The Training Ground (10 page)
General Torrejón sent his cavalry off into the chaparral to the right of the American forces as the battle raged, hoping to use the cover of the thick vegetation and the low hills to hide his men. But the land was swampy, as Taylor well knew. The Mexican cavalry bogged down. Not only that, but the American Fifth Infantry had anticipated the move and taken up positions on the edge of the chaparral. As Torrejón’s men charged the Fifth in force, eight hundred lance-carrying Mexican cavalry, looking like medieval throwbacks, galloped into the American rifles. The Americans, their bayonets affixed, formed themselves into a hollow square, four lines facing outward toward the points of the compass. The men of each line stood shoulder to shoulder, with another rank lined up behind them to fire a quick second volley while the first line reloaded.
Cavalry charges had been a staple of battle for centuries, and as far back as ancient Greece, infantry had formed into a square to defend against an onslaught. The hollow square required a great deal of nerve on the part of the foot soldier, for it was imperative for the lines to stand firm at all costs. Its weakest strategic points were the corners, but fainthearted soldiers who turned and fled were an even more deadly liability.
It had been three decades since an American force had formed such a square, whether they could pull it off was anyone’s guess.
The Americans held their fire until the lancers were just fifty yards away. “The front of the square attacked, poured in its volley of buckshot and balls,” wrote one lieutenant. “Horses, officers, and men of the lancers were brought to the ground. Many more of them reeled in their saddles, wounded. Some were thrown, and the rest, in confusion, galloped back to their own side of the field.” The Mexicans fell back to regroup. When they attempted to range even farther out in a last-ditch attempt to attack the wagon train, they were shocked to discover the Third Infantry waiting with a pair of cannons to block them.
Meanwhile, farther to the left, Grant and the Fourth were taking the brunt of the battle. Their artillery was systematically mowing down the Mexican forces, but time and again they regrouped, their lines bloodied but unbroken, their numerical superiority making itself known. Arista’s men returned fire with such ferocity that the Fourth began taking fantastic casualties and had to pull back. The Mexican troops were not their only danger: a prairie fire started by a powder wad that had fallen onto the grass threatened to engulf the Fourth. But though fire scorched the dry battlefield grass and raised so much smoke that fighting actually halted on both sides for an hour, no one was burned.
Like a curtain raised before a spectacular second act, the dissipating smoke gave way to more ferocious shooting. Fighting raged throughout the afternoon. Both sides were mentally and physically exhausted by the time the sun began to set. Fighting finally ceased for the night when the sky grew too black for either side to see what they were shooting at. The Americans promptly dropped to the ground and slept, resting upon the exact spots where they had stood when the sun dropped, unwilling to concede so much as an inch to the enemy. Somewhere out in the darkness and chaparral, the Mexicans did the same. The cries and moans of the wounded carried through the night, sometimes Spanish, sometimes English, always lonesome and heart-wrenching.
Grant, exhausted after the long day of marching and fighting, had no trouble resting. “I believe all slept as soundly on the ground at Palo Alto as if they had been in a palace. For my own part I don’t think I even dreamed of battles.”
In the predawn darkness, as Grant lay dreaming, Taylor called a council of war. He was worried and asked his key officers whether he should press the attack. Seven of the ten said no. But artillery specialist Captain James Duncan boldly declared, “We whipped ’em today, and we can whip them tomorrow.”
Taylor was fortified. “That is my opinion,” he declared. “Gentlemen, you will prepare your commands to move forward.”
Yet when the sun rose, the Mexican army was gone. It had retreated so quickly that surviving soldiers abandoned their personal baggage. The garbage of war littered the chaparral. Corpses dotted the grassy plain, and the air reeked of rotting flesh. Numerous Mexicans had been cut in two by the canister and grape. Bodies without heads, legs, and arms lay in the Texas dust. The Americans found one dead Mexican cavalry officer with a daguerreotype image of his sister tucked in one pocket, and another soldier with letters waiting to be mailed home tucked into the bill of his cap. When translated, the letters told of a poor army where the men were always hungry, surviving on a small daily ration of salted meat.
