We could fill sheets v/ith extracts from the public jour- nals, giving mournful details of the ravages of disease in our Mexican army. Let the following from a southern paper, and an advocate for the war, suffice. " At Perote there were 2,G00 American graves, all victims of disease, and at the city of Mexico the deaths were most of the time 1,000 a- month. The first regiment that went out from Mississippi buried 155 men on the banks of the Rio * Speech of Mr. Giddings, Feb. 3, 1847. Cong. Globe, p. 405 t Cong. Globe, Dec. 80, 1847.
Grande before it went into battle, and finally brought back less than half of its number. Two regiments from Penn- sylvania went out 1,800 strong, and came home with about 600. Two regiments from Tennessee without being in any battle, lost 300 men. Capt. Naylor, of Penn- sylvania, took down a company of 104 men, and brought back 17. He went into the battle of Contreras with 33, and came out of it with 19. But the most frightful in- ' stance of mortality was in the Georgia battalion. It went to Mexico 419 strong ; about 230 actually died ; a large number were discharged with ruined constitutions, many of them doubtless gone long since to their graves, and thus the battalion was reduced to 34 men fit for duty ! On one parade when a certain company, once mustering more than 100 men, was called, the call vras answered by a single private, its only living representative. From offi- cers of many other regiments we have received details very similar to the above, which may be taken as a pretty fair average of the losses in the volunteer remments—the o o regulars did not sufi'er to the same extent."
Mr. Clay in a public speech, estimated the loss of our countrymen in the first eighteen months of the war as equal to one half the whole loss sustained in our seven years' revolutionary struggle !
Mr. Calhoun declared on the floor of Congress that the mortality of our troops could not be less than twenty per cent.