American Settler Colonialism: A History

by Walter L. Hixson

  With the outbreak of the war, many of the ambivalent Tejanos, Neuvomexicanos and Californios, especially elites, were receptive to siding with the Americans. Many Tejanos initially supported Texas out of frustration with the inept government in Mexico City. The Mexican government dramatically underestimated the disillusion of people who lived far from the center, which would enable the invaders to exploit separatist tendencies. The Americans were well positioned to exploit these cleavages until the chauvinism, and indiscriminate violence of the US volunteers alienated the borderland residents and propelled a longer and bloodier war.

  Unleashing the Volunteers

  Like the previous Indian Wars, and the Civil War and the Philippine conflict to come, indiscriminate violence, massacre, and collective punishment characterized the “American way of war” in Mexico. Once hostilities commenced, American volunteers primed to kill became the vanguard of Manifest Destiny. Volunteers outnumbered army regulars by almost two to one, as Americans remained leery of standing armies long associated with Red Coats and British tyranny. Most Americans had little respect for the regular army “hirelings,” many of whom were immigrants and Catholics, whereas they perceived the 59,000 volunteers as venerable “citizen soldiers” and bulwarks of republicanism. Americans celebrated the tradition of volunteer militias, which they credited with redeeming the “frontier” from the savage Indians. Polk distrusted the regular army while exalting volunteers as “free citizens, who are ever ready to take up arms in the service of their country when an emergency requires it.”32

  Masses of men, especially in southern and western states, responded with rabid enthusiasm to Polk’s request for 50,000 volunteers. They hailed not only from Tennessee, “the volunteer state,” and other southern states, but also “from all quarters of our glorious Union … in one great common cause.” Many times more volunteers turned out than needed. Ohio met its quota within two weeks. Massachusetts rallied to the cause as the largest town hall meeting in the history of Lowell was a pro-war rally. Herman Melville found New Yorkers “all in a state of delirium” in which “military ardor pervades” and “nothing is talked about but the Halls of the Montezumas.” “Yankee Doodle” became the theme song of the Mexican War, thus connecting it with the original fight for liberty in 1776. It was the “order of Providence,” a Methodist clergyman and Louisiana volunteer declared, to show the Mexicans “the blessings of liberty” through violent aggression and annexation.33

  Buoyed by “a war mood that approached hysteria,” the American public thus embraced the volunteers and proved willing to overlook their indiscriminate violence. Some Americans got a hint of things to come as the volunteers descended on communities nearby their training camps where they could be seen “swaggering about with bowie knives.” The volunteers got into fights in which they “bruised, mangled, shot and stabbed each other.” They “crowed like bantam cocks, shouted ‘show us the Mexican niggers.’ ” Nonetheless, the volunteers remained popular, as young women decorated their camps and brought them cakes and other treats.34

  In May 1846, as Taylor’s forces defeated the Mexican army in a bloody fight at the northeastern city of Matamoros, packs of volunteers descended on the city. The streets quickly “filled with drunks carrying bowie knives, rifles, and pistols, which they used at the slightest provocation” as Matamoros devolved into “a state of anarchy.”35 Looting was the most consistent crime committed by the volunteers but murder and rape were not uncommon. The leaders of the irregular forces “scarcely attempt to interfere with them to prevent these depredations,” an Army officer lamented.36

  Had the US occupation been disciplined, the United States would have been well positioned to exploit the widespread Mexican ambivalence, thus making for a shorter and cleaner war. But as David Clary points out, “The litany of drunken brawls, fights, gang rapes, stabbings, shootings, arson, robberies, theft, livestock rustling, looting and desecration of churches and other crimes ended any hope for cooperation before the Army of Occupation had been in the area a month.”37

  The invaders transformed Matamoros into “a conquered city much the receptacle of all the dregs of the United States,” Colonel Samuel R. Curtis of 3rd Ohio Volunteers recorded in his diary on August 4, 1847. “Murder, rapine and vice of all manner of form prevails and predominates here.” Curtis had no love of Mexico, a “barbarous Catholic country” and a “den of thieves, robbers, and assassins.” It was his fellow volunteers, however, who shocked him most. “It is a disgrace to our country for our own citizens are much worse than the Mexicans who are mixed up with them,” he declared. Even though many of the daily acts of murder, robbery, theft, and rape were enthusiastically documented in the bi-weekly Matamoros newspaper American Flag, the “brutal crimes committed by the regular and volunteer soldiers in Mexico went unpunished.”38

