A Gallant Little Army Page 2
This war was also a turning point because of the level to which the army utilized training and professionalism to accomplish its objective, and no other army in the war better illustrates that than Scott’s. The seeds of a professional American army had been sown years earlier, some of them by Scott himself, and in this conflict the country witnessed the results. The war with Mexico marks the first major conflict in which West Point graduates comprised a majority of the officer corps, and Scott relied heavily on their engineering and reconnaissance skills. Indeed, he credited his young engineer officers with getting the army to Mexico City. Some of the army’s crack regiments were led by young lieutenants and captains who were imbued with not only practical knowledge but also with a sense of professionalism that had never before been seen in American history. More than 130 officers in the army later rose to the rank of general during the Civil War, and they carried with them memories from Mexico that influenced their Civil War generalship. The proper role of a staff officer, the value of extensive reconnaissance, the benefits that accrue from protecting civilian lives and property, the rapid success that results from flank attacks, the need to occasionally resort to the bloody bayonet assault in order to root out a stubborn opponent—these were among the lessons learned in Mexico. In many respects, the Mexican War served as a training ground.
Historians have produced excellent studies of the Mexican War over the years. Justin Smith’s old two-volume work, The War with Mexico, remains a valuable but admittedly biased study. Another dated but still useful study is Robert Selph Henry’s The Story of the Mexican War. The most solid, scholarly study that focuses on military aspects of the war remains K. Jack Bauer’s The Mexican War, 1846–1848, while John S. D. Eisenhower wrote his account, So Far from God: The U.S. War with Mexico, 1846–1848, for a popular audience. Digging beneath the military events, other historians have produced important books that uncover additional layers of the conflict. Robert W. Johannsen’s To the Halls of the Montezumas deals with how American society in the 1840s perceived the war. James M. McCaffrey in Army of Manifest Destiny: The American Soldier in the Mexican War, 1846–1848, and Richard Bruce Winders in Mr. Polk’s Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War, provide two very different kinds of studies of the experience of the common soldier in Mexico. Winders is also the author of a book entitled Crisis in the Southwest: The United States, Mexico, and the Struggle over Texas, which is one of the best accounts of the events leading up to the war. Paul Foos’s book, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict during the Mexican-American War, depicts a darker side of the conflict and often portrays American soldiers in an unfavorable light. In Doniphan’s Epic March: The 1st Missouri Volunteers in the Mexican War, Joseph G. Dawson chronicles the invasion of northern Mexico by another American force. The following books take a closer look at the Mexican perspective: William A. DePalo’s The Mexican National Army, 1822–1852, Irving W. Levinson’s Wars within War: Mexican Guerrillas, Domestic Elites, and the United States of America, 1846–1848, and Robert L. Scheina’s Santa Anna: A Curse upon Mexico. Finally, Donald S. Frazier edited what will likely remain for generations the best reference work on the conflict. The United States and Mexico at War: Nineteenth-Century Expansionism and Conflict is thorough, balanced, and authoritative. This is but a sampling, and one can readily see that a host of authors have covered various aspects of the war from different perspectives except, of course, Scott’s Mexico City Campaign.
My intention was to write a book that would fill a long-existing void. In addition to dealing with leadership issues in the army’s high command—the conduct of the campaign, the often shaky relationships among the generals, and civil-military relations—I have also tried to write from the perspective of the lower ranks. Wherever possible, I have allowed the soldiers who did the fighting to tell the story, and to that end I have incorporated many quotes from letters and diaries. This is the best way to provide a window through which the reader catches a glimpse of the ideas and attitudes of the participants. In weaving their words into this narrative, I opted to leave their passages just the way I found them in the primary sources, shunning the practice of indicating the obvious to the reader with the intrusive “[sic].” I have been especially attentive to reproduce the quotes exactly as they appear in the original texts so that when the reader encounters a misspelled word or incorrect punctuation, as in the misspelling of the word “curiosity” in the Clark quote above, he or she can safely assume that the soldier wrote it that way. The soldiers’ own words provide rich insights into their opinions regarding battles, generals, friendships, and personal ambition as well as their biases concerning race and religion and their feelings of superiority.
The campaign began on March 9, when Scott’s army landed at Veracruz and ended with the occupation of Mexico City on September 14. If one counts the four-day bombardment of Veracruz, two days of fighting at Cerro Gordo, a two-day battle around the Pedregal just south of Mexico City, and one day each for the battles at Molino del Rey and Chapultepec, that 190-day time period saw only 10 days of fighting. In the account that follows, I cover those battles in eight chapters, but I also devote a significant portion of the book to the issues that occupied the other 180 days of the campaign.
