What Hath God Wrought (110 page)

Mexico maintained a standing army small by European standards but substantially larger than that of the United States. Besides its war with Texas, this army had also repelled invasions by Spain and France and had subdued several domestic insurrections in the generation since independence. As a result officers often had combat experience; indeed, many of those in the higher ranks had fought for the Spanish king during the Mexican Revolution. Unfortunately many officers felt more loyalty to the army as an institution than to their civilian superiors. Within the Mexican army the cavalry constituted an elite arm, famous for superb horsemanship. The infantry included peasant conscripts even in peacetime, often
indios
with little knowledge of the Spanish language or sense of Mexican nationality, equipped with old muskets sold off by the British army as surplus after the Napoleonic Wars. The antiquated artillery was the weakest branch, a deficiency for which Mexico would pay dearly in coming battles. Although the official salary scales in the Mexican army compared favorably with U.S. ones, in practice the army often went unpaid and unsupplied, and resorted to preying upon local civilians. As the war went on, the Mexican army increasingly had recourse to untrained levies, who might go into combat never having fired their weapons. Finally, the states of the Mexican union controlled local militia, called national guard units. Although not necessarily well equipped or trained, the national guard units manifested high espirit de corps and in defense of their homes stood up firmly to U.S. firepower.
¹⁷

In Zachary Taylor’s force, immigrants made up at least half the enlisted personnel; this was typical of the composition of the regular U.S. Army. The Irish alone constituted a quarter and the Germans 10 percent. The Mexicans made strong appeals to U.S. troops to switch sides, targeting immigrants and Catholics in particular. Their broadsides emphasized the injustice of the invaders’ cause in the eyes of “civilized people” and stressed what North American Catholics had in common with Mexican Catholics. Alluding to well-known riots by U.S. Protestant nativist mobs, a Mexican pamphlet asked, “Can you fight by the side of those who put fire to your temples in Boston and Philadelphia?” Mexico also offered land grants to opposing soldiers who would desert and claim them: two hundred acres for a private, five hundred for a sergeant. Together, the inducements and propaganda had an effect. The first shots in the war were fired on April 4, 1846, not between Mexican and U.S. troops, but by American sentries at an immigrant deserter swimming across the Rio Grande to the Mexican side. (The episode prompted questions in Congress.) Around three hundred U.S. deserters, the great majority of them Catholics and/or immigrants, joined the Mexican army. The Mexicans organized them into a unit of their own named St. Patrick’s Battalion, for the largest single national group among the
sanpatricios
was of Irish origin.
¹⁸
In response, the U.S. Army appointed its first two Catholic chaplains (one of whom was killed in service). Most of the 9,207 deserters from the U.S. armed forces did not take up arms against their former comrades but simply disappeared. The desertion rate in the war with Mexico, 8.3 percent, was the highest for any foreign war in United States history—twice as high as that in the Vietnam War. Brutal corporal punishments, doubts about the American cause, and the prejudices of nativist officers all contributed to the desertion problem. Sometimes regular soldiers deserted to join volunteer units, in search of bounties and a more lax discipline.
¹⁹

The conquest of Mexico by the United States turned into a longer, harder, more expensive struggle than the politicians who provoked the conflict had expected. While the size of the armies was small, their casualty rates were high. Indeed, the war against Mexico has been accurately described as the deadliest that the United States has ever fought: One American soldier out of ten died in less than two years of service, while an almost equal number were incapacitated and sent home. Disease accounted for seven-eighths of the deaths. Living in crowded, unsanitary conditions and drinking impure water, the soldiers frequently fell prey to dysentery, body lice, and communicable infections. Regulars suffered less than volunteers, for they understood the importance of clean camps and well-cooked food, and they had all been inoculated against smallpox. In the end, the war cost the United States 12,518 lives and almost one hundred million dollars.
²⁰
Mexico lost many more lives and suffered extensive economic and social disruption. Although the total casualties look small by comparison with those of the Civil War, they did not seem small at the time, nor was the American public mollified by the fact that Mexican casualties were higher.