  As the Catholic Church represented an alien and undemocratic power to the Protestant US volunteers, they engaged in “robbing and killing priests, raping nuns, looting altars, and desecrating holy buildings. Taylor issued orders against this behavior but did little to stop it.” Texas Rangers near Saltillo tore down a crucifix, dragged it through the street, and trampled the parish priest. When the people resisted, the Rangers turned their violence upon them, “sparing neither age or sex in their terrible fury.”39

  Taylor deplored the violent disorder and clearly perceived that it would undermine the war effort by eroding Mexican ambivalence and strengthening guerrilla opposition. “Were it possible to rouse the Mexican people to resistance, no more effectual plan could be devised than the very one pursued by some of our volunteer regiments,” Old Rough and Ready lamented. “There is scarcely a form of crime that has not been reported to me as committed by them.”40

  Just as Taylor feared, within months a guerrilla war of resistance prevailed in Mexico. Indiscriminate killing, robbery, and sexual assault by the US volunteers inspired a vengeful hatred that prompted the Mexican people to engage in sniping, sabotage, hit-and-run attacks, and other tactics of irregular warfare. “We meet the inhabitants sullen, sulky, and with the best disposition in the world to cut the throats of each and every one of us,” an Army officer wrote.41 Livid over hitand-run attacks and other “dishonorable” behavior, the Americans responded by branding any armed Mexican a bandit subject to summary execution.

  The scarcely trained volunteers—abetted and encouraged by camp followers comprised of liquor salesmen, gamblers, and prostitutes—proved reminiscent of Indians and borderland settlers back home. Regular army officers frequently referred to the volunteers as “Mohawks,” likening them to Indian savages.42 Many of the volunteers were indeed borderland settlers well-schooled in Indian warfare and contemptuous of external authority. Lacking discipline and routine, their camps were often filthy breeding grounds for diseases that ravaged the ranks. They had no use for drills, discipline, rank, and supervision of any kind, though they remained close-knit within their own units. Most of them craved action and showed no reluctance to kill noncombatants.

  US volunteers demonstrated violent and undisciplined behavior that many observers associated with “the wild Indians.” Like indigenous warriors, the volunteers desired to take the spoils of victory and to return to their communities as heroes. “The propaganda surrounding the war was nakedly opportunistic and expressly promised plunder as the right of the volunteer,” Paul Foos explains. Volunteers signed on with promises of “roast beef, two dollars a day, plenty of whiskey, golden Jesuses, and pretty Mexican girls.”43

  Undisciplined and poorly led, the volunteers “act[ed] more like a body of hostile Indians than of civilized whites,” declared army regular George Meade, the future hero of Gettysburg. “They rob and steal cattle and corn of the poor farmers” and committed violent crimes “for no other object than their own amusement.” In a typical incident recounted by an army surgeon, some Texas volunteers in the midst of raiding a farm for horses and pigs shot to death the owner, his little son, and two servants when they came out of their ho
me in protest. The slaughter went unpunished.44

  The US public had no interest in trying Americans for crimes against Mexicans any more than it had for crimes against Indians. Volunteers committed violent crimes, including murder and rape, with impunity because of a weak US code of military justice. While the army could and often did severely punish men within its own ranks, Taylor and others did not have the same legal authority over the volunteers. The law required that citizen violators of orders and the rules of war be tried in civilian courts. Almost invariably, however, volunteer offenders sent off to New Orleans for trial found little difficulty in gaining release by obtaining a writ of habeas corpus. In May 1846, General Winfield Scott proposed changes in the law to address the problem but Congress failed to act.45

