Mexican Lancer’s Guidon
Cotton, pigment
1846-1847
Gift of William Clark Kennerly
MHS Collections
1984 083 0001
“The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name - liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names - liberty and tyranny.
--Abraham Lincoln
Address at Sanitary Fair, Baltimore, Maryland, April 18, 1864
The Mexican Army carried this hand-painted flag into battle at El Brazito and Sacramento during the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). The ghastly image of the skulls and crossbones on the front is accompanied by the motto Libertad o Muerte—Liberty or Death—on the back. It is thought that this flag was captured at Sacramento by the light artillery of Battery A, Missouri Volunteers, commanded by Major Meriwether Lewis Clark, who returned to St. Louis with it. Clark was a son of the western explorer William Clark.
When the Mexican Army flew this flag proclaiming death in the absence of liberty, they most likely meant freedom from both U.S. intervention into Mexican territory and American slavery. When the Americans acquired the banner, however, they applied its phrase and emblem to their cause of Manifest Destiny (which for some meant the extension of slavery into western territories). The story accompanying this flag, as it changed hands from Mexican to American, illustrates Lincoln’s understanding that two opposing sides often both lay claim to the same ideal.
Organized by the Virginia Historical
Society with additional support from the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter
Foundation and the
Lettie Pate Whitehead Evans Changing Exhibitions Fund, American. Support
in St. Louis is provided by The Stanley and Lucy Lopata Foundation
This exhibition has been made possible in part
by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Great Ideas Brought to Life.
