Chapter 13
On 8 October 1821 a liberal Spanish army officer by the name of Juan O’Donojú, born in Seville to Irish parents, drew his last breath in Mexico City. The official cause of his death was pleurisy, though some suspected he had been poisoned.
O’Donojú had arrived in Veracruz on the east coast of Mexico in July 1821 after being appointed jefe político superior, or supreme political head, of the Viceroyalty of New Spain by the new liberal Spanish government. He was, in all but name, the last viceroy of New Spain, a territory that in 1821 encompassed Mexico, Cuba, the present-day Dominican Republic, most of Central America and much of the modern United States, including California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. Unlike Ambrose O’Higgins, who, during the last years of his life, ruled in splendour from the viceregal palace in Lima over much of the Andean part of South America, O’Donojú was not to enjoy the trappings of the viceregal court; yet his contribution to the modern history of Spanish America was perhaps even more significant than that of O’Higgins. Less than two weeks before his death, many thousands of miles from his masters in Spain, O’Donojú decreed the independence of Mexico from the Spanish Empire.
The declaration of Mexican independence by O’Donojú and the conservative Mexican army officer Agustín de Iturbide took place against a background of continuing violence between rebel factions and Spanish troops. While the leaders of the independence movements in South America were predominantly aristocratic or middle-class, inspired by Enlightenment ideas, the rebellion against Spanish rule in Mexico was more complex, made up of different groups with often competing interests. The initial revolt was led by Miguel de Hidalgo, the parish priest of Dolores, a small town about 170 miles to the north-west of Mexico City. Hidalgo attributed the sufferings of his poor parishioners to Spanish misrule, and from the front of the parish church he issued the famous Grito de Dolores, or Cry of Dolores, which is celebrated today in Mexico as the crucial moment in the history of national independence. Hidalgo urged his parishioners to rise up against the authorities and led his indigenous and peasant followers into battle under a flag depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe, the most venerated Marian icon in the world. Despite early successes, however, Hidalgo procrastinated when he had Mexico City at his mercy, giving the viceroy time to organise his troops and crush the rebellion. Hidalgo was tried by the Inquisition and beheaded. Another Catholic priest, José María Morelos, replaced Hidalgo at the head of the independence movement, but in 1815 he was also captured and put to death.
For the next five years guerrilla forces under the leadership of Guadalupe Victoria and Vicente Guerrero continued to attack Spanish outposts. But events in Spain changed attitudes in Mexico. Riego’s liberal coup d’état in 1820 horrified the conservative elite in Mexico, including Agustín de Iturbide, a monarchist officer who had been fighting the rebel forces since 1810. On hearing of the change of government in Spain he and his fellow-conservative criollos changed tack, advocating independence from liberal Spain in order to preserve the privileges of the Church and the powerful landowners. Iturbide persuaded Guerrero to join this new independence movement, which based its programme for government on the Plan of Iguala or Plan of the Three Guarantees. These guarantees were: the maintenance of the monarchy, the preservation of Church privileges, and equal treatment for peninsulares and criollos. Iturbide and Guerrero formed the Army of the Three Guarantee to consolidate their power. By the time O’Donojú arrived in Mexico, most of the country supported the cause of independence.
Iturbide and O’Donojú made strange bedfellows. The Mexican was of Basque ancestry on his father’s side and came from a conservative landowning family. He had fought rebellions against Spanish rule for a decade when the arrival of the liberals to power in Spain turned him into an advocate of independence. He was personally ambitious and was accused of corruption and cruelty, but he was also deeply popular among conservative elements of Mexican society. On the other hand, O’Donojú was a liberal and a freemason.
Born on 30 July 1762 in Seville, Juan O’Donojú was baptised nine days later in the Sagrario, the parish church connected to the city’s giant gothic cathedral. His father, Richard Dunphy O’Donoghue, was from Glenflesk, County Kerry; his mother, Alice Ryan, was from Inch, County Tipperary.1 Juan enlisted in the Ultonia Regiment at the age of 19. He was a colonel when the French invaded Spain in 1808 and was given command of a regiment of light infantry. In November 1808 he was accused of treachery and ordered to face a court-martial in the aftermath of the disastrous Battle of Tudela in Navarre, in which Napoleon’s forces comprehensively defeated a Spanish force outside the town.2
But his disgrace did not last long. In May 1809 the Supreme Central Junta recognised the bravery of the troops under O’Donojú’s command in an action against the French near the village of Algorfa in Alicante.3 In 1811 he was captured by the French and imprisoned in Bayonne. He managed to escape and made his way to Cádiz, where he was appointed inspector-general of cavalry and then minister for war. As such he was responsible for the organisation of the Spanish army during and after the war and was in constant communication with Sir Arthur Wellesley, commander-in-chief of the British forces. He was also responsible for the prosecution of the war against the rebels in Spain’s American colonies.
