The Training Ground (25 page)
The Hacienda
F
EBRUARY 23, 1846
T
he Rifles reached the hacienda at 9:00 a.m.; they had been able to hear artillery for the final two miles of the march. “Excited by the sound, the regiment pressed rapidly forward, manifesting, upon this, as upon other occasions, their more than willingness to meet the enemy,” wrote Davis.
Things were going horribly for the Americans. Mexican forces had punched a hole in the American lines, and the Second Indiana had fled in full retreat. “As we approached the scene of action,” Davis said, “horsemen, recognized as of our troops, were seen running, dispersed and confusedly from the field; and our first view of the line of battle presented the mortifying spectacle of a regiment of infantry flying disorganized from the enemy.” Seven thousand Mexican troops were now driving on Buena Vista, where Wool’s terrified soldiers huddled inside the protection of the hacienda. “I rode into the court of the hacienda, and was taken from my horses and carried into a very large room,” wrote Lieutenant Samuel French, an artillery specialist who had been shot in the thigh with a musket ball. “The whole floor was covered with wounded. I was placed between two soldiers. One had both legs broken below the knee. The scene almost beggars description. The screams of agony from pain, the moans of the dying, the messages sent home by the despairing, the parting farewells of friends, the incoherent speech, the peculiar movements of the hands and fingers, silence, the spirit’s flight — to where? And amidst all this some of the mean passions of humanity were displayed. Near me was a poor soldier hopelessly wounded. He was cold, and yet a wretch came and, against remonstrances, took the blanket off him, claiming it was his.”
Zachary Taylor’s leadership style was a curiosity to military men. He did not oversee every last detail of a battle, preferring to draw up a broad plan beforehand and then allow his able commanders to execute that plan, utilizing knowledge of their troops and of the battlefield in order to make tactical maneuvers. Now, with chaos descending upon Buena Vista, Taylor’s battle plan was disintegrating. He desperately needed at least one commander to step forward and make a bold play that would turn the tide in the Americans’ favor — no matter how improbable the odds.
That commander was Jeff Davis. Once considered unworthy of marrying the general’s daughter, he would now attempt to save Taylor’s entire army.
The Mississippian halted his regiment at Buena Vista and implored the retreating Americans to stop running. “With few honorable exceptions, the appeal was unheeded, as were the offers which, I am informed, were made by our men to give their canteens of water to those who complained of thirst, on condition that they would go back. General Wool was upon the ground making great efforts to rally the men who had given way,” Davis remembered.
One common ploy by men not wishing to appear cowardly was to carry a wounded friend back to Buena Vista and then to stay there instead of returning to the battlefield. The hacienda, however, would offer no protection if the Mexicans overran Taylor’s position. “No one could have failed to perceive the hazard,” Davis later wrote.
While American soldiers fled in the other direction, the First Mississippi marched briskly into the battle. Now numbering just four hundred men, they advanced to within rifle range of a four-thousand-man Mexican force that was “supported by strong reserves, flanked by cavalry and elated by success” and then opened fire.
It worked. “The progress of the enemy was arrested,” wrote Davis. After their initial volleys, the Mississippians ran down into a chasm that separated them from the Mexicans, and continued firing as they climbed out on the other side. “The contest was severe — the destruction great on both sides. We steadily advanced, and, as the distance diminished, the ratio of loss increased.”
Davis’s men were falling and dying. Yet persistently, doggedly, the regiment pressed on. Davis was shot in the heel, and the musket ball drove bits of his brass spurs through his boot and into his foot. He had the wound treated while sitting in the saddle and then resumed the fight. His courage, and that of his men, emboldened their fellow Americans. The Third Indiana joined Davis’s men and protected their right flank. Davis sent his sergeant major off in search of artillery to strengthen their attack. Meanwhile, Mexican lancers had caught sight of the First Mississippi and were preparing an attack. “A body of richly caparisoned lancers came forward rapidly, and in beautiful order — the files and ranks so closed as to look like a mass of men and horses. Perfect silence and the greatest steadiness prevailed in both lines of our troops, as they stood at shoulder arms waiting an attack,” wrote Davis.
