Earlier this year, Ronald S. Coddington, editor and publisher of Military Images magazine, used primary sources to tell the story of Col. Lew Wallace and his Indiana Zouaves gathering in State House Square in Indianapolis to receive their regimental flags. It’s a rare glimpse of the pageantry and naïveté of these young soldiers, eager to go off to a war unlike anything they had ever experienced.
When the 11th Indiana mustered for duty in Indianapolis, Wallace asked his men to raise their right hands and swear an oath to “Remember Buena Vista.” At the Battle of Buena Vista during the Mexican-American War, the Second Indiana Regiment bore the brunt of the early Mexican attacks. When its colonel ordered a retreat, the regiment
withdrew in disorder. Jefferson Davis, then colonel of the Mississippi Rifles and, in 1861, Provisional President of the Confederate States of America, played a prominent role in the counterattack that drove the Mexican army from the field. In the years that followed, many Hoosiers accused Davis of disparaging their courage after the battle.
They would soon have an opportunity to avenge that long-remembered insult.
Spirit of '61 