A Gallant Little Army

by Timothy D Johnson

  21. P. G. T. Beauregard, With Beauregard in Mexico: The Mexican War Reminiscences of P. G. T. Beauregard, ed. T. Harry Williams (New York: DaCapo Press, 1969), 30–31; Worth quoted in Wallace, General William Jenkins Worth, 127; statement by Riley, no date and Scott to Riley, May 21, 1847, Riley Papers, USMA.

  22. Ripley to Marcy, Jun. 25, 1848, and Pillow to Marcy, Jun. 25, 1848, LR SW, RG 107, NA; Otis A. Singletary, The Mexican War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 147; Anderson, Artillery Officer, 124.

  23. Peskin, Volunteers, 86–96; Uncapher Diary, UT Arlington; Chauncey Forward Sargent, Gathering Laurels in Mexico: The Diary of an American Soldier in the Mexican American War, ed. Ann Brown Janes (Lincoln, Mass.: Cottage Press, 1990), 10; Tennery, Mexican War Diary, 82–92.

  24. Marcy to Scott, Apr. 30 and May 20, 1847, House Exec. Doc. No. 60, 30th Cong., 1st Sess.; Ethan Allen Hitchcock, “Sketches of the Campaign,” Ethan Allen Hitchcock Papers, USMA; Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, 2 vols. (New York: Charles L. Webster, 1885), 1:135; Meyer, South Carolina, 65.

  25. James K. Polk, The Diary of James K. Polk, ed. Milo Milton Quaife, 4 vols. (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1910), 2:466–67, 477–78; David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973), 499–501; Mahin, Olive Branch, 91; Wallace Ohrt, Defiant Peacemaker: Nicholas Trist in the Mexican War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997), 103.

  26. Ohrt, Defiant Peacemaker, 104.

  27. Marcy to Scott, Apr. 14, 1847, House Exec. Doc. No. 60, 30th Cong., 1st Exec.

  28. Ohrt, Defiant Peacemaker, 110; Scott to Trist, May 7, 1847, House Exec. Doc. No. 60, 30th Cong., 1st Exec.

  29. Scott to Marcy, Apr. 5, 1847, House Exec. Doc. No. 60, 30th Cong., 1st Exec.

  30. Mahin, Olive Branch, 91–93; Trist to Scott, May 9, 1847, Senate Doc. 52, 30th Cong., 1st Exec.

  31. Semmes to Scott, May 8, 1847, House Exec. Doc. 60, 30th Cong., 1st Exec.

  32. Scott to Marcy, Apr. 28, 1847, and Scott to Worth, Apr. 28, 1847, House Exec. Doc. No. 60, 30th Cong., 1st Exec.

  33. Proclamation to the Mexican Nation, May 11, 1847, House Exec. Doc. No. 60, 30th Cong., 1st Sess. Raphael Semmes, no friend of Scott’s, asserted that the proclamation had just the opposite of its desired effect. Many Mexicans were insulted by it and increased their resolve to resist the American invasion. See Semmes, Service, 211–13.

  34. Stevens, Life, 1:135; Thompson Narrative, BLY. The First Dragoons went to guard the train that Nicholas Trist was with. Uncapher Diary, UTA.

  35. Moore, Scott’s Campaign, 72; Tennery, Mexican War Diary, 85–86; Kirkham, Mexican War Journal, 6; Uncapher Diary, UTA; Peskin, Volunteers, 105.

  36. Kirkham, Mexican War Journal, 13; Ripley to mother, Apr. 23, 1847, and Ripley to sister, May 2, 1847, Roswell Ripley Papers, BLY; William Adee to Samuel Adee, Jun. 16, 1847, William F. Adee Papers, BLY; Moses Barnard Reminiscences, BLY; Stevens to wife, May 1, 1847, in Stevens, Life, 1:134.

  Chapter 7. Puebla: Waiting All Summer

  1. Scott to Worth, Apr. 23 and May 6, 1847, Scott to Marcy, Apr. 28, 1847, House Exec. Doc. No. 60, 30th Cong., 1st Exec.

  2. Smith, Diary, 10, Joseph Rowe Smith Papers, BYL.

  3. Jackson to sister, May 25, 1847, quoted in James I. Robertson Jr., Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend (New York: Macmillan, 1997), 91.

  4. Thomas R. Irey, “Soldiering, Suffering, and Dying in the Mexican War,” Journal of the West 11 (Apr. 1972): 291; James Rowe Smith, Diary, James Rowe Smith Papers, BLY; Justin H. Smith, The War with Mexico, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 2:60.

  5. Allan Peskin, ed., Volunteers: The Mexican War Journals of Private Richard Coulter and Sergeant Thomas Barclay, Company E, Second Pennsylvania Infantry (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991), 115; Madison Mills Diary, FHS; Smith, Diary, Smith Papers; Chauncey Forward Sargent, Gathering Laurels in Mexico: The Diary of an American Soldier in the Mexican American War, ed. Ann Brown Janes (Lincoln, Mass.: Cottage Press, 1990), 12; William P. Chambliss, “Record of Death & Discharges Company ‘C’ Tennessee Regiment,” BLY.

  6. J. Frost, The Mexican War and Its Warriors (New Haven, Conn.: H. Mansfield, 1850), 154; Lee to Mary, Apr. 22, 1847, George Bolling Lee Papers, VHS; Mark Crawford, ed., Encyclopedia of the Mexican-American War (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO Publishers, 1999), 213; Wilkins to brother, Apr. 24, 1847, John Darragh Wilkins Memorandum and Papers, BLY. The Perote Prison was also known as the Castle of San Carlos. Among the prisoners held in the castle were some of the members of the ill-fated Mier Expedition in 1842. See Richard Bruce Winders, Crisis in the Southwest: The United States, Mexico, and the Struggle over Texas (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2002), 50, 65–68.

  7. Robert Anderson, An Artillery Officer in the Mexican War, 1846–7 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1911), 162.

  8. John Wilkins, “Army Chronicle,” Wilkins Papers; John Hammond Moore, ed., “Private Johnson Fights the Mexicans, 1847–1848,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 67 (Oct. 1966), 214.

  9. K. Jack Bauer, The Mexican War, 1846–1848 (1974; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 271.

  10. Bauer, Mexican War, 271; Smith, War, 2:70; Smith to wife, May 13 and 14, 1847; in E. Kirby Smith, To Mexico with Scott: Letters of Captain E. Kirby Smith to His Wife, ed. Emma Jerome Blackwood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1917), 160–62; Roswell Ripley to mother, May 21 and Jun. 3, 1847, Roswell Ripley Papers, BLY.

  11. Ralph W. Kirkham, The Mexican War Journal and Letters of Ralph W. Kirkham, ed. Robert Ryal Miller (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991), 17; Robert W. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas (1985; New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 31; Charles Judah and George Winston Smith, Chronicles of the Gringoes: The U.S. Army in the Mexican War, 1846–1848, Accounts of Eyewitnesses and Combatants (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968), 227–28. From Forts Guadalupe and Loreto, Mexican forces repulsed a French army on May 5, 1862, during Napoleon III’s ill-fated attempt to take over Mexico. This Mexican victory is the subject of that country’s Cinco de Mayo celebration.

  12. Smith, To Mexico with Scott, 165, 168; Hiram B. Yeager to John C. Yeager, Jun. 10, 1847, Hiram B. Yeager Papers, DRTL. A Virginian in Taylor’s army, T. H. Towner, expressed the same bewilderment regarding that army’s ability to march through the country unopposed, and his answer exhibited a feeling of racial superiority similar to that felt by many in Scott’s army. In a letter home, he wrote, “They are a miserable race, at least those we have met with, possessing all the degrading traits of the Mexican character.” To allow so many foreign soldiers and wagons to travel through densely populated areas, thought Towner, “displays a degree of cowardice & a want of patriotism perfectly incomprehensible to the sons of the Old Dominion, and the fact has convinced me . . . that the Anglo-Saxon race possess more of the higher qualities which enable man than any other on the face of the earth.” See T. H. Towner to father, Apr. 14, 1847, Benjamin T. Towner Papers, Duke.

