The Aztec Club of 1847

Americans and their Clubs

Americans love clubs. Alexis de Tocqueville observed such during his travels through America in the 1830s when he spoke of how Americans were always founding societies for any and every purpose. This was an observation that came from a different era: the era of town meetings, parish communities, good feelings, faith-based civic life, all the fibers of the “Moral and Religious people,” which John Adams declared was the only kind of people for which the Constitution was written.  

In this we can find the strain of medievalism that survived in the United States when Absolutism and the Enlightenment brought about its end in Europe. A people moved purely by passionate faith perpetually creating and re-creating Guild-like structures for any and every purpose under the sun has something distinctly Middle Ages about it. While the morals have burned away, along with most of the religion, the civic habits have remained hard-coded into our culture.

This returns us to our original assertion– Americans love clubs, clubs of any kind, really: Varsity sports, branches of military service, our alma maters, our college fraternities, our careers, the Masons, the KOC, Lions, Ruritans, our religious confessions, party affiliations, sports teams we support, our home states, home counties, home towns, neighborhoods and boroughs, brands we’ll buy out of loyalty, and hereditary societies. Americans love clubs. Whether it’s the Comus Ball in New Orleans or the New York Metropolitan Opera, we all desire something that makes us separate from our fellow “Free men made equal in the eyes of God and under the law.”

This follows from our founding. In many ways, the United States was founded by a group of men who generally inhabited the same clubs: Be it the Masons, the Leather Aprons, the Sons of Liberty, the Mechanics, and eventually the Continental Congress. Upon the end of the Revolution, the Officers of the Continental Army immediately organized a society exclusively dedicated to them and their descendants: the Society of the Cincinnati, which quickly became the most prestigious society in the Union.

Indeed, membership in such was so exclusive in the early Republic that even the original members’ descendants, including sons and grandsons, had trouble achieving entry. Perhaps that’s why upon General Winfield Scott’s triumphant entry into Mexico City following the surrender of Santa Anna at Chapultepec, a group of young officers organized the “Aztec Club of 1847,” in emulation of their ancestors in military triumph.

The Mexican War is oft overlooked in American history, never mentioned without mentioning the Civil War in the same breath. Indeed, were one to read a roster of the officers that served, they’d find a who’s-who of near every major figure in American politics for the next quarter-century. Yet its importance, at least in the author’s humble opinion, is more relevant to our current times than the war that followed it (and not just because the GOP recently proposed military intervention in Mexico.)

The Mexican War was the first time the world saw what the United States is truly capable of when the whole country is acting in concert towards the achieving of a single objective. This objective was not just the achieving of the Polk Administration’s policy goal of expansion to the Pacific, rather, it was the double-barreled spreading of Democracy and its twin, Protestant Christianity, to the world by pen and sword.

This objective was also the inspiration behind that fraternity of triumphant young West Pointers who’d just had their first taste of military glory and triumph in founding their own Society of the Cincinnati. They called it the, “Aztec Club of 1847,” made up of regular army officers who’d served under General Winfield Scott (a member of the Cincinnati) from Veracruz to Chapultepec. In real terms it’s one of the most important societies in American history if one glanced at its membership.

Two of its number, Franklin Pierce and Ulysses S. Grant, would be elected President of the United States. Dozens became Congressmen, Generals, and Ministers of all sorts. It’s funny when one considers that it was founded as a glorified drinking club for the triumphant officer corps during their occupation of Mexico City.

And yet, not two decades after the foundation of the club, which counted George McClellan, John Magruder, Winfield Hancock, and Simon Buckner amongst its membership, the aforementioned members set to destroying each other on the field of battle. Surely, one would expect an elite such as this to pursue each other’s interests (which they very much did, both before and after those four damned years between ’61 and ’65,) to advance each other, support each other, and generally keep themselves separate from everyone else due to their merited membership in a club they themselves founded?

Americans love clubs. But they especially love old clubs. The older the club, the more glorious. Perhaps it’s a Pagan sentiment, the worship of a thing due entirely to its age, yet its occurrence is not likely to fade away with the fiber of moral character that necessitates our Constitution. The Aztec Club was a great club, yes. But the clubs of North and South, those clubs are older. Even as both draped themselves with a cause, with a colored rag of a flag to tell everyone what they were really fighting for, they were just clubs.

When our clubs come into conflict, the oldest club we were given entry to is likely the one that will triumph. Such is the way of Americans. Boy do we love our clubs. And from where this author is standing, America herself seems like the only club we have left.