Volunteers elected their immediate officers but, unlike state militias, were required to take orders from U.S.

In May 1846, Polk wrote Governor Thomas Drew seeking two groups of volunteers with enlistment for one year. Brown’s death fanned the flames of patriotism in Arkansas and coincided with President Polk’s call for volunteers. Shortly after Taylor’s forces drove Mexican troops from the area, Fort Texas was renamed Fort Brown, and the town of Brownsville, Texas, in time grew up around it. While Taylor’s army won battles at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, a small force under Major Jacob Brown, a former president of the Arkansas State Bank, held off a siege by Mexican forces at Fort Texas, across the river from Matamoros, Mexico. troops under General Zachary Taylor near the Rio Grande River in 1846 triggered war between the two countries. American annexation of Texas in 1845 and the stationing of U.S. leaders had seen Texas’s independence as a first step to it joining the United States, part of a broader American view of “Manifest Destiny.” Mexico, however, never recognized Texas’s independence. With Texas’s victory over Mexican general Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna’s troops in 1836, the former Mexican territory became an independent republic.

By war’s end, about 1,500 Arkansans had served, and Senator Ambrose Sevier of Arkansas had helped settle the peace.

As a frontier state, Arkansas was called upon early to supply troops after war against Mexico had been declared on May 13, 1846. Polk’s desire to annex the Republic of Texas as a state. The Mexican War was triggered by American expansionism and President James K.

The mexican war 1846 1848 k jack bauer