SYMPATHY
FOR THE DEVIL?
"RAT!"
screamed the tabloid headlines, when John Walker Lindh, "the
American Taliban," was hauled out of a prison basement in
Afghanistan and into the public limelight. Media commentators
would have a field day projecting their own obsessions onto Mr.
Lindh. Shelby Steele attributed his defection to "a certain
cultural liberalism" to be found in Northern California,
while a still loonier right-wing pundit called for his execution
"in order to physically intimidate liberals." The
New York Times pointedly contrasted Lindh’s childhood
with that of John Spann, the young CIA agent killed in Afghanistan
and raised in Georgia.
This
is silly, of course—pretending as it does that any one geographical
location in the United States has a monopoly on virtue or vice.
To so associate character with birthplace is to denigrate the
personal heroism Mr. Spann displayed in laying down his life for
his country. Meanwhile, it turns out that Lindh spent half of
his childhood in Maryland—and in any case, his internet rants
against rock music and Western cultural decadence were hardly
indicative of Marin County.
As
of this writing, John Lindh’s fate is in the hands of the
court and the furor surrounding his case has died down—at
least for the moment. Yet we should keep in mind just how absurd
it is to determine who a "real" American is by place
of birth. In another time, in another conflict, this sort of politically
driven opportunism came close to jeopardizing our entire war effort—and
may have cost us the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of American
soldiers.
The
Mexican War has nearly vanished from our collective consciousness
now, but it was a critical event in the building of the American
nation. The war added 529,000 square miles [Stevens, p. 287] to
the physical territory of the United States—and divided the
nation along fault lines that presaged the Civil War. No war in
our history would witness more brilliant feats of American arms;
no war would provoke such wholesale dissent, desertion, and even
treason.
The
military history of the war reads like a boys’ action-adventure
novel, full of epic marches over gruesome terrain, followed by
astonishing victories against overwhelming odds. The tiny, regular
American army and thousands of volunteer militiamen fought with
unsurpassed valor, under the brilliant leadership of generals
Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor, and a veritable "Dream
Team" of Civil War legends-to-be.
At
the same time, as Robert Ryal Miller relates in Shamrock and
Sword, many Americans—particularly in the North—viewed
the whole conflict as "Mr. Polk’s war"; an ill-concealed
effort by the president and his fellow Southerners to slap thousands
of new miles of slave territory onto the map. This was the war
that led Henry David Thoreau to write his essay, "Civil Disobedience."
Daniel Webster called it "a most unnecessary and therefore
most unjustifiable war…unconstitutional in its origin,"
while John Quincy Adams, then serving in Congress, denounced the
war with what was literally his dying breath. Their Whig colleague,
a congressional freshman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln,
agreed, claiming it had been started by "the sheerest deception,"
[Miller, pp. 21-23] while a young artillery lieutenant named Ulysses
S. Grant wrote that war with Mexico would be "the most unjust
thing that ever was," and later regretted that "I had
not moral courage enough to resign" [Stevens, pp. 111, 76]—even
as he stood with his battery on the banks of the Rio Grande, waiting
to invade.
A
more serious division was growing in the ranks. Out of nearly
41,000 regular soldiers who served in Mexico during the war, no
less than 5,331, or nearly 13 percent, deserted—a figure
that has never been approached before or since in the U.S. armed
forces. [Miller, pp. 23-24, Stevens, pp. 2-3]
What
was going on? There were, of course, the usual privations of army
life: bad food, poor shelter, boredom, disease. In Mexico, though,
two additional factors loomed large—religion and ethnicity.
A
large number of both the American regulars and the deserters were
German- and especially Irish-born immigrants. According to Peter
F. Stevens, in his meticulously researched history, The Rogue’s
March, John Riley and the St. Patrick’s Battalion, out
of some 5,000 "Irishmen" in the ranks, nearly 1,000
went over the hill—along with 445 Germans and 457 men born
in other European countries. [Stevens, pp. 2-3]
Many of the Irish could barely have considered themselves Americans,
having walked straight off the "coffin ships" from their
famine-ravaged homeland, and into the army. They also walked straight
into the rising Nativist, anti-immigrant tide of the late 1840s.
