Manifest Destinies, Second Edition

by Laura E. Gómez

  Once Congress officially established courts in New Mexico in 1850, they operated with two official Spanish translators, one to translate the court proceedings and another to translate for the grand and petit juries. This was not, however, the case in April 1847. There the official translator was Charles St. Vrain, who in addition to leading the volunteer forces against the rebels in the Santa Cruz, Embudo, Mora, and Taos Pueblo battles was also the slain governor’s business partner.122 It appears that his only role was to translate the testimony of Spanish-speaking witnesses into English (including that of sisters Ignacia and Josefina Jaramillo, respectively, Bent’s common-law wife and Kit Carson’s wife). His role did not include translating the proceedings from English into Spanish for the benefit of the defendants.

  The only trained lawyer in the courtroom (including the judge) was prosecutor Frank P. Blair, another Kearny appointee, a young man who had only recently become a lawyer in the Midwest. He had come west for health reasons when the war with Mexico broke out, so he traveled from Bent’s Fort to New Mexico with the army.123 Given Blair’s youth and novice status, it is likely that he made numerous errors, at least some of which would have harmed the Mexican and Pueblo Indian defendants. Whatever his limitations, at least the prosecutor was trained as a lawyer. Garrard describes one defense lawyer (perhaps the only one for all thirty-eight defendants) as “a volunteer private.”124 José Manuel García, whose trial for Bent’s murder was the first in the court session, was indicted early on the morning of April 6 (the day after the court convened and appointed the grand jury). At that time his lawyer asked for a brief adjournment to prepare for the trial; the judge granted the request and the court reconvened a few hours later to convict García in one afternoon. By the second trial, the defense lawyer had improved: in representing four defendants tried together for murder (Pedro Lucero, Manuel Romero, Juan Ramón Trujillo, Isidro Romero), the judge considered but rejected a defense motion to quash the indictment. According to a letter from Blair to the U.S. attorney general (which was received in Washington weeks after the trails had ended and the executions had occurred), the defense lawyer objected repeatedly to the court’s authority to hear any case against Mexican citizens. But both Houghton and Beaubien summarily overruled the defense objections.125 Over the course of two weeks, thirty-nine native men were indicted at Taos, nineteen of whom faced the death penalty. Yet none had the right to appeal.

  More than thirty native men captured in the army’s attack at Taos Pueblo were held prisoner in Santa Fe. The prosecutor eventually sought indictments for treason against twenty-nine of them. On March 8, 1847, Judge Joab Houghton convened a grand jury to consider whether to approve or reject the indictments. Although we do not know who served on the grand jury, the demographics of Santa Fe suggest that it likely contained a substantial number of Mexicans. The grand jury rejected twenty-five indictments on the grounds of “insufficient evidence.”126 It returned four indictments for “high treason” against the United States. The first and only treason defendant to stand trial was seventy-five-year-old Antonio Maria Trujillo, the father-in-law of Diego Archuleta, one of the leaders of the thwarted December 1846 plot, who eluded capture by the Americans. Three other native sons who were indicted for “high treason” were Pantaleon Archuleta, Trinidad Barcelo, and Pedro Vigil.127 The three were tried separately after Trujillo, with each trial ending in a hung jury. These outcomes suggest juries’ unwillingness, after the Trujillo case, to pass the defendants on to Judge Houghton for sentencing. In other words, majority-Mexican juries really were checking the power of Euro-American prosecutors and judges.

  Trujillo was convicted by a jury on March 12 and sentenced to be hanged four days later. In sentencing Trujillo, Judge Houghton said, “You have been found seconding the acts of a band of the most traitorous murderers that ever blackened with the recital of their deeds the annals of history. . . . For such foul crimes, an enlightened and liberal jury [has] been compelled . . . to find you guilty of treason against the government under which you are a citizen.”128 Previously at trial Trujillo’s lawyer challenged the court’s jurisdiction, apparently arguing that the court system created and appointed by Kearny was illegitimate because it was beyond the bounds of a military commander’s authority to take such actions.129 Houghton rejected the defense argument and refused to allow the jury to consider these issues. After Trujillo was convicted, Trujillo’s lawyer again raised the issue, this time moving for a mistrial and requesting a new trial.130 Perhaps it was these concerns that prompted Houghton, Blair, and scores of other Euro-American and Mexican elites to seek Trujillo’s pardon.131 In a June 11, 1847, letter to Colonel Price, then military commander of New Mexico, Secretary of War Marcy reported that he had “conversed” with President Polk about “the pardon of Antonio Maria Trujillo” and that, while the president would leave the matter to Price to decide, it was his view that Trujillo’s life should be spared.132

  At the national level, two additional questions about the American court’s legality persisted well beyond the trials themselves. In part the life of these questions beyond New Mexico was due to the fact that it took news from New Mexico from four to eight weeks to reach Washington, D.C. The first, broader question was whether these courts were legitimate at a fundamental level, given their creation by Kearny, as the leader of the invading forces, rather than by Congress. This question is, of course, related to the larger criticism that the Polk administration overstepped its prerogative in prosecuting the war; in short, congressional leaders (especially Whigs) accused Polk of illegally authorizing the invading army to do things only Congress could do (such as establish federal territories and civilian governments in those territories, including courts).133 Without addressing the New Mexico situation specifically, an 1850 Supreme Court opinion suggests that Kearny had overstepped his boundaries in establishing a civil government. In that case, the Court considered whether the Mexican port city of Tampico was a foreign or domestic port when it was under control of American naval forces during the Mexican War.134 With only one dissenting vote, Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that the port remained a foreign port, even though it was under U.S. military control. At the crux of the opinion was the belief that the power of the executive branch was inherently limited in a military context.

