Mexican-American War : Monterrey

"Much has been written about the Mexican war, but this ...is the best military history of that conflict...Leading personalities, civilian and military, Mexican and American, are given incisive and fair evaluations. The coming of war is seen as unavoidable, given American expansion and Mexican resistance to loss of territory, compounded by the fact that neither side understood the other. The events that led to war are described with reference to military strengths and weaknesses, and every military campaign and engagement is explained in clear detail and illustrated with good maps...Problems of large numbers of untrained volunteers, discipline and desertion, logistics, diseases and sanitation, relations with Mexican civilians in occupied territory, and Mexican guerrilla operations are all explained, as are the negotiations which led to war's end and the Mexican cession...This is an outstanding contribution to military history and a model of writing which will be admired and emulated." (Journal of American History). K. Jack Bauer was also the author of Zachary Taylor: Soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old Southwest (1985) and Other Works. Robert W. Johannsen, who introduces this Bison Books edition of The Mexican War, is a professor of history at the University of Illinois, Urbana, and the author of To the Halls of Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (1985).

This previously unpublished diary records the intuitive reflections of an educated man who served as a military administrator in northern Mexico during the Mexican War. Colonel Samuel Ryan Curtis, engineer, lawyer and graduate of West Point, arrived in Mexico in July of 1846 as commander of the 3rd Ohio Volunteer Regiment to find a volatile and chaotic situation in occupied towns along the Rio Grande. American civilians of the lowest sort--men and women--mingled with Mexican townspeople, robbing, murdering, and raping. Neither civil nor military law made provisions for governing municipalities under such conditions. Nor was the U.S. military prepared for a guerrilla struggle against renegade Mexican soldiers and bandits. This is Curtis's story of maintaining order under nearly impossible conditions--of death and suffering in his regiment from disease, not fighting, and of the tedium of army camp life. Curtis was a keen observer who chronicled martial unrest and political conditions in Matamoros, Camargo, and Saltillo. He also documented social and economic circumstances, as well as flora and fauna, and even the weather.

Few historical figures are as inextricably linked as Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. But less than two decades before they faced each other as enemies at Appomattox, they had been brothers -- both West Point graduates, both wearing blue, and both fighting in the same cadre in the Mexican War. They were not alone: Sherman, Davis, Jackson nearly all of the Civil War's greatest soldiers had been forged in the heat of Vera Cruz and Monterrey. The Mexican War has faded from our national memory, but it was a struggle of enormous significance: the first U.S. war waged on foreign soil; and it nearly doubled our nation. At this fascinating juncture of American history, a group of young men came together to fight as friends, only years later to fight as enemies. This is their story. Full of dramatic battles, daring rescues, secret missions, soaring triumphs and tragic losses, The Training Ground is history at its finest.

Eminent military historian John S.D. Eisenhower has written a highly readable and expert account of a war which--though frequently overlooked--tumed out to be the training ground for the American Civil War.

"Our country has entered on a new epoch of its history," wrote a Whig Party journal in 1849, just after America's triumph in the Mexican War. Indeed, for that romantic generation of Americans in the mid-nineteenth century, the Mexican War was a grand exercise in self-identity: it legitimized the young republic's convictions of mission and destiny to a doubting world. It was easily one of the most popular wars the United States has ever fought. This rich cultural history examines the war's place in the popular imagination of the era. As Robert Johannsen notes, the Mexican War was the first American conflict to be widely reported in the press, as well as the first to be waged against an alien foe in a distant, strange, and exotic land. For mid-century Americans, Johannsen shows, the war provided a window onto the outside world, promoting an awareness--if not an understanding--of a people and a land unlike any they had known before. The war helped to dispel some of the mystery of Mexico, as it generated a huge flood of popular literature, poetry, songs, art, and stage plays. Would-be historians began chronicling the war almost as soon as the first shots were fired, and the war provoked myriad questions about the true nature and purposes of the republic. Drawing on military and travel accounts, newspaper dispatches, and a host of other sources, Johannsen vividly recreates the mood and feeling of the period--its unbounded optimism and patriotic pride. The book's unique perspective not only adds a new dimension to our understanding of the Mexican War; it offers new insights into American itself. About the Author: Robert W. Johannsen is J.G. Randall Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and author of Stephen A. Douglas, which received the Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians.