Citing numerous letters, memoirs, and court-martial records, Stevens
shows that the deserters were bitterly resentful over what they
saw as a doubled-sided standard of military justice. European-born
troops—were routinely cursed as "foreigners" by
Nativist, "American" officers. They were also whipped,
beaten, branded, chained, and suffered such evocative punishments
as "riding the horse," the "barrel top," and
the "buck-and-gag" [Stevens, pp. 40-58] for the smallest
infractions or mistakes in drill. Feelings between some of the
officers and men deteriorated to the point of Vietnam-style, "fraggings"
of officers. Braxton Bragg, then a brilliant but particularly
harsh commander of artillery, survived two separate attempts by
his men to kill him by rolling a lit shell into his tent as he
slept. [Stevens, p. 172]
Even
before war was officially declared, hundreds of soldiers had begun
to desert, diving into the Rio Grande and swimming over to the
Mexican army in Matamoros. They were lured by a series of clever
propaganda pamphlets that promised deserters better pay, higher
ranks, many acres of land—and above all, appeals to American
Catholic troops not to fight an unjust war against their fellow
believers.
"Let
any man go down to hell and open an Irishman’s heart. The
first thing writ across it was land," was an proverb of the
day, but the religious appeal seems to have had a special resonance.
At the time, the U.S. army did not have a single Catholic chaplain
in its employ. President Polk hastened to rectify this, but the
desertions continued apace. Worse yet, an ambitious young Irishman
named John Riley had begun to organize some 200 of his fellow
deserters into a cohesive—and deadly—military unit of
their own, one that would be known as the St. Patrick’s Battalion—the
San Patricios.
Riley
remains to this day a shadowy figure, slipping in and out of history
like some trickster archetype. Little is known about him, right
down to the proper spelling of his last name. He may have been
a gunnery sergeant in the British army before emigrating to the
U.S.; certainly he was the most defiant and ambitious of all the
deserters, and a natural leader.
Before
long, Mexico had made him an officer—a position he would
have found all but unobtainable in both of his previous armies.
As a skilled gunner, Riley was able to mitigate one of the Americans’
greatest advantages, which was the "flying batteries"
that shuttled swiftly around the battlefield, able to unlimber
their guns and get off a round in less than a minute. Again and
again, at engagements from Monterrey to Buena Vista to Cerro Gordo
and Churubusco, Riley’s command turned these tactics on their
old comrades with devastating effect.
Their
success delighted the irascible Mexican dictator Santa Anna, who
planned to bring 3,000 American troops over, and so dissolve Taylor
and Scott’s invaders from within. Who was to say that he
would not succeed? It was one of those moments when history seemed
to be completely fluid. It was entirely possible that the more
numerous, seasoned Mexican troops could still win the war; that
North America would remain divided vertically—even that the
United States might be permanently divided along ancient religious
lines, instead of becoming the vast, polyglot nation that it is
today.
But
the Irish held. Bad as they were, the desertions never came close
to halting Scott’s final advance. The San Patricios
fought ferociously to the end, suspecting that capture meant a
rope. They were right; U.S. courts-martial sentenced 71 of the
73 captured deserters to hang for the crime of desertion during
time of war. General Scott commuted 20 of the sentences, but the
rest were executed—including 30 men who were hanged from
a bluff overlooking the final battle of the war—the breathtaking
army and marine assault upon the towering, stone fortress of Chapultepec.
The
condemned men were stood on wagons, with the nooses around their
necks, and told that when the U.S. troops had taken the fort they
would be hanged. From six o’clock in the morning of that
day, September 13, 1847, the men stood on their wagon boards,
watching the assault through the dust and the broiling heat. Then,
at 9:30, the serpent-and-eagle banner of Mexico was struck, and
the American flag was run up, signaling that Chapultepec had fallen.
The condemned men—cheered. Out of relief, out of admiration,
out of some last, wry defiance, one can only conjecture. The wagon
horses were promptly whipped up, the men hanged. [Stevens, pp.
245-276]
John Riley was not among them. He had deserted before hostilities
had been declared—and therefore, under the Articles of War,
was not guilty of a capital offense. This finding brought outrage
from both American officers and men, but General Scott stuck by
it. "Sooner than the life of Riley should be taken, he would
rather with his whole army be put to the sword in the assault
he was about to make upon the gates of the City of Mexico,"
one of Scott’s staff officers wrote of him—thereby providing
a nice lesson in the rule of American law.
Riley
was lashed and branded on both cheeks, but he was released, to
become a brevet colonel in the Mexican army. Afterwards, he slipped
back through the cracks of history, possibly back to Ireland.
There in Clifden, which was thought to be his hometown, there
is an momument, and a commemoration in honor of the San Patricios
every September 13; there are also two such commemorations in
Mexico.
A
better memorial, I think, were the 86 "Certificates of Merit",
awarded to Irish-American soldiers who remained loyal to their
new country. The memory of their fidelity, in the face of intense
bigotry, should serve as a guard against those who now seek to
divide us from within.
©
2002 Copyright Forbes Inc.
