Gender, Soldiering, and Citizenship in the
Mexican-American War of 1846–1848
PETER GUARDINO
IN 1846, MEXICAN MILITARY UNITS were gathering in the city of San Luis Potosı́ to
oppose the U.S. invasion of northern Mexico. During the buildup, a group of market
women commissioned and published a poem, which included the following lines:
To War, Mexicans
To War with courage
He who does not take up arms
Shows he has no honor
If you no longer have pants
Vile and Cowardly men
Abandon the muskets
The mortars and the Cannons
We will take them up
Let’s see if we can use them
And if by chance we do not triumph
At least we won’t run away.1
In nineteenth-century Mexico, “to have pants” was an idiomatic expression that is
best translated into contemporary American English as “to stand up and act like a
man.” The rhetoric here is by no means unique. This poem may be only the cleverest
of an endless stream of similar exhortations issued throughout the 1846–1848 war
between Mexico and the United States. Mexican men were repeatedly urged to defend not only their country and their religion, but also the honor of Mexican women.
The research for this article was made possible by a U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hays
Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship, two grants from Indiana University’s College Arts and Humanities
Institute, and a sabbatical from Indiana University. I am very much indebted to colleagues who commented following the presentation of various iterations of these ideas at lectures, conferences, or workshops at the University of Maryland, Stanford University, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México, San Diego State University, the Archivo Histórico del Estado de San Luis Potosı́, the Universidad Veracruzana, the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa, the Colegio Mexiquense,
and Indiana University. I would also like to extend special thanks to Judith Allen, Amy Greenberg, Lara
Kriegel, Sonia Pérez Toledo, Timo Schaefer, Rebecca Spang, Guy Thomson, and Charles Walker for
comments on various versions. Several anonymous reviewers for the American Historical Review helped
me strengthen comparisons, tighten arguments, and account for discrepancies. Finally, my children,
Rose Guardino and Walter Guardino, and my wife, Jane Walter, not only read and commented on
versions of this piece, they also forced me to sharpen my thoughts about how different parts fit together
during more than one dinner table conversation.
1 Rosa Helia Villa de Mebius, San Luis Potosı́: Una historia compartida (Mexico City, 1988), 101–
102.
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Peter Guardino
For instance, a poem published in Mexico City to spur Mexican men to greater efforts
as American forces approached spoke of the shame and dishonor faced by young
virgins after they were raped by Americans.2 Similarly, the governor of Oaxaca,
Benito Juárez, tried to motivate the citizens of his state to contribute resources for
the war by explicitly arguing that vile mercenaries were coming to “rape our wives
and children.” Politicians and concerned citizens repeatedly stressed the need to
defend the honor of Mexican women and reported rapes that American soldiers had
committed in conquered territory.3
Such rhetoric is not unusual in times of war, and the examples that could be cited
are almost endless. During World War I, for example, British women handed out
white feathers to able-bodied civilian men whom they deemed cowards, while on the
other side of Europe, Russian women formed an all-female battalion at least in part
to shame Russian men into greater efforts.4 The invocation of men’s masculine duty
to protect the safety and honor of women has been common, and often women themselves participate in these efforts. The ideal presented is one of responsible patriarchs or patriarchs-to-be defending their peaceful homes and the honor of their
women.
In Western political culture from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century,
the defense of the nation was commonly considered a masculine duty; women’s role
was to produce the warriors who would be sacrificed on the altar of nationalism.
Moreover, men had a duty to fight to protect women, and women themselves were
seen as the epitome of home, both as a place where the nation was nurtured and
as the locus of private rather than public interests. As Karen Hagemann puts it,
“The hierarchical order of gender relations was ideologically underpinned by
the designation of arms-bearing man as the protector of weak and defenceless
woman.”5 These ideas cohere in the concept of the citizen-soldier, a classical ideal
that was revived in the eighteenth-century revolutionary age. As various scholars have
pointed out, this new pairing of citizenship and soldiering was gendered, resulting in
what Robert Nye calls “the creation of a form of masculinity peculiar to the modern
nation-state, in which the citizen must carry within himself the qualities of the warrior.”6
“Mosaico,” La Voz Popular, August 25, 1847.
Juárez proclamation, October 28, 1847, in Ronald Spores, Irene Huesca, and Manuel Esparza,
eds., Benito Juárez, Gobernador de Oaxaca: Documentos de su mandato y servicio público (Oaxaca, 1987),
34. See also a report stating that after the fall of Monterrey, Americans respected neither property nor
the honor of Mexican women, in La Epoca, periódico oficial de San Luis Potosı́, October 13, 1846; and
the parish priest of Guadalcazar’s use of reports of rape to motivate militia and guerrilla forces in 1847,
ibid., January 5, 1847.
4 Melissa Stockdale, “ ‘My Death for the Motherland Is Happiness’: Women, Patriotism, and Soldiering in Russia’s Great War, 1914 –1917,” American Historical Review 109, no. 1 (February 2004):
78–116, here 91; Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa
(Cambridge, 2001), 269, 272; Nicoletta F. Gullace, “White Feathers and Wounded Men: Female Patriotism and the Memory of the Great War,” Journal of British Studies 36, no. 2 (1997): 178–206.
5 Karen Hagemann, “A Valorous Folk Family: The Nation, the Military, and the Gender Order
in Prussia in the Time of the Anti-Napoleonic Wars, 1806–1815,” in Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and
Catherine Hall, eds., Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century
(Oxford, 2000), 179–205, here 189.
6 Robert E. Nye, “Western Masculinities in War and Peace,” American Historical Review 112, no.
2 (April 2007): 417– 438, here 417. Genevieve Lloyd points out how “the masculinity of citizenship and
the masculinity of war have been conceptually connected in Western thought—and connected through
some of the most central ideals of the philosophical tradition: individuality, selfhood, autonomy, the
2
3
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Citizenship was earned and constantly reaffirmed with a particular kind of masculine
behavior.7
This kind of thinking about military affairs was relatively new. Until the late
eighteenth century, the early modern states that dominated Europe and often held
substantial colonial possessions in other parts of the world relied upon armies that
combined aristocratic officers with rank-and-file soldiers from the lowest classes of
society. Military service was not associated with political rights or participation. This
pattern began to change with the American Revolution, but truly widespread innovation would come only with the French Revolution. In that and subsequent wars,
several developments coincided to revive and rework the much older ideal of the
citizen-soldier. David Bell explains that Enlightenment philosophers explicitly attacked the professional armies of their day as mercenaries, seeking instead to revive
the Greek and Roman ideal, according to which all male citizens were obligated to
defend the polity, reinforcing both physical vigor and civic virtue.8 Because the people were sovereign, they were expected to defend that sovereignty with their own
bodies if the need arose, thereby entering into true selfhood and citizenship.9 The
relatively novel views of Enlightenment philosophers on a variety of issues came to
exert an extraordinary influence on politics and policy in Revolutionary France. The
threat of these radical ideas soon prompted European monarchs to intervene in
French politics, setting off a series of wars in which the very survival of various
polities was often at stake. In France and Prussia, in particular, these wars soon led
to the full-scale deployment of propaganda and the coercive apparatus of the state
to recruit armies that were supposed to include all eligible citizens. In other words,
the extraordinary demand for manpower that arose from military and strategic emergencies combined with the embrace of Enlightenment political thought to lead to a
practical and rhetorical revival of the citizen-soldier. Soldiering was now connected
to the nation-state. As Eugen Weber points out, that connection was strengthened
much later in the nineteenth century when conscription and service in national
armies became important mechanisms in the process through which some national
states convinced men from different regions that they were all part of the same
concern with ‘universal’ moral principles, the transcending of ‘private’ interests”; Lloyd, “Selfhood, War,
and Masculinity,” in Carole Pateman and Elizabeth Gross, eds., Feminist Challenges: Social and Political
Theory (Boston, 1987), 63–76, here 64.
7 Lloyd, “Selfhood, War, and Masculinity”; Frevert, A Nation in Barracks, chap. 1; Stockdale, “ ‘My
Death for the Motherland Is Happiness,’ ” 81–82; Karen Hagemann, “Of ‘Manly Valor’ and ‘German
Honor’: Nation, War, and Masculinity in the Age of the Prussian Uprising against Napoleon,” Central
European History 30, no. 2 (1997): 187–220; Linda K. Kerber, “May All Our Citizens Be Soldiers and
All Our Soldiers Citizens: The Ambiguities of Female Citizenship in the New Nation,” in Jean Bethke
Elshtain and Sheila Tobias, eds., Women, Militarism, and War: Essays in History, Politics, and Social
Theory (Savage, Md., 1990), 89–104; George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern
Masculinity (New York, 1996), 50–55, 107–111.
8 David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It
(Boston, 2007), 78–79. The classical ideal of the citizen-soldier also had been revived during the Renaissance. See Stockdale, “ ‘My Death for the Motherland Is Happiness,’ ” 81.
9 Geoffrey Best, War and Society in Revolutionary Europe, 1770–1870, revised ed. (Montreal, 1998),
78; Ute Frevert, A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany, Military Conscription and Civil Society, trans.
Andrew Boreham with Daniel Brückenhaus (New York, 2004), 9; Stockdale, “ ‘My Death for the Motherland Is Happiness,’ ” 81–82.
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nation.10 However, that did not happen everywhere, and it was particularly uncommon in the first half of the nineteenth century.
