Dismayed at the bloodletting and the franticness of the safeguards, US Army Captain James M Smith raised his own white hanky high up, and finished the butcher, keeping his own blood-crazed men from bayonetting the Saint Patrick's Battalion detainees on the spot. The New Orleans reporter George Kendall conceded:

"The boldest in the holding out were the traitors of the Saint Patrick's Battalion, who battled with distress to the last, tearing down, with their own hands, a few of the white banners lifted by the Mexicans in token of surrender."