  The second question was whether it was legal—under U.S. law—to accuse and convict Mexican citizens of treason against the United States. The Supreme Court’s decision in the Tampico case is relevant once again. The corollary to the president’s (and military’s) inherently limited power was the fact that foreign citizens in the military zone were in no sense American citizens:

  While it was occupied by our troops, they were in an enemy’s country, and not in their own; the inhabitants were still foreigners and enemies, and owed to the United States nothing more than the submission and obedience, sometimes called temporary allegiance, which is due from a conquered enemy, when he surrenders to a force which he is unable to resist.135

  Although the legality of the court conducting the 1847 treason trials was never litigated before an appellate court, this Supreme Court opinion calls it into question. Indeed, an essential element of the crime of treason is the act of belonging to a community: “It was necessary to prove that the person accused [of treason] had intentionally performed acts conflicting with his obligations as a member of the community.”136 Because they had not willingly joined the community, the Mexican and Indian rebels did not owe allegiance to the United States, for Kearny’s proclamations alone had not created such a duty. Thus, the prosecutions, convictions, and, in one case, execution of the rebels for treason were illegal.

  Despite the numerous and significant flaws apparent in the 1847 treason trials, they may have worked in two fundamental respects. In the wake of the deaths of perhaps thousands of men, women, and children in the winter of 1847, American civil authorities arrested another hundred Mexican and Pueblo Indian men for participating in the resistance. The American prosecutor attempte
d to obtain indictments against nearly four-fifths of these men, yet he was rebuffed in most cases by majority-Mexican grand juries. In the end, grand juries approved treason indictments against nine men, a far cry from the scores indicted for murder and other violent crimes associated with the January attack on Bent. Only two of the nine Mexican men charged with treason were convicted by juries, and although both were sentenced to death upon conviction, only one was executed for that crime. After the first treason conviction and execution in Taos, and after the first treason conviction in Santa Fe, it appears that majority-Mexican juries refused further convictions for treason, although they were willing to convict (and mete out death sentences) to those accused of murder. In this respect, the system worked as it was designed to, with lay jurors operating as a check on prosecutors and judges.

  What differed is that, in this instance, the judges and prosecutors were part of a colonizing force only marginally removed from the military occupiers. The trials occurred during the war, and military leaders might well have killed all of those captured or executed them after military trials. Instead, it seems that military and civilian authorities decided jointly that martial law without the cooperation of the native population (at least without the native Mexican population, if not the Pueblo Indian population) was necessary to ensure the Americans’ long-term control of the region. Thus, the hastily pulled together legal system had to seem legitimate enough, a key aspect being the incorporation of lay grand and petit jurors. This aspect of the trials worked to co-opt some Mexicans in the conviction and punishment of the anti-American rebels. Yet the Americans did not anticipate that, at least some of the time, Mexicans would exercise their authority as jurors, such as by refusing to acquiesce to indictments or convictions (topics explored in Chapter 3).

  It is the treason charges that most fundamentally present the paradox at the heart of this book: at this wartime moment, some Euro-Americans moved to treat Mexicans as American citizens even before the Senate had ratified the peace treaty and even before Congress had declared New Mexico a territory. A charge of treason made sense only if someone was seen as part of the political community, even if peripherally so. Moreover, it was Mexican jurors—presumptive “citizens” in their role as jurors—who decided the fate of their countrymen. With the military campaign against the native Mexican and Indian resisters complete, the civil authorities entered to consolidate American power over the natives. In 1846, the Americans understood the need to co-opt Mexican elites, even as they looked ahead to a time when Euro-American immigration would allow them to control the region without native complicity. While some members of elite families had been charged with crimes in the Taos and Santa Fe trials, most of those charged were not elites. Mexican elites’ allegiance to the Americans was strengthened by their incorporation into the system as jurors. Additionally, the political incorporation of Mexican elites divided them from other Mexicans and Pueblo Indians (a theme that reappears in Chapters 2 and 3), who, despite having many reasons to distrust Mexicans, had worked together with them against the Americans in Taos and other communities in the January 1847 rebellion.