After the crisis of the Napoleonic Wars, the citizen-soldier was a staple of political rhetoric in many countries. Yet the ideal was usually put into practice only
through temporary militia duty, and even for the militia it was often more rhetoric
than substance. When it came to the practical matter of manning the military, in both
the Americas and Europe most countries went back to the pattern set by early modern professional armies, forming relatively small permanent forces that combined a
professional officer class with lower-class soldiers. Soldiers were essentially a labor
force, men who enlisted because they could not make a good living in society or who
were recruited forcibly from among those who violated social norms.11 The citizensoldier might be an attractive ideal to politicians and political philosophers, but the
reality of army life was too unpleasant for most citizens to embrace.
The theory and practice developed in early modern European armies before the
revolutionary age continued. In this model, soldiers were not motivated by political
identity or ideology. Instead, armies took voluntary and involuntary recruits from the
dregs of society and molded them into effective soldiers by imposing strict discipline
and encouraging the development of bonds of masculine comradeship.12 Military
service was not something that the vast majority of people ever expected to experience, and people’s position in the political system of the place where they lived was
largely independent of any military service. Armies often included many foreigners
among both the officers and the rank and file.13
Mexico and the United States had similar professional armies before the two
countries came to blows in 1846. In both countries, soldiers in regular units that
existed on the eve of the war bore the brunt of the early fighting and remained
important throughout; these men were emphatically not citizen-soldiers, and their
recruitment was gendered. Both before and during the war, recruits for Mexico’s
regular army were secured from men who did not follow the gender norms expected
of upstanding male citizens.14 In the U.S., service in the ranks of the regular army
was a last resort for laborers who could not make a decent living in the volatile
economy and who had few prospects of achieving the respectable way of life that was
considered essential to family formation and citizenship. When the conflict began,
however, neither government felt that its regular units were sufficient, and both
therefore also raised and deployed thousands of citizen-soldiers. On the U.S. side,
these soldiers enlisted in volunteer regiments for limited terms specifically to fight
in this war. In Mexico, they were organized into National Guard units that were
10 Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford,
Calif., 1976), 298–302.
11 Best, War and Society in Revolutionary Europe, 30; Steven L. Hoch, Serfdom and Social Control
in Russia: Petrovskoe, a Village in Tambov (Chicago, 1986), 134, 136; Richard Holmes, Redcoat: The
British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket (New York, 2002), 16–55.
12 Jay Luvaas, ed. and trans., Frederick the Great on the Art of War (New York, 1966), 78; Peter M.
Beattie, The Tribute of Blood: Army, Honor, Race and Nation in Brazil, 1864 –1945 (Durham, N.C., 2001),
23.
13 Hoffman Nickerson, The Armed Horde, 1793–1939: A Study of the Rise, Survival and Decline of
the Mass Army (New York, 1942), 61, 68; Holmes, Redcoat, 48; Best, War and Society in Revolutionary
Europe, 27–28, 31.
14 José Antonio Serrano Ortega, El contingente de sangre: Los gobiernos estatales y departamentales
y los métodos de reclutamiento del ejército permanente mexicano, 1824 –1844 (Mexico City, 1993), 79–80.
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mobilized for the duration of the U.S. invasion. In both countries, the citizen-soldiers
were understood to be patriarchs and patriarchs-to-be from reputable families. Thus
in the Mexican-American War, the two relatively young republics each mobilized
very different kinds of soldiers. We know that on the U.S. side there were around
27,000 regular soldiers and 59,000 volunteers, but the available records do not allow
us to calculate similar numbers for Mexico.15 Although the recruitment of all of these
men was gendered, the regular army soldiers of the United States and Mexico were
more like each other than they were like the citizen-soldiers of their own countries.
Gender norms were central to military formations in both the United States and
Mexico because gender was fundamental to society and citizenship. The ways in
which the different kinds of military units were recruited had ramifications for the
experiences of the soldiers and their relationship to society. Prevailing ideas of citizenship were similar in the two countries, and thus similar kinds of masculine behavior entitled men to status as reputable citizens. Both countries recruited rankand-file soldiers from among men who were unable or unwilling to be respectable
male providers. Later, the manpower needs of the war led both countries to supplement their professional armies with separate units composed of soldiers of a very
different type. The recruitment of these citizen-soldiers was also gendered, but in
a completely different way, because they were the kind of reputable male providers
who would not have served in the professional armies. The distinction between the
non-citizen-soldiers who made up the armies with which both countries began the
war and the citizen-soldiers who were mobilized specifically for it is crucial to understanding how people experienced the conflict, and it also helps us understand
some of the limitations of these new nation-states.
UNDER MEXICO’S FIRST FEDERALIST REPUBLIC, from the mid-1820s to the mid-1830s,
the national government did not set criteria for citizenship, leaving the issue in the
hands of the states. Most states established essentially universal male citizenship,
although domestic servants were often explicitly excluded because they lacked the
necessary autonomy, and women were implicitly excluded on the same grounds.16 In
Mexico during this period, most men were encouraged to identify themselves as
citizens. When the centralists came to power in the mid-1830s, they dramatically
restricted citizenship. In 1836 they limited it to males with more than 100 pesos in
annual income; in 1843 the income requirement was increased to 200 pesos.17 The
first number effectively excluded the peasantry and urban laborers, while the higher
number excluded even respectable artisans. In 1846 the federalists regained power,
and citizenship was again regulated by the states. The states re-implemented their
earlier constitutions, re-legitimating the more expansive definitions of citizenship.
There is ample evidence that in popular culture, citizenship had a much broader
meaning than the simple question of who was allowed to vote. Indigenous peasant
15 Amy S. Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (New
York, 2012), 130.
16 Peter F. Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State: Guerrero,
1800–1857 (Stanford, Calif., 1996), 174 –175.
17 Ibid., 100.
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communities, for example, had their own definitions of who was a member with
political rights. These older notions did not correspond completely to post-Enlightenment ideas about citizenship, but it is clear that in many places the indigenous
formulation “sons of the village” was interpreted as equivalent to citizenship.18
Mixed-race people of modest means also had their own popular vision of citizenship.
Although this vision was informed by constitutions and laws, it also had more amorphous roots in older cultural understandings of what it meant to be an honorable
and committed member of the community, a vecino or neighbor. For most of the
colonial period, whites did not believe that people of mixed race could be vecinos.19
From the late colonial Bourbon reforms through the early national period, however,
broader definitions of who could be useful to the state and society led many mixedrace people to appropriate the status of respectable citizen for themselves.
In the popular mind, behaving honorably and doing one’s duty to the nation came
to be seen as sufficient for citizenship.20 This idea clearly had a gendered dimension,
as a citizen was supposed to act responsibly and provide for his family through honest
labor. For both indigenous and non-indigenous people, popular ideas about citizenship were sometimes associated with military service as citizen-soldiers in militia
units.21 In early-nineteenth-century Mexico, citizenship was very much a contested
concept. Wealthier and more conservative Mexicans often feared that the extension
of citizenship to the urban and rural poor promoted political instability. Yet many
relatively poor Mexicans embraced more egalitarian ideas of what it meant to be a
citizen, and when they again became legally entitled to citizenship in 1846, they
responded enthusiastically.
In the early-nineteenth-century United States, as in Mexico, citizenship was defined not through the national constitution or legislation, but instead through the
laws and constitutions of the various state governments. In American history, the
Jacksonian period is best known for the extension of the right to vote to all white
males regardless of their economic means. This blanket inclusion of white men was
directly tied to the exclusion of other groups from these rights. Attitudes about race
hardened even in the North, and a political system predicated on a complex gradation of rights based on economic status became increasingly dichotomized on racial grounds. In various states, poor white men gained the right to vote even as free
blacks lost it. Southerners increasingly justified slavery on the basis of the profound
racial differences between whites and blacks, and they sometimes restricted the
rights of free blacks even to own property.22
18 Ibid., especially 91–92; Peter Guardino, The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca,
1750–1850 (Durham, N.C., 2005), 233–238, 271–272; Florencia E. Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The
Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley, Calif., 1995); Guy P. C. Thomson with David G.
LaFrance, Patriotism, Politics, and Popular Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Juan Francisco Lucas and the Puebla Sierra (Wilmington, Del., 1999); Michael T. Ducey, A Nation of Villages: Riot and
Rebellion in the Mexican Huasteca, 1750–1850 (Tucson, Ariz., 2004).
19 Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish
America (New Haven, Conn., 2003).
20 Sarah C. Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender, and Politics in Arequipa, Peru,
1780–1854 (University Park, Pa., 1999), 172–180. See also Richard A. Warren, Vagrants and Citizens:
Politics and the Masses in Mexico City from Colony to Republic (Wilmington, Del., 2001).
21 See, for instance, Seth Meisel, “From Slave to Citizen-Soldier in Early-Independence Argentina,”
Historical Reflections/Reflexiones Historiques 29, no. 1 (2003): 65–82.
22 Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America, revised ed. (New York,
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Jacksonian democracy was bound up both with aggressive warfare against Native
Americans on the frontier and with the expulsion of Native Americans from areas
already dominated by whites. Western migration was symbolic of white male supremacy, and it of course led to wars against Native American groups.23 As Reginald
Horsman explains in his classic work Race and Manifest Destiny, Americans increasingly asserted that Indians could never be assimilated and could only be forced to
recede before the tide of democratic civilization.24 This intellectual argument had
emotional depth because a commitment to expansion held out the promise of migration and economic advancement to the relatively poor white males whose votes
had become so important. This same combination of cultural shift and economic
self-interest was even more evident in the case of southern tribes within the boundaries of existing states. These tribes had, to varying extents, accepted many of the
political and economic institutions of supposedly superior white civilization, including elected government, literacy, and, ironically, slavery.25 None of this protected
them from Jacksonian democracy. The democratization of politics went hand in hand
with the campaign to remove these Native American groups from the South.26
Mexicans were also victims of the rise of Jacksonian democracy. The same expansion of the cotton economy that made expelling Native Americans from the U.S.
