Army of Manifest Destiny: The American Soldier in the Mexican War, 1846-1848

12. Epilogue

CHAPTER 12 ~pilogue The American soldiers who fought in Mexico were like American soldiers in other wars in many ways. And in many ways they differed. The soldiers of the I840S went off to war with a feeling of personal and national invincibility that was not often expressed in earlier conflicts but that American soldiers embraced avidly for the next hundred years. The soldiers of these later wars also shared a supreme confidence in their abilities to vanquish any enemy. Those who volunteered for military service against Mexico took part in a very different kind of war than had faced their predecessors in uniform. It was a relatively short conflict in which American armies were universally victorious in major battles. It was also, from the beginning, a war of conquest against an ethnically dissimilar enemy. None of these factors by themselves are unique to the Mexican War, but taken together they set this war apart from all others and caused the experiences of those who took part in it to be unlike what American soldiers in most other wars encountered. Lasting for approximately sixteen months, from the opening shots at Palo Alto until the capture of the enemy capital, the Mexican War was longer than the Spanish-American War, about the same length as American involvement in World War I, and shorter than all except the Persian Gulf War. This brevity worked to the benefit of the individual soldiers' perceptions of their roles in the war since it kept antiwar sentiment among American civilians to a minimum. This is not to say 2°5 206 EPILOGUE that there was no opposition to this war, only that the fighting did not drag on interminably and allow this resistance to fester and grow. Although there was a certain amount of political contrariness, particularly among the Whigs, the war ended before it reached the lengths to which the Federalists went during the War of 1812, or the Peace Democrats-or Copperheads-during the Civil War. The war with Mexico also produced very little in the way of organized popular protest. Even though the people on the home front undoubtedly grieved for their loved ones who died in the fighting or in their sick beds, it was all over before these emotions could be galvanized into widespread antiwar sentiments. Longer conflicts, such as the Civil War and the Vietnam War, did give rise to large segments of the population actively demonstrating against them. Closely associated with the shortness of the Mexican War was the overwhelming success that United States forces enjoyed in battle. Everyone of the major encounters with Mexican troops resulted in American victory. (The only other wars with such records were the Persian Gulf War, our shortest war, the Spanish American War and -according to some historians-the Vietnam War, our longest.) This unbroken string of triumphs made the war much more palatable to both the American public and the soldiers. It was still difficult to accept the loss of a son or brother in battle, but knowing that he died in a winning effort engendered a certain sense of pride and, no doubt, alleviated some of the emotional pain. The triumphant progress of the war also made it difficult for any sort of a popular antiwar movement to get started. I The combination of a war that was both short in duration and of unparalleled success militarily meant that the supply of willing enlistees was sufficient to carryon the war. In spite of the fact that General Scott had to postpone his campaign to capture Mexico City until fresh volunteers arrived to replace those whose enlistments had expired, the government was able to raise these troops without resorting to conscription. This facet of the war lends itself quite easily to historical speculation . For example, what would have happened if the Mexicans defending Monterrey had been able to hold out against Taylor's army, forcing him to invest the city in a long-term siege? Or what if Santa Anna had EPILOGUE 207 defeated Taylor at Buena Vista? What would have been the effect if Mexican troops had been able to raise the siege of Veracruz, or if they had defeated Scott's army at Cerro Gordo? Each of these scenarios would have resulted, at the very least, in much heavier American casualties, and would have undermined popular backing of the war. This loss of support might then have translated...