Taylor’s early victory over a larger army that chose its ground well got his country’s war with Mexico off to an impressive start. Throughout the conflict the U.S. armed forces demonstrated superb strategic planning, tactical leadership, technical skill, and courage. The occupation of so much of Mexico’s vast territory by a comparatively small army in less than two years represented an astonishing feat of arms. The extent of this military achievement has never been fully appreciated, because Americans preferred to believe that their national expansion occurred automatically, as the fulfillment of an inevitable and plainly manifest destiny. Once over, the war against Mexico was conveniently forgotten, along with the bitter partisan divisions it provoked among Americans themselves.

II

Although President Polk had invoked the danger to Taylor’s troops in securing a swift declaration of war from Congress, he showed little further interest in them once the war had begun. As he laid out his plans to the cabinet on May 30, 1846, these called for rapid seizures of Alta California and Nuevo México, followed soon by a peace treaty on the basis of
uti possidetis,
the United States retaining permanently what its armies had occupied.
²¹
Of the two Mexican provinces, California was by far the more important to U.S. policymakers.

As early as June 1845, Secretary of the Navy Bancroft had sent orders to Commodore John D. Sloat of the Pacific Squadron in Honolulu to occupy San Francisco immediately upon the outbreak of war with Mexico. The same month Captain John C. Frémont led a military expedition overland westward from St. Louis. If war broke out, both navy and army would be poised for action in California.
²²
Frémont’s qualifications for his sensitive mission included extensive experience in the Far West; a capable, energetic wife, Jessie Benton Frémont; and the political influence of her father, Senator Thomas Hart Benton. The captain also had a strong sense of his own destiny and a talent for publicity. After crossing the Rockies and the Great Basin, he and his party startled the Mexican authorities in California, where Johann Sutter welcomed them to his estate called New Helvetia on 10 December. By the twenty-seventh, Frémont had made his way to Monterey and a conference with the U.S. consul there, Thomas Oliver Larkin. Larkin, ever an eager conspirator, got “the idea that great plans are meditated to be carried out by certain persons.”
²³
Frémont assured the Mexicans he was just exploring and would soon leave for Oregon. When his sixty-two heavily armed and ill-mannered visitors still remained on March 8, the suspicious authorities ordered them out. Frémont at first tried to defy the order, then moved his party very slowly northward. Along the way they massacred Indians.
²⁴
After two months they reached Klamath Lake just over the California-Oregon border.

On April 17, 1846, a U.S. warship arrived at Monterey bearing Marine Lieutenant Archibald Gillespie with secret instructions from the State Department for both Larkin and Frémont, dated—the courier having come via Mexico City, Mazatlán, and Hawaii—the previous October. The letters appointed Larkin a confidential agent and told him to assure any potential rebels in California that “they would be received as brethren” should they wish to follow the Texan example and seek annexation by the United States. The administration expressed particular anxiety to preempt any British intervention in California.
²⁵

(Polk was not the only one to think California might interest the British. Desperate for money to prepare for war with the United States, President Paredes had offered to mortgage California to Britain in return for a loan. If the British had accepted the proposal, the U.S. president’s dream of acquiring California would have turned into a nightmare. Ironically, Polk’s zealous pursuit of California almost lost it.)
²⁶

