Customer Reviews

Army of Manifest Destiny: The American Soldier in the Mexican War, 1846-1848 (American Social Experience)

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I was doing genological research and wanted to understand better what the folks who were involved in the Mexican War were thinking, why they fought, where they came from, etc. This book did that and more. It is incredible to read the very words of these soldiers--it makes you realize that there is very little difference between our us and our ancestors. No one can explain it better than their own words.

This book was good more for its subject (and the necessity of writing a book about it) than any brilliance on the author's part. In fact, when the author states that he only wrote this book because he was an actor in a 1980's TV show about the Civil War and was curious about the Mexican-American War experience, his lack of credentials showed. This book's writing style feels amateurish, and does nothing to pull the reader in. Instead of giving the reader a full view into the mindset of an American soldier in the 1840's in Mexico, the author distances himself greatly from the soldiers' minds by constantly complaining how racist and ethnocentric they were. This is typical apologetic garbage from the 1990's, not objective scholarship. For one thing, I doubt the soldiers would have called themselves "racist," and it would have done the author a great service to try to understand WHY the soldiers had such low opinions of Mexicans (perhaps because of their voluntarily low standards of living, acquiescence to a corrupt government and a church of loose morals, lack of technological and economic progress, etc). Adding an understanding that most of the soldiers had never gone more than a dozen miles beyond their homes until they joined the army would have helped that understanding as well.

There is no discussion in this book about the equipment of the soldiers, whether regular or volunteer. There is no mention of the types of uniforms that the volunteers chose for their units. The author repeats himself for no apparent reason several times in this book, not only to complain about racism but to say that the soldiers would overcome this racism in order to get with Mexican women. This is another point where the author seems ignorant of facts: American men before the Civil War regularly had children with black slaves despite being fiercely racist, so why should Mexicans be treated any differently? He states that some American soldiers and Mexican women got married, but fails to mention any specific examples and how their marriages turned out personally.

All in all, I only liked this book because of its topic. I feel better informed about crime and punishment in the U.S. Army on campaign in Mexico, and about the deserters that joined the Mexican Army, but other than that I feel I would be much better served by bypassing this author and reading the primary sources myself. With that in mind, the author has supplied an extensive list of sources in the end of the book, which I will be researching now.