EXCERPT FROM MEMORIES OF THE NORTH AMERICAN INVASION (c. 1850, by José María Roa Barcena)

José María Roa Barcena's history of the Mexican-American War notes that the disposition of Texas was long a volatile issue, not least since Mexico's 1829 laws forbidding slavery in the region. With its robust hunger for new land—an appetite whetted in some part by pro-slavery sentiments—the United States was bound to eventually wage war with Mexico. Facing this, Mexico proved a weak opponent. Disorganization in its political and military institutions meant that Mexican soldiers lacked the resources to exploit opportunities with the same effectiveness as their better-equipped American enemies. Still, Roa Barcena praised his country's troops for re-grouping and continuing to fight after each defeat.

A criollo gentleman, Roa Barcena disparaged the "physical inferiority" of his countrymen to partially explain Mexico's poor fortunes. But he more vociferously condemned Mexico's continued lack of national unity. He wondered what might have happened differently if in the years since its independence Mexico had not been at war with itself, but instead had enjoyed strong, competent national leadership. In this light, Roa Barcena praised the United States for its will and discipline during the war. The United States fought only to expand its territory, he observed, not to conquer, enslave, or punish Mexico. Roa Barcena hoped that Mexico would realize this.

Mark D.Baumann,
New York University

See also Mexican War ; Texas .

Our war with the United States was the double result of inexperience and vanity about our own capacities, on the one hand; and of an ambition unconstrained by concepts of justice and of the abuse of force, on the other.

The rebellion of Texas, more due to the emancipation of the slaves in Mexico than to the fall of the federalist constitution of 1824, would have taken place without the one or the other. It was the result of a plan by the United States, calculated and executed calmly and cold-bloodedly in a manner truly Saxon. It consisted in sending its nationals to colonize lands then belonging to Spain and later to ourselves and in inciting and aiding them to rebel against Mexico, repulsing any counterattack on our part and setting up an independent nation, obtaining in the process the recognition of some nations, and entering finally into the North American confederation as one of its states. Is there calumny or simply happenstance in this? Look at the extensive and illuminating information presented by General Don Manuel de Mier y Terón, who researched in our archives on the subject of the situation and dangers of Texas and of our northern frontier, long before the rebellion of the colonists; consider the initiatives of our Minister of Relations, Don Lucas Alaman, on April 6, 1830, and, most of all, the note of the North American envoy William Shannon of October 14, 1844, which said about the motion for the annexation of Texas then pending in Washington: "This has been a political measure that has been fostered for a long time and been considered indispensable to the security and well-being [of the United States], and consequently, it has been an objective invariably pursued by all parties, and the acquisition of this territory [of Texas] has been a subject of negotiation by almost all the administrations in the last twenty years."

The rebellion of Texas found Mexico flushed with pride over the brilliant results of its war of independence and believing itself capable of any enterprise. With the presumption and boldness that come with youth and inexperience it sent its ill-equipped and ill-provisioned army across immense deserts to the Sabine River to severely punish the rebels, but in the bewilderment of its first defeat this army was forced to retreat to the Rio Grande, as though signaling in anticipation the entire area that we were going to lose, all the way down to this point. Mexico's later and futile shows and preparations aimed at the recovery of Texas, which took place before and during the act of annexation of that state to the American Union, provided that country with a pretext for bringing war upon us, by virtue of which it took over, in the end, the areas above the Rio Grande which remained to us, such as New Mexico and Upper California.

Mexico, if it were to have acted with prevision and wisdom, should have written off Texas in 1835 while fastening into itself and fortifying its new frontiers. It should have recognized as an accepted fact the independence of that colony and, by way of negotiations, should have resolved any differences and settled boundary questions with the United States. It was imprudence and madness not to have done either the one or the other, but one has to agree that such judicious conduct would not have prevented the new territorial losses suffered in 1848. The area between the Rio Grande and Nueces rivers, New Mexico and Upper California, all these too were indispensable to the security and well-being of the United States, as is demonstrated in its diplomatic correspondence, in various allusions in President Polk's messages to Congress, in Trist's note of September 7, 1847, to the Mexican commissioners, and above all by the armed invasions of New Mexico and Upper California, all carried out when the two nations were presumably in a state of peace. Thus the pretext might have been different but the appropriation of those territories would have been the same.

The war with the United States found us in disadvantageous conditions in all respects. To the physical inferiority of our races must be added the weakness of our social and political organization, the general demoralization, the weariness and poverty resulting from twenty-five years of civil war, and an army insufficient in number, composed of forced conscripts, with armaments which were in a large part castoffs sold to us by England, without means of transportation, without ambulances, and without depots. The federation, which in the enemy country was the bond by which the different states united to form one, was here the dismemberment of the old order to constitute many diverse states. In sum, we changed the monetary unity of the peso to centavos while our neighbor combined its small change to make a stronger monetary unit. One of the more deplorable effects of this political organization, weakened and made even more complicated by our racial heterogeneity, could be seen in the indifference and egotism with which many states—while others such as San Luis Potosí made astounding contributions to the defense effort—entrenched themselves in their own sovereignty, denying the resources of money and manpower to the general government which were needed both to face the foreign invasion and to contain and suppress the Indian uprisings. As for our army, its inferiority and deficiency could be seen from that first campaign on the other side of the Rio Grande, which signaled the beginning of the war in 1846. There a detachment of from three to four thousand men, who, because of a rapid and unexpected movement, called Taylor's attention to their advance, had to stop to cross the river in two launches. They were decimated by the artillery of the enemy while our cannon balls could not reach them, and they had to abandon on the field of battle their wounded to the humanity and mercy of the conqueror, while they retired in complete disorder to Matamoros to regroup and await replacements, only to be defeated again at Monterrey.