  As Taylor’s army moved from Matamoros into the interior, the Mexican army put up strong resistance before surrendering Monterey amid “tremendous slaughter and destruction.”46 Beginning in September 1846, the occupation of Monterey would last two years, the longest of any Mexican city, and was atrocious from beginning to end. Taylor again established no security patrols hence the populace was subjected to the “beastly depravity and gross outrages of the volunteers,” a disgusted Lieutenant Daniel H. Hill observed.47

  Indiscriminate violence worsened after the Battle of Angostura (also known as the Battle of Buena Vista), one of the bloodiest fights in US history up to the time. Santa Anna was back (minus one of his legs) and at the forefront of an army with superior numbers. The Mexicans fought tenaciously, killing 270 and wounding some 400 others in Taylor’s army, while 591 of its own men were killed and more than 1,000 wounded. Superior US artillery turned the battle of Angostura, the last regular armed confrontation in northern Mexico. The region thereafter became a theater of vicious guerrilla attacks followed by a US scorched-earth response.

  Virtually all signs of ambivalence had disappeared as a result of the violent pathologies of the American volunteers. “The smiling villages that welcomed our troops on their upward march are now black and smoldering ruins,” a regular confided. “The march of Attila was not more withering and destructive.”48

  One of the most infamous atrocities of the war occurred in response to the ambush of a weakly escorted US wagon and mule train north of Monterrey. The Mexican attackers killed and mutilated several teamsters, took others prisoner, and destroyed property. To avenge the assault, Taylor sent his most brutal force, a unit of Texas Rangers under Captain Mabry “Mustang” Gray. The Texans descended on the nearest pueblo and dragged 24 men, who had nothing to do with the wagon train assault, out of their beds, tied them to posts, and shot them in the head. The news of this atrocity traveled fast and incited guerrilla resistance throughout northern Mexico.49

  No one disputes that the worst offenders in the course of an almost uniformly atrocious US campaign in Mexico were the Rangers and other Texas volunteers. Hardened by years of conflict with Indians as well as Tejanos, the Texans well remembered the Alamo and Goliad. They regularly took their revenge against innocent people. “The mounted men from Texas have scarcely made one expedition without unwarrantably killing a Mexican,” Taylor grumbled.50

  The Ranger volunteers carried themselves with a certain gangland panache, as they wore colors, cultivated bushy beards, and packed multiple weapons, both guns and audacious bowie knives, which they employed with unbridled enthusiasm. At the outset of the occupation of Monterey, Texas volunteers summarily slaughtered at least 100 non-resisting citizens and torched the city. They committed “murder, rape, and robbery … in the broad light of day,” complained Hill, the future Confederate general. “The Mexicans dread the Texans more than they do the devil, and they had good reason for it,” a soldier wrote in his diary.51

  While it was typical of Army regulars to criticize the conduct of their rival volunteers, even the other volunteers condemned the Texas Ranger companies for their gratuitous violence. However, the Texans were familiar with the southwestern terrain and valued for their work as both scouts and light cavalry. Despite their “reign of terror upon the countryside,” the utility of the Texans to the army “meant that no questions were asked when they went on rampages against civilians.”52

  In the last week of 1846, a band of Arkansas Volunteers known as the Rackensackers matched the depravity of the Rangers as they “celebrated Christmas with an orgy of rape, murder and destruction.” In response to the killing of one man from their company, the Arkansas volunteers trapped and slaughtered 25 to 30 men, women, and children who had fled into a cave. Army Private Samuel Chamberlain provided a graphic account of the incident. When his group of regulars arrived at the scene, they aimed their weapons at the volunteers who were in the midst of killing and mutilating the unarmed Mexicans. “Women and children were clinging to the knees of the murderers and shrieking for mercy.” Chamberlain had no love for the Mexican “greasers” but the indiscriminate slaughter, capped off when a “savage cutthroat marched out with a swagger and gave a fancy Indian dance,” sickened him. Taylor declared that the incident put an “indelible disgrace upon our arms and the reputation of our country” but, as was routine, it went unpunished.53

