On this day in 1847, the first of several courts martial for desertion and treason commenced in Tacubaya, Mexico. On trial were Irish Catholic deserters from the U.S. Army whom Mexican Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna had formed the year before as the San Patricio Battalion.
All but two of the seventy-two deserters were sentenced to die on the gallows. But after a trial review, only fifty wound up dancing on the rope. There’s a good book on the battalion, its fighting during the U.S.-Mexican War and its fate. And how after the war was over, its ranks swelled with new deserters whose politics eventually became too much for the Mexicans to bear.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 