The Training Ground Read online

  Lieutenant Samuel French, an artillery lieutenant who graduated from West Point in Grant’s class, wrote of a typical morning loading the mules: “One was lassoed and throwed and the pack saddle put on. Then, for his load, two barrels of crackers were securely put on,” French remembered. “He surveyed the load from right to left with rolling eyes, squatted low, humped himself, sprang forward, stood on his forefeet and commenced high kicking, exploded the barrels of hardtack with his heels, threw the biscuits in the air with the force of a dynamite bomb, and ran away with the empty barrels dangling behind, as badly scared as a dog with tin buckets tied to his tail.”

  The mules were the most obvious symbol of a very frustrating time for Grant. He felt powerless. He hated his new job, was angry that he hadn’t seen Julia in a year and upset that her father had prohibited them from getting married during his last leave. Most of all, he deeply resented having to wage war in Mexico.

  To Grant, Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma were proof that the Mexicans had lost. Their insistence on retreating farther and farther into their country rather than surrendering enraged him. “If these Mexicans were any kind of people they would have given us a chance to whip them enough some time ago and now the difficulty would be over; but I do believe they think they will outdo us by keeping us running over the country after them,” he wrote to Julia.

  His letter of September 6 was one rant after another. “Julia, ain’t you getting tired of hearing war, war, war? I am truly tired of it. Here it is now five months that we have been at war and as yet but two battles. I do wish this one would close. If we have to fight I wish we could do it all at once and then make friends,” Grant wrote bitterly.

  Despite his misery, Grant was a professional. He deftly guided his complement of wagons and mules through the ranks of men marching the dusty road into Mexico. They may have started every morning far behind the troops, but by the time the soldiers made camp each night, Grant had already arrived and unloaded his tents, poles, cooking gear, and provisions. “There was no road so obstructed,” wrote Second Lieutenant Alexander Hays, “but that Grant, in some mysterious way, would work his train through and have it in the camp of his brigade before the campfires were lighted.”

  Not all quartermasters were as ambitious as Grant. There were several instances of baggage trains never catching up with the columns of soldiers, forcing the officers to sleep out in the open, without even a thin wool blanket between them and the hard ground. The desert temperatures, which rose to such withering heights during the day, plummeted each night. Cold and lack of food had a crippling effect on morale, so Grant’s nascent talents as a quartermaster were greatly appreciated by the men of the Fourth. He was so busy that he didn’t write a single letter to Julia during the entire march.

  Despite the fact that the United States had officially invaded Mexico, the truth was that the extent of the American incursion was minimal until August 1846. From Port Isabel to Matamoros to Camargo, Taylor had simply followed the course of the Rio Grande inland. He hugged the border between the two nations, positioning all his troops within miles — and often within eyesight — of the river. As invasions went, it was rather modest, from close-up seemingly just another chapter in the decade-long border war between Mexico and Texas.

  At first the penetration from Camargo to Monterrey was more of the same. The American army traveled in a west-by-northwest fashion, parallel to the Rio Grande, until they got to Mier, 120 miles from Matamoros. There they wheeled ninety degrees to the left and marched seventy-five miles due southwest into the heart of Mexico. Mier was atop a hill, with two churches, streets naturally paved by the rocky ground, and two streams running through the middle that came together to form a large creek, known, unforgettably, as the Alamo. Mier had recently been savaged by Comanches. After the locals pleaded for protection, it was agreed that a force of a hundred American soldiers would remain behind in town.

  On a map, it was almost possible to draw a straight line that began in Washington, D.C., passed through Mier, and ended in Monterrey. This line represented both the genesis and the hopeful conclusion of the Mexican War. Taylor, for one, didn’t think that General Ampudia and the Mexican army would defend Monterrey. The Mexican retreat, he believed, had just been a way of testing the United States’ will. The Mexican army would cede those towns along the Rio Grande, knowing that the U.S. Army would one day leave, after which they could be recaptured. Only by penetrating deep into Mexico and once again defeating the Mexican army could the Americans show a willingness to elevate the conflict beyond a mere border squabble — even if it meant marching all the way to Mexico City.

  It was deeply symbolic that Mier was the fulcrum of Taylor’s advance. The last great border war between Texas and Mexico had been fought in 1842. A band of three hundred starving Texans had crossed the Rio Grande two days before Christmas, searching for food for themselves, their horses, and their families. They thought they found it in Mier. The Texans had spent the past year fighting the Mexicans rather than tending to their farms and families. Two months earlier, thirty-six of their brethren had been blown to bits by Mexican cannons in a conflict just east of San Antonio known as the Dawson Massacre. So when they galloped into Mier, they came as bullies, impotent when facing the Mexican army but all-powerful against the peaceful citizens of Mier. The Texans presented the residents with a staggering list of essential items to be handed over immediately. Included were forty sacks of flour, twelve hundred pounds of sugar, six hundred pounds of coffee, and “200 pairs of strong, coarse shoes, 100 pairs of pantaloons, and a hundred blankets.” The mayor of Mier, who knew that more than three thousand Mexican troops were within a day’s march of the town. He argued for time to gather so many disparate items.

  The Texans galloped back to their side of the Rio Grande in exchange for a promise from the mayor that food and supplies would soon be delivered to their camp. If that promise was broken, the Texans vowed to return.

  The Mexican army marched into Mier the next day. It was Christmas Eve, but General Pedro Ampudia was not in a giving mood. He positioned his men on the town’s flat rooftops and then waited to spring his trap. He didn’t have to wait long.

  The Texans galloped back at twilight on Christmas Day, armed to the teeth and eager to extract vengeance. Ampudia’s men eagerly opened fire. The Texans were outnumbered ten to one, but more than held their own. Husbanding ammunition and choosing targets carefully, they patiently picked off the Mexican sharpshooters, evening the odds.

  The fighting descended into a musket battle that raged for nineteen hours in the city’s streets. Some six hundred Mexicans were killed; in contrast, just thirty-one Texans died. But by noon on December 26, the Texans had run low on musket balls. Ampudia sent a messenger to inform them that Mexican reinforcements were galloping to Mier. This was a hoax, a painful battle ruse that the Texans would not find out until after they threw down their arms and surrendered.

  The surviving Texans would bitterly regret their decision not to fight until the last man. The Mexicans considered them vigilantes, not prisoners of war, and treated them as criminals. The Texans were marched to Matamoros, where they were held before continuing their march once again, this time toward a prison hundreds of miles south in Mexico City. At the town of Salado, roughly a third of the way from Mier to their waiting cells, they rebelled and escaped on foot into the nearby mountains.

  But as the Texans had shown when they first arrived in Mier, they had little talent for living off the land. Starving and dehydrated, all but three were soon rounded up and returned to Salado. When word of their escape reached the Mexican dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna — the same Santa Anna who had defeated the Texans at the Alamo — he was furious. Santa Anna ordered that each of the prisoners be shot. When the regional governor refused to carry out the command, Santa Anna schemed a far more twisted manner of dealing with the Texans. Each was to partake in a life-and-death lottery. The prisoners would be blindfolded and forced to withdraw a singl
e bean from an earthen jar filled with dry white beans, among which were seventeen black beans. When that day, March 25, 1843, came, every man drawing a black bean was shot at dusk. One Texan fell to the ground, pretending to be dead; he escaped that night, only to be captured and shot soon afterward.

  The remaining Texans continued their march south to Mexico City at gunpoint, where they were imprisoned at the maximum-security Perote Prison in the heart of Mexico’s capital. Their case soon attracted international attention. Diplomats from the United States and Great Britain lobbied to set them free. This effort was ultimately successful, although many of the Texans died before their release was secured in 1844.

  These memories were fresh in the minds of American soldiers marching through Mier toward Monterrey. The Black Bean Episode, as it had come to be known, was by no means ancient history. That deadly lottery had taken place during Grant’s final months at West Point, and the final Perote prisoners were released while he was stationed with Longstreet at Camp Salubrity. There was even a Mier veteran among the troops. Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Walker of the First Texas Division had been a private during the Battle of Mier, but he had gone on to become one of the leaders of the Salado escape and was one of the three Texans who had avoided recapture. Walker had gotten his revenge by fighting at the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, yet he was by no means through.

  As he had in Matamoros, General Taylor insisted that his army not follow a scorched-earth policy, which invading armies had used for thousands of years. There was no raping and pillaging. Instead of just helping themselves to cattle and crops and whatever else they required or wanted, the American soldiers were required to purchase what they needed. The most important of the commodities was corn. Without corn it was impossible to feed the horses and mules or to make corn bread to supplement the men’s meals. Though initially scarce, as the landscape grew more lush and tropical with Monterrey’s approach, corn could soon be had for just a dollar a bushel. And while the daily search for corn was still a burden to Grant and the other quartermasters, they were at least appeased by the news that Taylor planned to modify his policy toward the locals when they reached Monterrey. Instead of paying for everything, Taylor planned to force civil authorities to provide all his army required, including corn and flour.

  Until then, they continued to march. The American army tramped into the foothills of the great Sierra Alva, a spur of the Sierra Madre range that runs down the spine of Mexico. Here the streams ran clear, and large boulders had recently tumbled into the road, dislodged by heavy rains.

  The road led them through gorgeous Cerralvo, an old Spanish town of some eighteen hundred people, with a distinctly European appearance: a crumbling castle made of gray stone; a cathedral with a high steeple from which emanated the sound of chimes; a network of canals; the aroma of fresh flowers from the many formal gardens; and a clear stream running through the center of the main street, spanned by ornate bridges arching gracefully from one side to the other. The temperatures were pleasant, a calming departure from the heat of Camargo. Brief daily downpours had the effect of cleansing the air, and many soldiers quickly proclaimed it to be the most welcoming spot they had yet seen in Mexico.

  Taylor’s army camped outside town, arranging their tents in the familiar company rows, but muddled on the next day, pausing only in the village of Marín — though not to sightsee. The time had come to prepare for battle. Taylor waited for the soldiers and wagons and mules and cannons that had set out from Camargo in his wake, gathering his entire force for the final push into Monterrey.

  Like spectators in a great drama, the local citizens watched the invasion with some fascination, but they also sang out words of warning. “The forward division halted again at Marín, twenty-four miles from Monterrey,” Grant would remember later. “But this place and Cerralvo were nearly deserted, and men, women, and children were seen running and scattered over the hills as we approached. But when the people returned they found all their abandoned property safe, which must have given them a favorable opinion of Los Grengos — ‘the Yankees.’ ” “We saw Mexicans sitting in their doorways along the route to see us pass. They had lost all fear of us, now that they saw we had no intention of injuring peaceful citizens,” wrote Lieutenant Abner Doubleday of New York, an 1842 West Point graduate. “They said to us ‘Mucho fandango a Monterrey,’ which is equivalent to ‘they are getting up a dance for you in Monterrey.’ ”

  The Mexican army had spent the entire summer preparing Monterrey for Taylor’s fandango. On the nineteenth, the American troops moved within three miles of that vital stronghold. It was, at long last, time to dance.

  NINETEEN

  Prelude

  SEPTEMBER 19, 1846

  Jefferson Davis, his lack of uniform giving him a decidedly unmilitary appearance, inspected the Mississippi Rifles as they stood, rank and file, in the American encampment outside Monterrey. The formation was tight, the rows neat and bodies erect. All around the Rifles, row after row, acre after acre, mile upon mile, white tents were being pitched as Taylor’s army made itself at home.