Consul Larkin eagerly accepted his new assignment, and Gillespie hurried north, catching up with Frémont on May 8. The marine delivered his packet and filled the Pathfinder in on the latest intelligence and gossip, no doubt including that Larkin had told José Castro,
comandante
at Monterey, “Our Flag may fly here in thirty days.” In his
Memoirs
Frémont claimed he learned that “possession of California was the chief object of the President.” At the end of the conversation Frémont concluded—as he put it—that “my hour had come.”
²⁷
He turned and headed south, back to raise up a rebellion in California. Neither Frémont’s actual orders nor the other messages brought him by Gillespie have ever come to light, so we do not know whether he followed his instructions or went beyond them. Perhaps the government left things ambiguous and expected Frémont to read between the lines. The role of a headstrong military leader on the frontier operating with unclear official authorization—the role of Jackson in Florida and Robert Stockton in Texas—was repeated by Frémont in California. Contemporaries recognized the pattern. Indeed, many filibustering expeditions tried to take over foreign territory by force of arms with no U.S. government authority at all (as happened over the years in Nicaragua, Cuba, Texas, Canada, and the Floridas).
²⁸

In 1846, the population of Alta California numbered about fifteen thousand, not counting the much larger number of Native Americans who lived according to their own cultures and largely remained neutral in the war (though some did fight for or against Frémont). Only about eight hundred of these people were of U.S. origin, most of them very recent arrivals.
²⁹
With the reckless daring that characterized his whole life, young Captain Frémont expected to make a successful revolution based on those eight hundred. Although no one in California knew yet that war had broken out between the United States and Mexico, everyone knew enough to think it likely.
Comandante
Castro began to make inquiries about undocumented foreign settlers, and though he was generous with permissions to remain, some emigrants from the U.S. became fearful of eviction. Emboldened by Frémont’s presence and probably encouraged by him, a band of these settlers stole a hundred or so horses intended for Castro and then on 14 June abducted a prominent landowner and retired general, Mariano Vallejo, holding him prisoner for two months despite the fact that he was the best friend the Americans had among the
californios
. The next day the rebels seized the town of Sonoma and raised a flag with a crudely pictured grizzly bear on it. After fending off Castro’s militia, naming Frémont as their leader, and spiking the seventeenth-century Spanish cannons in the undefended Castillo de San Joaquín overlooking the Golden Gate, the Bear Flaggers gave themselves a celebration at Sonoma on the Fourth of July. At Frémont’s insistence, they declared the independence of California, then listened to a reading of Jefferson’s Declaration (an invariable feature of American celebrations of the Fourth in those days), and—being in Mexico—danced a
fandango
.
³⁰

The significance of this little rebellion was transformed three days later by the appearance of the United States Navy, which took possession of Monterey, as in 1842, without bloodshed. Although no official notification had reached him, Commodore Sloat had taken care to assure himself that there was a war, not wishing to repeat Commodore Jones’s embarrassment. While cautious in that way, Sloat showed an astonishing presumptuousness of his own. He proclaimed not simply a wartime occupation but the permanent annexation of California to the United States, which he had no legal authority to do. The next day, July 8, Captain John B. Montgomery of the USS
Portsmouth
performed the same ceremony at Yerba Buena (renamed San Francisco in January 1847). Thus Sloat cut short the possibility of an independent California Republic. In Sonoma, the Stars and Stripes replaced the Bear Flag that had flown for three weeks. When HMS
Juno
visited San Francisco Bay on July 11, the Royal Navy could only observe an American fait accompli.
³¹

In the middle of the month Robert Stockton arrived, fresh from trying to “manufacture a war” in Texas, and succeeded the ailing Sloat as commander of the Pacific Squadron. Stockton managed to persuade Frémont that a naval commodore (equivalent to a brigadier general) outranked an army captain and then, recognizing a kindred spirit, delegated to him tactical command of U.S. forces on land, into which the Bear Flag rabble were incorporated. The two filibusterers, Stockton and Frémont, then went about conquering the rest of California. They acted with dispatch but also with such tactlessness that they completely alienated most of the
californios
, who, having long enjoyed considerable autonomy, might have welcomed the new regime. On August 13, Stockton occupied Los Angeles, a town of fifteen hundred that had replaced Monterey as Mexican civil capital of California. On August 17, a ship arrived at San Pedro carrying, at last, official news of the U.S. declaration of war. General Castro and Governor Pío Pico having departed with eight hundred followers, Stockton and Frémont thought the war in California over.