Volume 90, Number 1 - California Historical Society

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6 A portrait of Alfred Sully as a young lieutenant during the Mexican War (1846–48) was featured in this 1914 article in the New York Times, along with drawings he made during that conflict and an excerpt from a letter he wrote describing the American assault on Veracruz in 1847. Identified here as the son of the renowned painter Thomas Sully, Alfred became newsworthy in his own right at a time when public attention was focused on “the present trouble in Mexico”—the article’s reference to the Mexican Revolution, which erupted in 1910 and led to American military intervention in that country. The New York Times, May 3, 1914 California History • volume 90 number 1 2012
fate, wealthy Californios fell back on the custom of accommodating respectable Americans and trying to win them over. For their part, Sully and other officers welcomed those overtures and found interacting with their Hispanic hosts enjoyable and instructive. Sully would follow the example of earlier American captains and traders by entering this hospitable society through marriage. But his union would end tragically, and he bore some responsibility for setting that tragedy in motion. Although he had more in common with the appreciative maritime visitors who courted Californios in earlier times than with the defiant overlanders who spurned them, he came into California as a conqueror, and his marriage amounted to a personal conquest, which he achieved by imposing on those over whom he had authority. This ill-fated marriage was the first of three such relationships Sully entered into during his military career, all of them with women from groups subsumed forcefully within the expansive nation he served. Professionally and personally, he wrestled with the contradictions inherent in Jefferson’s goal of an empire for liberty—a problematic objective that could not be pursued without taking liberties in the process. hoSting the oCCupierS Soon after landing in Monterey, Sully made the acquaintance of Angustias de la Guerra, whose Spanish-born father, José de la Guerra y Noriega, had commanded the presidio at Santa Barbara and whose husband, Manuel Jimeno Casarín, had served as an official in Monterey before American forces occupied the town in 1846. She had long and close ties to Anglos. Among her in-laws were the American merchant Alfred Robinson and the English trader William Hartnell, both of whom had become Catholics and Mexican citizens before entering her family. Annexation by the United States, she concluded, was a Professionally and personally, he wrestled with the contradictions inherent in Jefferson’s goal of an empire for liberty—a problematic objective that could not be pursued without taking liberties in the process. better fate for California than continuing “on the road to utter ruin” under a poor and politically unstable Mexico. American forces took Monterey unopposed, and she and other prominent residents saw no reason to spurn polite American officers such as Lieutenant Edward Ord, brother of Dr. James Ord, an army physician whom she married following the death of Jimeno. In her wartime diary, she referred to Edward Ord fondly as “Don Eduardo,” observing that “he looks like one of us. He is very charming and dances divinely.” But her friendship with him and other American officers did not ease her fears that this new regime might bring wrenching changes to her country. “Putting the laughter and dancing aside,” she wrote, “we are all ill at ease because we do not know how we, the owners of all this, will end up! May God be with us!” 4 7
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Volume 90, Number 1 - California Historical Society

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