South so attractive encouraged Americans to move to the Mexican province of Texas.
These immigrants eventually sought independence from Mexico in a war characterized by a fierce propaganda campaign fought in American newspapers, parks, and
theaters.27 Mexicans were racialized and feminized, and ironically, one of the principal arguments used for such characterization was Mexico’s inability to defend its
settlements from the increasingly severe Indian raids that American expansionism
had caused.28 The placing of Mexicans among the inferior races was largely complete
by 1846, and it had drastic consequences for Mexico.
The changing ideology of race as it was applied to blacks, Native Americans, and
Mexicans was intimately connected to the increasing rights accruing to white men.
As Harry Watson puts it, “all white men would be equal, at least in theory, but no
one else would be the equal of a white man.”29 Jacksonian egalitarianism depended
on white males’ ability to rather ostentatiously hold themselves above free blacks,
women, Native Americans, immigrants, and, of course, Mexicans. The egalitarian
rhetoric of the era was all the more strident because it contrasted with an economy
in which the distribution of wealth was increasingly unequal, leaving more and more
2006), 52–53. On property rights, see Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, Forging Freedom: Black Women and
the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2011), 120–122.
23 Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca, N.Y., 2002),
146.
24 Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism
(Cambridge, Mass., 1981).
25 On slavery, see Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early
America (Cambridge, Mass., 2010).
26 Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians (New York, 1993),
75; Theda Purdue and Michael D. Green, The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears (New York, 2007),
70.
27 Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 214.
28 Ibid., 208, 231–234; Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the MexicanAmerican War (New Haven, Conn., 2009), xvii, 83–85, 227–229, 245, 290.
29 Watson, Liberty and Power, 53.
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men unable to achieve the economic autonomy that seemed to be implied in their
political conquest of citizenship.30
In both countries, gender norms were critical to popular ideas about citizenship.
In Mexico, citizenship was a right of respectable men who worked to support their
spouses, children, and aged parents. These were men who avoided promiscuity,
heavy drinking, excessive domestic violence, immoderate gambling, and idleness.31
They were, in other words, honorable. Even misbehavior that we would not think of
as gendered was often viewed that way: Habitual drunkenness was seen as a problem
in Mexico because it led to fights between men, because it exacerbated domestic
violence, and because men who spent their money achieving a drunken stupor were
men who were not providing for their families. Gambling could damage society by
disturbing the peace directly, but also by placing families at risk of destitution. Other
negative behaviors were even more explicitly gendered. Promiscuity, domestic violence, and even simply failing to provide adequate support likewise placed families
at risk and eroded the foundation of both society and the economy.
Some behavior that did not fit the norms of respectability was itself evidence of
alternative kinds of masculinity. Next to the sober, responsible, and hardworking
patriarch or son of the family, there was the alternative model of the hard-drinking,
macho, posturing, quick-to-anger, sexually irresistible “real man.” Women, parents,
and local authorities favored the former model, but the latter model also had credibility in popular culture. In effect, this model offered men another kind of honor,
one that was accessible to all regardless of their means.32 Again, though, the practical
question was one of limits. The occasional binge or drunken fight was not enough
to lead authorities to take action against an otherwise responsible father and husband, but if the behavior was repeated and impinged on social calm and the wellbeing of the family, that was another matter.33
In recent years, a number of historians of Latin America have demonstrated the
centrality of the concept of honor in ordering society and justifying social hierarchy.34
The wealthy, however, were not the only people who considered themselves honorable. Honor does not appear often in documents produced by or about indigenous
peasants, but it is clear that for Hispanic people of various racial mixtures and social
30 Ibid., 17– 41; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America,
1815–1848 (New York, 2007), 586, 851; Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, The Dominion of War:
Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000 (New York, 2004), 213.
31 Generally, domestic violence was considered excessive enough to merit intervention by authorities
when it was so severe that women might leave their husbands, breaking up the male/female pair that
was the basis of the economy of families, and the reproduction of labor for the larger economy. Even
then, authorities would first try to restore marital harmony with advice and light sanctions. Generally,
they would send the male to the army only if repeated efforts to restore harmony had not modified his
behavior. On authorities and domestic violence in Mexico during the period, see Laura M. Shelton, For
Tranquility and Order: Family and Community on Mexico’s Northern Frontier, 1800–1850 (Tucson, Ariz.,
2010), 63–65; and Guardino, The Time of Liberty, 247.
32 Steve J. Stern, The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995), 156–161, 177–188; Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens, 174 –177; Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, Gender and the Negotiation of Daily Life in Mexico, 1750–1856 (Lincoln, Neb., 2012), 15.
33 Stern, The Secret History of Gender, 80–111; Lipsett-Rivera, Gender and the Negotiation of Daily
Life in Mexico, 177–181, 214 –216; Shelton, For Tranquility and Order, 63–68; Guardino, The Time of
Liberty, 246–247.
34 Anne Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial
Spanish America (Stanford, Calif., 1999), 33–34, is perhaps the best short introduction to the subject.
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positions, the idea of honor was important. Their ideas certainly did not duplicate
those of elites. In general, they were more likely to believe that through virtuous
behavior they could earn and maintain honor. For both the relatively humble and
elites, behavior in sexual and family relationships was crucial to honor, but the poor’s
definition of honorable behavior was broader. In essence, honesty, family formation,
and hard work were the marks of an honorable man. Combined with this was a sense
that such a man should be treated with dignity, not made subject to the caprice of
others.35
Gendered behavior and citizenship were also contested in the United States. The
increasing importance of the market economy and the Second Great Awakening led
many Americans to promote a particular set of male behaviors that stressed autonomy, self-reliance, and self-discipline. This required abstention from alcohol, or
at least moderation. Citizens were supposed to be “intelligent, hardworking, thrifty,
self-controlled, and civic-minded,” according to Harry Watson, and in fact the justification for excluding women, free blacks, and immigrants from citizenship was
their very lack of these qualities.36 Yet again there were alternative models of masculinity, especially in the rural South and Midwest and among urban workers and
recent immigrants. Here drinking, gambling, and fighting were not only accepted,
they were crucial to male identity. Bertram Wyatt-Brown argues that violence was
particularly central to male honor in the South, because men of all ranks needed “to
preserve white manhood and personal status in the fraternity of the male tribe to
which all belonged.”37 Others have emphasized that this more violent version of
masculinity or multiple violent versions of masculinity also were important in the
rural Midwest and for the urban poor of northern cities.38 Notably, even this alternative masculinity was connected very closely to citizenship, and it was displayed
during election campaigns and on election day, when brawling and rioting were a
regular part of the action.39
QUESTIONS OF GENDER AND CITIZENSHIP were crucial to recruitment into both kinds
of military formation in both Mexico and the United States. Although certainly a few
Mexicans volunteered for the service, generally the ranks of Mexico’s regular army
were filled with conscripts. Beginning with Mexican independence in the 1820s, state
and local authorities were required to periodically yield up to the permanent army
35 Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens, 172–175; Lipsett-Rivera, Gender and the Negotiation of Daily
Life in Mexico, 13.
36 Watson, Liberty and Power, 52, 220. See also Michael D. Pierson, Free Hearts and Free Homes:
Gender and American Antislavery Politics (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003), 8; Dorsey, Reforming Men and
Women, 93.
37 Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (1982; repr., New
York, 2007), 369.
38 Amy S. Greenberg, Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City
(Princeton, N.J., 1998), 68; Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 19, 99; Peter Way, “Evil Humors and
Ardent Spirits: The Rough Culture of Canal Construction Laborers,” Journal of American History 79,
no. 4 (1993): 1397–1428, here 1402–1403; James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men
Fought in the Civil War (New York, 1997), 26; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the
Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York, 1984), 308; Andrew R. L. Cayton, Frontier
Indiana (Bloomington, Ind., 1998), 293.
39 Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 430– 434.
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a “contingente de sangre” or “blood quota.”40 Over the decades leading up to the
Mexican-American War, regional governments came up with these men in two ways,
the levy and the draft lottery. These methods were supposed to be quite different,
but in practice the differences were minimal.
In the levy, regional governments were each assigned a quota, but they were
allowed to fill it as they wished. Local authorities sometimes sentenced criminals who
had been judged guilty of assault, robbery, or even murder to the army, but this group
was too small to fill the quotas.41 Instead, authorities invariably focused on the larger
but more nebulous category of men deemed detrimental to local society. These men
were sent to the army not as part of their sentence for a specific crime, but instead
on the basis of their reputations and previous interactions with authorities. Although
the regional governments were free to act as they wished, they all targeted the same
group. In Michoacán’s rules from 1844, the quota was to be filled with “vagrants,
those who frequent taverns or bordellos, loafers, professional gamblers, men living
with women they are not married to, married men who mistreat their wives, men who
do not fulfill family obligations, incorrigible sons, orphans without means, and, lastly,
those suspected of having committed a crime.” The criteria were largely the same
in Oaxaca, Puebla, San Luis Potosı́, Querétaro, Guanajuato, and other states.42 The
similarities were not accidental. The language harked back to eighteenth-century
colonial decrees regulating forced recruitment, and state politicians circulated their
laws and constitutions from state to state. More importantly, they represented a
common cultural sense of which individuals were useful to society and which were
pernicious.43
For regional and local authorities, military recruitment served to rid society of
people who did not follow norms. Officials wanted to protect local elites from financial harm, collect taxes, and promote economic development, and thus they
needed to safeguard the most productive men from forced recruitment. They were
acutely aware that removing able-bodied men from the families they supported
would leave those families impoverished, as there was no effective social safety net
in nineteenth-century Mexico. Authorities also clearly used the threat of the levy to
affirm expectations regarding gender.44 Enforcing gender norms was seen as central
both to keeping order in society and to protecting families from destitution. If society
was to function and reproduce itself properly, men of modest means had to form
Best, War and Society in Revolutionary Europe, 90.
