Thank you, Mexico!
Are many Americans aware of the military history of 330 million Americans and 126 million people of the Mexican Republic?
Does Donald J. Trump, former president, know that thousands of Mexicans and former Mexican citizens fought in the American Civil War (1861-1865) in the Union Army? Or that Mexicans defeated the French Army on Cinco de Mayo in a battle that may have saved the United States?
The United States was fighting for its very existence. The war started April 12, 1861.
Eleven months later 4,000 Mexicans fought and miraculously defeated 4,000 French and French-led 2,000 Mexican Monarchist troops at Puebla (poo-ehblah), 100 kilometers east of Mexico City.
Puebla sits on the only military route from the port of Vera Cruz through 14,000 feet high mountains to Mexico City that had been used in 1519 by Hernando Cortez. Americans used the same invasion route in 1846.
The Mexican victory at Puebla was a military miracle. The French had not been defeated in battle since the 1815 defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. Observers considered the French Army to be Europe’s best in 1862.
Mexicans defeated that very French Army at Puebla, Mexico, on May 5, 1862. The Mexicans fought with rifles last used in the Battle of Waterloo, as well as machetes and primitive Amerindian bows and arrows.
French, British and Spanish troops landed in Mexico in January 1862 to collect Mexican debts for private European banks. The British and Spaniards negotiated deals quickly then left. The French stayed.
After the first defeat of the French Army since Waterloo, Paris deployed 30,000 new troops. They took Puebla after a 60-day siege and took Mexico
City shortly thereafter. That was too late.
So why should Americans honor Mexicans who defeated the French on May 5, 1862? Simple, between that date and the
July 4, 1863, Abraham Lincoln’s army reversed its losses against Robert E. Lee’s rebel troops.
The reason was, when Gen. U.S. Grant captured Vicksburg, Miss., the last Confederate bastion on the Mississippi River, French-supplied cannon, gunpowder and rifles stopped coming through Mexico.
If the French had won the battle of May 5, 1862, they would have conquered all of Mexico permitting them to supply Confederates for a year before the Battle of Gettysburg. As it was, they sent 30,000 rifles to the Confederacy.
Given more cannon through French-occupied Mexico, Gen. Lee would have won the Battle of Gettysburg. The United States of America would have died there and then.
Concurrently, Mexican Americans who had been Mexican citizens a dozen years before and anti-slavery Mexicans, flocked to the Union Army in the New Mexico territory. They defeated Confederates at the Battle of Glorieta Pass forcing them back to Texas without food and barefooted — never to return.
Today, U.S. Army records show that 20,000 former Mexican citizens, U.S. citizens only since 1849 under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, volunteered for the U.S. Army and fought throughout the Civil War in the New Mexico Territory and Texas.
Additionally, California Gov. Leland Stanford organized the Union-associated California Native Cavalry, a segregated all-Mexican American horse soldier brigade. He appointed California State Sen. Romauldo Pacheco (former Mexican citizen) as its commanding officer. Brig. Gen. Pacheco was the highest ranking Hispanic officer of Union land forces. David Farragut, the highest-ever ranked Hispanic American military officer, an admiral, was Pacheco’s naval equivalent.
When the Confederates surrendered in 1865, Gens. Grant and Phillip Sheridan, Union forces Commander in Texas, ordered captured Confederate cannon, rifles and other military supplies to be gathered on the Rio Grande River and left unguarded at night. Mexican soldiers crossed the river at night and “stole” the former Confederate weapons to fight the French.
Though an “open secret,” Sheridan publicly admitted to the “secret help” with: “(He) later admitted in his memoirs that he had supplied arms to Juárez’s forces ... which we left at convenient places on our side of the river to fall into their hands.”
Additionally, Sheridan encouraged demobilized Union soldiers to cross the Rio Grande to enlist in the Mexican Army. It paid the same as the Union Army, $10-a-month. The Lincoln government helped Mexico and Mexicans.
The Mexicans commissioned the “American Legion of Honor” regiment and staffed it with volunteer American battle-tested officers and enlisted men.
Trump — who obviously did not study history at Fordham and Penn, stated clearly that “Mexico does not send its best to the United States;” the ones who come are “criminals, rapists and drug smugglers.” That, he claimed, is why he insisted on a “beautiful wall” to keep out Mexican “criminals, rapists and drug smugglers.”
The Mexican defeat of the French on Cinco de Mayo, 1862 and the thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans who fought for the Union Army during the Civil War helped preserve the United States of America.
They did all this four decades before the first German Trump (Drumpf) set foot in the United States. President Trump “celebrated” his first Cinco de Mayo by eating a taco salad. Mexicans deserve more.