The following is the preface of my upcoming and groundbreaking work on Winfield Scott’s 1847 Mexico City campaign, slated to be published soon by McFarland Books:

The US-Mexican War (1846–48) was America’s first major foreign war and the most important campaign in that conflict was General Winfield Scott’s 1847 effort to seize Mexico City. It was a daring and bold project that involved landing soldiers and supplies at the coastal city of Veracruz, and marching a limited number of men 250 miles into the interior in hostile territory. Outnumbered three-to-one, and never amounting to over 10,000 soldiers, Scott’s army engaged the Mexicans in one major siege, and four major battles – three of which took place in and around Mexico City. Since the war’s conclusion, which granted the United States large swaths of relatively unpopulated territory in what is today the American Southwest, historians have tried to explain how exactly Scott was able to do what he did.

The origins of this work stem from my doctoral studies at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain, which began in 2018. My dissertation there addressed how the Napoleonic war in Spain, otherwise known as the Peninsular War (1808–14), informed the US Army’s novel population-centric strategy designed to mitigate insurgency during the Mexican-American War (1846–48). The inspiration for that study was Timothy D. Johnson’s 1999 appearance on C-SPAN’s Book TV series, where the historian discussed his recent biography of General Winfield Scott, the commander of the campaign to seize the Mexican capital. Johnson suggested that future scholars might delve into the connections between the two wars, and I took him up on that offer. Similarly, at an earlier period in my undergraduate studies, I was influenced by Robert W. Johannsen’s seminal work, To the Halls of the Montezumas, which highlights the social history of the Mexican conflict in America and how the country’s first foreign war inspired a generation in a myriad of ways. The result of my PhD studies, which blended social and operational histories, was ultimately published into a more concise book, with Henry Halleck playing a prominent (albeit overlooked) role in helping Scott formulate a successful plan of action in central Mexico.         

When I defended my dissertation, the president of my doctoral committee, William Fowler, of the University of St. Andrews, known for his biography of Mexican general and statesman Antonio López de Santa Anna, among other works on nineteenth-century Mexican history, asked me a question that has remained on my mind: “Were the Americans simply lucky?” It was a good question, and the short answer was ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ However, rather than defend the American officers who meticulously planned the Mexico City campaign, I conceded that indeed luck played a role, without articulating exactly how. Delayed for a number of years, this work is a response to that question, and it is my hope that Professor Fowler is satisfied with the answer. Explained in this heretofore untold nexus between Mexican history and the American conquest, a pivotal aspect to understanding why they achieved what they did with such a small army is found in the lack of resistance to U.S. forces in Puebla. Had Puebla resisted the American invasion – the more than halfway point between the coast where Scott’s army spent a number of months – it would have been extremely difficult to proceed further afield. As the reader will discover, Mexican history, as distorted as it was at the time, has something profound to say about this.

It is not my intention to litigate Mexican ethnohistory or the sixteenth century conquest, which is a fiercely debated field of its own, but simply to declare that that epoch – as skewed as it was by Spanish, American, and Mexican writers – influenced public perception of the campaign, how American officers formulated the U.S. Army’s strategy using Puebla, and how American soldiers viewed the conflict. In other words, while the Napoleonic occupation of Spain acted as a negative template for the U.S. Army’s efforts to reduce the potential of an insurgency or uprising, which I have demonstrated in other works, Mexico’s history provided insight into the social landscape and the important relationship between the capital and periphery. Time and time again, history has shown how ruling classes in capitals perilously overestimate their support among populations resentful of paying tribute and taxes. Here Puebla has much to say, and even the oft celebrated but little understood Cinco de Mayo holiday factors into this analysis because it demonstrates that Puebla was indeed capable of defending itself, but chose not to.

And why [Raphael] Semmes? I discovered Semmes’s autobiography while writing another work detailing the U.S. Navy’s effort in the war and American ambitions in Yucatán, Tabasco, and Central America. Semmes’s observations of Mexico, like others written by war veterans during the antebellum period, was enlightening as well as entertaining – particularly his search for Midshipman Rogers amidst Scott’s campaign. He had a story to tell, but more importantly, I discovered that Semmes, like many of his counterparts, was influenced to a large degree by William H. Prescott’s popular 1843 History of the Conquest of Mexico – which chronicled the downfall of the Aztec Empire at the hands of a small but determined band of Spanish conquistadors under Hernán Cortés between 1519 and 1521. The conquest is indeed a true story, retold by an American with all the romantic trappings and embellishments reflective of the era, and from a man who ultimately opposed the war even though his work aided the American victory. Moreover, due to the similarities between campaigns separated by more than three centuries, contemporary comparisons abounded, blending myth and legend in an epic example of how history often repeats itself – or at least rhymes.

In relation to this historical confluence, I have built upon the historian Richard L. Kagan’s previous work, and unearthed an overlooked but significant aspect of the war that I explain in the third chapter amounts to a ‘paradigm within a paradigm.’ Furthermore, unlike previous histories, this work also demonstrates that Mexicans viewed the U.S. Army’s campaign from a related perspective – which did nothing to increase their confidence despite the fact that they greatly outnumbered their enemy. In this regard, Cortés was better enabled by thousands of indigenous allies, namely the Tlaxcalans, while Scott’s victory was achieved on the battlefield and in his ability to placate a large segment of disinterested Mexicans after years of internal division.

Many years ago, while my wife and I spent a week enjoying Puebla on a six-week journey through Mexico, we took a day trip to Cholula. Located just outside of Puebla, Cholula is famous for being the site of the Great Pyramid – long known in Náhuatl as Tlachihualtépetl, or ‘man’s (made) mountain.’ Often overshadowed by its more well-known cousins in history and reference: the Aztec Empire’s capital Tenochtitlán, where Mexico City now lays, and Teotihuacán, where the Pyramid of the Sun is found, the Great Pyramid of Cholula is the largest ancient pyramid temple by volume on the planet – larger even than the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. Sitting atop its peak, where Toltecs, Chichimecas, and Tlaxcalans once performed their ceremonies, is the modest church of Our Lady of Remedies (Nuestra Señora de los Remedios) – a perch that allows a stunning view over the plains below. We did not know it at the time, but Semmes and some officers galloped their horses up the long road winding around the pyramid, and may not have realized its true size because much of it lay beneath the earth, as it had for centuries, and was not excavated until years later. He did know, however, due to having read Prescott and others, who in turn read the sixteenth-century chronicles of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who accompanied Cortés, that it played a part in the conquest of Mexico, just as it had in 1847.

Were the Americans simply lucky? They were lucky in that there existed a formula that could be crafted to achieve victory – a road map reliant on a set of circumstances and phenomenon unrepeatable in other lands and social landscapes because each country has its own unique past that informs its present. They were lucky that such disunity existed and were advantaged by studying it. Thus the adage often attributed to Thomas Jefferson applies: “I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.” That much could be said of the small U.S. force in the heart of Mexico. When the storm of war arrives, however, no amount of hard work, experience, or tenacity, guarantees victory.