  13. Peskin, Volunteers, 124; Kirkham, Mexican War Journal, 33; Fitzgerald to Blackburn, Jul. 10, 1847, Blackburn Family Papers, FHS.

  14. Albert Brackett to Charles Brackett, Dec. 12, 1847, Albert G. Brackett Papers, DRTL; Alfred Hoyt Bill, Rehearsal for Conflict: The War with Mexico, 1846–1848 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), 251; William Pierce Diary, UTA; Moore, “Private Johnson,” 216.

  15. Moore, “Private Johnson,” 218; Kirkham, Mexican War Journal, 21; Smith, To Mexico with Scott, 178–79; Lee to Mary, Nov. 4, 1846, Lee Family Papers, VHS.

  16. Theodore to father, Jun. 3, 1847, in Theodore Laidley, Surrounded by Dangers of All Kinds: The Mexican War Letters of Lieutenant Theodore Laidley, ed. James M. McCaffrey (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1997), 92; H. Judge Moore, Scott’s Campaign from the Rendezvous on the Island of Lobos to the Taking of the City (Charleston: J. B. Nixon, 1849), 116–17; Smith, To Mexico with Scott, 160–62, 165�
��67; Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, 2 vols. (New York: Charles L. Webster, 1885), 1:123; Bill, Rehearsal, 245.

  17. Kirkham, Mexican War Journal, 19; B. S. Roberts Diary, Justin H. Smith Collection, LAC, UT; Smith, War, 2:72; Bill, Rehearsal, 248; Anderson, Artillery Officer, 211–13.

  18. Scott to Trist, May 29, 1847, House Exec. Doc. No. 60, 30th Cong., 1st Sess.

  19. Dean B. Mahin, Olive Branch and Sword: The United States and Mexico, 1845–1848 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1997), 95; Bauer, Mexican War, 284.

  20. Marcy to Scott, May 31, 1847, United States War Department Letters, BLY.

  21. Scott to Quitman, May 31, 1847, Scott Letter, BLY; Robert E. May, John A. Quitman: Old South Crusader (1984; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 181–82.

  22. Anderson, Artillery Officer, 226; Ethan Allen Hitchcock, “Sketches of the Campaign,” Ethan Allen Hitchcock Papers, USMA; Scott to Worth, Jun. 16, 1847, Ethan Allen Hitchcock Papers, LC.

  23. Edward S. Wallace, General William Jenkins Worth: Monterey’s Forgotten Hero (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1953), 138; Smith, War, 2:72; Scott to Worth, Jun. 19 and Jun. 20, 1847, Hitchcock Papers, LC; General Orders No. 186, Jun. 24, 1847, and No. 196, Jun. 30, 1847, in Hitchcock Papers, LC; Hitchcock, “Sketches of the Campaign,” Hitchcock Papers, USMA.

  24. Wallace, General William Jenkins Worth, 137–38; Raphael Semmes, Service Afloat and Ashore during the Mexican War (Cincinnati: Wm. H. Moore, 1851), 317–19; George R. Stewart, John Phoenix, Esq., the Veritable Squibob: A Life of Captain George H. Derby, USA (New York: Henry Holt, 1937), 47; Hitchcock, “Sketches,” Hitchcock Papers.

  25. Hitchcock, “Sketches,” Hitchcock Papers; Anderson, Artillery Officer, 277.

  26. Scott to Quitman, May 31, 1847, Scott Letter, Beinecke; Marcy to Scott, Apr. 30 and May 20, 1847, United States War Department Letters, Beinecke; Scott to Marcy, Jun. 4, 1847, House Exec. Doc. No. 60, 30th Cong., 1st Sess.

  27. A. Brooke Caruso, The Mexico Spy Company: United States Covert Operations in Mexico, 1845–1848 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1991), 152–53; Robert Ryal Miller, Shamrock and Sword: The Saint Patrick’s Battalion in the U.S.-Mexican War (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 76; Judah and Smith, Chronicles of the Gringoes, 229–32; Bauer, Mexican War, 274; Kirkham, Mexican War Journal, 39; Daniel Harvey Hill, A Fighter from Way Back: The Mexican War Diary of Lt. Daniel Harvey Hill, 4th Artillery, USA, ed. Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr. and Timothy D. Johnson (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2002), 106; Edmund Bradford to John Tazewell, Jan. 2, 1848, Edmund Bradford Papers, BLY.

