A Fighter from Way Back: The Mexican War Diary of Lt. Daniel Harvey Hill, 4th Artillery, USA

Abstract

A Fighter from Way Back: Mexican War Diary of Lt. Daniel Harvey Hill, 4th Artillery, USA. Edited by Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr. and Timothy D. Johnson. (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2002. Pp. ix, 370. Maps, illustrations. Cloth, $39.00.)Historians of Mexican-American War often have employed Daniel Harvey's Hill's letters on The Army in to discuss conditions in American Army of Occupation in camp at Corpus Christi and on march to Matamoros from July 1845 to April 1846. In particular, these letters often have been used as evidence of logistical difficulties facing U. S. forces during War with Mexico. Hill, more widely famous as a Confederate general, was an irritable man, and his impatience led him to pessimism and acerbic judgments on all he encountered. In this diary, kept from Hill's departure for South Texas in May 1846 until his departure from Veracruz in March 1848, young West Pointer turned his intellect on everything he saw, usually critically. His dismissive views of Mexico-its politics, economy, religion, and inhabitants-were representative of most U. S. observers, and Hill's chauvinism, combined with Mexican poverty, led to increasingly negative judgments as war went on. Indeed, Hill began to label potential effect of U. S. victories on Mexico providential, another reaction common among invaders, for whom cultural contact did not inspire amity. Many Americans were awed by Mexican landscape, enjoyed Mexican food and companionship of Mexican women, and showed great curiosity during early months of their time in Mexico, but many reacted like Hill, either because they encountered Mexican antagonism more frequently or because they increasingly noted dark skins and poverty of Indian and mestizo inhabitants rather than light skins and wealth of Mexican elite on whom they initially focused their observations.Hill criticized all his superiors, and, most bitterly and even more often volunteers and new regiments raised for Regular Army, which he singled out as worthless raw levy (149-50). This antipathy was partly a function of Hill's West Point education and his consequent valuation of professional expertise, partly due to his antipathy to partisan politics (the basis for most of officer appointments in new regiments), and most of all due to volunteers' lack of discipline, which Hill found objectionable both practically and morally. (A quest for professional expertise and antipathy to partisanship also lay behind Hill's criticism of army's supply effort, criticism ultimately directed at civilian secretary of war rather than uniformed supply bureaus.) Indeed, Hill's diary reads as a sustained indictment of volunteers, for endemic indiscipline and pandemic violence against civilians, providing literally dozens of references to volunteer atrocities. (Regular soldiers, under often atrocious discipline themselves, rarely committed such acts, fearing lash and other tortures their officers inflicted.) In a rare moment of humor, Hill observed, the whole Regiment of 3d Dragoons (one of new regiments authorized for duration of war) is not worth three tacos (179).Hill made a number of insightful comments on army's morale, especially in moments before battle, though he referred only briefly to his own expectations on eve of battle. …