Ferdinand VII returned to the Spanish throne in 1814, and O’Donojú was arrested for his liberal sympathies and the fact that he was a freemason and imprisoned in the Castle of San Carlos, on the outskirts of Palma on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca. He spent four years in prison, suffering tortures that left permanent scars and probably hastened his death.
The restoration of the liberal constitution in 1820 brought a change in O’Donojú’s fortunes. The new government appointed him to the Viceroyalty of New Spain as jefe político superior, with a view to him carrying out a liberal policy. He replaced the outgoing viceroy, Juan Ruiz de Apodaca, who had been overthrown by the Spanish field-marshal Pedro Francisco Novella. O’Donojú was under the impression that he would be welcomed in Veracruz, given his mission to reform the institutions in Mexico on a liberal footing; instead he was faced with a widespread conservative-led insurgency. Without men or resources, he quickly agreed to a meeting with Iturbide. The result was the Treaty of Córdoba, signed by O’Donojú and Iturbide in the town of that name on 24 August 1821. The treaty put into effect the form of government envisaged in the Plan of Iguala and became the basis for a newly independent Mexican empire.
The Spanish government rejected the Treaty of Córdoba, and – not for the first time – O’Donojú was accused of treachery. He himself was convinced that he had acted correctly, inspired by a political view that held the liberty of the people as sacred. He wrote that he was convinced that every society had the right ‘to declare its liberty and defend at the same time the life of the individual,’ and that any efforts made to ‘oppose that sacred torrent, once its majestic and sublime course had begun,’ were useless.4 In September he convinced Novella to lay down his arms and accept the independence of Mexico. On 23 and 24 September 1810 Iturbide’s troops marched into Mexico City to acclamation. Three days later the country’s independence was officially declared in the city.
O’Donojú now found himself in an invidious position. He was unable to return to his homeland, where he was regarded as a traitor for having, seemingly without a thought, given away most of Spain’s remaining American possessions. Though he was popular with the Mexican people, he was wary of accepting a position in the new regency council offered to him by Iturbide. He felt that he could not accept the conservative nature of the new government, which was hostile to liberals and to freemasons. He also realised that Iturbide was anxious to consolidate his own personal power, without a rival for the people’s affections. In any event, within days of the declaration of independence O’Donojú was struck down with a debilitating illness. He died on 8 October, at the age of 59, only two months after he had arrived in Veracruz. He left behind his impoverished widow, María Josefa Sánchez, and three children. As befitted the extraordinary role he had played in the achievement of Mexican independence, O’Donojú’s body was embalmed and placed in the vault reserved for the Spanish viceroys under the magnificent baroque Altar of the Kings in Mexico City’s cathedral.
Exactly 300 years after Cortés had vanquished the Aztecs, Mexico was at last free of Spanish rule. Iturbide took control of the provisional governing junta, and in May 1822 he was proclaimed Emperor Augustine I of Mexico, after Ferdinand VII had rejected an offer to become the first monarch of the independent Mexican Empire. Iturbide was crowned in July 1822 in a lavish coronation ceremony in the cathedral in Mexico City, ruling until March 1823, when growing opposition forced him to abdicate. That same year the Federal Republic of Central America, consisting of present-day Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, seceded from the Mexican Empire.
A federal republic replaced the monarchy in 1823. Over the next two decades conservatives and liberals, centralists and federalists fought for power in Mexico. Successive governments attempted to revive a faltering economy and stave off secessionist threats from the regions, all the while contending with the threat of invasion from hostile powers, including Spain, France and the United States. In 1835 the Mexican state of Texas rose up against the conservative government of General Antonio López de Santa Anna. The unrest was driven by more than 20,000 Anglo-American ranchers who had settled in Texas and were disturbed by the government’s new centralist constitution. Santa Anna led an expedition to quell the uprising, wiping out the defenders of the mission station of El Álamo near San Antonio. The outrage felt by the Anglo-Americans at Santa Anna’s bloody actions led to the famous call ‘Remember the Alamo!’ In April 1836, at the Battle of San Jacinto, the Anglo-Americans defeated Santa Anna’s army, and an independent Republic of Texas seceded from Mexico. It was the decision a decade later by the United States government to annex Texas that led to the Mexican-American War.
