THE FIGHT FOR THE REPUBLIC
Mexico’s loss was huge in brief 1846 battle with theU.S. over Texas
On a beastly hot afternoon in the spring of 1846, two armies near the mouth of the Rio Grande clashed amid razorsharp cord grass, spindly mesquite and ubiquitous prickly pear. The Battle of Palo Alto on that day in May wasn’t a Bunker Hill or a Gettysburg; the bloody engagement rates a mere passing mention in the history books. And yet the two armies trying to annihilate each other — Americans on one side, Mexicans on the other — set in motion a little war that would transform the history of two neighboring nations, not to mention the world itself.
America’s brief war with Mexico would never be described as “splendid,” to borrow a word the U.S. ambassador to Britain applied decades later to his friend Teddy Roosevelt’s Spanish-American War. The more accurate word is “momentous.” The Mexican War was the most significant armed struggle between two nations in the Western Hemisphere.
The conflict lasted a mere two years, although those two years were the culmination of hostilities that had begun more than a decade earlier, when a ragtag band of Texans under Gen. Sam Houston routed the army of Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna at San Jacinto.
Texas may have wrenched itself away from Mexico on that April afternoon in 1836, but Santa Anna, even in defeat, never recognized the sovereignty of Texas. The avaricious general and occasional dictator could not accept the fact that the distant northern reaches of his nation had disappeared as irrevocably as his left leg, amputated after being shattered by cannon fire in “la Guerra de los Pasteles” (the Pastry War), a comic- opera invasion of Veracruz by a French fleet in 1838. (The French were would-be debt collectors.)
A few years after repelling the invaders from across the sea, Santa Anna declared himself interim president, ruling over a nation whose people had been warring among themselves for going on three decades. Perhaps to distract them from their misery, he revived Mexico’s war with the fledgling republic to the north.
In March 1842, Santa Anna sent a force of some 700 men under the command of Gen. Rafael Vasquez to retake San Antonio. The army came, quickly conquered and then, after a few days, left.
The invasion was something of a prelude to a more ambitious revanchist effort. It came in September, when a 1,200man force under the command of a French-born general named Adrian Woll sneaked into San Antonio under cover of fog and recaptured the town. Texans, including a band of Texas Rangers led by the legendary Jack Hays, fought fiercely and within a few days had driven Woll and his men back across the Rio Grande.
Despite their victory, the people of Texas needed help. They needed military help, for sure — protection against Mexico to the south and Comanches to the north and west — but the more immediate need was action to stave off insolvency. Annexation by the U.S. would solve the twin crises, but when Washington dallied, France and Britain expressed interest in expanding their spheres of influence in the Western Hemisphere. Both nations courted young and needy Texas. British leaders, for example, sounded out the Texans on the idea of emancipating Texas slaves in return for a British loan to replenish the republic’s dwindling treasury. Another idea was for Britain simply to buy all the slaves and free them. “Either way,” as University of Texas at Austin historian H.W. Brands noted in his book “Lone Star Nation,” “Texas would grow closer to heaven and Britain.”
When the eyes of Texas averted to Britain, the U.S. took notice, just as President Sam Houston expected. Enlisting the lobbying aid of his old mentor, aged and ailing Andrew Jackson, Houston and annexation allies in the U.S. Congress prevailed. With the enthusiastic support of newly elected President James K. Polk, a Manifest Destiny expansionist, they brought to fruition the objective most Texans had devoutly wished since the birth of the wobbly republic.
On Dec. 29, 1845, Polk signed the act that merged the Lone Star into an American constellation. Nearly two months later, on Feb. 19, 1846, President Anson Jones lowered the flag of the Republic of Texas for the last time. For the first time, he raised the Stars and Stripes of the United States over the dogtrot cabin state capital in Austin.
Less than a month later, Mexico broke off diplomatic relations with the United States. Polk dispatched a force of almost 4,000 men under the command of Gen. Zachary Taylor to the shores of Corpus Christi Bay. After eight months of training on the beach, Taylor marched his men down the coast to Boca Chica, where the Rio Grande meets the sea. Across the river, 5,000 Mexican soldiers under Maj. Gen. Mariano Arista waited. When Arista sent a force of 1,600 men across the river to cut off the Americans from a coastal supply port at Point Isabel, the two armies engaged in a skirmish. “Hostilities may now be considered to be commenced,” Taylor wrote to his adjutant general.
The Battle of Palo Alto on
May 8 and at nearby Resaca de la Palma the following day were the first major conflicts of the Mexican War. Thanks primarily to superior artillery, the Americans prevailed in the tangled, thorny brush of South Texas. Their victories in that godforsaken place opened the way for an American thrust into the heart of Mexico. Congress declared war on May 13.
Taylor’s 6,000-man force, along with Rangers under Hays and Ben McCulloch, marched to the fortified city of Monterrey, where in September 1846 the Americans defeated superior Mexican forces. Functioning as Taylor’s cavalry arm, the Rangers, in the words of the late historian T.R. Fehrenbach, “were irregulars, hardly proper soldiers, who fought like devils, but behaved like wild men.” Taylor realized the Texans were settling old scores, and no Mexican, regardless of age or sex, was safe. The general, known as “Old Rough and Ready,” couldn’t control them.
“I fear they are a lawless set,” he said, although there was little doubt that he relied on
“los diablos Tejanos.” It was the Rangers, for instance, who stormed up Federation Hill between Saltillo and Monterrey, seized an enemy cannon and turned it on fleeing Mexican troops.
In March 1847, Gen. Winfield Scott landed at Vera Cruz and immediately advanced toward Mexico City. By September, his troops had occupied the teeming city. Trying to keep the Rangers from killing civilians, Scott assigned them to eliminate a troublesome band of guerrillas. Armed with Bowie knives and Colt revolvers, they routed the band of 450 at a place called Zacualtipan.
On Feb. 2, 1848, the war formally ended with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Victory meant that the U.S. had established its southern border with Mexico at the Rio Grande, but that agreement is not what made the war momentous. For a mere $15 million and the assumption of paltry Mexican debts, the U.S. acquired 1million square miles of Mexico, half the nation’s territory. The spoils of war included not only the vast state of Texas but also New Mexico, Arizona, California, Utah, Wyoming, Nevada and a portion of Colorado. The Louisiana Purchase in 1812 had doubled the size of the U.S; four decades later, the Mexican War increased the size of the nation by 64 percent.
The U.S. had become a continental colossus.
The significance of that vast territory became almost immediately obvious when word began to spread that a carpenter building a sawmill on the American River in Northern California spied glinting flakes of gold in the clear mountain stream. His discovery in January 1848 set in motion a gold rush that drew some 300,000 fortune-seekers to what would soon be known as the Golden State.
“Polk and the expansionists had expected the Mexican War to pay for itself in the long run,” historian Brands has written; “to see it pay so soon — and in gold, no less — was enough to convince the most skeptical that God was an American.”