The Second Battle of Mora was a February 1, 1847, military engagement during the Taos Revolt of the Mexican–American War in and around the village of Mora in US-occupied northern New Mexico. Seeking revenge for United States Army's January 24 defeat at the hands of a Mexican-national militia of Hispanos (acting as Mexican nationals) and their Puebloan allies at First Battle of Mora, Capt. Jesse I. Morin and his men destroyed the village the next week, with the insurgents fleeing into the mountains.
On February 1, approximately 200 United States troops led by Captain Jesse I. Morin marched to Mora armed with one or possibly two howitzer cannons, the week after a failed January 24, 1847, expedition by Capt. Israel R. Hendley – who was killed in First Battle of Mora, having marched against superior enemy numbers and without artillery. Hendley had gone to Mora in response to a series of insurrectionist assassinations of American government employees and traders in Taos and Mora, around 20 to 25 killings in total.
The two forces of the Second Battle of Mora were this time about the same strength of numbers; they exchanged fire with no sign of the insurgents being willing to yield. The Americans brought up their cannon (triggering many noncombatants to flee Mora for the mountains) and initiated a short but devastating barrage on the old fort protecting the town. The Americans then attacked on foot; the battle was short, marked by skirmishing in the dirt streets of Mora, but the rebels did not give up until the town was in ruins, despite having little defense – or effect. No American casualties were reported at the Second Battle of Mora, while the Mexicans and their indigenous allies suffered several dead or wounded, and 17 men were captured for trial as traitors (being nominally American subjects under the US provisional government of New Mexico and the Kearny Code).
A February 15, 1847, US government proclamation wrote that the US Army had burned the Upper and Lower Mora (misspelled "Moro") to the ground, This battle marked the end of one campaign of the Taos Revolt.
American soldiers were directed by Morin to pursue the fleeing New Mexicans, and he ordered the complete destruction of Mora (at that time consisting of two actual settlements, Upper and Lower Mora). Federal troops killed stragglers, and looted and burned the villages, the nearby ranches, and the wheat fields and other crops surrounding the settlements. Others chased after the New Mexicans through Mora Valley, as the surviving insurgents and other inhabitants fled up and over the surrounding mountains, to other villages of northern New Mexico. They stayed in these other hamlets for some time, due to crop and livestock destruction by Morin's men leaving them no food source. Meanwhile, the bodies of the American casualties of the January battle in Mora were returned to the garrison at Las Vegas and buried there. The New Mexican civilians eventually returned to Mora and rebuilt.
The Mexican-American War (1846–1848) grew from the annexation of Texas (1845) and a disputed border between Texas and Mexico at the Rio Grande. President James K. Polk ordered US troops under General Zachary Taylor into the contested zone; after a skirmish that killed American soldiers, Congress declared war in May 1846. US forces won a series of engagements — Palo Alto, Monterrey, Buena Vista — before General Winfield Scott led an amphibious landing at Veracruz and an overland campaign to Mexico City, which fell in September 1847. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (February 1848) transferred California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming to the United States in exchange for $15 million and assumption of $3.25 million in claims — roughly 525,000 square miles, a 67 percent expansion of US territory. The war's outcome immediately reopened the slavery question: the Wilmot Proviso, debated throughout the war, proposed banning slavery from any territory acquired from Mexico, foreshadowing the sectional crisis of the 1850s.
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