On 10 September 1847, just as the first rays of the sun began to appear over the horizon, the residents of a small Mexican village were awakened to shouts and the sound of rattling cartwheels. San Ángel has since been swallowed up by Mexico City’s urban sprawl, but in the middle of the nineteenth century it was a typical Mexican village. At its heart was the plaza of San Jacinto. On that September morning, however, it was not the church that dominated the square but a large gallows, with 16 nooses hanging from a beam 40 feet long, towards which a ragged group of prisoners, members of the Mexican army, were marched by their blue-uniformed guards, members of the United States army. There was a tense atmosphere in the square as us officers and local villagers waited for the gruesome spectacle to begin.
Sixteen of the prisoners were brought to a halt under the gallows. The remaining 14 were brought to the other side of the square and tied to some of the trees in front of the parish church, under whose branches the villagers would normally take shelter from the midday sun. The guards moved towards the prisoners tied to the trees and stripped them of their uniforms. A United States general then gave the order for the lashings to begin. The men who carried out the punishment were Mexican muleteers. They used knotted rawhide lashes, which, according to an eyewitness, gave the backs of their victims the ‘appearance of a pounded piece of raw beef, the blood oozing from every stripe.’5
Perhaps the most barbaric part of the morning’s proceedings was the branding. The officer in charge of the punishment ordered a brazier to be lit, and when the branding iron was red-hot it was applied to the face of each prisoner, leaving the letter D, for deserter, indelibly scarred in the flesh of their cheek. The screams of the men as the iron seared the skin pierced the early morning air of San Ángel.
The prisoners who had been left to stand underneath the gallows were now hoisted onto eight mule-drawn carts, their heads placed in the nooses. The us officer in charge of the execution beckoned forward the five Catholic priests who had been watching silently from beside the door of the church. They were led onto the back of the carts by a priest carrying a large wooden cross. The priests heard the men’s last confession and administered the last rites. The order was then given for the carts to move away, and the bodies of the 16 men dropped. Some of the men died instantly, their necks broken by the fall, their bodies twitching involuntarily, as if participating in a ghastly parody of a village dance; the more unfortunate ones, including Captain Patrick Dalton, slowly choked to death, their feet a matter of inches from the earth and the promise of life. The dead bodies were then cut down and brought to the cemetery in a neighbouring village. Iron collars with long spikes were placed around the necks of the surviving prisoners before they were led off to jail.6
Two days later the us army repeated the exercise on a hill close to the Mexican village of Mixcoac. This time there were 30 nooses attached to the gallows. Among the men sentenced to death was Francis O’Connor (not to be confused with Francis Burdett O’Connor). He had at first been reprieved, owing to the fact that he had lost both his legs in battle and was dying from his wounds; but the officer in charge of the execution, an Irish-American by the name of Colonel William Harney, ordered him to be brought up from the prison. Harney refused to carry out the executions until he could see the United States flag flying over the fort at nearby Chapultepec, where the us army was besieging the Mexican garrison. Throughout the morning the prisoners stood sweating on the back of the carts, the nooses around their necks. Finally, at about 9:30 a.m., Harney saw the Stars and Stripes raised over Chapultepec, and he gave the order for the carts to be moved away. Alongside the 30 men who died that morning, another eight were given 50 lashes and branded.
The men who died at the hands of the us army on those September mornings in 1847 were members of the Mexican army’s Batallón de San Patricio, or St Patrick’s Battalion. To the officers of the us army who court-martialled and executed them, the prisoners who died – most of them Irish – were traitors, who had deserted their country; in Mexico they are honoured as heroes who fought for the liberty of the Mexican people in the face of us aggression.
There is also a racial and religious aspect to the story of the San Patricios; for, while Catholic and Protestant and Irishman and Englishman fought alongside each other for South American liberty, the men who made up the St Patrick’s Battalion were mostly Catholic Irish emigrants, escaping not only poverty but also the religious and racial prejudice that existed among the predominantly Protestant officer corps of the United States army.
