The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1846 – 1848
The county sent no company to Mexico, and its historian tells why: "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." In place of a company, Howard prints the names of the county's individual soldiers as the whole of its record: 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 men. Several of them served again in the Union army; Blowney attained the rank of major in the Civil War. Howard's aside travels with him in the county's memory: Blowney was the South Bend sign painter who employed the young James Whitcomb Riley. The Mexican War's thinness here is itself the documented fact — the same county that could not raise a company in 1846 sent its first company out within four days of Sumter in 1861.
Sources:
- Howard, History of St. Joseph County (1907), vol. 2, military chapter — the Whig and abolitionist explanation, the thirteen names, Blowney's later service and the Riley aside.