Wounded Mexican and American soldiers were taken to a field hospital. They were treated side by side. Taylor chose to bury the dead before chasing the enemy, and Grant spent the morning supervising a burial party. “It was a terrible sight to go over the ground the next day and see the amount of life that had been destroyed. The ground was literally strewed with the bodies of dead men and horses. The loss of the enemy is variously estimated from 300 to 500. Our loss was comparatively small,” he wrote. “About twelve or fifteen of our men were killed and probably fifty wounded.” The difference in the battle had been Taylor’s deliberate use of artillery. Having wasted much of their firepower on their initial, premature assaults, the Mexicans fired just 750 rounds during the long afternoon, while the Americans launched almost 3,000 projectiles into the enemy ranks.
Yet there was little time for self-congratulation. Fort Texas was still under siege, and the Mexican army, wherever they were, still held the road. Just before noon, Taylor ordered his men to march forward once again. This time he intended not only to relieve the fort but to push the Mexican army back across the Rio Grande — and perhaps to follow them if conditions were right.
Resaca de la Palma
M
AY 9, 1846
W
ar,” Sam Grant wrote of his first taste of combat, “seems much less horrible to the persons engaged in it than to those who read of the battles.”
Lieutenant George Gordon Meade understood that sentiment very well. Palo Alto was his first taste of battle, too. Meade had found it nothing short of exhilarating. “I was in the action during the whole time, at the side of General Taylor, and communicating his orders, and I assure you that I have had my ‘
baptême de feu
.’ ”
At thirty-one, Meade was the oldest second lieutenant in Taylor’s army. Other officers might have been discouraged lagging so far behind their peers, but not Meade, a man who had already lived an extraordinary life. He had an open face, kind blue eyes hidden behind spectacles, and a long, brown beard. Meade was married to the former Margaretta Sergeant, the daughter of John Sergeant, who had been Henry Clay’s running mate in the 1832 presidential election. They had wed on Meade’s twenty-fifth birthday and now had two young sons and a six-month-old daughter, all of whom he pined for during the long Texas days and nights. Saying good-bye on the day he departed for the war had been a “terrible agony” for the reserved cartographer. “No one can tell how my heart was rent at parting with you,” he wrote Margaretta three days later.
Meade was, despite his slow progress up the career ladder, an elite individual in myriad ways. For starters, he was a member of that select band of officers known as the Corps of Topographical Engineers. In all of the U.S. Army, just forty-four men were so designated. They were a unit without a past, so to speak, for the “topogs” had never been employed in an actual war; Mexico would be the first.
Members of the Topographical Corps possessed a singular form of expertise. On the one hand, they were primarily engineers. But unlike members of the more traditional and much larger Corps of Engineers, who specialized in bridge and fort construction, the topographer’s job was to map the land, surveying natural and man-made features for military purposes and building roads, lighthouses, and canals when needed (the Mexican army’s lone engineering corps, the Zapadore, performed both engineering specialties). Very often, topographical engineers worked alone, riding out into the countryside to gaze upon the land. In this way, they behaved very much like explorers, appraising the unknown and returning with not just a perfect new map but also detailed information about local plants and animals, the current and depth of rivers, and the sort of rock formations that studded and scarred the landscape. A good topographical engineer was equally at home holding forth with generals, scientists, and civil engineers, for the information he discovered in the course of his duties was precious to them all.
Meade was born on New Year’s Eve, 1815, in Cádiz, the booming Spanish port from which Columbus once sailed. His father, Richard, ran a profitable export company. Business was so good that he often accepted fine paintings in lieu of payment. His personal collection eventually included canvases by Rubens, Van Dyck, Titian, and Goya, as well as a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington, which Richard Meade presented to the Spanish government as a gift in 1818.
