FROM PALO ALTO, TO MEXICO CITY, 2 PRESIDENTS' DEATHBEDS

By Juan Montoya 

On the hot South Texas morning of May 8, 1846, as Zachary Taylor's 2,288 Army of Occupation marched across the plain of Palo Alto – about five miles north of present-day Brownsville – unit surgeon Joseph K. Barnes and his assistants brought up the rear as the Americans squared off against Gen. Mariano Arista's 3,709-strong Mexico's Army of the North. 

Before the day was over, Barnes and his assistants tended to the nine Americans killed and the 47 wounded in the first battle of the Mexican-American War. Then-Lt. Ulysses S. Grant in his memoirs wrote about the futile shots of the Mexican artillery and dodged the solid ball shots as they bounced along the grassy plain.

But at least one of them struck Samuel Ringgold as he directed his "flying artillery" which is given the credit for winning the day for the Americans who killed 102 Mexican soldiers and left another 129 wounded on the ground after the smoke had cleared.

Little did Grant and commander Taylor – both future presidents – know that West Point-trained Barnes would go on to become Surgeon General of the United States and that he would tend to the first two presidents killed by assassins.

But on that hot day – and on the Battle of Resaca de la Guerra the next day – Barnes and his assistants tended to dying soldiers of both armies as they lay moaning on the South Texas battlefields. A few days later, Grant and Barnes accompanied Taylor's army as he crossed over the Rio Grande into Matamoros and then made its way west to Camargo and south to the battle and occupation of Monterrey.

A few months later, President James Polk – frustrated that a divided Mexican government still wouldn't negotiate for the sale of California – gutted Taylor's officer corps and sent Barnes, Grant, and the army's top cadre of officers to join Winfield Scott to invade Veracruz and go on to capture the Mexican capital and force a surrender.

After the Treaty of Guadalupe ended the war, Barnes went back to regular service in the United States, serving in different posts across the growing nation, including California. Barnes then was named Surgeon General of the United States. 

He was in Washington D.C. after the Union Army was victorious over the Southern Confederacy and rebel sympathizer John Wilkes Booth shot and killed President Abraham Lincoln, on April 15, 1865, just six days after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Grant at the Appomattox Court House, Virginia.

As Lincoln lay dying in the Peterson House across from Ford's Theater, Barnes was one of the surgeons who tried futilely to save his life. Barnes had been named Surgeon General March 13, about a month before Booth shot Lincoln. (In the graphic at right he is the one seated on the left at the foot of the president's bed.)

Later in his career, in 1881, he was also one of the doctors who tended to the final weeks of President James A. Garfield after he was shot by disgruntled job seeker Charles Guiteau at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station.

The prolonged and painful death of Garfield took a heavy toll on Barnes and he retired on June 30, 1882. He would die less than a year later on at his home in Washington on April 5, 1883, almost 37 years after he tended to American soldiers wounded at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Guerra.