This publication analyses and explains the role of the U.S. Army Topographical Engineer Corps in the war with Mexico, commencing with the activities of the Topographical Engineers in 1845 and tracing their evolution from a scientific, mapping, and construction agency of the federal government to their active participation in the war. Includes the role the Topographical Engineers played in military reconnaissances and explorations in anticipation of the hostilities between the United States and Mexico. Their role during the war is recounted, particularly the conquest and explorations of California, New Mexico, and Arizona. Included is Capt. John C. Fremont's third expedition, important for both its military and geographic contributions. Under the commands of Generals Scott and Taylor in Mexico, several officers of the corps assumed important leadership responsibilities in addition to their topographic duties.

Not merely a catalog of names, dates, and statistics of the war between the United States and Mexico, this book instead focuses on the conflict as seen by ten principal characters who participated in it. Using letters, journals, and memoirs as well as other historical documents, John Edward Weems reveals the views of men as disparate as the young Lieutenant Sam Grant, President James K. Polk, Captain Robert E. Lee, and Mexican political and military leader Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Weems blends the words of men in action with historical events, bringing to life once again a tragic, unpopular war that changed forever the destinies of two neighboring countries.

Popular historian Joseph Wheelan recounts James Polk's strategy of last resort for prying California away from Mexico. He had tried to buy it; he had instructed his agents to encourage a settlers' revolt. When these measures failed, the impatient president, while cynically condemning Mexico's anger over America's annexation of Texas, sent General Zachary Taylor's army to the Rio Grande River, into territory that Mexico claimed as hers. By provocatively sending Taylor there, the president got his war -- and, as bitter corollaries, the scathing criticism of congressional leaders on moral grounds, and Mexico's lasting distrust of its powerful northern neighbor. The Mexican War was America's first truly modern war. Steamships ferried troops, daguerreotypes captured the spectacle of infantry and cavalry marching off to battle, newspapermen reported from the front lines for the first time, and telegraphs helped speed news of victories to eager readers back home. For the first time, large numbers of the regular Army's field-grade officers were West Point-trained. Weapons technology advances such as the mobile field artillery, the Colt six-shooter and the Sharp's Rifle gave the U.S. Army daunting firepower. These advantages ensured victory even when Mexican troops outnumbered Americans by as much as 4-to-1.

James Knox Polk (1845-1849) was the first commander-in-chief to demand detailed knowledge of his administration's every action. He made audacious use of covert actions and was determined to keep these operations from the Congress. Polk authorized covert operations in both the Republic of Texas and Mexico to bribe and cajole the Texans into voting to join the Union and to cause the Republic of Texas to be at war with Mexico at the time of annexation.Secret agents were sent to Cuba; spies bribed Mexican officials not to resist the invading Americans. Mexican highwaymen were released from prison, recruited as spies, and known as the Mexican Spy Company.

Confederate general Joseph O. Shelby and his legendary Iron Brigade refused to acknowledge Lee's surrender at Appomattox. Instead, they fought their way to Mexico in search of a place where they could continue to defy the United States government. These veteran Missouri calvarymen clawed their way for fifteen hundred miles, fighting Juaristas, Indians, desperados, and disgruntled gringos. Never defeated, they disbanded only when the Emperor Maximilian (the Austrian pretender to an illusory Mexican throne) declined their services. Shelby's adjutant, journalist John N. Edwards, recorded the exploits of this superb mounted brigade and its quixotic final march.This stirring adventure tale and gem of Lost Cause literature was first published in 1872 and except for a 1964 collectors' edition has been out of print for more than a century. Conger Beasley has written an appropriately lively introduction which includes the first biographical sketch of the author. He has also annotated the text to identify people, places, and events.

The war with Mexico was the one of the most decisive conflicts in American history. After smashing Mexico's armies the young republic bestrode the North American continent like a colossus with one leg anchored on the Atlantic seaboard and the other on the Pacific. It was a bitter, hard fought war that raged across Mexico through the northern deserts, the fever-ridden Gulf cities and the balmy haciendas of California. This book covers the full course of the war, ending with General Winfield Scott's march from the captured port of Vera Cruz to Mexico City, fighting all the way.

‘There never was so fine an American army,’ wrote second-lieutenant, John Sedgwick, in describing the troops under Major-General Zachary Taylor in 1846. Another then second-lieutenant, destined to see many more armies; U.S. Grant, also thought highly of them: ‘The rank and file were probably inferior … to the volunteers that participated in all the later battles of the war; but they were brave men, and then drill and discipline brought out all there was in them.’ Philip Katcher writes the story of the regulars and volunteers who fought in the Mexican-American War, detailing the infantry, cavalry, artillery and staff of both the American and Mexican armies.

Eminent military historian John S.D. Eisenhower has written a highly readable and expert account of a war which--though frequently overlooked--tumed out to be the training ground for the American Civil War.