Page:The War with Mexico, Vol 2.djvu/234

216 reports; and the disposition to view us with cordiality received a shock from which it never recovered. "People near Matamoros, previously inclined to favor the Americans," declared the comandante general of Nuevo León in a broadside, "have written these weighty words: 'The domination of the Grand Turk is kinder than that of the Americans. Their motto is deceit. Their love is like the robber's. Their goodness is usurpation; and their boasted liberty is the grossest despotism, iniquity and insolence, disguised under the most consummate hypocrisy.'" As an offset, the bad conduct of Mexican officers and troops did not signify. That was a family affair.

The blackest shadow in the picture, however, was New Mexico. Armijo had compensated the people for his tyranny and robbery by permitting them every sort of license in their social relations. Virtue was little known and less valued. Even women fought duels with dirks or butcher-knives. Dances, at which all classes mingled in the revelry, were the chief amusements; the church bells announced them; and at mass one heard the same music, played by the same musicians. Gambling and cock-fighting stood next in esteem, perhaps; and then came other vices that seemed more precisely necessities than ornaments of existence.

To throw into a small and isolated community of that sort, without books or society or proper diversions, a large number of young and reckless frontiersmen greatly above the average in physical vigor, was to make it a seething caldron of gross passions. The soldiers were not willing to do what little work there was, and they scorned regulations. "The dirtiest, rowdiest crew I have ever seen collected together," was a responsible British traveller's description of the American forces; and a soldier wrote in his diary, "A more drunken and depraved set, I am sure, can never be found." To be liked, an officer had to be lax, and to be unpopular was liable to mean — as good officers learned — a pistol or a sabre in one's face. Half the captains, a letter said, could be found every night in bad places. The disorder of the governor's Christmas dinner party disturbed the whole town. There was probably no deliberate oppression. Gross outrages appear to have been few. But the drunken, brawling, overbearing volunteers despised the men about them and showed it; and the latter,