There were fifteen hundred lancers in all, wearing brass helmets plumed in black and scarlet, and blue tunics faced in red. They sang in cadence as they trotted their horses forward, sitting erect in the saddle, the polished tips of their lances pointing straight up at the brilliant blue sky. Davis didn’t have time to form his men into a fighting square. Instead, he ordered the Indiana and Mississippi men to make a V to repel the charge, with the tip pointed at the lancers. The formation was born of necessity, not some great stroke of tactical genius. All the while, Davis said, “I repeatedly called to the men not to shoot.”
The lancers trotted closer and closer. They did not know what to make of the V, for such a formation had never been used against a cavalry charge in the history of war. Eighty yards away, they came to a complete halt.
A few of Davis’s men fired, against orders. That was the provocation the others needed. Davis could only watch as both lines of his impromptu V soon “poured in a volley so destructive that the mass yielded to the blow and the survivors fled.”
Against all odds, the battle became a rout.
The surviving Mexican cavalry galloped away. Davis directed his troops to cross a series of ravines to link up with the beleaguered American artillery. Braxton Bragg’s flying cannon was anxiously pouring double canister down onto a slowly advancing squad of Mexican infantry. The North Carolinian was such a petulant and dislikable man that two attempts had been made on his life by his own men since the war began. But at Buena Vista he showed the depths of his military prowess, flitting his cannon from one side of the field to the other in almost maniacal fashion, pouring fire into the Mexican lines. Now, the men of Mississippi and Indiana came to Bragg’s aid and drove the enemy back before he could be overrun. “Though worn down by fatigue and thirst, the ranks thinned by our heavy losses in the morning, they yet advanced upon the enemy with the alacrity and eagerness of men fresh to the combat,” Davis wrote proudly of his troops.
Once again, darkness halted the fighting. Davis, at long last, unable to bear the pain of the musket ball rubbing against bone any longer, galloped from the field to seek medical assistance. He never returned. Davis ended the day among the eight hundred men jammed into the Buena Vista hacienda. His wound was severe enough that he would require crutches to stand upright for the next two years and would undergo intermittent surgeries for the rest of his life.
Davis was placed in a common wagon alongside Lieutenant French and a volunteer lieutenant and carried to Saltillo, where they arrived at 10:00 p.m. The city had become one enormous hospital, particularly the Cathedral of Santiago, which was filled to overflowing with wounded. The First Mississippi had suffered thirty-nine killed and fifty-six wounded, yet Davis was hailed as the great hero of Buena Vista, and his men “conceived him to be superior to any officer in the army — those of them who have no personal fondness for him prefer him as a commander to anyone else.”
The next morning, as American troops rose from a night of fitful sleep to continue the fight, they were shocked and greatly relieved to discover that the Mexicans had fled. Santa Anna, who had lost more than four thousand men, was already racing his tattered army back toward Veracruz to head off Scott’s invasion. “I passed over the Mexican slain,” Captain William P. Rogers of the First Mississippi wrote of the battlefield scene that morning. “There they lay in heaps, the dead and the dying. The wounded have by their sides small sacks of parched meal. They have evidently been poorly fed and clothed, as was indicated by their emaciated forms. Some would eagerly beg for ‘Agua and Pan’ while others would exclaim ‘Ciete me Señor’ as I passed. Others also we would see who had passed unhurt through the fight, but who from exhaustion and emaciation were scarcely able to speak.”
Mexican critics would swear that Santa Anna had actually won the battle, despite his retreat. “For lack of provisions and water, General Santa Anna had to retreat, but if General Taylor was left the victor, why did he not attack and conquer the miserable remains of the army which fell back to San Luis?” asked Carlos María de Bustamante, a member of the Mexican Congress who had once been a cavalry officer. “The Battle of Angostura [the Mexican name for Buena Vista] was not in any way won by General Taylor.”
Yet the fact remained that Zachary Taylor and his army, against long odds, had held fast. Buena Vista was his last battle and perhaps his greatest victory. His losses were exorbitant: 272 killed and 388 wounded out of the 4,691 Americans who began the fight. He rode from the battlefield and pulled his forces back into garrison duty, there to spend the rest of the war.
Lobos Island
F
EBRUARY 25, 1847
G
rant struggled to move his pen across the page, pressing the steel nib down hard on the paper to keep his script from becoming erratic — a nearly impossible task, for he was writing to Julia from inside the USS
North Carolina
as raging swells rocked her from side to side. Once upon a time, the
North Carolina
had been the most powerful vessel in the U.S. Navy, a seventy-four-gun ship of the line that had gun ports for more than a hundred cannons and had twice been the flagship of a commodore. But those days were in the past. Now, even though it still carried ninety enormously powerful cannons (including fifty-six 42-pounders and twenty-six 32-pounders), the outmoded
North Carolina
was less a dreadful weapon than just another vessel filled with seasick American soldiers, bobbing in violent chop off the Mexican coast, two hundred miles north of Veracruz.
Grant lifted pen from page and peered out over the horizon. Thirty other transports bobbed at anchor, riding out the storm as they awaited the arrival of still more troopships. Once the rendezvous was complete, they would sail for Veracruz and the start of the invasion. “There is a report here that General Taylor has had a fight with Santa Anna some place beyond Monterey and repulsed him but it is not generally believed,” wrote Grant. “My anxiety to see you my Dearest Julia increases with the space that separates us. Vera Cruz is twenty degrees south of Jefferson Barracks. I have dreamed of you twice since my last letter. All my dreams agree in one particular, that is in our marriage, either that the day is set or the ceremony is being performed.”
Grant and the Fourth had been reassigned to General Worth’s division, a transfer that he did not enjoy in the least. “I found General Worth a different man than any I had before served directly under. He was nervous, impatient, and restless on the march, or when important or responsible duty confronted him,” Grant recalled, having gathered his first impressions while marching from Monterrey back to Port Isabel. “General Worth on one occasion at least, having made the full distance intended for the day, and after the troops were in camp and preparing their food, ordered tents struck and made the march that night which had been intended for the next day. Some commanders can move troops so as to get the maximum distance out of them without fatigue, while others can wear them out in a few days without accomplishing so much. General Worth belonged to the latter class.”
The only upside of joining Worth’s division was that it reunited Grant with Longstreet, and also with Grant’s old West Point acquaintance Thomas Jackson, whose artillery unit had been transferred from Wool’s command.
The Mexican War was the first time steamboats were widely used by an army, but the ships that would transport the Americans to Veracruz were nearly all sailing vessels. Grant had boarded the
North Carolina
at the mouth of the Rio Grande. Accommodations were limited, and “the trip was a comfortless one for officers and men.” That discomfort increased as the ships sailed farther south into the tropics, where humidity and the cramped conditions conspired. The Quartermaster Department had been unable to procure antiscorbutics or green vegetables, so the daily diet consisted of salt meat and hard bread, and many of the men became ill from the shipboard fare. One vessel had suffered an outbreak of smallpox, and one hundred men had perished, their bodies buried at sea. “The character of the recruits that have recently joined is of such a nature that disease and death must be expected among them,” noted one army surgeon. “Many of them are boys too young to undergo the hardship of a soldier’s life, while others are old and worn out men who should never have been enlisted.”
Young and old, sick and well, officer and enlisted, regular and volunteer, they were all part of an ongoing logistical marvel. Since Polk had approved the Veracruz landing three months earlier, the U.S. Army’s Quartermaster Department had labored long and hard to assemble the supplies and transportation necessary to put Scott’s hoped-for twenty-five thousand American soldiers on the beach. This was not just a matter of locating brigs, barks, and schooners for naval transport (163 vessels were eventually gathered from Port Isabel, Tampico, and New Orleans, then pressed into service as transports); men had to be off-loaded from their sailing ships and rowed ashore. The Quartermaster Department had hastily ordered the construction of special “surfboats,” which could carry fifty men without foundering in the shore break. The boats were built in three lengths — 40 feet, 37 feet 9 inches, and 35 feet 9 inches — that nested inside one another on the deck of the transport ship during the month-long journey to Mexico. They were flimsy and designed to be used just once, but of the 141 that were contracted, only 65 were built in time for the landing, meaning that the eight crewmen aboard each surfboat (seven seamen and a petty officer) would off-load men and then row back out to the transport to take on another load. Once the troops were ashore, the operation would be repeated, but with munitions, animals, and other miscellaneous supplies. Each soldier would carry enough provisions to last him three days — just long enough for the ships to be off-loaded, if all went well. Artillery and horses would go last.
Veracruz was a significant target. It was no provincial backwater, nor even a small regional hub like Monterrey or Saltillo. It was a bustling city and a strategic port, with that mix of the purely nautical and the basely commercial that defined ports around the world. Veracruz was just as vital to Mexico’s economy as Boston or Charleston was to the United States’. Landing at an established harbor gave Scott a more formidable jumping-off point — and a far more daunting defensive position than a simple beachhead. Almost all oceangoing European and American trade into Mexico had been conducted at Veracruz since the first Spaniards arrived in 1518. Veracruz could rightfully claim that it was the first European city on the American mainland. Even better, it was one of the oldest existent cities in all of the Americas. The highly sophisticated Huastec Indians had settled the area three thousand years earlier, giving way to the Totonacs, who were linguistically related to the Mayas but under Aztec rule.
When the first Spaniards arrived, they witnessed four Totonac priests giving offerings to the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca on the small island where the San Juan de Ulúa fortress would one day be constructed. The Spaniards made Veracruz pivotal to their empire in the Americas, and all silver and gold from Mexican mines that was bound for Europe was loaded aboard ships in its harbor. As a result, Veracruz became a favorite target of pirates seeking plunder.
Among those to attack the port was a young Sir Francis Drake, whose unsuccessful 1568 assault made him a national hero in England. The Spaniards recognized that Drake’s would not be the last attempted invasion, and they worked hard to make the city impregnable. Everything about its posture was defensive: the fifteen-foot-high city walls that protected Veracruz from invasion by land; the two forts and nine redoubts studding the wall; and the city’s crown jewel, the fortress of San Juan de Ulúa, considered by many military experts to be the strongest fortification in North America — and equal to the renowned fortress at Gibraltar. San Juan de Ulúa was not one bastion, but three, a sprawling gray eminence seven hundred acres in size, built on an island a thousand yards offshore, its various sections divided by canals and drawbridges. It was all but invasion-proof, with fifteen-foot-thick stone walls (and a similarly thick stone roof in key areas) designed to absorb cannonball blasts with ease. There were 250 gun ports, and many of the cannons were enormous sixty-eight- and eighty-four-pounders. The fort featured a moat, battlements, parapets, an internal system of bridges, cisterns filled with a two-year supply of water — and deep dungeons where prisoners were chained to the walls, even when high tide brought in waist-high ocean water. Appropriately, San Juan de Ulúa being of Spanish design, a broad open-air plaza lay at the center, lined by tall houses. In preparation for the American invasion, shells and shot had been heaped in the center of the plaza.
The most intriguing of all the fort’s European characteristics were the cannons. Many were Spanish and made of brass, dating back a century to the reign of Philip V. Others were French. There was no precise count, but the fort was filled with more than two hundred such guns. The Spanish king Charles V had spent forty million pieces of gold to begin construction of San Juan de Ulúa in the sixteenth century, but it would not be completed for more than a hundred years after his death in 1558. For more than eighteen months after Veracruz fell during the War of Independence, Spanish Royalists had remained in the fort, safe from any and all attack. But although they had enough munitions to last for years, they were ultimately reduced to starvation. The fortress was the last place in Mexico to fly the Bourbon flag of Ferdinand VII. With its lowering, all of Mexico finally belonged to the Mexicans. Thus Veracruz and the fort were more than just a city and its castle; they were symbols of a nation’s greatness. The military academy at Veracruz had trained many a Mexican officer, including Santa Anna. To capture this jewel of a city was to strike a solid blow against Mexican national morale.
“In my next,” Grant wrote, referring to the letter he would write after the invasion, “no doubt I will have some news of a great battle to relate.”
That battle would be for Veracruz.
