From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Home: The Case for the Exhumation, Identification, and Repatriation of the unidentified American fallen from the Mexico City Campaign
Amidst the bustling metropolis of modern Mexico City, lies a reminder of past conflict. From 1846 to 1848, Mexico and the United States fought the Mexican American War, a chapter in the history of the United States that is often overshadowed by the abundant literature and dramatization of the American Civil War. The Mexican War was the first conflict in the history of the United States in which a substantial number of service members perished from either combat or disease. According to the Defense Casualty Analysis System, while fewer than seven thousand service members died in the Revolutionary War and War of 1812 combined, the death toll for the United States in the Mexican War from all causes in all theaters stands at 13,283 (Defense Casualty Analysis System, 2020). Near the San Cosme garita, where the future President U.S. Grant would distinguish himself in its capture, lie the remains of approximately 750 U.S. Soldiers and Marines to whom we still owe a debt that has gone long forgotten.
The Mexico City National Cemetery is a United States owned and administered veteran’s cemetery wherein lie the remains of approximately 1500 U.S. veterans. The first 750 of these are those veterans who were buried in hastily dug graves at the conclusion of the Mexico City campaign in 1847 (Fox News, 2013). Due to the logistical constraints of the era, soldiers were not always returned to their homes after they fell, and many were simply buried on site. In an act of the 31st Congress approved on September 28, 1850, the Congress allocated ten thousand dollars “For purchasing, walling, and ditching a piece of land near the city cemetery near of Mexico, for a cemetery or burial-ground, for such of the officers and soldiers of our army, in our late war with Mexico, as fell in battle, or died in and around said city, and for the interment of American citizens who have died or may die in said city, to be expended under the direction of the President of the United States (U.S. Congress, 1850).
In 1851, once the land for the cemetery had been purchased from the Mexican government, the United States authorized an expedition to exhume the hastily buried soldiers from the surrounding fields and rebury them in graves in the newly founded cemetery. After four years of being interred, the forensic technology of the day was nowhere near capable of identifying the remains, and the original wooden markers had been destroyed or lost, so these soldiers remained unidentified. In a 2013 interview, Park Superintendent Hector de Jesus stated that the inability to identify the remains properly was the deciding factor in the decision to leave them in place (Fox News, 2013).
Since the day that the expedition to recover the remains of the fallen from Mexico City arrived to complete their task in 1851, the field of forensic science has grown and developed from virtual non-existence to being capable of achieving wonders that people in the 19th century could scarcely have imagined. We can hardly fault them for choosing to simply inter the fallen soldiers they could recover in a common vault and label them as “unknown”, as even the most basic tenants of osteological analysis and methodologies were as yet unknown to them. Gregor Mendel was still far from discovering the laws of inheritance, and so the ability to determine genetic relationships via our chromosomes would be quite alien to a people who had only just learned what a chromosome was and had not yet named it as such (Durmaz et. al., 2015). Isotopic analysis, a method which uses the bones and teeth of a deceased person to determine their region of origin, would be equally unfamiliar to a society that did not even have the periodic table as we know it (Aronsen et al., 2019, Price et al., 2019, Lehn et al., 2015). . It is quite impossible to understate the scientific achievement that has occurred since the start of the new millennium, much less the 19th century. With these new and incredible tools of discovery and deduction, it is now possible to do what we once thought impossible. In this case, that includes bringing identity to men who had long ago lost it to time, the elements, and the neglect of a society that was unsupportive of the cause for which it was lost. Especially with the rise of commercial enterprise in these fields, particularly genetics and artificial intelligence technologies, we have never been so capable to pay this long overdue gesture of honor and respect to these fallen service members.
Work on recovering and identifying remains from this era is not without precedent. On Wednesday, September 28, 2016, exactly 166 years to the day after Congress passed the bill allocating the funding for the Mexico City cemetery, the remains of up to 13 soldiers from the Battle of Monterrey arrived at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where the remains of all fallen U.S. service members from any conflict abroad are received. These remains were first discovered in 1996, and after five years of negotiations with the Mexican government, were returned to the United States in 2016. The remains were treated like any fallen soldier from more recent conflicts, given an honor guard and caskets draped by the American Flag. From there, the remains were taken to Middle Tennessee State University, where Dr. Hugh Berryman, Dr. Derek Frisby, and Dr. Shannon Hodge would analyze them with the hopes of making an identification. The remains were thought to be at least partially composed of Tennesseans based on the units that fought at Monterrey, thus the link between this battle and Middle Tennessee State University (Oppmann, 2016). The successful completion of this diplomatic effort proves that it is not all together inconceivable or beyond our reach, and that just as this team of scientists and anthropologists is working to identify the men of Monterrey, so too should we attempt to identify the men of Mexico City.
