FROM PALO ALTO AND RESACA DE LA GUERRA TO U.S. SURGEON GENERAL, JOSEPH K. BARNES TENDED TO TWO ASSASSINATED PRESIDENTS, PERFORMED JOHN WILKES BOOTH AUTOPSY

 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 and killed Major 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. Ringgold languished for three days before dying in Port Isabel.

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. Although he did not perform the autopsy on the dead president – it was surgeons Edward Curtis and Joseph Janvier Woodward – he was present along with other military officers and friends.  (In the graphic at right he is the one seated on the left at the foot of the president's bed.)

But Barnes' role did not end with tending to the dying president. The hunt for John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln's assassin, ended April 26, 1865, on the porch of Richard Garrett's house near Port Royal, Virginia where Sergeant Boston Corbett had shot him through the neck as he hid in a tobacco barn that had been set on fire.  

And it fell on Barnes with two assistants –  Barnes, Woodward, and Dr. George Brainard Todd – to perform Booth's autopsy aboard the Montauk On April 27, 1865. Barnes wrote the following account to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton:

"Sir, I have the honor to report that in compliance with your orders, assisted by Dr. Woodward, USA, I made at 2 PM this day, a postmortem examination of the body of J. Wilkes Booth, lying on board the Monitor Montauk off the Navy Yard.

The left leg and foot were encased in an appliance of splints and bandages, upon the removal of which, a fracture of the fibula (small bone of the leg) 3 inches above the ankle joint, accompanied by considerable ecchymosis, was discovered.

The cause of death was a gun shot wound in the neck - the ball entering just behind the sterno-cleido muscle - 2 1/2 inches above the clavicle - passing through the bony bridge of fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae - severing the spinal chord (sic) and passing out through the body of the sterno-cleido of right side, 3 inches above the clavicle.

Paralysis of the entire body was immediate, and all the horrors of consciousness of suffering and death must have been present to the assassin during the two hours he lingered.".

Later in his career, in 1881, Barnes 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 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.