It might also be useful to the reader to know at the outset what this book is not. It is not an attempt to provide the Mexican side of the conflict, except where some context is necessary. Neither does it endeavor to provide an account of, or assign blame to, the causes of the conflict. I also chose not to provide detailed treatment of the months following the capture of Mexico City, which would involve a range of issues very different from the six-month military campaign. Tracking down guerrillas and setting up a system of taxation in Mexican towns and cities to help pay for the war are essential components of the occupation phase and worthy of an in-depth study. However, that aspect of the war in central Mexico, although no less important, was ancillary and almost anticlimactic to the march from Veracruz to Mexico City, and an entire book would be required to do it justice. I will leave that study for some other historian.
Also, a note about word usage is in order. The term American can be used to refer to South Americans and Central Americans as well as North Americans. However, because writing about the “Americans” is so much more convenient and less awkward than writing about the “United States soldiers” or “members of the North American army,” I use the term American repeatedly in reference to those who are obvious to the reader, which is in keeping with the way others have used it when writing about the war. I also use the modern spelling Monterey and Veracruz rather than the old forms Monterrey and Vera Cruz.
The Mexico City Campaign, like all other military operations, provides an opportunity to observe the best and the worst of humanity. The individual soldiers brought to the army different attitudes and beliefs as dissimilar as the geographic regions from which they came. However, collectively, they gave the army the diversity to accommodate all of the following descriptive terms: brilliant, determined, sacrificial, heroic, benevolent, brave, incompetent, cruel, racist. The outward displays of personal conduct ranged from heroic and honorable to cowardly and unscrupulous, and the inward motivations that produced these acts also ran the gamut from patriotic and charitable to prejudiced and insubordinate. In war, some things never change.
There is a sense in which the Mexican War is like any other war, and that has to do with the evolution that often occurs in the mind of the soldier. When N. H. Clark arrived in occupied Veracruz, he was at the base of operations in central Mexico. It was the conduit through which all supplies flowed inland to the various elements of the army. It was also the beginning and ending point for every soldier’s experience in Mexico as new recruits arrived and veterans left, and in both situations, soldiers painted a familiar picture. Those just arriving and preparing to march inland to join the army were excited and curious, anxious to make a name for themselves—according to Clark, “full of
ambition, hope and chivalry.” However, those who reached the coastal city on their way home, those who had tasted battle and who had had their thirst for excitement quenched, painted a different picture, and the contrast was striking to Clark. They arrived “broken down, out of health and despirited—many minus an arm or leg destined to be cripples all their life.” It was an “unfortunate” type of glory, thought Clark, who concluded, “I would much prefer being killed.”6 Such is war, and such was the Mexico City Campaign.
chapter one
Veracruz
The Gibraltar of Mexico
What a pity it is that Mexico wont succumb to the idea of our power and thus render a demonstration of it unnecessary! It would save a deal of trouble and expense.
—J. C. Phelps, American soldier
Major General Winfield Scott stood on the wooden deck of the steamer Massachusetts and watched as his men climbed from their large transport vessels into smaller landing craft. It was a warm afternoon, 85 degrees, with a gentle southeasterly breeze, barely strong enough to make a ripple on the water’s smooth surface. Each soldier carried a three-day ration of bread and meat in his haversack and sixty rounds of ammunition for his .69 caliber smoothbore musket. The boats they climbed into were specially constructed beach landing craft made of white oak and white pine and constructed in Philadelphia at a cost of $795 per vessel. Each craft held about forty-five men, or half a company. These surfboats, identical on both ends, could be steered with a single oar in either direction to facilitate repeated trips from ship to shore. Although Scott had requested 141 of them, only 67 were completed in time to be used. After several hours of loading, the boats were sorted and tied off to the steamer Princeton.1
Soon after 5:00 P.M., as the sun sank in the western sky, the report of a signal gun marked the beginning of the largest amphibious assault in American history before World War II. Sailors cut the towlines releasing the surfboats for their first trip to the beach, and oarsmen began to row furiously as if in a race to cover the 450 yards to shore. Packed on the decks of the transports, other soldiers awaiting their turn to go ashore gave a shout, and bands began to play the “Star Spangled Banner” as the long line of boats plied their way toward the coast. Curious onlookers from British, French, and Spanish ships anchored nearby also watched the grand spectacle. The first wave of more than 2,500 men, one-fourth of the American army, affixed bayonets to their muskets in case they met resistance on the beach. Before reaching the surf, the shriek of artillery shells passed overhead from shallow draft steamers assigned to cover the landing. They were aimed at the scattered sand dunes dotting the terrain 150 yards from the beach, where enemy cavalry had been spotted earlier in the afternoon.2
Major General Winfield Scott. Courtesy of the author.
The date was March 9, 1847, and the war with Mexico was nearing the end of its first year. From his vantage point on the Massachusetts, Scott could see the entire stretch of coastline called Collado Beach, which he and Commodore David Conner had selected days earlier as the landing site. Collado Beach was located two miles south of the port city of Veracruz, and the Americans hoped to capture the city as the first step in establishing a firm foothold in central Mexico, and in so doing shift the focus of the war away from the north. For a year, American armies had been operating in the northern part of the country and had fought and won important battles, but they had been unable to bring the war to a close. To force the Mexicans to surrender, Scott, in his Memoirs, wrote that his army had “to strike, effectively, at the vitals of the nation.”3 Veracruz, if it could be captured, would serve as a base of operations for his army to march inland and threaten the enemy capital at Mexico City 260 miles away. Thus, the Mexico City Campaign represented a new strategy in the American effort to win the war.