  Despite such protestations, Taylor had unleashed US forces in response to banditry and irregular warfare targeting his troops and supply lines. Taylor inflicted collective punishment for guerrilla attacks by ordering the burning of villages located in the vicinity. Meanwhile, the volunteers “committed rape and pillage … while the democratically elected officers looked the other way.” A pro-war correspondent form New Orleans doubted “that negroes in a state of insurrection would hardly be guilty” of such crimes. A sergeant in a volunteer regiment acknowledged privately that Americans were beginning to “act as Guerrillas,and have been killing, I fear, innocent Mexicans as they meet them … This has led to reprisal and recrimination until it is dangerous to be out alone.”54

  The scorched-earth tactics carried out by Taylor’s army of occupation “transformed much of northeast Mexico into a moonscape,” as Clary puts it. Opportunistic Mexican bandits and desperados preyed on their fellow citizens as well. The people of northern Mexico were thus “plundered by both sides, their lives often taken and their wives and daughters outraged and carried off.”55

  The War on the Western Borderlands

  Neuvomexicanos displayed ambivalence at the outset of the war as a result of their disaffection of Mexico City combined with extensive trade ties with the Americans on the Santa Fe Trail. While Taylor’s army incited a guerrilla war by laying waste to northern Mexico, General Stephen Watts Kearney marched the Army of the West from Fort Leavenworth to Santa Fe to lay claim to colonial space for the United States. In the summer of 1846, Kearney sent advance notice that his approaching army represented no threat to the citizenry as his purpose was “seeking union with and ameliorating the conditions of the inhabitants.” Many New Mexicans hoped that the US Army could rein in the marauding Indian tribes that plagued the Santa Fe trade.56

  Despite Kearney’s noble intentions, ambivalence quickly gave way to simmering resentment as the Americans once again alienated the resident Hispanic population. Kearney angered Neuvomexicanos by putting in charge a group of US merchants who reaped the profits from sales of stock and supplies to the newly arrived army while the Hispanics got the crumbs. At the same time, a wide array of Indian tribes—Apaches, Comanche, Kiowa, Ute, and Navaho among them— seized upon the disarray brought on by the war to step up their own depredations against the Mexicans, the Americans, and each other.57

  In January 1847, the impoverished pueblo Indians and Hispanics lashed out against the US occupiers and Mexican collaborationists. In Taos, long the center of American trade and settlement, an angry mob broke into the home of Governor Charles Bent to murder and decapitate him as his wife and children fled through a hole in the wall of their adobe abode. The ethnic violence lasted a few weeks until volunteers and vigilantes variously butchered, arrested, and scattered the “rebels” who were said to be committing treaso
n in their native land. The Americans killed some 150 insurgents, while only seven of its men died.58

  In California as in New Mexico the US invaders alienated an ambivalent Hispanic population otherwise predisposed to favor them over the distant and incompetent Mexican government. The collapse of the Spanish mission system in the 1830s had weakened Hispanic unity in California and made many like the ranchero Mariano Vallejo receptive to breaking away from Mexican authority. Descending from Sutter’s Fort, the “Pathfinder” John C. Frémont, accompanied by Kit Carson (the actual finder of mostly long extant Indian paths) and a motley crew of mountain men and adventurers, proclaimed the “Bear Flag revolt” in June 1846. The US Navy, which had landed at Monterey, sanctioned Frémont’s proclamation of Californian independence. Commodore Robert F. Stockton gratuitously named himself the ruler of the territory. Frémont and Stockton quickly alienated the Californios through their racist arrogance, which included the arbitrary arrest and imprisonment of Vallejo and others. By the time Kearney arrived from New Mexico, California like northern Mexico had become inflamed with guerrilla resistance.59

  Having seized California, New Mexico, and Texas, the United States had seemingly realized its expansive settler colonial ambitions but the violence would not end until Mexico formally acknowledged American sovereignty over the new lands. As with Indian removal, Americans sought a veneer of legality as a means of disavowing the colonizing act. Polk demanded a formal peace treaty that would end the guerrilla resistance and rationalize the US aggression by providing it with a diplomatic gloss. As Mexico refused to accommodate the Americans, Polk decided to initiate a wider war by invading Central Mexico and marching on the capital to compel recognition of the US conquests.