Debt collection was constantly an issue in a nation whose national treasury had been laid bare by the Napoleonic Wars. Richard Meade had allowed Spain’s Loyalist government to use his ships and wealth in their cause, but when he pressed the Spanish treasurer general for the return of those assets after the war, the government of Ferdinand VII responded by throwing him into a waterfront gulag known as the Castillo de Santa Catalina. For two long years he suffered in a dank cell while Spain ignored diplomatic overtures that might secure his release. Young George’s mother — Dona Margarita Coates Butler de Meade, or just Margaret — was forced to abandon her husband in order for the family to stay afloat financially. She took the children to America to be with relatives who lived there, leaving behind their handsome whitewashed home, with its floors of Italian marble and its walls lined with old masters.
Richard Meade might have spent the rest of his life in the Castillo de Santa Catalina, but fate intervened on March 15, 1818, when Andrew Jackson celebrated his fifty-first birthday by marching his volunteer army into Spanish-held Florida to make war on the local Indians. The rationale — that the United States had to invade in order to ensure its own security — was a feeble excuse for the American government to flex its muscles against a down-on-its-luck world power. Growing American furor over Richard Meade’s imprisonment counterbalanced the Spanish outrage over Florida. On April 4, 1818, the U.S. Senate, in the strongest terms possible, demanded that Meade be released unharmed or “whatever personal injury may be done him should be retaliated against by the employment, if necessary, of the whole force of this nation.” No less than Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams took up the cause. “The imprisonment of Richard W. Meade is an act of cruel and unjustifiable oppression,” Clay declared. He added that it was the duty of the American government “to afford Mr. Meade its aid and protection, and that this House will support and maintain such as the President may hereafter adopt.”
In the end, the Spaniards sold Florida to the United States for five million dollars and released Richard Meade in June 1818. (Spain refused to ratify the Florida treaty until language erasing Meade’s financial claims against the Spanish government were included in the deal.) The conflict over, Meade’s sympathizers vanished. He sailed home to America, his business in ruins, the U.S. government having also rejected his claims.
Seven years later, Richard Meade died at the age of just fifty. The family, while not destitute, was now far from wealthy. In a cost-cutting move, fifteen-year-old George, the ninth of eleven Meade children, was sent off to West Point to gain a free education. Appropriately, it was President Andrew Jackson who signed the boy’s appointment.
Margaret Meade was anguished about sending her boy away, a feeling she would not share with him until fifteen years later, when it looked as if he would soon see battle. “Although in my ignorance I was cruel enough to send you to West Point,” she wrote George on the eve of the Mexican War, “it was the moral standing of the institution, and the education you could not escape if you remained there, also the intention of your lamented father, who said your mathematical head fitted you for it, that led me to commit the act.”
Like Grant and Longstreet, Meade hadn’t been a model cadet, placing halfway down his class in chemistry, artillery, conduct, infantry tactics, and final standing. He was assigned to the artillery after graduating in 1835, but — never having learned to enjoy military life — Meade resigned his commission one year later. He took a surveying job with a southern railroad, but after meeting Margaretta in 1840, Meade rethought his earlier decision. He had been raised to prize a high social standing. A military commission, despite the army’s abysmal pay scale, afforded him a status that he lacked as a railroad survey engineer. In 1842 he reapplied to the army and was assigned to the Topographical Corps — which was why, eleven years after graduating from West Point, Meade was such an aged second lieutenant.
Meade had suffered greatly after arriving at Corpus Christi in September 1845, taking to bed with fever and jaundice brought on while making maps in the torrential winter rain. Yet he had refused an opportunity to return home, because the war was his chance to finally receive promotion, and going home would mean that others would advance instead of him. But as the weeks and months progressed, Meade’s reasons for wanting to be at the front changed. He found himself swept up in the emotions of war and began to care deeply for the men around him. He mourned the death of Colonel Trueman Cross, the quartermaster ambushed by Mexican militia, and grew uncharacteristically furious at reports that Mexican general Ampudia had been seen wearing Cross’s gold watch. “This dastardly act,” he wrote, seething, in a letter home, “has inspired us all with a burning desire to avenge the Colonel’s murder.” Personal advancement became a secondary concern.
