=Comrades of the Mexican war=:
I am asked to give some recollections of the Mexican War, but little
remains for me to say after the comprehensive and eloquent history of
that war by Judge McKay, of South Carolina.
It would be presumptuous of me, after what we have just heard from the
Judge and Colonel Hungerford, to say another word. Larger gatherings
this magnificent Hotel Continental has often had within its walls,
for time has thinned the ranks of the Mexican veterans even more
woefully than did Mexican shot and shell, but it may be doubted
whether caravansary ever sheltered a party with more enthusiasm than
is shown here to-night in Paris, the gay capital of France, by the few
comrades gathered here to celebrate victories in which we were humble
participants nearly 50 years ago.
The thought of the days of 1847 helps me to feel young again, and
brings vividly to my mind the gay, rollicking little army that marched
out of Puebla on that bright August morning (alas! how many never to
return), when General Scott left Puebla with his little army of 10,000
men to fight an army of 35,000 veteran troops of Mexico, in trenches,
in mountain gorges, fortified cities, surrounded by impassable
marshes, your base, if you had any, hundreds of miles away, you faced
the men that had showed the quality of their mercy at Mier and the
Alamo. You felt that defeat meant death. ’Tis not becoming in soldiers
to boast, but who, among all of you that assemble on this glorious
anniversary, will not straighten up an inch taller when he says, “I
was one of that little army.”
Where is there one whose eyes will not flash when the glorious 20th
of August is mentioned; when that little army fought five distinct
battles--among them Contreras, San Antonio, Churubusco, San Puebla.
Then came the 8th of September, that proud but sorrowful day, when you
lost 900 out of 4,000 engaged. Then came Chapultepec, and the crowning
event--our flag waving over the National Palace. The cathedraled City
of Mexico at our feet; Popocatépetl, with its venerable summit of
eternal snows, 18,000 feet above the sea, looks down upon us as it
did upon Cortez three hundred years before, only its breezes kiss the
folds of the new flag of America in place of the old flag of Castile.
These memories are dear to us all, and I can think of no happier way
of passing one day in the year than the old veterans meeting together
and fighting their battles over again.
Now, allow me to turn to what occurred under General Taylor, who
commanded the little army of occupation on the northern line of
operations. I will only refer to the Battle of Buena Vista, which was
a glorious victory, and the last general battle and crowning glory of
this brave little army. It will be recollected that General Santa Anna
was so certain of a victory that he wrote to General Taylor saying,
“you are surrounded by 20,000 men, and cannot in any human probability
avoid suffering a rout and being cut to pieces with your troops, but
as you deserve consideration and particular esteem, I wish to save
you from a catastrophe,” and gave one hour from the arrival of his
flag of truce to General Taylor to surrender. Old “rough and ready”
did not require all the hour to respond. He wrote his memorable,
but brief dispatch, “I decline acceding to your request.” But think
of the situation; an army of 20,000 veteran soldiers, Santa Anna at
their head, General Alvarez Chief of Cavalry, Lombardine of Infantry,
Requena of Artillery, Villarnil of Engineers, with Vasquez, Torrejou,
Ampudia, Andrade, Minon, Pacheco, Garcia, Ortega, Mejia, Flores,
Gusman, Mora, Romero, and other dashing general officers, and to
resist all this less than 5,000 American regulars and volunteers, and
of regulars less than 500.
On the morning of 22nd February, 1847, the Mexican cohort appeared
on the distant hills, dense squadrons of horse, with glittering
lances and gay pennons, forming the advance serried files of
infantry, artillery, and cavalry, column after column in apparent
endless massiveness followed, but it was Washington’s birthday, and
General Taylor declined to surrender, and that meant hard fighting.