  28. Moore, “Private Johnson,” 218; Bauer, Mexican War, 284; Kirkham, Mexican War Journal, 22; Mills Diary, FHS; Israel Uncapher Mexican War Diary, UTA; Moses Barnard Reminiscences, BLY.

  29. William Austine to cousin, Jul. 4, 1847, William Austine Papers, SHC, UNC; Hill to friends, Nov. 8, 1847, A. P. Hill Papers, VHS; Albert Nicholson to Thomas Nicholson, Apr. 22, 1848, Albert C. Nicholson Papers, BLY; George C. Furber, The Twelve Months Volunteers; or, Journal of a Private, in the Tennessee Regiment of Cavalry, in the Campaign Mexico, 1846–7 (Cincinnati: J. A. & U. P. James, 1848), 311, 402–3.

  30. Smith, Diary, Joseph Rowe Smith Papers, BLY; Walker to Molly, Jul. 27, 1847, William Henry Talbot Walker Papers, Duke University.

  31. Kirkham, Mexican War Journal, 18, 27, and 125, n. 2; Lytle to uncle, Dec. 8, 1847, in William Haines Lytle, For Honor, Glory and Union: The Mexican and Civil War Letters of Brig. Gen. William Haines Lytle, ed. Ruth C. Carter (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 47–48; Peskin, Volunteers, 181.

  32. Frederick Zeh, An Immigrant Soldier in the Mexican War, trans. William Orr and Robert Ryal Miller (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995), 52; Edward H. Moseley, “The Religious Impact of the American Occupation of Mexico City, 1847–1848,” in Militarists, Merchants, and Missionaries: United States Expansion in Middle America, ed. Eugene R. Huck and Edward H. Moseley (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1970), 45; Smith, To Mexico with Scott, 171–72; Bill, Rehearsal for Conflict, 249.

  33. Moore, “Private Johnson,” 215; Anderson, Artillery Officer, 178; Moore, Scott’s Campaign, 117; Peskin, Volunteers, 125–26; Richard Bruce Winders, Mr. Polk’s Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997), 126.

  34. Kirkham, Mexican War Journal, 31; Johannsen, To the Halls, 31, 34–36; Anderson, Artillery Officer, 147–48, 176, 185–86. William Austine to cousin, Nov. 1, 1847, Austine Papers. Mexican writer José Mariá Roa Bárcena described General Scott as “noble and kind” and his men as exhibiting “discipline, vigorous and severe among the corps of the line, which even extended to the volunteers, with the exception of some of the detached forces.” See Bárcena, “Memories of the North American Invasion,” in The View from Chapultepec: Mexican Writers on the Mexican-American War, ed. and trans. Cecil Robinson (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989), 49.

  35. Hiram B. Yeager to John C. Yeager, Jul. 16, 1847, Yeager Papers; Hill, Fighter from Way Back, 152; Kirkham, Mexican War Journal, 31; Irvin W. Levinson, Wars within War: Mexican Guerrillas, Domestic Elites, and the United States of America, 1846–1848 (Forth Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2005), chap. 3, esp. 51–53.

  36. Winders, Mr. Polk’s Army, 62–63; Peter F. Stevens, The Rogue’s March: John Riley and the St. Patrick’s Battalion, 1846–48 (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1999), 48–55, 171–73, 213; John Meginness Manuscript, John Franklin Meginness Papers, UTA.

  37. Winders, Mr. Polk’s Army, 62; Sargent, Gathering Laurels, 14; Peskin, Volunteers, 88; Otis A. Singletary, The Mexican War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 146.

  38. Stevens, Rogue’s March, 222, 226–29; William Austine to cousin, Jul. 4 and Nov. 1, 1847, Austine Papers. Among the inducements offered to Americans to switch sides was land—a certain number of acres for a year of service in the Mexican army and additional acreage for each additional year. For a private those amounts were 200 and 100, for a corporal 300 and 150, a lieutenant 1,200 and 600. See Wilfrid Hardy Callcott, Church and State in Mexico, 1822–1857 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1926), 198.

