Battle of Resaca de la Palma

The Battle of Resaca de la Palma is remembered as both a test of Jefferson Kyle Kidd’s wartime communications work and a close encounter with battlefield violence. A cannonball shattered a table only three feet from him, while the fighting around him turned from danger to a breach of the enemy lines and the taking of spoils.

Communications and Command

Before the battle, Kidd had been drawn into Zachary Taylor’s forces to organize communications. His task was practical: arrange couriers and secure the paper, ink, and horses needed to carry orders. Taylor made him a brevet captain in the Second Division, with Kidd’s earlier service in the War of 1812 cited in support of the rank. The appointment gave him a place in the military organization, but his work remained bound to the movement of information and supplies.

The Cannonball

At Resaca de la Palma, one of José Mariano Martín Buenaventura Ignacio Nepomuceno García de Arista Nuez’s twelve-pound cannonballs passed through the staff tent and broke a table into fragments. Kidd was only three feet away. The blast sent the oil from the lamps into large transparent dots on the canvas. A major was left motionless with a splinter of table lodged through his neck; he complained that his collar was too tight, fainted, and, against expectation, survived. The scene places the major’s narrow survival beside Kidd’s own proximity to the impact, making the shattered furniture a measure of how little separated ordinary work in the tent from lethal force.

Breach and Spoils

The battle did not end with the cannonball’s passage. Kidd heard the alarm and watched men crash through the opposing lines, then return cheering with what they had taken: the Mexican general’s table silver and writing desk, along with the colors of the Tampico Battalion. The movement from assault to loot gives the victory a blunt, sardonic aftermath. The account treats the seizure of enemy property as an expected part of military success, setting the orderly business of dispatches against the disorder and appropriation that follow a breach.