The line of battle was formed by General Wool, General Taylor held
Colonel Jefferson Davis (his son-in-law) with his Mississipi Rifles,
Lieut.-Col. May’s Dragoons, the light batteries of Captains Sherman
and Bragg, and Captain Steers’ squadron in reserve. General Lane
moved forward with a section of Washington’s battery to arrest the
advance of the army, but that enemy seemed invincible; before night
the Mexicans had occupied the sides and scaled the summits of the
Sierra Madre. That night our little army lay on their arms without
fires, and long before daybreak were aroused from their slumbers to
the tug of war; the day dawned bright, and beautiful skies unclouded,
and mountain bathed in sunlight. Ampudia commenced the battle early,
and at 8 o’clock Santa Anna had his main column in motion, at 11 he
summoned General Taylor to surrender; the fortunes of the day seemed
against us. Lieutenant O’Brien, whose name is so indelibly written
on Buena Vista, maintained his ground until all his cannoniers were
killed or wounded. Eight regiments of Mexican infantry fell upon
the 2nd Illinois, and they were forced to take shelter. Braggs’ and
sections of Sherman’s batteries had been ordered to their relief.
Immense hosts of Mexican troops poured along the base of the mountain
to the rear of the American line. Colonel Jefferson Davis hastened
to meet them, the Mississipi Rifles went into action in double quick,
and fired advancing, the front lines of the enemy seemed to melt
before them: in the thickest of the fight Captain Bragg sent to Taylor
for a supporting party, Taylor sent back the answer, “Major Bliss
and I will support you.” He galloped to Braggs’ support, and there
gave the celebrated order, “A little more grape, Captain Bragg.” The
American line had been turned in the morning, but before night it was
recovered. In the success of the battle Colonel Jefferson Davis justly
claims a conspicuous part. Our little army of less than 5,000 men
for more than 12 hours sustained this terrible fight against 20,000
Mexican troops, and thus closed one of the most memorable battles of
modern times.
Mexico has fallen, the Stars and Stripes fly above the “Halls of the
Montezumas”--a nation has been conquered. History records no deeds of
greater daring, no triumphs of arms more brilliant. Empire was added
to empire, 1,000,000 square miles of territory were acquired--three
and a half times the area of France--a dwelling place for 100,000,000
of freemen, won by half a hundred thousand. Until then much of the
territory of the Mississipi-Missouri belonged to Mexico. Now the whole
valley of one million five hundred thousand square miles, the river,
with thirteen hundred navigable branches, running from its source five
hundred miles to the north, cutting through its magnificent mountain
gateway turning to the sea, running through territories and states,
until sweetened by the breath of the olive and the orange, and finally
received into the warm embrace of the tropical gulf, 5,000 miles from
the land of the pine to the land of the palm, long enough to reach
from the mouth of the Hudson to the mouth of the Nile. Add the empire
drained by the Colorado, crown these with California--and all is ours,
and won under the flag that now protects it.
Judge McKay’s reference to Colonel A. W. Donophan and his famous march
from Missouri to Mexico with Colonel Sterling Price reminds me of the
ever-to-be-remembered passage from Brazos Santiago to New Orleans on
the old Mississipi River a tow-boat of six hundred tons, the “Mary
Kingsland,” on which I was one of the invalid passengers. We had
crowded on that small vessel nearly 900 men of Colonel Donophan’s
regiment, over 800 men of the 2nd Indiana (Colonel Bowles) and over
100 sick men of other commands. Many of these men were down with
yellow fever, of whom ten died during the five days’ passage, and were
buried at sea. You may talk of the Black Hole of Calcutta, but I do
not think it was any worse than the lower hold of that steamer, where
we were obliged to lie packed together like sardines on square blocks
of iron used as ballast, where the foul, stenchful bilge water came
oozing up between these iron blocks. Then to add to our discomforts
we had nothing to eat but the hardest kind of ship-biscuit that was
impossible to masticate, and rotten, green measly pork and Rio coffee
served out in the green bean. The stuff was so vile that we were often
obliged to vomit after each meal, as we could not retain the putrid
meat on our stomachs.
The Government, no doubt, paid for sound pork, but in those days
the Government contractors were principally gentlemen from the
neighbourhood of Jerusalem, located at Cincinnati, who were not over
scrupulous as to the kind of meat they supplied providing they got the
money.