Captain John Riley from Clifden, County Galway, was among the Irish prisoners who would bear the physical and emotional scars for the rest of their lives. He was one of the tens of thousands of Irish immigrants who were flooding into North American cities in the 1840s. Their arrival coincided with the rise of the nativist movement, whose anti-Catholicism extended into the upper echelons of the United States army. Desperate to make a living, Riley had joined the us army as a private. The Irish Catholics who enlisted in the army were treated as little more than cannon fodder. Realising the extent of anti-Catholic prejudice in the us army, and the large number of foreign soldiers within its ranks, the Mexican government launched a propaganda campaign to entice them to desert.
Riley was among hundreds of Irishmen who deserted the United States army to fight for the Mexicans. Writers and historians have ascribed religious and cultural motives to the Irish deserters, believing that they saw parallels in the Mexican-American War with their experience in Ireland. And there is much to suggest that this is true. Riley is believed to have given the battalion its name and its flag. The flag had a green background, with an image of St Patrick embroidered on one side and a harp and shamrock on the other.7 However, as in all wars, there must also have been more prosaic factors at work. The Irish deserters may have expected better treatment from the Mexicans; some of them may have been coerced into joining after being taken prisoner; others may have been seduced by a way of life that seemed to offer more than they would find back in the tenements of the North American cities from which they had come. In his book The Irish Soldiers of Mexico, Michael Hogan questions various hypotheses about the San Patricios. He writes:
Some American historians claim the concept of the ‘Irish Catholic Battalion’ was simply Mexican propaganda. Others claim that it was a concept originated by nativists to cast aspersions on the loyalty of Irish troops serving the American Army and thus minimize their contributions. Another revisionist viewpoint, denying or minimizing the Irish/Catholic connection, may have been inspired by the Irish-Americans themselves who were anxious to be assimilated in American society. Thus, they were eager to insist that the San Patricio Battalion was simply a mixture of races and that religion was not an issue. The majority of Irishmen and Catholics did, in fact, remain loyal to their adopted flag during the Mexican War despite provocation and abuse.8
The St Patrick’s Battalion has earned an honoured place in the history of modern Mexico, not just for its willingness to fight but for the skill and bravery with which it undertook the fight. Riley was a talented soldier who by April 1846 had organised himself and 47 other Irishmen into a small artillery unit. By the summer there were more than 200 soldiers in the battalion, organised in two companies. Most were Irish, but there were also Mexicans of recent European descent, as well as other European-born volunteers, many of them German.
In August 1846, determined to reverse a series of defeats at the hands of the us army during the summer, the Mexican government recalled Santa Anna from self-imposed exile. Santa Anna now became the pre-eminent military commander, replacing General Pedro de Ampudia, whose capitulation to General Zachary Taylor’s besieging troops at Monterrey had weakened his reputation.
In February Santa Anna led the 20,000-strong Army of the North towards a mountain pass called Buena Vista in the Mexican state of Coahuila. On the morning of 23 February the San Patricios directed their fire along the American line. From the crest of a ridge they manned three 16-pound guns, training their sights on the enemy positions. Despite superior numbers, Santa Anna’s army was tired from the long march north; the Americans were better trained and had superior artillery. By the end of the day, however, Taylor’s army had sustained heavy casualties, and more than a thousand men had deserted.9 Nevertheless, Taylor claimed victory at Buena Vista, citing the battle as part of his campaign for the presidency of the United States the following year.
On 17 April the us and Mexican armies, including the San Patricios, clashed again at Cerro Gordo close to the town of Xalapa, between Mexico City and Veracruz. Thanks to the actions of an irrepressible Virginian captain named Robert E. Lee, who later led the Confederate forces during the American Civil War, the us army overran the Mexican forces. In the middle of the night Lee led a party of engineers up a treacherously steep trail to take command of an adjacent hill, allowing the American artillery to enfilade the Mexicans the following morning. Santa Anna and his men retreated, leaving behind his treasury of $20,000 in gold coins.
