Historians of the Mexican war have talked easily about 'the people' and 'public opinion'... evidence, however, is not from 'the people' but from the newspapers, claiming to be the voice of the people. The New York Herald wrote in August 1845: 'The multitude cry aloud for war.' And the New York Journal of Commerce, half-playfully, half-seriously, wrote: 'Let us go to war. The world has become stale and insipid, the ships ought to be all captured, and the cities battered down, and the world burned up, so that we can start again. There would be fun in that. Some interest,-something to talk about.' The New York Morning News said 'young and ardent spirits that throng the cities . . . want but a direction to their restless energies, and their attention is already fixed on Mexico.'"

This initial spirit soon wore off...

...As the soldiers moved up the Rio Grande to Camargo, the heat became unbearable, the water impure, and sickness grew-diarrhea, dysentery, and other maladies-until a thousand were dead. At first the dead were buried to the sounds of the "Dead March" played by a military hand. Then the number of dead was too great, and formal military funerals ceased...

...Desertion grew. In March 1847 the army reported over a thousand deserters. The total number of deserters during the war was 9,207: 5,331 regulars, 3,876 volunteers. Those who did not desert became harder and harder to manage. General Gushing referred to sixty-five such men in the 1st Regiment of the Massachusetts Infantry as 'incorrigibly mutinous and insubordinate.'

The glory of the victory was for the President and the generals, not the deserters, the dead, the wounded...John Calhoun of South Carolina said in Congress that 20 percent of the troops had died of battle or sickness. The Massachusetts Volunteers had started with 630 men. They came home with three hundred dead, mostly from disease, and at the reception dinner on their return their commander, General Gushing, was hissed by his men. The Cambridge Chronicle wrote: 'Charges of the most serious nature against one and all of these military officials drop daily from the lips of the volunteers.'

As the veterans returned home, speculators immediately showed up to buy the land warrants given by the government. Many of the soldiers, desperate for money, sold their 160 acres for less than $50. The New York Commercial Advertiser said in June 1847: 'It is a well-known fact that immense fortunes were made out of the poor soldiers who shed their blood in the revolutionary war by speculators who preyed upon their distresses. A similar system of depredation was practised upon the soldiers of the last war.'"