Away from the battlefield, in the army camps, the romance of the recruiting posters was quickly forgotten. The Second Regiment of Mississippi Rifles, moving into New Orleans, was stricken by cold and sickness. The regimental surgeon reported: “Six months after our regiment had entered the service we had sustained a loss of 167 by death, and 134 by discharges.” The regiment was packed into the holds of transports, eight hundred men into three ships. The surgeon continued:
The dark cloud of disease still hovered over us. The holds of the ships…were soon crowded with the sick. The effluvia was intolerable.… The sea became rough.… Through the long dark night the rolling ship would dash the sick man from side to side bruising his flesh upon the rough corners of his berth. The wild screams of the delirious, the lamentations of the sick, and the melancholy groans of the dying, kept up one continual scene of confusion.… Four weeks we were confined to the loathsome ships and before we had landed at the Brasos, we consigned twenty-eight of our men to the dark waves.
Meanwhile, by land and by sea, Anglo-American forces were moving into California. A young naval officer, after the long voyage around the southern cape of South America, and up the coast to Monterey in California, wrote in his diary:
Asia…will be brought to our very doors. Population will flow into the fertile regions of California. The resources of the entire country…will be developed.… The public lands lying along the route [of railroads] will be changed from deserts into gardens, and a large population will be settled.…
It was a separate war that went on in California, where Anglo-Americans raided Spanish settlements, stole horses, and declared California separated from Mexico—the “Bear Flag Republic.” Indians lived there, and naval officer Revere gathered the Indian chiefs and spoke to them (as he later recalled):
I have called you together to have a talk with you. The country you inhabit no longer belongs to Mexico, but to a mighty nation whose territory extends from the great ocean you have all seen or heard of, to another great ocean thousands of miles toward the rising sun.… Our armies are now in Mexico, and will soon conquer the whole country. But you have nothing to fear from us, if you do what is right…if you are faithful to your new rulers.… I hope you will alter your habits, and be industrious and frugal, and give up all the low vices which you practice…. We shall watch over you, and give you true liberty; but beware of sedition, lawlessness, and all other crimes, for the army which shields can assuredly punish, and it will reach you in your most retired hiding places.
General Kearney moved easily into New Mexico, and Santa Fe was taken without battle. An American staff officer described the reaction of the Mexican population to the U.S. army’s entrance into the capital city:
Our march into the city…was extremely warlike, with drawn sabres, and daggers in every look.… As the American flag was raised, and the cannon boomed its glorious national salute from the hill, the pent-up emotions of many of the women could be suppressed no longer…as the wail of grief arose above the din of our horses’ tread, and reached our ears from the depth of the gloomy-looking buildings on every hand.
That was in August. In December, Mexicans in Taos, New Mexico, rebelled against American rule. The revolt was put down and arrests were made. But many of the rebels fled and carried on sporadic attacks, killing a number of Americans, then hiding in the mountains. The American army pursued, and in a final desperate battle, in which six to seven hundred rebels were engaged, 150 were killed, and it seemed the rebellion was now over.
In Los Angeles, too, there was a revolt. Mexicans forced the American garrison there to surrender in September 1846. The United States did not retake Los Angeles until January, after a bloody battle.
General Taylor had moved across the Rio Grande, occupied Matamoros, and now moved southward through Mexico. But his volunteers became more unruly on Mexican territory. Mexican villages were pillaged by drunken troops. Cases of rape began to multiply.
As the soldiers moved up the Rio Grande to Camargo, the heat became unbearable, the water impure, and sickness grew—diarrhea, dysentery, and other maladies—until a thousand were dead. At first the dead were buried to the sounds of the “Dead March” played by a military band. Then the number of dead was too great, and formal military funerals ceased. Southward to Monterey and another battle, where men and horses died in agony, and one officer described the ground as “slippery with…foam and blood.”
The U.S. Navy bombarded Vera Cruz in an indiscriminate killing of civilians. One of the navy’s shells hit the post office, another a surgical hospital. In two days, thirteen hundred shells were fired into the city, until it surrendered. A reporter for the New Orleans Delta wrote: “The Mexicans variously estimate their loss at from 500 to 1000 killed and wounded, but all agree that the loss among the soldiery is comparatively small and the destruction among the women and children is very great.”
Colonel Hitchcock, coming into the city, wrote: “I shall never forget the horrible fire of our mortars…going with dreadful certainty…often in the centre of private dwellings—it was awful. I shudder to think of it.” Still, Hitchcock, the dutiful soldier, wrote for General Scott “a sort of address to the Mexican people” which was then printed in English and Spanish by the tens of thousands saying “we have not a particle of ill-will towards you…we are here for no earthly purpose except the hope of obtaining a peace.”
It was a war of the American elite against the Mexican elite, each side exhorting, using, killing its own population as well as the other. The Mexican commander Santa Anna had crushed rebellion after rebellion, his troops also raping and plundering after victory. When Col. Hitchcock and Gen. Winfield Scott moved into Santa Anna’s estate, they found its walls full of ornate paintings. But half his army was dead or wounded.
General Scott moved toward the last battle—for Mexico City—with ten thousand soldiers. They were not anxious for battle. Three days’ march from Mexico City, at Jalapa, seven of his eleven regiments evaporated, their enlistment times up, the reality of battle and disease too much for them.
On the outskirts of Mexico City, at Churubusco, Mexican and American armies clashed for three hours and thousands died on both sides. Among the Mexicans taken prisoner were sixty-nine U.S. Army deserters.
As often in war, battles were fought without point. After one such engagement near Mexico City, with terrible casualties, a marine lieutenant blamed Gen. Scott: “He had originated it in error and caused it to be fought, with inadequate forces, for an object that had no existence.”
In the final battle for Mexico City, Anglo-American troops took the height of Chapultepec and entered the city of 200,000 people, General Santa Anna having moved northward. This was September 1847. A Mexican merchant wrote to a friend about the bombardment of the city: “In some cases whole blocks were destroyed and a great number of men, women and children killed and wounded.”
General Santa Anna fled to Huamantla, where another battle was fought, and he had to flee again. An American infantry lieutenant wrote to his parents what happened after an officer named Walker was killed in battle:
General Lane…told us to “avenge the death of the gallant Walker.… Grog shops were broken open first, and then, maddened with liquor, every species of outrage was committed. Old women and girls were stripped of their clothing—and many suffered still greater outrages. Men were shot by dozens…their property, churches, stores and dwelling houses ransacked…. It made me for the first time ashamed of my country.
One Pennsylvania volunteer, stationed at Matamoros late in the war, wrote:
We are under very strict discipline here. Some of our officers are very good men but the balance of them are very tyrannical and brutal toward the men.… [T]onight on drill an officer laid a soldier’s skull open with his sword.… But the time may come and that soon when officers