See, for example, Archivo Histórico del Estado de San Luis Potosı́, Secretaria General del Gobierno [hereafter AHESLP, SGG], 1846, leg. 1, exp. 8.
42 The quote is from Serrano Ortega, El contingente de sangre, 79–80. See also ibid., 46– 47. For
similar procedures in the 1860s, see Guy Thomson, “Los indios y el servicio militar en el México decimonónico: Leva o ciudadanı́a?,” in Antonio Escobar Ohmstede, ed., Indio, nación y comunidad en el
México del siglo XIX (Mexico City, 1993), 207–251, here 213–215.
43 For the colonial antecedents, see Serrano Ortega, El contingente de sangre, 30, 45. For Argentina,
see Ricardo D. Salvatore, Wandering Paysanos: State Order and Subaltern Experience in Buenos Aires
during the Rosas Era (Durham, N.C., 2003), 265.
44 Sonia Pérez Toledo believes that in Mexico City the wives and parents of potential recruits also
used the threat of forcible recruitment to discipline their badly behaving husbands and children. Often
they denounced the behavior of these men, yet testified on their behalf after the men were jailed awaiting
military service, securing their release. Pérez Toledo, Trabajadores, espacio urbano y sociabilidad en la
Ciudad de México, 1790–1867 (Mexico City, 2011), 169.
40
41
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families and support them with their labor. In effect, forcible military recruitment
was gendered because gender was constitutive of local economies and societies.
The levy was only one of the systems used to forcibly recruit men into Mexico’s
permanent army. The national government sometimes mandated draft lotteries, for
which officials recorded the characteristics of all males, with selections then made
by chance from the resulting list of eligible men. The leaders of the military preferred
the lottery because they believed that it yielded healthier, better-behaved men, as
well as men with strong local roots who supposedly would be easier to find if they
deserted.45 However, this logic was circumvented in practice because politicians still
recognized the importance of preserving the social fabric. The lottery was far from
universal, and it too was highly gendered.
The first group subject to the draft consisted of men between the ages of eighteen
and forty who were either single or widowers without children. If there were more
men in the group than were needed, the unlucky ones were chosen by lot. If this
group did not yield enough recruits, then the next group to be tapped was married
men who did not live with and support their wives. If the number of recruits was still
insufficient, a lottery was held among married men who supported their wives but
did not have children. Men who had children to support were not drafted. There were
also various other exceptions. The exception that people most often invoked was for
single men who were supporting their younger siblings and/or aged parents. Notably,
the government specified that if aged parents had several eligible sons, “the official
will be careful to except the one who best conducts himself with his parents and gives
them the greatest support.” In other words, it was the men who fell short of the
standard when it came to obeying and supporting their parents who were shipped
off to the army. Even in the official rules for the lottery, the importance of gender
norms is evident.46
Both class and gender also operated in the actual interpretation of draft regulations. Draft committees consisted of the local mayor, the parish priest, and two
prominent citizens—in other words, propertied and honorable patriarchs.47 These
were the same kind of people who would have been making the decisions on the levy,
rounding up the troublemakers. For these men, even the draft lottery was still a tool
for keeping order in society, and for ridding it of people who did not adhere to certain
norms. As one official put it, his only objective in managing the lottery was “to purge
the villages of vicious people.”48 Local officials sought to preserve the labor force,
protect local families from destitution, and enforce gender norms. Military officers
may have dreamed of a draft lottery in which all men would have an equal chance
of being drafted, but that is not what they got.49 And although draft lotteries figure
prominently in the science and folklore of the citizen-soldier ideal, nothing seems
Serrano Ortega, El contingente de sangre, 51, 53–59.
The rules cited are for the 1844 draft and are found, among other places, in Archivo Histórico
del Distrito Federal [hereafter AHDF], Municipalidad Guadalupe Hidalgo, Milicia Guardia Nacional,
caja 186. Note that certain professions, including lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, government officials,
teachers, priests, muleteers, mine workers, and cultivators of cotton, were exempt, although there was
no general exemption for wealthy men.
47 AHESLP, SGG, 1846, leg. 1, exp. 5.
48 Ibid., leg. 6, exp. 7.
49 Archivo de Defensa Nacional (Mexico), exp. 2107, fols. 7–8.
45
46
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to have been further from these Mexican officials’ minds than forming a citizen army
motivated by patriotism.
The gendering of the draft lottery, and the ways in which it replicated the levy
and simultaneously undermined the notion of a citizen soldiery, can be seen in officials’ choice of who should be sent to the army, and in how they described the
draftees. One of those unfortunates was Antonio Ventura; according to a selection
committee, his “wife has declared that they are having marital difficulties and he has
abandoned his family to go around in friendship with Margarita Segura.”50 Other
committees chose Vicente Mesa “for his depraved behavior and for not fulfilling his
natural duties to his father,” and Gaspar Santiago because “although he has a father
and mother, he does not help them in any way, he is a misbehaving bum.”51 José
Marı́a Alvarez was sent to the army because he “continually mistreats” his wife.52
Draftee Julián Garcı́a was described as “an idle youth,” “a habitual drunk” who “is
not useful to his parents in any way.”53 Again and again it is clear from the documents
that the men who were actually recruited through the draft lottery were those the
authorities saw as thieves, gamblers, drunks, lazy bums, troublemakers, wife-beaters,
men who did not support their families, and men who were sexually promiscuous.
Even in the draft lottery, the government inserted itself very firmly into gender and
family relations. The influence of class is much more difficult to see, because although middle-class and wealthy people do not seem to have ever been drafted in
Mexico, they represented only a tiny percentage of the population in the first place.
One suspects that social connections to the men making decisions were sufficient to
protect even wealthy and middle-class men who violated gender norms from the
draft, and that less harsh means were used to police their behavior.
Mexicans understood the specific rules and cultural assumptions that ruled forced
recruitment. In indigenous communities, early marriage and child-bearing were already the norm, but officials suspected other Mexicans of marrying early to avoid
military service.54 More often, families and occasionally friends also resisted forced
recruitment by appealing to authorities, defending their men’s responsible masculinity and honor. The parents and wives of recruits submitted hundreds of petitions
testifying to the conscripts’ honorable work, support of their parents, and good behavior.55
These documents are often heartrending. They were clearly aimed at protecting
the income that families depended on for their very existence, but they also show
us conceptions of gender and even honor. Julián Martı́nez composed a letter to the
governor asking that his son Candelario be exempted from military service because
“I am an old father unable to work, and my son is the only one who sustains my wife
and maiden daughters, who for lack of resources are at risk of misery, nudity, and
prostitution.” In a similar letter, the elderly Marı́a Alvina Urbina asked for an exemption for her son Queriano Moreno, saying that he was her only source of support
50 AHESLP, SGG, 1846, leg. 4, exp. 21. In this case, “having marital difficulties” is the best short
translation I could think of for the more evocative “handan en mal estado.”
51 Ibid., leg. 6, exp. 1, exp. 12.
52 Ibid., leg. 9, exp. 7.
53 Ibid., exp. 9.
54 Ibid., leg. 1, exp. 73.
55 For similar petitions in Argentina, see Salvatore, Wandering Paysanos, 275–276.
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as she finished out her days, and that he was not “a depraved man, a bum, or damaging to society.”56 José Domı́nguez testified that his friend Margarito Román, besides supporting his mother and two younger siblings, “behaves with honor” and was
not “by any means a bum or depraved man.”57
Domı́nguez, in fact, leaves us with another point to consider. The word “honor”
is not found in the official list of possible reasons why a man could be exempted from
forced recruitment, but as becomes clear here, it found its way into petitions for
exemption. It even shows up, along with affiliated terms such as hombre de bien,
which can be translated as “upright man” or “respectable man,” on the lists that
officials compiled explaining whom they had decided to exempt. Thus, for instance,
the muleteer Gregorio Gallo is described as an hombre de bien, and the shoemaker
Ygnacio Cervantes is listed as supporting his father and two sisters “with honor.”58
As Peter Beattie has argued in his work on the Brazilian army in the nineteenth
century, the idea of honor that many poor Latin Americans tenaciously clung to was
the very antithesis of service in the regular army. As Beattie memorably puts it, “In
some ways, the barracks were a male equivalent of the bordello; both attempted to
distance ‘dangerous’ male and female ‘loners’ from ‘honorable’ family households.”59 Honor was perhaps the most fragile possession of the respectable poor in
Latin America, and it was not likely to survive service in the regular military. The
regular army was for drunks, gamblers, thieves, and men who did not support their
wives or obey their parents.