For a moment it seemed that the fortune of arms had turned toward us. With the impetus and speed with which in 1829 he reached the beaches of Tampico to repel the Spanish invasion, Santa Anna arrived in the country, established general headquarters in San Luis, enlarged and organized his forces, and advanced with them to encounter Taylor at Angostura. He attacked there and forced the enemy to abandon its forward positions. He captured part of their artillery. He made them think that they had been defeated. But at the ultimate hour, the Mexican cavalry failed in its assignment. It was supposed to have advanced from the direction of Saltillo to Buena Vista. Provisions were exhausted, and the Mexicans had to break camp—again with the abandonment of the wounded. A disastrous retreat was begun toward Aguanueva and San Luis, which turned into an absolute rout.

Taylor had been battered and rendered incapable of launching upon any new operations, but the enemy was rich and powerful and could send army after army upon us. While Taylor was rebuilding along his northern line, other North American divisions invaded and conquered New Mexico and the Californias, and we had already lost at Tampico. The army of Major General Scott disembarked and set its batteries against Veracruz and occupied that ruined and heroic plaza at the end of March 1847. The remains of our only army, abandoning its line of defense against Taylor, set out, tattered and burned by the fires of sun and combat, upon a march of hundreds of leagues to Cerro Gordo where, reinforced by some of the units of the National Guard, it defended and finally lost positions that had been badly chosen. This army was broken up and disbanded but not without having made its victory very costly to the enemy.

The defense of the Valley of Mexico constituted the last and most determined of our efforts. A new army, relatively numerous but composed in large part of new and undisciplined troops, occupied the line of fortifications, designed and constructed by Robles and others of our most skilled engineers. Despite the fact that Scott took a deviant route to avoid the firepower placed at El Penon [a heavily fortified position] in his approach to the capital, the plan and all the dispositions for the defense seemed to assure us of a triumph, but human will and arrangements are to no avail if the designs of providence are against them. A knowledgeable and valiant general, placed at the head of a detached division assigned the task of falling upon the rearguard of the enemy when it should attack any point in our line, disobeyed, in his zeal to take the offensive, the orders of the commander in chief. He altered and destroyed the total plan for the defense by occupying and fortifying positions on his own and provoking the battle of Padierna. And Santa Anna, who with the troops at his disposal should have helped him in this battle, adding his weight to Valencia's division (now that the two had exchanged roles), remained a simple spectator of the action, thus allowing it to be lost, though he could have been able to win and should have gained the victory, according to the rules of military science. A glorious page among so many disastrous events was written by the National Guard of the Federal District in its defense of the Convent of Churubusco. Not only here, but in Veracruz, New Mexico, California, Chihuahua, and Tabasco we have seen peaceful citizens take up arms to oppose the foreign invasion and to do battle to the point of exhausting all their strength and resources.

After the first armistice, hostilities were renewed with the battle of Molino del Rey, in which the valiant Echeagaray and his Thirtieth Light saw the backs of the enemy and captured their artillery, which was brought back to our line. Again, this military action, so glorious for us despite its loss, should have been a victory if our commander-in-chief had been there and if the cavalry divisions had attacked at the opportune moment. Chapultepec and the battles at the city gates presented scenes of heroic valor on the part of their defenders and were tinted with foreign blood, but they were, nevertheless, lost, leaving Scott the master of the capital and virtually terminating any further resistance on the part of the Republic.

Such were our campaigns from 1846 to 1848, and in them our army and national guard complied with their duties and presented the uncommon spectacle of rallying to do battle again with the invader, practically the day after each defeat—something which is not done by cowards. No country, where the moral sense is not lacking, could view with indifference in its own annals defenses such as those of Monterrey in Nuevo León, Veracruz and Churubusco; battles such as Buena Vista and Molina del Rey; deaths such as those of Vazquez, Azonos, Martinez de Castro, Fronera, Cano, León, Balderas, and Xicotencatl. And as for the commander-in-chief, Santa Anna, his errors and faults notwithstanding, when the fog of political passions and hatreds has cleared away, who will be able to deny his valor, his energetic vigor, his constancy, his fortitude in the face of the repeated strikes of an always adverse fortune, the marvelous energy with which he roused others to the defense and produced materials and provisions out of nothing and improvised and organized armies, raising himself up like Antaeus' strong and courageous after each reverse. What might not the defense of Mexico have been if there had been some years of interior peace, with an army better organized and armed, and under a political system which would have permitted the chief to dispose freely of all the resistant elements in the nation? One word more about the campaign in order to do proper justice to the enemy: his grave and phlegmatic temperament, his lack of hatred in an adventure embarked upon with the simple intention of extending territory, his discipline, vigorous and severe among the corps of the line, which even extended to the volunteers, with the exception of some of the detached forces that were a veritable scourge, and above all, the noble and kind characters of Scott and Taylor lessened to the extent possible the evils of warfare. And the second of those chiefs cited, who commanded the first of the invading armies, was, once the campaign in the Valley [Mexico City and environs] was ended, the most sincere and powerful of the friends of peace.

Not only was this not dishonorable, but it will figure in the diplomatic annals of the Hispanic American countries as having contributed to the result of a negotiation which only the patriotism and intelligence of Pena y Pena and Couto [Mexican president and Mexican peace commissioner] could have resumed on the agreed-upon conditions, when we were completely at the mercy of the conqueror.

SOURCE: Robinson, Cecil, ed. and trans. Excerpt from "Memories of the North American Invasion." In The View from Chapultepec: Mexican Writers on the Mexican-American War. Tucson, Ariz.: University of Arizona Press, 1989, pp. 44–49.