 (emphasis added).
136 Kettner, Development of American Citizenship, 181.
137 Tórrez, “Crime and Punishment,” 3.
138 Conversation with Gloria Cordova on August 2, 2006. Cordova is an eighth-generation descendant of Juan Antonio Abán Cordova, who participated in the rebellion against the Americans.
139 The leading text on New Mexico’s path from territorial status to statehood is Larson, New Mexico’s Quest for Statehood.
140 See Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 11–12.
141 For example, Horsman reports that “Secretary of State James Buchanan had a particularly low opinion of Mexican character and talents and for much of the war balked at the idea of annexing territory that contained any large numbers of Mexicans.” Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 232; see also Merk, Manifest Destiny, 151–52 (quoting editorials in the Louisville Democrat and the Washington Union).
142 As quoted Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 241.
143 Griswold del Castillo, Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 44. Unde
r Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, the president is authorized to negotiate treaties with foreign nations; treaties must then be approved by two-thirds or more of the Senate; after Senate approval, the president ratifies treaties. Government Accountability Office, “Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,” 29n7.
144 Texas senator Sam Houston succeeded in moving the Senate to conduct its deliberations of the treaty in secret. Griswold del Castillo, Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 44–46.
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