  39. Moore, “Private Johnson,” 219; H. Clay to Mr. Levesh, Nov. 26, 1847, Mexican War Collection, UTA.

  Chapter 8. Puebla: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

  1. Smith to wife, Jun. 4, 1847, in E. Kirby Smith, To Mexico with Scott: Letters of Captain E. Kirby Smith to His Wife, ed. Emma Jerome Blackwood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1917), 177.

  2. Justin H. Smith, The War with Mexico, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 2:72, 362, n. 61; H. Judge Moore, Scott’s Campaign from the Rendezvous on the Island of Lobos to the Taking of the City (Charleston: J. B. Nixon, 1849), 118–19; John Hammond Moore, ed., “Private Johnson Fights the Mexicans, 1847–1848,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 67 (Oct. 1966): 216, 218–19; George B. McClellan, The Mexican War Diary of General George B. McClellan, ed. William Stan Myers (New York: DaCapo Press, 1972), 18.

  3. Hiram B. Yeager to John C. Yeager, Jul. 16, 1847, Hiram B. Yeager Papers, DRTL; William Austine to cousin, Jul. 4, 1847, William Austine Papers, SHC, UNC; Smith, War, 2:75–77, n. 422; K. Jack Bauer, The Mexican War, 1846–1848 (1974; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 273; Madison Mills Diary, FHS.

  4. Bauer, Mexican War, 273; Mills Diary, FHS.

  5. Mills Diary, FHS.

  6. James K. Polk, The Diary of James K. Polk, ed. Milo Milton Quaife, 4 vols. (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1910), 3:79, 88–89; Patrick Galt to Alexander Galt, Jun. 24, 1847, Patrick Galt Papers, Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Va.

  7. This often-cited quote is mentioned in Winfield Scott, Memoirs of Lieut.-General Scott, 2 vols. (1864; Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 2:466, but is difficult to independently corroborate. James W. Pohl, “The Influence of Antoine Henri de Jomini on Winfield Scott’s Campaign in the Mexican War,”
Southwestern Historical Quarterly 77 (Jul. 1973): 98.

  8. Bauer, Mexican War, 273; Allan Peskin, ed., Volunteers: The Mexican War Journals of Private Richard Coulter and Sergeant Thomas Barclay, Company E, Second Pennsylvania Infantry (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991), 108; James I. Robertson Jr., Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend (New York: Macmillan, 1997), 60; Thomas Claiborne, “Reminiscences of the Mexican War,” 27–29, Thomas Claiborne Papers, SHC, UNC; Irvin W. Levinson, Wars within War: Mexican Guerrillas, Domestic Elites, and the United States of America, 1846–1848 (Forth Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2005), 42. Estimates of Mexican losses range from nineteen to as many as sixty.

  9. George W. Hartman, A Private’s Own Journal: Giving an Account of the Battles in Mexico, under Gen’l Scott (Greencastle: E. Robinson, 1849), 15; Peskin, Volunteers, 110; Chauncey Forward Sargent, Gathering Laurels in Mexico: The Diary of an American Soldier in the Mexican American War, ed. Ann Brown Janes (Lincoln, Mass.: Cottage Press, 1990), 12.

  10. Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr. and Roy P. Stonesifer, The Life and Wars of Gideon J. Pillow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 74–79.

  11. Mills Diary, FHS; James Fitzgerald to William Blackburn, Jun. 14 and Jul. 10, 1847, Blackburn Family Papers, FHS; Raphael Semmes, Service Afloat and Ashore during the Mexican War (Cincinnati: Wm. H. Moore, 1851), 314.

  12. Dean B. Mahin, Olive Branch and Sword: The United States and Mexico, 1845–1848 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1997), 97, 102–3; “Memorandum,” Ethan Allen Hitchcock Papers, LC.

  13. Wallace Ohrt, Defiant Peacemaker: Nicholas Trist in the Mexican War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997), 116; Scott quoted in Charles Winslow Elliott, Winfield Scott: The Soldier and the Man (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 491; Smith, War, 2:130–31; Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990).