Thus, when he heard the first cannonballs dropping on Fort Texas, Meade was thrilled that the war had begun. During the battle at Palo Alto, he and his fellow topographical engineers set aside their usual duties and found themselves in the thick of the action. Lieutenant Thomas Woods worked with an artillery battery, using his knowledge of the terrain to help sight the eighteen-pounders; Lieutenant Jacob Blake acted as a forward scout, boldly riding his horse to within fifty yards of the Mexican lines before the battle began, making careful mental notes about the size and location of infantry units, and the caliber and position of their artillery, in effect giving Taylor a visual map of the enemy’s strength and tactics; and as a battlefield messenger for Taylor, Meade had been a crucial communications link between Taylor and his subordinates.
The following morning, that glory was diminished when Blake was wounded in a freak accident. As he dismounted from his horse and unbuckled his gun belt to sit down to rest, one of his pistols dropped to the ground and discharged a round. The ball struck Blake in the abdomen. “That poor Blake,” Meade wrote to Margaretta, “after having gallantly borne himself through the conflict yesterday, unfortunately shot himself accidentally today, just as we marched, and it is feared the wound is mortal.” It was. Blake passed away in the afternoon, wishing to the end that he had died from a bullet on the dusty plains of Palo Alto instead.
By the time Blake died, Taylor was already chasing the Mexican army back toward Matamoros, advancing down the slender thoroughfare that sliced across the landscape like a dusty scar. Meade described the terrain to Margaretta in a letter the next day. “From the Palo Alto to the river there is a thicket in this country called chaparral, which is almost impassable when you are off the road, and which consists of thick thorny bushes that will tear your clothes to pieces in trying to get through,” he wrote. To make better time, Taylor had ordered the supply train to stay behind with a small complement of infantry and artillery. While strategically savvy, this bold gambit reduced the size of the attacking American force to just seventeen hundred men. The Mexican army had ample reinforcements waiting in Matamoros. Once again they would outnumber the Americans three to one.
Taylor was convinced that the Mexicans had hidden in the chaparral yet again, waiting to spring another trap. In response, on May 9 he sent an advance party out to search for the enemy. These scouts were a handpicked corps of 150, under the command of Captain George McCall and artillery officer Charles Ferguson Smith, who had led the crossing of the Rio Colorado. The two were ideal for the job. The dashing McCall was an expert in close-combat skirmishes, having battled the Seminoles in the swamps of Florida. Smith, whose big, drooping mustache and narrow eyes gave him a ferocious, predatory look, had taught infantry tactics at West Point for four years. If any men could divine the strengths and weaknesses in Arista’s lines, it was McCall and Smith.
Patiently and methodically, they worked their way along the road on horseback, searching for the enemy. The land was riven by dry streambeds and small pools of water, delineating long-ago paths of an even greater Rio Grande. The main road from Port Isabel to Matamoros — the Camino de Matamoros — dipped down into these ravines, or
resacas,
on its linear journey inland. The Mexican army — if it was still out there — was hidden in one of those chasms.
By 3:00 p.m., McCall and Smith had found it. The Mexicans had taken up positions inside the Resaca de la Palma, named for the palm trees lining its banks. The ravine was a dozen feet deep and an eighth of a mile wide, and the Mexicans were spread along a mile-wide front. Trees had been chopped down and piled across the road like stacks of cordwood to make the position more impregnable. Arista had selected the site well, the ravine being lined on both sides with thick forest. Unbeknownst to McCall and Smith, Arista had temporarily paused the siege of Fort Texas and ordered the soldiers there to reinforce his ranks. The chaparral prevented Arista from using his cavalry, but it provided his troops with excellent fighting positions. He was depending upon superior numbers and that superb defensive location to win the battle.
McCall ordered his scouts to show themselves just long enough to draw enemy fire, hoping to learn the location of enemy gun positions. They did more than offer the Mexicans a glimpse: Arista’s men were so well hidden in the chaparral that the American scouts almost walked directly into their fortifications, resulting in a quick burst of artillery fire that killed five men.
The deadly encounter had revealed a battery of eight cannons positioned alongside the road, their barrels aimed directly toward the approaching Americans. McCall retreated, sending a handful of his men back to inform Taylor of the findings and forming the rest of them into a fighting square. There, in that no-man’s-land between the Mexican and American lines, the squad waited for Taylor to bring his army forward.
