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The Thornton Affair, also known as the Thornton Skirmish, Thornton's Defeat, or Rancho Carricitos, [2] was a battle in 1846 between the military forces of the United States and Mexico 20 miles (32 km) west upriver from Zachary Taylor's camp along the Rio Grande.
The Battle of Resaca de la Palma was one of the early engagements of the Mexican–American War, where the United States Army under General Zachary Taylor engaged the retreating forces of the Mexican Ejército del Norte ("Army of the North") under General Mariano Arista on May 9, 1846.
The location where the initial bloodshed (known as the Thornton Affair) occurred in April 1846 is located in present-day Cameron County, Texas, just north of the Rio Grande which represented the American claim for Texas's boundary with Mexico (as well as the current international border).
On April 25, 1846, a 2,000-man Mexican cavalry detachment attacked a 70-man U.S. patrol commanded by Captain Seth Thornton, which had been sent into the contested territory north of the Rio Grande and south of the Nueces River. In the Thornton Affair, the Mexican cavalry routed the patrol, killing 11 American soldiers and capturing 52. [12]
The Mexican War overview map. The Mexican–American War began after Thornton's Defeat in 1846. This same year a battalion of Mormon men was recruited by the United States Army in western Iowa and dispatched with General Steven Watts Kearny's "Army of the West" across what they considered the "Great Western Desert".
After the Thornton Affair of 25–26 April, when Mexican forces attacked an American unit in the disputed area, with the result that 11 Americans were killed, five wounded, and 49 captured, Congress passed a declaration of war, which Polk signed on 13 May 1846. The Mexican Congress responded with its own war declaration on 23 April 1846.
On May 13, 1846, the United States Congress passed An Act providing for the Prosecution of the existing War between the United States and the Republic of Mexico, thereby declaring war against Mexico. The declaration resulted in the Mexican–American War (1846–48). The act laid out regulations for the size and organization of the militia to ...
President James K. Polk directed U.S. foreign policy from 1845 to 1849. The history of U.S. foreign policy from 1829 to 1861 concerns the foreign policy of the United States during the presidential administrations of Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan.