The Training Ground Page 10
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 str
engths 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.
Taylor’s army marched toward the Mexican line. Once again, it was the Mexicans who would fire first — and this time they were using the proper lethal armament. “A heavy discharge of grape was fired into our advance, showing that the enemy still disputed our march,” Meade noted wryly.
As he did the day before, Taylor moved his artillery to the front of the column. The oxen dragged two eighteen-pounders and a pair of twelve-pounders forward. And while the chaparral that hid the Mexicans also provided perfect cover for the Americans, allowing the guns to be drawn perilously close to the Mexican lines, it was also so tall and thick that the artillerymen couldn’t accurately aim. It would be up to the infantry to find gaps in the chaparral and overrun the Mexican positions.
This suited Meade just fine. His sadness about being separated from his wife and children had been set aside. He was enjoying the war very much. Meade was proud that Taylor was using him as a messenger, and he took an almost glib satisfaction in noting that “an officer of the General’s staff had his horse shot under him, not two yards from me, and some five horses and men were killed at various times right close to me.”
It was as if Meade had committed an act of bravery just by being in the vicinity of someone else’s death.
NINE
Brown Bess
MAY 9, 1846
The Mexican soldiers hadn’t eaten in more than twenty-four hours and were losing faith in their officer corps. Despite the decline in morale, they prepared to stand fast against the American onslaught.
But the officer corps wasn’t the only test of their faith. A Mexican soldier crouched in the folds of Resaca de la Palma needed to look only to the weapon in his hands to cast further doubt on the Mexicans’ ability to defeat the Americans. The gun was a British-made “Brown Bess” musket, a smoothbore flintlock that had a range of less than a hundred yards. Part of the British army’s Land Pattern musket series, first introduced in 1722, the .75-caliber gun weighed ten pounds, had a walnut stock, and could be fitted with a seventeen-inch bayonet — which was important because the gun’s accuracy was so minimal that the manufacturers had never bothered to install a gun sight. The Brown Bess (a nickname believed to stem either from slang for England’s Elizabeth I or from braun buss, German for “brown gun”) had long been used throughout the British Empire, and both redcoats and rebels had fired it during America’s Revolutionary War. But in 1838 the British began moving toward a percussion-cap rifle and sold thousands of their Brown Besses to Mexico. As Arista’s men stood fast and awaited the American onslaught, the majority of them were armed with a century-old relic that possessed such a fearful recoil that most Mexicans fired from the hip so that the gun didn’t break their facial bones (which would prove to be a problem inside the resaca, where shooting from a prone or kneeling position with the stock nestled against the cheeks was ideal).
They had the advantage when it came to sheer numbers, but their best hope lay in allowing the Americans to draw close. The Mexicans could then let loose a volley and swarm toward the enemy en masse in a bayonet charge — a case of their tactics being restricted by their weapons.
IN MCCALL’S ABSENCE, Grant was thrust into the role of temporary company commanding officer. He reveled in the “honor and responsibility,” but found himself simultaneously eager to lead men into battle and fearful of getting them slaughtered. When Taylor gave the order to advance, Grant and his men were on the army’s far right flank. What followed was an ungainly, uncertain march into the Mexican position. Though the Mexicans knew that the Americans were on their way, and were poised to open fire the instant they saw a blue uniform, all the Americans could see was a thorny wall of chaparral. Grant led his company “through the thicket wherever a penetrable place could be found, taking advantage of any clear spot that could carry me towards the enemy.” “At last I got up pretty close without knowing it,” he recalled. “The balls commenced to whistle thick overhead, cutting the limbs of the chaparral right and left. We could not see the enemy, so I ordered my men to lie down — an order which did not have to be forced.”
Pinned down, Grant ordered a retreat. He and his men fell back into the dense brush so that Grant could study the landscape and find a better place to attack. Up and down the American line, other officers were doing the same. Individual military units were unable to see one another, so junior officers and company commanders improvised a new strategy, advancing bit by bit, searching for an elusive hole in the chaparral that would allow them to attack without being mowed down.
As they did so, they realized that they had waded not onto a battlefield but into a well-laid trap. The Mexican forces were spread in front of and inside the rugged ravine, a strategic conceit brought on by their numerical superiority. General Arista knew that the Americans would be unable to outflank his men, thanks to the chaparral, and that any breakthrough on his right was impossible because the ravine wound to the north on that side; if Taylor attempted an attack there, his army could be trapped within the gulch, an easy target for artillery and infantry sharpshooters. As Arista had planned it, the Americans had no choice but to attack head-on, into the maw of a fortified, well-manned defensive position. All through the night and morning, his artillery had dug in. The fresh replacements who had forded the Rio Grande from Matamoros were rested and fed, with plenty of ammunition at the ready and the luxury of spending hours concealing themselves among the trees and earthen crags, digging in while they awaited the Americans. The Mexican army was fighting on Texas soil, but they planned to defend it as if it were still their own. Arista’s army was buoyed by the prospect, and deeply confident of victory.
But Taylor had the rare gift of being able to conceive instant battlefield stratagems that never occurred to other leaders. He knew that if he spread his men across the entire length of the canyon, as Arista had done, his troops would be easily overwhelmed. And though Palo Alto had been a victory, he couldn’t afford to be foolish. The few thousand American men inching forward through the chaparral were the only s
oldiers he had. In fact, those troops represented almost the entire U.S. Army. America’s prewar force numbered just 6,562 officers and enlisted men. With two-thirds of those men stationed with Taylor in Texas, that left just a few thousand soldiers to guard the entire Canadian border and western frontier. Arista didn’t just have more soldiers at his disposal than General Zachary Taylor; the Army of the North outnumbered that of James K. Polk, commander in chief and president of the United States.
But Taylor had a plan: to follow Napoleon’s axiom that “fire must be concentrated on one point, and as soon as the breach is made, the equilibrium is broken and the rest is nothing.” It was a premise borrowed from Alexander the Great, Hannibal, and Caesar. Taylor would concentrate his forces on a single point at the center of the Mexican line. They would burst through like a fist shattering a thin pane of glass, using their speed and guile to make up for inferior numbers. McCall would lead the way.
The attack would have to be brisk. If the Mexican line held, Arista could reposition his forces, encircling the Americans and using the chaparral as a natural barricade to prevent them from escaping. “The determination today was to go the whole hog and charge at once, without standing off at a shooting distance,” an officer noted.