By lying as they do without a name, they are an affront to the 19th century sensibility of the Good Death, and what it meant to die and be remembered well. They fell thousands of miles from their home, away from their loved ones, and were not afforded the coffin or the individual grave that was considered the minimum standard of decency in the era.
There are many reasons why we, specifically as Americans, are morally obligated to attempt to repatriate the remains of these unknown fallen back to the United States. These men fell in an era of Jacksonian Individualism, where the prevailing ideology was that each man had value, that each man should go the way he saw fit and was rendered free to do so by the struggle of the American Revolution and the battles fought to keep that freedom since. Those feelings were put into timeless words by contemporary authors such as Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, who expressed more eloquently than this author ever could the intrinsic value of the unique human spirit, why it must be cherished and preserved, and why attempts to subdue it must be resisted.
In This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, Drew Gilpin Faust dedicates a chapter to describing the American practice of the “Good Death” and how it was shaken by the massive casualties incurred during the Civil War. Fundamental to this ritual was a sense of preparation for death, that the deceased knew death was coming, had resigned himself to this fate, and subsequently prepared his spirit accordingly. By lying as they do without a name, they are an affront to the 19th century sensibility of the Good Death, and what it meant to die and be remembered well. They fell thousands of miles from their home, away from their loved ones, and were not afforded the coffin or the individual grave that was considered the minimum standard of decency in the era. There was a disparity in the way officers and enlisted men were treated in life and in death, the former being afforded the luxury of a return home, the latter being left in the earth in anonymity. Such inequality suggests that the vast majority if not all the men buried in the vaults of Mexico City National Cemetery could be enlisted men, and their unequal treatment is hardly in the vein of Jacksonian democracy or the values we hold today.
While we may not ultimately be successful in identifying each individual, by undertaking this endeavor we will have done much to fulfill our duty as a nation to these men and, if nothing else, return them to the country for which they fought and died. This mission has no expiration date. Our duty to these men is sacred, our bond eternal.
The United States was founded on the importance of individual rights and individual freedoms, the idea that each person is inherently valuable and has something to contribute to our society, not merely as a nameless face as part of a larger collective. This idea was expanded in the period of Jacksonian Democracy that, amidst the vastly expanding nation undergoing dramatically change by the Industrial Revolution, emphasized the importance of the common person and our government’s duty to remember those who may not have the wealth or resources of the elite yet are every bit as valuable to the success of the nation (Meacham, 2008). We spare no efforts to recover the missing or recently fallen on the modern battlefield, even at the cost of additional lives lost. In a new era of Great Power competition in which the United States has yielded its title of the lone superpower and is quickly losing ground in technological superiority, the United States Armed Forces’ greatest comparative advantage relative to its adversaries is found in the quality and training of the individual servicemember. While this was certainly not the case in the Army of the 1840s, we can honor the men who served at that time by attempting to restore their individuality and grant them their individual burials, in their home states, that would be in keeping with the practice of the ars moriendi “the art of dying” and the “Good Death” that were so vital to mortuary tradition in their time. While we may not ultimately be successful in identifying each individual, by undertaking this endeavor we will have done much to fulfill our duty as a nation to these men and, if nothing else, return them to the country for which they fought and died. This mission has no expiration date. Our duty to these men is sacred, our bond eternal.
Brian Fiallo is an active duty Army Armor officer currently attending the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Citations
Aronsen, Gary P., et al. 2019 “‘The dead shall be raised’: Multidisciplinary analysis of human skeletons reveals complexity in 19th century immigrant socioeconomic history and identity in New Haven, Connecticut.” PLoS ONE, vol. 14, no. 9, 2019, p. e0219279
Bauer, K. Jack. 1974. The Mexican War, 1846-1848. Macmillan Publishing Co. New York City.
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Fox News. 2013 Cemetery in Mexico Holds Remains Of 750 U.S. Soldiers Killed During Mexican-American War. Retrieved July 01, 2020 from www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/cemetery-in-mexico-holds-remains-of-750-u-s-soldiers-killed-during-mexican-american-war
Lehn, Christine et al. 2015. Provenancing of unidentified corpses by stable isotope techniques – presentation of case studies. Science and Justice. Vol 55 (2015), p. 72-88.
Meacham, Jon. 2008. American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House. Random House, New York.
Oppmann, Andrew. 2016. MTSU Experts Will Study Mexican War Remains in U.S. [+VIDEO]. [online] MTSU News. Retrieved December 17, 2020 from http://mtsunews.com/mexican-war-remains-returned
Price, T. Douglas, et al. 2017 Multi-isotope proveniencing of human remains from a Bronze Age battlefield in the Tollense Valley in northeast Germany. Archaeological Anthropological Science (2019) 11:33–49.
Smith, Justin H. 1919 The War with Mexico. Macmillan Publishing Co. New York City.
U.S. Congress 1850. An Act making Appropriations for the Support of the Army for the Year ending the thirtieth of June, one thousand eight hundred and fifty-one. 31st Cong. (1850).