As dawn broke on the morning of September 13, 1847, a group of men stood on hastily erected gallows, nooses secured around their necks. In the distance, they watched as the relentless artillery bombardment rained down on Mexican troops at Chapultepec Castle, home to a military academy and site of the penultimate major battle in the war between Mexico and the United States. In the days prior, other members of their battalion had been publicly whipped, branded and hanged; theirs was to be yet another grisly spectacle of revenge. The last thing they witnessed was U.S. soldiers storming the desperately guarded structure on the horizon. The American colonel overseeing their execution pointed at the castle, reminding the men that their lives would extend only as long as it took for their death to come at the most humiliating moment possible. As the U.S. flag was raised at approximately 9:30 a.m., the condemned men were “launched into eternity,” as newspapers would later relay to readers in the United States.
The men who died that day were not ordinary enemy fighters. They were captured soldiers from El Batallón de San Patricio, or the Saint Patrick’s Battalion, who had fought fiercely in the Battle of Churubusco just weeks earlier. Many were Irish immigrants who had come to the United States to escape economic hardship, but found themselves fighting in the Mexican-American War against their adopted country. The conflict pitted many Catholic immigrants to America against a largely Catholic Mexico and these soldiers had switched sides, joining Mexican forces in the fight against the United States. They were, for the most, part die-hard believers in the cause around which they had coalesced—defending Mexico—until those very last moments on that September morning. Though they were on the losing side of the war, their actions are still celebrated in Mexico today, where they are viewed as heroes.
John Riley, an Irish immigrant who once trained West Point cadets in artillery, was the founding member, along with a handful of others who would later join him, of the San Patricios. When U.S. troops had arrived in Texas during the spring of 1846 ahead of a formal declaration of war, he crossed his own proverbial Rubicon—the Rio Grande River—and offered his services to the Mexican military.