I will never forget the horrors of that five days passage, and to
add to our trouble, we experienced one of those terrible storms they
called “northers” in that latitude, during which we very nearly
foundered. You can imagine a small paddle-wheel river-steamboat of 600
tons loaded down with nearly 2,000 men, 16 pieces of brass cannon,
and thousands of Mexican lances, besides the rotten pork, Rio coffee,
and the hardest kind of tack. The cannon and lances were captured
by Colonel Donophan’s regiment at the Battles of Sacramento and San
Jacinto, and comprised all the artillery the Mexicans had at these two
fights.
I am confident if this war occurred at the present day, we would
have had a harder task to perform, as Mexico is possessed now of a
well-disciplined army, splendidly officered and of very different
materials, and trust we will always live in peace and friendly
intercourse with our Mexican brothers, as should become all near-by
neighbours and friends.
Sherman and others, returning from the shores of our Western sea,
joined in another march, from Atlanta, to our Eastern sea, and but for
these, who can tell what would have been the result of our experiment
of self-government, or where the boundary lines of the States of
freedom would be drawn to-day. Milton says:
“Peace hath her victories
No less renowned than war,”
and the men of peace who remained fought battles in the material
world, with equal dangers requiring equal courage, and with results as
supremely grand. The difficulties, dangers, and cost incident to the
construction of the Central Pacific Railway were such as scarcely to
be comprehended by men of to-day; its obstacles were simply appalling.
The art of railway construction at that time was so far removed from
its present advanced state that engineers looked upon the project with
amazement, and capitalists with derision, its conception was so bold,
so grand, so stupendous, so startling, as to fill the incredulous even
with admiration. Bonaparte’s crossing of the Alps with his army and
artillery is dwarfed into tameness when compared with the achievement
which made this the highway of nations and the “rapid transit” of
the world’s commerce. In the autumn of 1849, the very month that
California was organised as a territory, a Pacific Railroad Convention
was held. On May 1, 1852, the Legislature of California passed “an
Act granting the right of way to the United States for a railroad to
connect the navigable waters of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for
the purposes of national safety in the event of war, and to promote
the highest interests of the Republic, pronounced one of the greatest
necessities of the age.” A Senator, upon the floor of Congress,
said: “I look upon the building of the railroad from the waters of
the Missouri to the Pacific Ocean, at the time particularly in which
it was built during the war, as perhaps the greatest achievement of
the human race on earth.” Let us honour the builders with a simple
moment’s consideration. Engineer Colonel O. M. Poe, in his report to
General Sherman, said: “An army of workmen were employed, 25,000 men
and 6,000 teams, and the route presented a busy scene. The woods rang
with the strokes of the axe, and the quarries with the click of steel;
the streams were bordered with lumbermen’s camps and choked with
floating logs, and materials, supplies, and equipment for the Central
Pacific were scattered from New York _via_ Cape Horn and San Francisco
to the end of the track advancing eastward.” The base of supplies of
the Central Pacific from the Eastern Rolling Mills, by the way of Cape
Horn to the track layers, was equal to the circuit of the globe on the
parallel of the road. This distance was so great as to keep materials
to the value of millions of dollars, and sufficient for nearly a
year’s construction, constantly in transit. In cutting the Sierras,
miles of snow and rock were tunneled; snow slides and avalanches
destroyed many lives and large amounts of property. To hasten the work
of piercing the Sierras, three locomotives, forty cars, rails, and
track material for forty miles of railroad were hauled on sleds by
oxen and horses over the summits of that Alpine range and down into
the cañon of the Truckee River. This over a pass in which the annual
average snowfall was forty feet and the depth of hard settled snow
in midwinter was eighteen feet on the level. Who at this distance
appreciates the stupendous work of these Titans? From the Truckee to
the Bear River in Utah, the inhabitants did not average one to each
ten miles. With the exception of a few cords of stunted pine and
juniper, all the fuel had to be hauled from the Sierras. For over five
hundred miles there was not a tree that would make a board or tie.
Fortunes were expended in boring for water and in laying pipes, in
some instances over eight miles in length, to convey water to the line
of the road.