  After dismissing his troops, Davis surveyed Monterrey, three miles to the south. Heavy fog had hung over the city that morning, hiding it entirely from the Americans. But as the sun climbed higher in the sky, the fog burned off, dramatically revealing the object of their long march. Monterrey was a large Mexican city of ten thousand residents, with a cathedral and rows of flat-roofed stone houses. Founded in 1596 by the Spanish, it had been a small settlement until the Mexican War of Independence but had since flourished, becoming the commercial hub of northern Mexico and capital of the Nuevo León state. The city rested on a plateau, built along the banks of the Río Santa Catarina (already very familiar to the Americans as the Río San Juan, the name it assumed at Camargo), with the lush Sierra Madre rising sharply to the south. A pass cut by the river was the only way through those jagged peaks, leading farther inland to the city of Saltillo. Compared with the harsh desert environment and shabby adobe cities along the Rio Grande, Monterrey was an oasis of civilization to the Americans. “This is the most beautiful spot that it has been my fortune to see in this world,” Grant would describe it.

  Yet at this moment in history, there was nothing idyllic about Monterrey. It was studded with forts and batteries. A tricolor Mexican flag hung limply from a flagpole, pointedly reminding Davis and the others that they were on foreign soil. The city was the ideal defensive stronghold for a retreating army, with fortifications made of solid granite. A prominent citadel, weathered to a forbidding dark hue by the elements and time, rose from the plain to guard Monterrey’s northern approach. A dry moat surrounded the citadel’s walls, which were seven hundred feet long on each side. Mexican cannons — aged castoffs imported from Europe that were heavy and hard to reload but still quite capable of decimating any army that came within range — jutted from the parapets. American soldiers, predictably but also somewhat ominously, had already begun calling it the black fort.

  There were even more fortifications on the western approach to Monterrey. Loma de Federación and Loma de Independencia were a pair of hills looming over the city like sentinels. Each was a thousand feet high and occupied by the Mexican soldiers. The view from the summits was stunning and all-encompassing, allowing the Mexicans a bird’s-eye view of American troop movements as the army approached the city.

  In the center of it all was Monterrey itself, with its narrow streets and alleys and thick wood doors, seemingly tailored for guerrilla operations and house-to-house fighting. Monterrey pre-sented the most daunting challenge the Americans had yet seen. There were no sweeping vistas as there had been at Palo Alto or Resaca de la Palma, where the terrain had been suited to cavalry charges and an artillery battle. Taylor, perhaps making his first blunder of the war, had even left most of his large cannons back at the Rio Grande, thinking they would slow down his army during the rugged overland journey.

  Monterrey would be a more intimate battle. The fightin
g would be hand-to-hand and the enemy so close that a man might smell the other’s breath as they fought. “The city has to be carried,” one American officer noted. He then added with prescience, “The bayonet will probably have to do the work.”

  The Mexican army had made great changes in leadership in the three months since both sides had last met. Gone was Major General Mariano Arista, whose overconfidence had cost him Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma. Replacing him as commander of Mexico’s Army of the North had been General Francisco Mejía, who in turn was replaced by Ampudia. As the Americans knew all too well, Ampudia was also the man who had orchestrated the massacre at Mier two years earlier.

  Ampudia owed his new command to none other than General Antonio López de Santa Anna, the infamous butcher of the Alamo, Goliad, and the Black Bean Episode. Santa Anna’s postwar exile had come to an end during August, as Taylor’s army prepared to move from Camargo toward Monterrey. President Polk had foolishly arranged for Santa Anna to be smuggled back into Mexico from his exile in Cuba on August 14, with the understanding that the Mexican general would find a way to rise to power and then align himself with the American side. Santa Anna wasted no time in taking control of the Mexican army, but rather than befriend the Americans, he now ached to defeat them. Though based hundreds of miles south in Mexico City, Santa Anna had been in constant contact with Ampudia via messengers on horseback.

  Santa Anna had originally ordered Ampudia to march his army all the way back through the narrow notch in the mountains to Saltillo, there to make a stand. The rotund major general, however, feared his men would mutiny if he retreated too far into the Mexican interior. He also recognized something Santa Anna could not have known from so far away: Monterrey’s tremendous military advantages. With the broad plain sprawled before the city, and the mountains providing natural protection to the rear, an attacking army could approach from only one direction. By fortifying Monterrey’s approaches, Ampudia could draw Taylor’s army in and then decimate it.