Seizing the port city would be no easy feat because of its impressive defenses. A triangular wall fifteen feet high stretched around Veracruz, with a strong cannon-studded fort located at each angle. Fort Concepción stood at the northern end of the long waterfront wall, and on the angle at the southern end was Fort Santiago. At both of these forts, the wall turned inland and eventually met to form the third angle of the triangle at Fort Santa Barbara. Spaced between these large bastions were nine smaller forts, each mounting additional guns. Granite, coral, and bricks along with lime cement constituted the primary materials of the wall, and manning the fortifications were 3,360 men. The most impressive aspect of the city’s defenses was the castle of San Juan de Ulúa standing a thousand yards offshore and dominating the water approach to the city. This quadrangle fortress rose sixty feet above a base that rested on Gallega Reef, and atop its stone walls rested 150 guns of various types. Within its walls were an additional 1,030 defenders. The city’s intimidating defenses caused some soldiers, like Samuel Lauderdale, to refer to Veracruz as “the Gibraltar of Mexico.” T. H. Towner predicted in a letter to his father that capturing San Juan de Ulúa will “certainly be the great fight of the war, indeed the greatest which has ever taken place on the American continents.” 4 But the castle’s strength is precisely what Scott sought to avoid by landing his army over two miles away. He would approach the city from the land side, thus negating the powerful seaward defenses.
For an old soldier like Scott, the scene was a sublime and majestic pageant. Surfboats stretched for hundreds of yards; naval gunfire whizzed overhead as they moved steadily toward land. From Scott’s vantage point in the Gulf of Mexico, the snow-capped peak of Mount Orizaba, which reached an altitude of 17,400 feet, was sometimes visible late in the afternoon despite a distance of a hundred miles. It was late in the day, an hour before sunset, as the first boats touched sand. The landing at Veracruz set into motion a carefully planned operation that had been incubating since the previous fall. The masterful execution of the campaign would be the crowning achievement of Scott’s career, and he hoped it might even win for him the prize he always had coveted: the presidency.
Like Orizaba, which towered above everything around it, Scott was the preeminent military giant of his day. A hero from the War of 1812, he had won fame fighting along the Niagara River where, in 1814, a British bullet had smashed into his left shoulder, scaring him for life. He did not fare well leading troops against the Seminole Indians in Florida in 1836, but he rejuvenated his reputation by demonstrating genuine diplomatic skill during the Canadian border disputes of the 1830s and 1840s. However, periodically during his career, his ambition and temperamental disposition had caused him to become embroiled in bitter disputes with fellow officers and presidents. He had always envisioned himself as an aristocratic general out of the old European mold, which resulted in his condescending nature. Scott’s strict enforcement of discipline and love of ornate uniforms had won him the soubriquet “Old Fuss and Feathers.” He realized one of his life objectives in 1841 when he became the commanding general of the United States Army. He possessed both the image and the title to which younger officers aspired. He was a large man too, six feet, four inches tall, and had an ego to match. His legendary arrogance and penchant for indiscreet letter writing had resulted in a turbulent relationship with President James K. Polk, who had appointed Scott to field command in Mexico only as a last resort.
Their trouble began at the outset of the war ten months earlier, when Polk assigned Scott to take command of Brigadier General Zachary Taylor’s army on the Rio Grande. The war was unpopular with the opposition Whig Party, and that made the prompt and vigorous prosecution of the conflict a political imperative. For Polk and the Democratic Party, the war was about land acquisition, but politics and an impatient public dictated that it be limited in both time and money. But Scott had a penchant for planning and for not moving until all of his plans were in place. A week after Scott’s May 13 appointment, he was still in Washington, drafting orders, requisitioning supplies, and formulating strategy, all of which caused the president to conclude that Scott was too “scientific and visionary.” The commanding general was all talk and no action, thought admin
istration officials, and his delays were an embarrassment. Scott was not sympathetic to the president’s political dilemma. But Polk had a knack for partisanship to go with his lack of understanding of the military prerequisites for waging war. Polk misinterpreted Scott’s cautious planning for unnecessary lethargy, and this disconnect provided the bases for mutual misunderstandings from the outset. Furthermore, Scott’s Whig affiliation and his presidential aspirations did not foster an atmosphere of cooperation between the two. So the president instructed Secretary of War William L. Marcy to prod the general into action. On May 21, Scott’s arrogance took over, and he responded to the administration’s push with a politically charged letter to Marcy. He informed the secretary that he was too smart a soldier to leave the capital without covering his back. “My explicit meaning is—that I do not desire to place myself in the most perilous of all positions:—a fire upon my rear, from Washington and the fire, in front, from the Mexicans.”5