Not surprisingly, authorities routinely used the word “consigned” to refer to the
act of sending men to the regular army, the same word used when people were sent
to prison.60 Recruits of course lost their freedom of movement, but they were also
alienated from the rights of citizenship in another way. The introduction of citizenship as the central political ideal in early-nineteenth-century Mexico brought with
it the abolition of corporal punishment. This prohibition theoretically extended to
the regular army, but in practice Mexican officers and sergeants often beat soldiers
with batons or sheathed swords.61 This physical discipline was yet another sign that
the men who were sent to serve were not considered citizens, and therefore they were
not the citizen-soldiers who were the staple of modern political rhetoric.
Mexican regular units were staffed by recruits whom even average Mexicans regarded as dishonorable and lowly. Does this mean that their social position was lower
than that of their counterparts in the American regular army? In a word, no. In the
United States, unlike Mexico, service was not obligatory for anyone. However, the
regular army was the destination of last resort for the men who became common
AHESLP, SGG, 1846, leg. 1, exp. 10.
AHDF, Municipalidad Guadalupe Hidalgo, Milicia Guardia Nacional, box 186.
58 Ibid.
59 Beattie, The Tribute of Blood, 9. The same was largely true of the army of Great Britain. See
Holmes, Redcoat, 268.
60 AHESLP, SGG, 1846, leg. 1, exp. 5.
61 William W. Carpenter, Travels and Adventures in Mexico: In the Course of Journeys of Upward of
2500 Miles, Performed on Foot; Giving an Account of the Manners and Customs of the People, and the
Agricultural and Mineral Resources of That Country (New York, 1851), 66, 80; Archivo General de la
Nación (Mexico) [hereafter AGN], Archivo de Guerra, 74, sin expediente, sin foja; ibid., 439, fols.
126–129; ibid., 409, fols. 19– 49; AHESLP, Supremo Tribunal de Justicia, 1848, Mayo, exp. 17; AHESLP,
SGG, 1847, leg. 1 sin expediente; AHESLP, SGG, 1845, leg. 30.
56
57
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soldiers. These were largely urban working-class men and recent immigrants who had
a hard time making a decent living, or any living at all.62 They were pressed into the
ranks not by the coercive power of the state but by the even harsher discipline of
hunger. A recent immigrant named George Ballentine, one of the few enlisted men
from the regular army who wrote a memoir, pointed out that he had entered the
service because when he arrived, he “was not at all prepared to find the scramble
for the means of living so fierce as I found it to be in New York.” German immigrant
Frederick Zeh said that he entered because in trying to make a living in the Philadelphia area, he “often passed out from hunger.”63 These were men who moved
from place to place, doing the menial labor that others eschewed; they were part of
a large pool of lower-class laborers that Paul Foos calls a “roving international proletariat.”64 Thus for them, the decision to enter the army was an economic one. Army
recruiters offered housing, food, clothing, medical aid, and pay during the five-year
term of a soldier’s service.65 The recruits viewed themselves as a labor force, and in
fact many believed that they had the right to desert when the terms under which they
had enlisted were violated, especially when they were poorly fed or their pay was in
arrears.66 Military service was not a duty of citizenship for them, and in fact more
than 40 percent of them were not Americans.67
Americans had little respect for these men. Hardworking citizens assumed that
people who were so down on their luck in an expanding country must have moral
defects, a notion that was increasingly popular during this period. As historian
Brucey Dorsey explains, “men whose poverty made them dependent were portrayed
as moral failures and less than fully men.”68 American civilians often treated army
recruits with intense contempt. The immigrant recruit Ballentine points out that
civilians “seemed to look upon us in the light of a degraded caste, and seemed to
think that there was contamination in the touch of a soldier.” One civilian remarked
that the soldiers seemed like fine candidates for the state prison.69 When C. M.
Reeves arrived in Pittsburgh to join the army in December 1844, the clerk at his hotel
62 Frederick Zeh, An Immigrant Soldier in the Mexican War, trans. William J. Orr, ed. William J. Orr
and Robert Ryal Miller (College Station, Tex., 1995), 4 –5; George Ballentine, Autobiography of an
English Soldier in the United States Army, ed. William H. Goetzmann (Chicago, 1986), 3–11; Corydon
Donnavan, Adventures in Mexico: Experienced during a Captivity of Seven Months in the Interior (Cincinnati, 1847), 191; Edward M. Coffman, The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime,
1784 –1898 (New York, 1986), 137–141, 146.
63 Ballentine, Autobiography of an English Soldier in the United States Army, 3; Zeh, An Immigrant
Soldier in the Mexican War, 4 –5.
64 Paul Foos, A Short, Offhand Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict during the Mexican-American
War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002), 108; Francis Paul Prucha, The Sword of the Republic: The United States
Army on the Frontier, 1783–1846 (London, 1969), 326–330. See also Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women,
61.
65 Ballentine, Autobiography of an English Soldier in the United States Army, 11.
66 Ibid., 28; Zeh, An Immigrant Soldier in the Mexican War, 40– 42; Coffman, The Old Army, 194 –196.
67 Foos, A Short, Offhand Killing Affair, 23; James M. McCaffrey, Army of Manifest Destiny: The
American Soldier in the Mexican War, 1846–1848 (New York, 1992), 29.
68 Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 58–63, 75; Richard Bruce Winders, Mr. Polk’s Army: The
American Military Experience in the Mexican War (College Station, Tex., 1997), 50–51; Coffman, The Old
Army, 137.
69 Ballentine, Autobiography of an English Soldier in the United States Army, 34 –35. For more evidence of this kind of attitude, see Prucha, The Sword of the Republic, 320–326; Paul W. Foos, “Mexican
Wars: Soldiers and Society in an Age of Expansion” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1997), 177. On the
British army in the period, see Best, War and Society in Revolutionary Europe, 234 –235, and Holmes,
Redcoat, 16.
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viewed his scruffy appearance with considerable suspicion, believing that he would
not be able to pay his bill. When Reeves returned the next day to settle the bill and
informed the man that he had enlisted, the clerk told him, “you have entirely ruined
yourself you had much better go down to a Steamboat and work for your daily bread.”
As Reeves marched with his fellow recruits to the steamboat that would take them
out of town, a pack of schoolboys chanted, “See the dirty soldiers, soldiers will you
work?”—a question they answered themselves by chanting, “No I’ll sell my shirt first,
the dirty soldier’s going to be shot at and missed. What’s the price of whiskey, soldier?” The boys followed the recruits, “hooting and yelling as if we were a lot of
miserable thieves or something worse.” After these experiences, Reeves “felt as though
I was some criminal, entirely cast outside of society, and was on my way to some Penal
colony or penitentiary, there to answer for my crimes.”70 This observation is very
close to the Mexican practice of sentencing misbehaving men to the army.
Here again gender played a part. Family formation and a respectable life as local
citizens were not options that were open to these men because a steady income was
not within their reach. Moreover, many recruits were immigrants, and poor immigrants, like blacks, were seen as passionate, profligate, lazy, and dependent, all qualities that distanced them from the sober, hardworking autonomy expected of citizens.71 This was doubly true of Catholics, who were seen as particularly dependent
because the Church hierarchy prevented them from forming rational religious beliefs
based on Bible reading. Many Americans viewed Catholics as “powerless, effeminate, dependents lacking in rational agency.”72 For nativists, Catholics’ dependence
on the Church hierarchy made them unfit for citizenship. Moreover, the very forms
of masculinity that immigrants expressed, revolving around drinking, fighting, and
pride in manual labor under harsh conditions, also seemed to disqualify them from
inclusion in the body politic. Shelley Streeby argues convincingly that even during
the war, service in the regular army did not affirm an immigrant’s manhood and
citizenship: “Questions about the national and racial status of the immigrant Irish
were also questions about manhood. Could the Irish be faithful ‘sons’ to their adopted nation? Were they ‘manly’ enough to be incorporated into a band of white U.S.
brothers?” Many Americans saw immigrants who served in the U.S. regular army as
a threat to the concepts of manhood and national identity that were part of the
citizen-soldier ideal.73
For both native sons and immigrants, joining the regular army was not an act of
70 C. M. Reeves, “Five Years Experience in the Regular Army of the United States, Including the
War with Mexico” (ms., Cincinnati Historical Society Library), 26. This chant seems to have been wellknown. A Cincinnati street urchin flung it in the face of a young Ulysses S. Grant soon after he donned
the regular uniform for the first time. Grant, Personal Memoirs (Westminster, Md., 1999), 18. See also
Justin Harvey Smith, The War with Mexico, 2 vols. (1919; repr., Gloucester, Mass., 1963), 1: 164; and
Prucha, The Sword of the Republic, 320.
71 Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 122, 196, 199, 219, 220–225; Watson, Liberty and Power, 245.
Many Americans considered the Irish in particular to not even belong to the white race. See Noel
Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (1994; repr., New York, 2009), 49, 89; Matthew Frye Jacobsen,
Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1998),
48, 70; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class,
revised ed. (London, 2007), 133.
72 Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 236; Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York, 2005), 98.
73 Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley, Calif., 2002), 15–16, 82–83, 98, quote from 103.
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citizenship, and it was not seen as moving people closer to citizenship. It was a sign
that the individual was unable to succeed as a responsible, autonomous individual
worthy of citizenship. Moreover, when men joined the American regular army, they
became less autonomous, and one of the most important symbols of this was the
prevalence of fierce corporal punishment in the regular army. This kind of discipline
was considered beneath the dignity of free citizens and more appropriate for slaves
and the quasi-slaves that regular soldiers were believed to be.74 American regulars,
like their Mexican counterparts, were definitely not citizen-soldiers.