Upon this desert stretch, as far as from Boston to Buffalo, there was
nothing that entered into the superstructure of a railroad, not even
good stone, and water for men and animals was hauled at times for
forty miles. The cost of supplies was fabulous; oats and barley for
the animals cost from $200 to $280 per ton, and hay $120. But, as
with Grant at Vicksburg and at the Wilderness, the work went on, the
road was completed, and it was California Pioneers who did it, and who
made the road they built their monument, and “success” their epitaph.
Senator Benton said his dream was “to see a train of cars thundering
down the Eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, bearing in transit
to Europe the teas, silks, and spices of the Orient.” His dream is
practically realised, as there are seven trans-continental lines
bearing this commerce to the Atlantic.
The Pioneer has left other material legacies to the nation. The great
American Deserts you knew will soon be blotted from our maps. By
the science of civilization large tracts of these have been made to
“blossom like the rose,” rivers that ran to waste now work the mine,
turn the wheel, and then with the artesian flow irrigate the desert
wastes, until fruitful gardens have grown like sweet dreams along the
trail where comrades of ours died of damning thirst.
We all love the sweet flowery land we knew as territory, then as the
new, and now the dear old State. We remember with becoming pride
our first votes. California came into the Union a Free State. How
controlling this action was none knew, nor when viewed in the light
of the history of the Rebellion can it be measured. California
became a gem in the Federal coronet. The pen of Bishop Berkley must
have pointed toward it when he wrote his epigrammatic expression,
“Ho! westward Empire takes its way.” It is a sunny land, and merits
the sobriquet, “Italy of America,” with its clear skies, charms of
climate, wonderful soils, wealth of mines, fabulous products and
enchantments of scenery, crowned with the Yosemite Falls, the highest
in the world, descending in three leaps 2,500 feet, or one-half a
mile, from the glaciers and eternal snows of the Sierras to the valley
below, a very Eden of sublimity and loveliness, perhaps the most
wondrously grand and beautiful spot on the earth. To stand for an hour
upon a summit crest of the Sierras, the grandest of America’s Alpine
ranges; to live a day amid their icy homes; to descend their western
slopes; to trace their long summit lines of snow-clad peaks that link
Oregon to Aztec Mexico; to walk where a single step takes you from
the glacier ice to Spring’s resurrection, where the violets greet you
with sweetest smiles through dewy tears of joy, born on the spot where
the snows of yesterday were melted by the morning’s sun; the great
pines and sequoia gigantea, those wonders of the world’s forests,
in whose branches the birds chorused their matin songs centuries
before the Christian era, towering below you; the silvery lines of
the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers mirroring hundreds of miles of
the great central valley, reaching far North and South from the Bay
of San Francisco; the Coast Range alone curtaining the Pacific Sea,
with stern old Mount Diablo standing as the sole sentinel guarding the
Golden gate--these are alone worth crossing a continent to see--and
recall the words of Tom Moore, who, after visiting the mountains of
New England, the rivers and lakes of New York, the St. Lawrence and
grand old Niagara, wrote to Lady Charlotte Rowdon, saying:
“Oh, Lady, these are miracles which man,
Caged in the bonds of Europe’s pigmy plan,
Can scarce dream of, and which the eye must see
To know how beautiful this world can be.”
Pity he could not have seen and sung of our lands of the Yellowstone,
the Columbia, and the Yosemite,--what words would these have inspired
his poet pen to write.
Among the gentlemen who have honored us with their presence here
to-night as one of our guests I notice my friend the Honorable Felix
Campbell, Member of Congress from Brooklyn, and who is now the Dean
of the delegation to the Congress of the United States from the
great State of New York, and who has been honored with many many
re-elections to that body; his presence here to-night is particularly
welcome to us old soldiers of the Mexican War, for we all remember the
active part he took in helping to secure the passage of our pension
bill a few years ago.