  Official executions were uncommon in New Mexico, both before and after American rule. Reporting on the Spanish colonial and Mexican periods, historian Robert Tórrez found that only a handful of executions occurred. During the official U.S. territorial period (1850–1911), fewer than fifty men were executed. Tórrez speculates that majority-Mexican juries retained a collective memory of these first American executions that made them wary of convictions for first-degree murder, knowing that hanging was the mandatory sentence.137

  I am left wondering about the significance of these legal executions for the Catholics who were martyrs in that 1847 Easter season and their relatives, then and now. For instance, should we now remember those executed as traitors to the United States, the nation of their descendants? In a conversation with a descendant of a Taoseño who participated in the rebellion against the Americans, I learned that the story of the treason trials lives on in stories passed down through the generations.138 For this descendant, the story was mixed in that, on the one hand, elders told of the family’s ancestors who were “traitors” to the Americans, thus bringing shame upon the family. Yet the elders told their younger listeners that their ancestors “had good reasons to do what they did” as patriotic Mexicans at war with the United States. Instead of largely ignoring these events (or talking about them in whispered, “private” conversation), we should embrace them as part of the complicated, messy history of the Southwest.

  Race and Citizenship after the War

  If the first prong of the legal colonization of New Mexico was these early trials for treason and murder in connection with the 1847 resistance to the American invasion, the second prong was the broader effort by the Americans to establish political authority over the region, first through military rule and then by civilian government. Two years after the war ended, Congress admitted California as a state and designated the remainder of the Mexican Cession as the Territory of New Mexico. New Mexico remained in this ambiguous political status for the next sixty-four years, until it was admitted as the forty-seventh American state in 1912.139

  In large part, New Mexico’s delayed statehood was due to the racial composition of its population. American ideas about the racial inferiority of its Mexican enemies had been in wide circulation during the debates leading up to the war and during the war itself, as we have seen.140 But they came to a head in 1848, as the question of how much territory Mexico would cede to the United States became paramount. Debates in Washington, D.C., and in the nation’s major newspapers reflected racist concerns about incorporating “too many Mexicans,” and the goal of ending the war became entangled with the goal of getting the most land from Mexico with the smallest number of Mexicans.141 The thorniest problem was the question of citizenship and what precisely the relationship of the people in the new lands would be to the nation. Secretary of State Buchanan spoke for many when he pondered the question: “How should we govern the mongrel race which inhabits [the new territory]? Could we admit them to seats in our Senate and House of Representatives? Are they capable of Self-Government as States of this Confederacy?”142

  On two days in February 1848, President Polk’s cabinet debated whether the president should recommend ratification to the Senate of the proposed treaty ending the war with Mexico.143 About a week later, the treaty went to the Senate for approval, where it weathered eleven days of secret deliberations before being approved by a vote of thirty-eight to fourteen.144 The purpose of the treaty was to end the war in a way that was mutually acceptable to both nations. The Americans insisted on a sizable cession of Mexican territory (ultimately about half of Mexico’s total territory at the time), and the boundaries of the cession were laid out in the treaty.145 The Mexicans negotiated a sum of fifteen million dollars to be paid to indemnify Mexico for claims against its citizens and for the war more generally. The Mexican negotiators also sought to include provisions for the protection of the political, religious, and property rights of its citizens living in the ceded territory.

  The Senate’s modifications were significant and nearly caused the Mexican legislature to reject the treaty, which would have prolonged the war.146 The Senate voted to strike entirely proposed Article X of the treaty, which pertained to the fate of Mexican and Spanish land grants in the ceded territory (discussed in detail in Chapter 4). The Senate also voted to modify Article IX, which, as it was originally drafted, sought to protect the rights of the Mexican citizens by ensuring that the ceded territory would be admitted as one or more states of the Union “as soon as possible.”147 Instead, the Senate altered Article IX to more vaguely refer to when the ceded lands might become states: Mexicans living in the ceded territory who chose not to retain their Mexican citizenship “shall be incorporated into the Union of the United States and be admitted, at the proper time (to be judged of by the Congress of the United States) to the enjoyment of all the rights o
f citizens of the United States according to the principles of the Constitution.”148 Some of the Mexican legislators debating ratification after the U.S. Senate’s amendments presciently feared that the Mexican citizens were doomed to ill treatment by the Americans: “The North Americans hate us, their orators deprecate us even in speeches in which they recognize the justice of our cause, and they consider us unable to form a single nation or society with them.”149

  In its approval process, the Senate left intact Article VIII of the treaty, dealing with the citizenship rights of the Mexican citizens living in the ceded territory. Under that provision, Mexicans living in the ceded region had three options.150 First, they could choose to leave their homes in order to relocate south of the newly established U.S.–Mexico border. An estimated four thousand people chose this option, an astounding number given the trauma and cost such moves must have entailed at that time.151 A second option for the former Mexican citizens was to remain in their homes, now in the United States, but elect to maintain their Mexican citizenship.152 Given conflicts during the early 1850s about who was eligible to vote and hold office, it appears that numerous Mexicans elected to maintain their Mexican citizenship in the period immediately following the ratification of the peace treaty. In one instance in 1853, forty Mexicans were indicted by the Euro-American prosecutor for falsely claiming they were U.S. citizens. When the prosecutor produced records showing these men had elected to retain their Mexican citizenship, the judge ruled the records unreliable, invalidated the 1849 process for retaining Mexican citizenship, and dismissed all the cases, with the result that the Mexican men were allowed to vote.153 The third option operated by default: if the former Mexican citizens remained in their homes and did not formally elect to retain Mexican citizenship, they would be presumed to be U.S. citizens after one year.