MEXICAN AND AMERICAN REGULAR ARMY UNITS shared a key characteristic. They were
filled with men who were either unable or unwilling to be honorable masculine providers and citizens, men who were drawn from the least respectable parts of the
lowest classes of society. Once the fighting began in 1846, both governments realized
that their current armies would not be sufficient for the conflict at hand. They worked
to expand the ranks of their regular armies, but they also recruited units of citizensoldiers from the respectable male citizenry. In the United States these were called
volunteer regiments, and they signed on for either one year or the duration of the
war. In Mexico they were National Guard units, which were mobilized for the emergency. American volunteers and Mexican National Guardsmen were often in the
thick of the fighting, especially later in the war as the theaters of operations moved
closer to the more densely populated areas of central Mexico. The evidence produced by their recruitment, organization, and experiences amply demonstrates their
conscious efforts to conform to the citizen-soldier ideal.
Militia forces nominally existed in many U.S. states, but outside frontier regions
they were typically only political and social clubs.75 During the Mexican-American
War, the United States instead recruited large numbers of fixed-term volunteers.
These men saw themselves as citizen-soldiers and were motivated to join by patriotic
rhetoric, peer pressure, and the promise of land bounties. Small volunteer units were
raised in specific towns and counties, and regiments were named after the states they
came from. Men served with their neighbors under officers whom they themselves
elected. They were not placed in regular army units, and most considered themselves
not only different from but better than regular soldiers.76 Even the most casual perusal of the hundreds of memoirs and letters these men produced shows that they
very much saw themselves as the embodiment of the classical ideal of the citizensoldier, an ideal they traced back to the American Revolution and the War of 1812.77
74 See, for example, Thomas Tennery’s comments in The Mexican War Diary of Thomas D. Tennery,
ed. D. E. Livingston-Little (Norman, Okla., 1970), 88; Coffman, The Old Army, 137, 197.
75 Foos, “Mexican Wars,” 146–164.
76 Richard Coulter, Volunteers: The Mexican War Journals of Private Richard Coulter and Sergeant
Thomas Barclay, Company E, Second Pennsylvania Infantry, ed. Allan Peskin (Kent, Ohio, 1991), 226–
227.
77 Not surprisingly, these champions of Jacksonian citizenship granted the victory of citizen-soldiers
over British regulars at the Battle of New Orleans a particularly reverent place in their identities. Robert
W. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York,
1985), 56–57; J. Jacob Oswandel, Notes on the Mexican War, 1846–1848 (Knoxville, Tenn., 2010), 257;
Coulter, Volunteers, 19; Graham A. Barringer, “The Mexican War Journal of Henry S. Lane,” Indiana
Magazine of History 53, no. 4 (December 1957): 383– 434, here 388.
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In fact, the very existence of these documents is telling evidence of how different the
social status of rank-and-file volunteers was from that of the regular army’s rank and
file. The volunteers were literate men who were engaged in a grand patriotic adventure and had families to write home to about it. Afterward they wrote memoirs
to explain their experiences and justify their actions. In regular army units, generally
only the professional officers, many of whom were West Point graduates of middleclass background, wrote memoirs and letters.78
The volunteers were not simply citizens, they were citizens in particularly Jacksonian ways. Their service was connected to American expansionism not simply because this was a war to acquire territory, but because they were explicitly promised
land in the West as a reward for their service.79 Moreover, their patriotism was based
not only on a positive image of American culture and institutions, but also on an
exceedingly negative image of Mexicans, Mexican religion, and the Mexican state.80
Volunteers saw Mexicans as an inferior race that could and should be dominated,
much as Jacksonian white male citizens elevated themselves above blacks and Native
Americans.
The volunteers’ more established place in the gender order did not prevent them
from facing problems as a result of their service. Service removed them from local
society at a time when their peers were establishing their economic place and forming
families. The people left behind were acutely aware of this fact. Thus one finds letters
like that from R. Marshall of Greensboro, Kentucky, to the volunteer John Cox, in
which Marshall writes: “John you must make haste and come home if you do not all
the girls and boys will marry.” A few months later, Marshall wrote almost the same
thing to volunteer John Minton, exclaiming, “we have lots of marrying going on
unless you get back pretty soon I am afraid all the girls will be married I think the
boys are acting very wrong when you are all out fighting the battles of your country
they are here sleeping with all the girls.”81 Volunteers wrote of longing for the homes
and families they had left behind.82 Families in the United States were particularly
afraid that their young men would either stay to make their fortunes in a conquered
78 Foos, A Short, Offhand Killing Affair, provides an interesting social and cultural history of volunteer units. For the rhetoric of citizen soldiering, see Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas, 51–67.
On the fierce local pride of volunteer regiments in the Civil War, see McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 5, 83. Regarding memoirs, Frederick Zeh and George Ballentine were both exceptions as literate
immigrants who ran into hard times in America and joined regular units. Coffman points out that 35
percent of regular army recruits could not even sign their names; The Old Army, 141.
79 Laura Jensen connects the nineteenth-century practice of offering land to veterans to the growth
of a particular kind of state, one that linked civic virtue with individualism and made aggressive war seem
more benevolent. Jensen, Patriots, Settlers, and the Origins of American Social Policy (New York, 2003),
especially 180.
80 The most trenchant analysis of this process remains Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 208–228.
See also McCaffrey, Army of Manifest Destiny, 33–34.
81 Filson Historical Society, Cox Family Papers, C877, R. Marshall to John Cox, August 18, 1846;
R. Marshall to John Minton, November 3, 1846. See also Indiana State Historical Society, Carr Family
Papers, William Davis to Thomas Carr, January 18, 1847; Indiana State Historical Society, Benjamin
Franklin Scribner Papers, folder 4, Benjamin Franklin Scribner to “Ned”(no last name given), January
8, 1848; Indiana State Historical Society, Smith-Holiday Family Papers, Adaliza Holliday to Joseph W.
Holliday, December 17, 1847; W. Campbell to Joseph W. Holliday, December 31, 1847; Charles Jones
to Joseph W. Holliday, January 26, 1848; McCaffrey, Army of Manifest Destiny, 87; Oswandel, Notes on
the Mexican War, 247.
82 The Mexican War Diary of Thomas D. Tennery, 13, 16.
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Mexico or move to the newly acquired lands of the Southwest, making impossible
the continuity of family-owned businesses and family relationships.83 These fears
were no doubt magnified by popular fiction and journalism that encouraged the idea
that virile American volunteers could aid the annexation of territory by marrying
Mexican women.84 Writing from Mexico, Kentucky volunteer Daniel Runyon of Mason County hit on all of these gender anxieties in the same letter when he said that
back home he had “left spies over all the girls who were in the least interesting” to
him, adding that in Mexico he saw
some of the most lovely women here I have ever beheld and I can’t help falling in love with
them—and my misfortune is I can’t tell them of the depth of my passion. So unless the war
continues I will not be able to present to you a Spanish Beauty as my Bride. Give my love
to the Mason senoritas but don’t say a word about my being in love with the beautiful Castillians of the “Sunny South.” Tell all my friends they can hear from me by writing a few lines
particularly the females.85
Volunteers had removed themselves from a gender order back home in accordance
with which they were expected to marry and form families, but they were also exposed, at least in theory, to the idea that Mexican women could make suitable mates,
and that type of union might facilitate American goals. Their position was an uncomfortable one.
Many Americans doubted the ability of immigrants, and particularly Catholic
immigrants, to become citizens. Immigrants who joined the regular army in search
of a stable source of income seemed to be providing proof of their inability to achieve
the kind of autonomy and steady income that could support families and a democratic government. However, both the Democratic Party and immigrant political and
religious leaders were interested in combating nativism. The recruitment of volunteer units specifically for the Mexican-American War provided them with a potent
opportunity. In some cities, leaders deliberately recruited companies of immigrants
for volunteer regiments, and then heavily publicized their service as evidence of their
loyalty to their adopted country. Immigrants’ participation as citizen-soldiers facilitated their assimilation into the new Anglo-Saxon racial identity and, of course,
Democratic Party politics. This process was neither easy nor automatic. Even immigrants in volunteer regiments faced ethnic prejudice, and the war literature in
American popular culture was peppered not only with images of immigrant citizen
soldiers proving their loyalty to their new nation, but also with Irish soldiers who
betrayed the United States.86 With respect to both how Americans understood the
83 Filson Historical Society, Cox Family Papers, A. C. Cox to John Cox, March 1, 1847; Indiana State
Historical Society, Smith-Holiday Family Papers, C. Blackford to Joseph W. Holliday, March 16, 1848.
84 Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire, 23, 26, 88–90; Amy Kaplan,
The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 27; Streeby, American
Sensations, 64 –65.
85 Filson Historical Society, Runyon Family Papers, Daniel Runyon to Maria Runyon, April 21,
1848.
86 Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire, 45; Tyler V. Johnson, Devotion to the Adopted Country: U.S. Immigrant Volunteers in the Mexican War (Columbia, Mo., 2012);
Foos, A Short, Offhand Killing Affair, 42– 43, 68–69, 94 –96; Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 89,
185–186; Streeby, American Sensations, 16, 103–106.