By 1847 the Mexican government was desperate for men, and it continued to persuade Irish immigrants to desert. John Riley called on his countrymen to side with the Mexican people against the us army, which, ‘in the face of the whole world has trampled upon the holy altar of our religion’ and ‘set the firebrand upon a sanctuary devoted to the Blessed Virgin.’10
The San Patricios made their final stand at the Battle of Churubusco. On 19 August General Gabriel Valencia left Mexico City at the head of a 4,000-strong army, part of the Mexican government’s last-gasp effort to cut off General Winfield Scott from his supply base on the Atlantic coast. Valencia encountered the us troops camped near the town of Contreras and prepared to attack the following morning. It was another night raid led by Lee that proved the difference. Lee and his small group of men picked their way to the rear of the Mexican army through a lava field, which Valencia had considered impassable, and charged the Mexican camp. As shells began raining down from the front, Valencia’s army fled in confusion.
Santa Anna’s force, which had been to the rear of Valencia’s, retreated to Mexico City. The San Patricios, some 200 men, were stationed in a monastery on the Mexico City side of the River Churubusco and were ordered to protect the retreating army. It was their actions on 19 August 1847 that earned them a place in Mexican history.
The bridge over the river was protected by a 15-foot earthen embankment. The riflemen and artillerymen of the San Patricios were placed on platforms on top of the 12-foot high walls that surrounded the monastery. The us assault began at 11 a.m. The Irish defenders fought bravely against wave after wave of attacks throughout the morning and early afternoon, when they began to run out of ammunition. Retreating into the grounds of the monastery, they were forced to fight hand-to-hand with bayonet and rifle butt. According to Michael Hogan, ‘the dead and wounded were now as numerous as those still fighting on the parapets. The blood stood in deep puddles and the men slipped and skidded, sometimes sliding off the balconies to crash on the rocks below.’11 The surviving San Patricios surrendered and were taken prisoner.
The us army entered Mexico City on 14 September 1847. The war was over in all but name; however, it would take another eight months before an official treaty was signed. In the meantime the us army occupied the capital.
The Battle of Churubusco was the end of the Irish battalion’s participation in the Mexican-American War, but it was not the end of the San Patricios. In June 1848, as part of the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the San Patricios who were still in us prisons were released. They joined a new Batallón de San Patricio, which had been created by the Mexican army and was stationed north of Mexico City in the state of Querétaro. The battalion comprised discharged men and deserters from the us army, as well as the old San Patricios. They were involved in putting down a royalist revolt and were subsequently given the responsibility of policing the town of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
John Riley was promoted to lieutenant-colonel and given command of the new battalion. He had grown his whiskers to hide the brand on his cheek. However, in July 1848 the Mexican government arrested him on suspicion of being involved in a planned rebellion. The San Patricios were disbanded; one company was sent to Mexico City, the other ordered to remain in Guadalupe Hidalgo. The officers were now terrified that they too would be arrested, and the unit fell apart. The government dissolved the battalion shortly afterwards.
The existence of the Battalion of St Patrick had been short but significant. John Riley was later released, and he rejoined the Mexican army as an infantry officer. He was discharged in 1850 with the rank of major on disability pay, suffering from the effects of ill health, including a bout of yellow fever. There is no firm evidence pointing to what happened to him after his discharge. One writer suggested in 1999 in an English-language newspaper published in Mexico City that he had died a penniless drunk in Veracruz in 1850, based on a death certificate found in the city for a 45-year-old Irishman by the name of Juan Reley.12
Riley and the other members of the battalion who fought in the Mexican-American War continue to be honoured in the Plaza del Jacinto in the San Ángel district of Mexico City. The Irish ambassador in Mexico unveiled a bust of Reilly in 2010 to mark the bicentenary of Mexican independence and the centenary of the Mexican Revolution. Just across the road, marking the spot where the executions of the men took place, there is a plaque, which was unveiled in 1959. It reads, in translation: In memory of the Irish soldiers of the heroic St Patrick’s Battalion, martyrs who gave their lives for the cause of Mexico during the unjust North American invasion of 1847. There are 71 names on the plaque, though not all of these were executed. There are Irish names, including William O’Connor, Richard Hanly, Alexander McKee, Andrew Nolan, Patrick Dalton, Thomas Riley, Francis O’Connor, Peter Neil, Kerr Delaney, Harrison Kenny, John Sheehan, David McElroy, Patrick Casey, James McDonnell, Gibson McDowell, John McDonald, John Cavanagh, Thomas Cassidy, John Daly, James Kelly and John Murphy; but interspersed with these names are those of Henry Logenhamer, Henry Octker, Herman Schmidt and Parian Fritz, testifying to the fact that, though predominantly Irish, the San Patricios was a multinational battalion.