Monterrey Is Ours! The Mexican War Letters of Lieutenant Dana, 1845-1847 (review)

166civil war history Monterrey Is Ours! The Mexican War Letters ofLieutenant Dana, 18451847 . Edited by Robert H. Ferrell. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Pp. xv, 218. $29.00.) Napoleon Jackson Tecumseh Dana was aptly named. The son of an artillery officer, Dana was born at an army post in 1822 and graduated from West Point twenty years later. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the 7th Infantry, and in 1844 married Susan Lewis Martin Sandford. As did so many of the elder generation which served in the Civil War, Dana received his baptism of fire during the conflict with Mexico. Dana took part in the defense of Fort Brown at the outbreak of hostilities, and participated in the battle for Monterrey, the siege of Veracruz, and the action at Cerro Gordo. He was severely wounded during the assault on Telegraph Hill, and returned home after recuperating . Dana left the army in 1855 and became a partner in a banking concern at St. Paul, serving as a brigadier general in the state militia. After the fall of Sumter, he was appointed colonel of the 1st Minnesota Infantry volunteers and fought at Ball's Bluff. Dana commanded a brigade of John Sedgwick's division of the Second Corps during the Peninsular campaign, and was again seriously wounded at Antietam. He rose to the rank of major general but did not engage in active field service for the remainder of the war. Dana was a successful businessman following his retirement from the army in 1865, and he served as deputy commissioner of pensions in the late 1890s. He died in 1905. This edition is culled from more than one hundred letters to his "beloved, sweet little Sue" that Dana wrote after being posted to the Texas border in the summer of 1845. During the first few months on the banks of the Nueces, the chief danger to the American "army of occupation" (2) came not from their Mexican foes but from accidents. One such incident, the explosion of a boiler aboard a supply steamer from Galveston, killed seven soldiers. Dana beautifully captured the romanticism of the time with his description of the military internment: "The beating of the waves of Corpus Christi Bay and the murmur of the river shall make a long, long requiem, which will sing its strains long after the tears of those who love shall cease to flow. There, Mexico, lie the first who have fallen" (12). Other prevalent antebellum traits embodied by the lieutenant included ethnocentrism and a fierce sense of nationalism, both of which are evident in the contempt with which Dana treated the Mexican people. The enemy troops were cowardly and treacherous, and the women "the most revolting, forbidding, disgusting creatures in the world, not even excepting our own Indians" (181). The "señoritas do not wear drawers, and when the wind blows right there is no telling how much one might see" (90), but Dana emphasized he would look upon them "naked with just the same feeling that I would book reviews167 see an oranutan" (144). Sue must have taken cold comfort from such thoughts. Even the Texans were viewed with suspicion by Dana; the majority were dismissed as fugitives from justice or debt, and "the best of them looked as if they could steal sheep" (14). Clearly, these letters were intended solely for Sue's eyes; they reveal the intimate feelings of her young husband and contain occasion sexual references which belie their early Victorian era origin. Dana, for example, promised to play "rascal" upon his return: "I shall want to kiss you all over, and won't you let me do it? . . . May I kiss you over and over again on your lips, titties, belly, legs and between them too? Yes, I must. Tell me, dear one, if I may" (22). As the weeks passed, Dana echoed the soldier's traditional plaints: "Our mails come very seldom" (15); and he railed against the quartermaster department and sutlers who stuck close to the troops "like so many bloodsuckers" (24). The boredom was leavened by drilling the men ("of all things to try one's patience," Dana later noted, "A stupid recruit is...