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war and how they later remembered it, the place of immigrants in volunteer regiments remained dramatically distinct from the place of immigrants who served in the
regular army.87
In Mexico the volunteers served in National Guard units. Although the term
“National Guard” was new, the tradition of part-time soldiering in Mexico went back
to the colonial period. Units had a decidedly local character, and their social composition and political leanings varied along with it, but members were expected to
be honorable and respectable.88 Service was not always entirely voluntary, but for
militia units, even compulsory service generally targeted men of good character.89
As with the American volunteers, units were raised in specific localities, and they
selected their own officers, using the practices and rhetoric common in civilian elections.90 To sum up, Mexican National Guardsmen, like American volunteers, saw
themselves as exemplifying the citizen-soldier ideal.
In 1846, in desperate need of more troops for the war, Mexican authorities attempted to reinvigorate and exploit the citizen-soldier ideal. Military service was
touted as the ultimate civic duty during this time of crisis. The National Guard units,
in gendered terms, were to be made up of responsible patriarchs, the hardworking,
civic-minded men who could and did form families. Observer Guillermo Prieto described them as “composed of the most select of society; they sprang from what I
would call the heart of families; it was the family that fought in defense of the great
home that is called the fatherland.”91 This drive to reinvigorate the notion of a citizen
soldiery took place just as the official definition of citizenship was again expanding
with the reintroduction of federalism.92 Authorities sought to portray this new duty
as proof of the renewed egalitarianism that made the revival of federalism appealing
to many Mexicans of modest means. In a florid proclamation in 1846, the prefect of
San Luis Potosı́, Juan Maria Balbontı́n, intoned that
The peasant and the soldier, the poor man and the rich man, the artisan, the farmer, the
merchant, in a word, everyone who can honor himself with the title of citizen . . . has the right
to write his name on the muster books of the militia and proudly call himself a republican
soldier. A thousand times blessed is this day that has illuminated the true equality of all the
classes.93
87 Amy Greenberg points out that the public was in general more concerned about the volunteers
than the regulars, and it maintained a sharp distinction between the two; A Wicked War, 130.
88 Mallon, Peasant and Nation, and Thomson with LaFrance, Patriotism, Politics, and Popular Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Mexico. See also Florencia Mallon, “Peasants and State Formation in
Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Morelos, 1848–1858.” Political Power and Social Theory 7 (1988): 1–54;
Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State ; Alicia Hernández Chávez,
La tradición republicana del buen gobierno (Mexico City, 1993); and above all for the period that interests
us here, Pedro Santoni, Mexicans at Arms: Puro Federalists and the Politics of War, 1845–1848 (Fort
Worth, Tex., 1996).
89 Christon I. Archer, The Army in Bourbon Mexico, 1760–1810 (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 1977), 233–
236.
90 AGN, Gobernación, leg. 220, caja 1, exp. 3; ibid., caja 2, exp. 7; ibid., leg. 244, caja 1, exp. 3.
91 Guillermo Prieto, Memorias de mis tiempos (Mexico City, 1996), 260.
92 Memoria sobre el estado que guarda la administración pública de Michoacán leı́da al Honorable
Congreso por el Secretario del Despacho en 22 de enero de 1848 (Morelia, 1848), 27; AHDF Ayuntamiento,
Militares Guardia Nacional, vol. 3276, exp. 6.
93 AHESLP, Impresos 1846, September 21, 1846.
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However, invoking the genie of egalitarianism was not nearly enough to eliminate
popular disdain for rank-and-file service in the regular army, a disdain rooted in
decades of recruitment focused on the dregs of society.
The problem was the same for both countries involved in the conflict. Citizensoldiers of the Mexican National Guard and the American volunteers did not want
to be treated like the soldiers of the regular units they fought alongside.94 The regular
units were either people who flouted the standards of morality and honor that even
lower-class citizens clung to, or people who were simply unable to aspire to the
respectable employment needed to become honorable, self-reliant family men. Volunteer or National Guard units and their supporters saw regular soldiers as lacking
in the free will exercised by true citizens. Prieto referred to Mexican regular soldiers
as having “the mechanical movements of puppets.” Congressmen Daniel Tilden of
Ohio called American regulars puppets, and American volunteers saw them as automatons or machines.95 For this reason, even at the height of the manpower crisis
faced by the Mexican forces, civilian politicians argued that men should not be conscripted into National Guard battalions, saying that this would devalue National
Guard service.96
The American volunteers were appalled at the thought that they might ever be
subjected to the same brutal methods of corporal punishment that were staples in
the lives of regulars.97 Even the threat of such treatment could lead volunteers to
mutiny. Mexican National Guardsmen also seem to have bristled at the idea of being
subject to corporal punishment.98 One gets the sense that in both countries this kind
of discipline was considered unmanly and beneath the dignity of free citizens.99
One of the ironies of the history of the American volunteers in the war is that
although they looked down on regulars and their humble origins, they were clearly
less well behaved in their relations with Mexican civilians. Despite their more respectable backgrounds, they seem to have patterned themselves on the drinking,
Coulter, Volunteers, 226.
Prieto, Memorias de mis tiempos, 260; Smith, The War with Mexico, 2: 320; Johannsen, To the Halls
of the Montezumas, 40– 41. Of course, this precise obedience to orders was exactly what officers sought
to instill in the soldiers. Wayne E. Lee, Barbarians and Brothers: Anglo-American Warfare, 1500–1865
(New York, 2011), 179.
96 AGN, Gobernación, sin sección, vol. 330, exp. 4; Memoria sobre el estado que guarda la administración pública de Michoacán leı́da al Honorable Congreso por el Secretario del Despacho en 22 de enero
de 1848, 6.
97 McPherson points out that Civil War volunteers resented harsh military discipline; For Cause and
Comrades, 57.
98 AHESLP, SGG, 1848, leg. 6; “Decreto Número 12,” La Época, periódico oficial de San Luis Potosı́,
February 11, 1847.
99 Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas, 40– 41; Winders, Mr. Polk’s Army, 13, 81, 84 –85. For
disciplinary methods and soldiers’ reactions to them, see Ballentine, Autobiography of an English Soldier
in the United States Army, 272, 285–286, 332–333; Winders, Mr. Polk’s Army, 85–86. North Carolina
volunteers who were threatened with corporal punishment mutinied. McCaffrey, Army of Manifest Destiny, 115–117. On corporal punishment and notions of citizenship in the United States, see Foos, A Short,
Offhand Killing Affair, 15–17. Around the time of the war, reformers from the northern United States
were actively campaigning to end corporal punishment in the U.S. navy, arguing that it was incompatible
with citizenship and democracy. See Myra C. Glenn, Campaigns against Corporal Punishment: Prisoners,
Sailors, Women, and Children in Antebellum America (Albany, N.Y., 1984), especially 44, 55, 114, 137–
138. Scholars have noted that corporal punishment made military service seem dishonorable to British
and Brazilian men of the period. Best, War and Society in Revolutionary Europe, 235; Beattie, The Tribute
of Blood, 9. Goldstein points out that in war, “enemies and subordinates are gendered feminine”; War
and Gender, 333.
94
95
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brawling masculine identity common in the South, the Midwest, and urban areas, and
they also seem to have taken to heart the least savory aspects of Manifest Destiny.
The volunteers, unlike the regulars, often harassed, robbed, and raped Mexican civilians.100 Amy Greenberg argues persuasively that gender values were also at stake
in American debates over expansionism, with advocates of a restrained patriarchal
masculinity based on expertise and moral behavior jousting with those who espoused
a more violent, martial masculinity based on physical dominance.101 To some extent,
the volunteers can be seen as a group of men who crossed from restrained masculinity
to martial masculinity as they made the long journey to Mexican territory. When Polk
issued the call for volunteers, he was inadvertently inviting thousands of young
American men to at least temporarily put aside their likely futures as restrained
masculine providers and adopt the more violent version of masculinity that was also
culturally available to them. In the camps they found a homosocial environment in
which boredom encouraged behaviors such as drinking and gambling.102 Young men
were away from the supervision of their parents for the first time, and even the
relatively few married men were far from the eyes of their wives. Service in a volunteer regiment was in a sense like being in a saloon or election-day crowd, except
that it lasted for months rather than a few hours.103 Moreover, volunteers from the
Mississippi and Ohio River Valleys were steeped in the lore of violent, vengeful
warfare with Native Americans, while those from eastern cities had firsthand knowledge of similarly violent forms of masculinity. In Mexico these volunteers encountered a population that American culture had thoroughly racialized and identified
as ripe for domination. American generals found it quite impossible to control the
unsanctioned violence that resulted. Some Americans came to believe that the war
had ruined the morals of at least some of the young men who served in volunteer
regiments.104
MANY MEXICANS AND AMERICANS SHARED similar beliefs about the behavior of respectable and honorable men. Such men were serious, hardworking fathers and
sons—the type of behavior that led to good reputations and citizenship. This version
of masculinity shaped government policy about the problem of military manpower.
If decent and honorable men served militarily, they would serve as citizen-soldiers.
In turn, those who did not want to or were not able to fulfill these ideals became
100 Evidence of this is very ample. McCaffrey, Army of Manifest Destiny, 122; Foos, A Short, Offhand
Killing Affair, 113, 119–125; Greenberg, A Wicked War, 131–134.
101 Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire, especially 8–14.
102 Some volunteer soldiers resisted this transformation. In his letters home, Kentucky volunteer
Daniel Runyon several times mentions his participation in a temperance society within his regiment, and
criticizes drinking in the army. Notably, the temperance society included less than fifty men in a unit
whose strength was at least several hundred. Filson Historical Society, Runyon Family Papers, Daniel
Runyon to Asa Runyon, October 9, 1847, and Daniel Runyon to Marie Runyon, March 15, 1848. See
also Winders, Mr. Polk’s Army, 13.