I must also not forget to mention the name of my old friend and
fellow forty-niner of California, James Phelan, Esq., of San
Francisco to whose generosity we are mainly indebted for this splendid
entertainment to-night, whose patriotic spirit and warm-hearted nature
always come to the front on such occasions. May his shadow never grow
less, and that he may never die till I kill him.
As allusion has been made to the war of the rebellion, in which
comrade McKay took a most prominent part on the side of the South,
and Colonel Hungerford and myself serving in the Union Army. Although
_South Carolina_ and _New York troops fought side by side in the
same brigade under the gallant General Shields in Mexico_, we found
ourselves, _unfortunately_, arrayed against each other in later years
in our own country, and _no man who is a man_ will from _political_ or
_personal_ motives _keep alive the passions of the war_, or by fanning
the embers of sectional hatred for _political_ or _partisan effect_,
subject our people to the charge of vindictive malignity. I trust we
have long since forgotten the bitter memories of our Civil War, and
that we only remember the _gallant acts_ and _deeds_ of _both armies_.
I have hoped for years back that the time would come, and it is
happily now at hand, when the brave soldiers of the society of the
army of Northern Virginia, who fought under the gallant Lee, will
meet side by side at the annual reunions with the soldiers of our
society of the army of the Potomac, who fought under McClellan, Grant,
Meade, and Sheridan, and at other festive meetings of our various army
gatherings and organizations of old soldiers, where I have never heard
a word said against, but the highest praise accorded to our gallant
but misguided southern brothers for their bravery and daring on the
battlefield.
Colonel Murphy was called upon to respond to the last sentiment,--in
memory of our dead comrades,--which he did, as follows:
I am called on to say a word to the memory of our dear departed
comrades. Would that I had command of language to do justice to our
dead heroes. Father Time has fearfully thinned our ranks, and few of us
can point to the comrade who was his file leader and marched shoulder
to shoulder with us nearly 50 years ago, and the death roll since the
Mexican War has been frightful among the distinguished men of that army
who have been called to their final account. I mention a few, Scott,
Taylor, Pillow, Quitman, Twiggs, Duncan, Pierce, Kearney, Hancock,
Shields. The last named general, and the last surviving general of that
war, was a welcome guest at my house a few years ago when stricken with
a fatal sickness when far away from his Western home and kindred. I
well remember the gallant Lieutenant Ralph Bell of the South Carolina
Regiment, mentioned by comrade McKay, and who, while wounded, led the
forlorn hope at Chapultepec. He accompanied me to California in 1849,
and his eyes I closed in death at Sacramento City the following year,
and whose placid countenance looks down upon me here to-night. These
are sad memories, and the tongue can but feebly express the feelings
of the heart at this time; our own bent forms and fast becoming hoary
locks admonish us that it will not be long before we too are called to
tread the same path, and no matter what our former condition in life,
there is no distinction then. The dead, how beautiful is the memory of
the dead, what a holy thing it is in the human heart, what a chastening
influence it has upon human life, how it subdues all the harshness
that grows up within us in the daily intercourse with the world, how
it melts our hardness and softens our pride, kindles our deepest love,
and waking our brightest aspirations in the camp and by the wayside, in
solitude or among our comrades, think sadly and speak lovingly of the
dead.
It occurred to the compiler of this pamphlet that it would not be
out of place to mention the name of Colonel Murphy’s son, Ignatius,
a well-known journalist and editorial writer, who wrote the life of
Colonel Hungerford (a book of nearly 400 pages). This gallant soldier
recently died in Rome, Italy, at the home of his daughter, the Countess
Telfener, at the Villa Ada, attaining the ripe age of seventy-five
years. He passed peacefully away, surrounded by his affectionate wife,
his daughter, the Countess, and his numerous grandchildren.
Ignatius Ingoldsby Murphy deserves more than a mere honourable mention
in connection with the corn propaganda. When his father commenced
his missionary labors, in 1887, he was flooded with correspondence from
all parts of Europe. This son, who was a third year naval cadet at
Annapolis, resigned, and came over to Europe to assist his father, for
which his knowledge of European languages eminently qualified him.
[Illustration: IGNATIUS INGOLDSBY MURPHY