Cathey letter to home: Mexican War

Andrew Cathey died in the Mexican War 1846 to 1848.…no record has been found on the circumstances of his death or place of burial.

From Andy to his niece in North Carolina:

I am sorry for all

them that I left behind

the tears I have shed run down

in my eyes and make me blind.

Our almighty God,

he knows the point,

the very spot where

each of us shall fall

and who shall be

the earliest lot who

the cast off all

our journey here end.

You have just begun

 with many a friend

little way home from wigatism Federalist

where is the old Riogrande.

1847 Uncle Andy

In summary, Andy(age 21 ½) enlisted, fought and died in late 1847 or early 1848. Political turmoil raged in the US which hurt the American cause. Soldiers suffered diease, hardship,cold wet even in summer.

A freshman Congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln lashed out against the war, calling it immoral, proslavery, and a threat to the nation's republican values. In Congress, he proposed the so-called "Spot Resolution," demanding that President Polk identify the precise spot on which Mexicans had "shed American blood on American soil." One of Lincoln's constituents branded him "the Benedict Arnold of our district," and he was denied renomination by his own party.

As newspapers informed their readers about the hardships of life on the front, public enthusiasm for the war began to fade. The war did not turn out to be the romantic exploit that Americans envisioned. Troops complained that their food was "green with slime" and "acted as an instantaneous emetic." Diarrhea, amoebic dysentery, measles, and yellow fever ravaged American soldiers. Seven times as many Americans died of disease and exposure as died of battlefield injuries. Of the 90,000 Americans who served in the war, only 1,721 died in action. Another 11,155 died from disease and exposure to the elements.

Public support for the war was further eroded by reports of brutality against Mexican civilians. Newspaper reporters claimed that the chapparral was "strewn with the skeletons of Mexicans sacrificed" by American troops. After one of their members was murdered, the Arkansas volunteer cavalry surrounded a group of Mexican peasants and began an "indiscriminate and bloody massacre of the poor creatures." A young lieutenant named George G. Meade reported that volunteers in Matamoros robbed the citizens, stole their cattle, and killed innocent civilians "for no other object than their own amusement." If only a tenth of the horror stories were true, General Winfield Scott wrote, it was enough "to make Heaven weep, & every American of Christian morals blush for his country."

Dissent even made its way to the battlefield. A group of enlisted Irish-Catholic Americans, shocked by the desecration of Catholic churches, deserted to the Mexican side, formed the San Patricio Battalion, and fought against the American army. At Churubusco, 65 members of the battalion (which also consisted of foreign nationals resident in Mexico) were captured. Fifty were executed and 11 others were punished with fifty lashes apiece and the letter D (for deserter) branded on their cheeks.

A young essayist and poet named Henry David Thoreau staged the best known act of protest against the Mexican war. On July 23, 1846, the constable of Concord, Massachusetts, arrested the Transcendentalist poet for failure to pay the state poll tax (a head tax on male citizens between the ages of 21 and 70). The constable actually offered to pay the tax if Thoreau was short of money, but Thoreau insisted that he refused to pay on principle, as a protest against his country's involvement in the Mexican War. The constable then placed Thoreau in the local jail. Thoreau spent only a single night in jail because his tax was paid, much to his disgust, by one of his relatives.

In response to his arrest Thoreau wrote an essay that became a source of inspiration for Leo Tolstoi, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Thoreau entitled his essay "Civil Disobedience." In it he declared that if all citizens who opposed the Mexican War followed his example and went to jail for their beliefs, the government could be forced to end the conflict. It was the duty of every individual to protest a government policy, even though it had been adopted with majority consent, when it conflicted with moral law. "Any man more right than his neighbor," he wrote, "constitutes a majority of one."

So how should an individual protest a moral wrong? Here Thoreau was at his most creative. He described a type of disobedience that disrupted the everyday workings of society and dramatized the moral issues at stake, without resorting to violence. Individual acts of protest, he argued, would awaken the conscience of those people whose consciences could still be stirred.

Out of Thoreau's jailing grew a legend. Ralph Waldo Emerson, America's greatest philosopher, visited Thoreau in jail. Emerson asked, "Henry, why are you here?" Thoreau replied, "Why are you not here?"

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In a fantasy we hide what we need. We imagine what would nuture us, excite, and make us feel good. we fantasize to compensate for what we missing in our life. Fantasies do not satisfy....because we do not have to change. If we have fantasies we need not change.
they give us relief...but the real relief is is about giving and recieving our needs.
 
I only escaped from one illusion to another. I refuse to escape to another.