The Mexican War: a Whig county, thirteen named men, and one who never came home

1846 – 1848

The county's war, at Howard's strength: "St. Joseph county was scarcely better, if as well, represented in the Mexican war. The majority of the inhabitants were Whigs; and there were besides many influential citizens of abolition proclivities. The Mexican war was therefore not looked upon with any great degree of enthusiasm." Howard names the county's few: Henry J. Blowney, John H. Fisher, George F. Frank, Hugh L. Hinds, Edwin T. Lucado, John Owen, John Pendl, Moses Peltier, John B. Raymond, Albert Steinbeck, William S. Saunders, Eugene N. B. Sweetland and Frank X. Vilare — thirteen. Blowney's is the course that runs on: he enlisted in Company I, 2nd Illinois Volunteer Infantry, served through the Mexican campaign and was four times wounded, and came back to be major of the 29th Indiana in the Civil War. None of the thirteen is placed in Clay or Harris township.

This ground's claim, at family-record strength: Joseph Belledin, a Rhinelander who brought his family to this county about 1839–40 and settled on the Kankakee river west of South Bend, "at the time of the Mexican war offered his services to his country, and was never heard from after the close of that conflict." That is the whole of it — one clause in his son's biography, written sixty years later. Belledin is not among Howard's thirteen; no roster reached carries him; and the family's ground, on the Kankakee, lay west of South Bend rather than in either of this section's townships. He is printed because his son John Belledin — whose Civil War course stands below — made his farm in Clay Township and carried the pension and the memory there for forty years; the father's loss is the family's war inheritance on this ground, printed as the family record it is. The settling source for the service itself is Indiana's record of its Mexican War volunteers, where a St. Joseph County man's name would stand if his service was the state's.

Sources:

1. Howard (1907), vol. 1, "Other Early Wars" — the county's Mexican War frame and the thirteen names; the Blowney notice in vol. 2.
2. Howard (1907), vol. 2 — the John Belledin sketch, for Joseph Belledin.