103 Robert E. May makes essentially the same argument about filibusterers, who might be seen as
the extralegal, unsanctioned extension of the volunteer experience after the war. May, Manifest Destiny’s
Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002), 100. Notably, volunteers’
misbehavior began as soon as they were mustered in the United States, long before their arrival in
Mexico. McCaffrey, Army of Manifest Destiny, 36, 44 – 45.
104 Greenberg, A Wicked War, 191–192, 232, 238.
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regular soldiers in the permanent armies of the two republics. In both the United
States and Mexico, service in such units was not considered respectable. Even the
poor viewed those soldiers with a certain disdain, at least in peacetime.
Nevertheless, the two countries also shared similar alternative models, centered
on physical dominance, of what it meant to be a man. In this more rough-and-tumble
version of masculinity, men prized their willingness to defend their status or dominate others with violence, and their freedom to engage in a raucous male sociability
lubricated by alcohol. Honor here was about standing up for oneself and demonstrating mastery over others, and it was accessible even to men of modest economic
means. Those who followed this set of masculine norms out of choice or the simple
impossibility of attaining the economic stability needed for respectability might very
well end up in the peacetime permanent armies of Mexico or the United States.
Considering both citizen-soldiers and the non-citizen-soldiers of the regular units,
both society and military service can be understood only through an analysis of gender norms.
These two kinds of masculinity were always in competition but were never completely separate. They were, after all, about behavior, and behavior is mutable. In
some cases this was a question of degree. In both Mexico and the United States, one
could engage in some fighting, drinking, and domestic violence without passing totally from the ranks of the respectable. Moreover, the behavior of American volunteer soldiers in Mexico shows very clearly that men who in the absence of war
might balance the two kinds of masculinity could tilt very heavily in one direction
when they were armed and sent far from home to invade territories inhabited by
people they saw as contemptible others.
The most famous unit in the Mexican-American War was actually composed of
men who switched sides. Some deserters from the U.S. regular army fought in the
Mexican army as a unit called the St. Patrick’s Battalion. Although there never were
more than a few hundred San Patricios, their story has inspired Mexican and American novels, a feature movie, a musical album, annual commemorative ceremonies
in Mexico and Ireland, and many books and articles by both academic and popular
historians.105 The motives of these men have been passionately debated. Did the San
Patricios switch sides because they believed the war to be unjust? Were they rankled
by the nativism and anti-Catholicism of U.S. army officers? Were they Irish nationalists? Were they mercenaries drawn by Mexican promises of better pay and treatment? Were they traitors? There is no consensus on quite what to make of them.
Yet when we look at them in context, their decisions become more understandable. Notably, although not all of them were Irish or Irish-Americans, they all had
105 The novels are Patricia Cox, Batallón de San Patricio (Mexico City, 1999); and James Alexander
Thom, St. Patrick’s Battalion (New York, 2006). The movie is One Man’s Hero (1999), directed by Lance
Hool, and the album is San Patricio (2010), by American roots musician Ry Cooder and Irish folk group
the Chieftains. Books by academic historians include Robert Ryal Miller, Shamrock and Sword: The Saint
Patrick’s Battalion in the U.S.-Mexican War (Norman, Okla., 1989); and Dennis J. Wynn, The San Patricio
Soldiers: Mexico’s Foreign Legion (El Paso, Tex., 1984). Popular histories of value and note include Peter
F. Stevens, The Rogue’s March: John Riley and the St. Patrick’s Battalion, 1846– 48 (Washington, D.C.,
1999); Michael Hogan, The Irish Soldiers of Mexico (Guadalajara, 1997); and Jorge Belarmino, Cuestión
de sangre (Mexico City, 2008). The articles are too numerous for any footnote of reasonable length.
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deserted from regular army rather than volunteer units.106 In the United States, the
San Patricios had little chance of becoming citizens due to their lack of economic
opportunity and nativism. They were members of a roving international proletariat
that provided the cannon fodder not only for various armies but also for early industrial capitalism. These men signed on to the U.S. army as contract laborers, even
if their tools were guns.107 When the contract was violated and the Mexicans offered
more pay, higher rank, and a chance to settle down as Mexican citizens, why would
they not accept? Moreover, at their trials, some San Patricios testified that they had
actually been forced into the Mexican army, through either physical force or hunger.
They claimed that they had deserted the U.S. army with the hope of taking up civilian
life in Mexico. Some said that Mexican military officials later coerced them into
joining the San Patricios. Others found that as American troops drew ever closer to
Mexico City, growing civilian xenophobia made the streets dangerous for them. The
deserters could not seek work, and enlistment in the Mexican army was the only way
to prevent starvation. These narratives are a reminder that American regular soldiers
were recruited from the poor, whereas Mexican regular soldiers were conscripted.108
The San Patricios were in a sense caught in the gap between the model of professional soldiers recruited from the dregs of society and motivated by money, discipline, and comradeship and the model of respectable citizen-soldiers motivated by
patriotism. Their motivations are probably best understood in the light of the first
model because at every turn they were forced to decide between unattractive alternatives, leading them to immigrate, work as menial laborers, commit years of their
life to the brutal discipline and hazardous duty of the U.S. army, and leave it for the
even worse labor market of Mexico or the less well fed and riskier role of Mexican
soldiers. First in their countries of birth, then in the United States, and then ultimately in Mexico, they had trouble gaining a foothold in society, and for most of them
the struggle to make a living ended in violent death on the battlefield or on the
gallows. The San Patricios were a stark example of the kind of non-citizens who made
up the regular armies of their era.
Nevertheless, they were often both criticized and praised through reference to
the ideal of the citizen-soldier, according to which men were supposed to fight for
their country. Thus, American nativists saw the San Patricios as disloyal to the
United States and believed that the group confirmed their own darkest suspicions
106 Robert Ryal Miller, “Los San Patricios en la guerra de 1847,” Historia Mexicana 47, no. 2 (1997):
345–385, here 378–382.
107 Foos, A Short, Offhand Killing Affair, 108. Evidence of this contractual thinking among recruits
is seen in several different kinds of documents. See, for instance, the case of John Duzer, who finished
a term of service in which he had risen to the rank of sergeant in a regular army unit and then was
persuaded by a sergeant of the South Carolina regiment that he could take the other man’s place at the
same pay and receive a land bounty. When he was placed in the ranks instead, he deserted. National
Archives (United States), Record Group 153, Records of the Judge Advocate General, Court Martial
Case Files, 1809–1894, EE523. Ballentine, a keen observer of his fellow regular soldiers, said that soldiers
deserted when they felt that the contract they had signed up under was being violated by officers; Autobiography of an English Soldier in the United States Army, 28.
108 These claims can be found in National Archives (United States), Record Group 153, Records of
the Judge Advocate General, Court Martial Case Files, 1809–1894, EE525. They are corroborated by
appeals to British consular authorities made in the weeks and months prior to the final battles around
Mexico City. Public Record Office, Foreign Office, The National Archives, Kew, UK, 203-92, fols. 3,
5; 203-93, fols. 66, 105, 107.
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about immigrants.109 American volunteers who were fiercely attached to the ideal
of the citizen-soldier saw the defection of the San Patricios as evidence that immigrant mercenaries were not to be relied on in wartime.110 Many Mexicans, in turn,
believed that the San Patricios had embraced the Mexican cause due to the inherent
justice of its defensive war and their adherence to the Catholicism that was so central
to Mexican national identity. They welcomed the San Patricios as new fellow citizens
prepared to risk their lives for Mexico. Some of the most respectable women of
Mexico City fed and nursed the captured San Patricios and pleaded to American
authorities on their behalf even as they showed much less concern for the plight of
wounded prisoners from the Mexican regular army.111 Ironically, they saw the San
Patricios as respected and cherished citizen-soldiers, heroes of Mexico, a land to
which most had probably never given even a passing thought before the war.
The San Patricios were the most famous soldiers of the war because they very
dramatically lived a contradiction. Many citizens in both new nation-states wanted
to imagine their armies as national, but citizens’ commitment to national identity did
not spur them to accept long-term military service. Serving for an extended time in
the military prevented men from establishing themselves in local society, forming
families, and supporting them. Such service was reserved for men who could not
attain these goals and the citizenship that came with them. Before the war began,
this pattern suited even those most committed to the new idea of national identity.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the idea of the citizen-soldier
fighting for his nation had become a powerful way to think about war between national states, and it came to dominate the way many literate Mexicans and Americans
understood the war. The San Patricios, as non-citizen soldiers in two different
armies, did not fit, and the resulting discomfort and puzzlement continue to drive
interest in them to this day.
Stevens, The Rogue’s March, 281–282.
See, for example, Coulter, Volunteers, 146–147, 158–159, 270, 315.
111 AHDF, vol. 2265, exp. 31, fol. 1; ibid., vol. 2268, exp. 80, fol. 276; AHDF, Actas de Cabildo
Originales de Sesiones Ordinarias, 170a; Foos, A Short, Offhand Killing Affair, 112.
109
110
Peter Guardino is Professor of History at Indiana University. He is the author
of Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State: Guerrero,
1800–1857 (Stanford University Press, 1996) and The Time of Liberty: Popular
Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750–1850 (Duke University Press, 2005). He is currently working on a comparative social and cultural history of the 1846–1848 war
between the United States and Mexico.
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