The Training Ground Read online

  For now, Taylor resorted to the traditional. Though he had ordered the heavy artillery left behind in Camargo, he had hedged his bets by dragging three very large guns up from the Rio Grande. There was nothing “flying” about the pair of twenty-four-pound howitzers and the cumbersome ten-pound mortar now being moved into siege range. Once in position, these guns — courtesy of Company C, First U.S. Heavy Artillery — would be capable of dropping monstrous shells on Monterrey. Taylor’s scouts had discovered a natural hedgerow out on the plain, big enough to conceal those cannons and hundreds of men. During the night the artillery and soldiers had dug into the depression behind that berm. “The point for establishing the siege battery was reached, and the work performed without attracting the attention of the enemy,” Grant noted.

  Grant’s Fourth Infantry, which had also supported Ridgely’s artillery at Palo Alto, spent the night of September 20 as part of a forward egress from Walnut Springs. The men huddled together in the brisk air. Their bodies had been warmed at first from the labor of placing the guns, but now they were chilled and their clothes were still damp with sweat. Back at Walnut Springs, watch fires kept soldiers warm when breaks in the weather made it possible, but fire was out of the question for the forward troops. Side by side, some standing watch, some curled up on the ground, they waited out the darkness, praying for morning to come, even though they knew all too well that daylight would not deliver them from their misery. Come dawn they would be warmed by the sun and would then race, on command, toward the unknown of Monterrey’s defenses. As cold as the night might have been, nothing made them tremble inside the way thoughts of the impending attack did.

  Their safety blanket was those three big guns. Combined with Bragg and Ridgely’s flying artillery, the howitzers and mortar formed an unusual aspect of Taylor’s strategy. Normally, heavy artillery might be used to besiege the city, as the Mexicans had attempted at Fort Brown. Or the guns could be used against columns of infantry, as at Palo Alto. But during his reconnaissance on the nineteenth, Major Mansfield realized quite astutely that the Mexican army would never leave the city. Their battle plan was to draw the Americans in to create an optimal field of fire. Taylor’s men, if all went according to plan, would march straight into the fortified kill zones. But relying so heavily on these strongpoints meant the Mexicans were effectively stuck: they couldn’t travel from strongpoint to strongpoint without risking annihilation, and they couldn’t march out onto the prairie without throwing their entire battle plan into disarray.

  Taylor’s artillery had just enough firepower to prove Mans-field’s analysis was correct. The big guns were trained on the Black Fort and La Tenería. These would keep the Mexicans pinned down inside their fortifications. Should Ampudia’s army venture out, most likely with a cavalry force, the artillery would cut them down. And when the time came for an American assault, those cannons would lay down suppressing fire to protect the American charge.

  That protection had its limits. Any frontal assault on Monterrey was going to be bloody.

  At dawn, Worth’s forces rose from the ground several miles to Taylor’s right. Once again they slogged toward the Saltillo road. As they did, the big guns of Company C, First U.S. Heavy Artillery, opened fire. The diversionary tactic was designed to keep the Mexicans focused on the First and Third divisions, distracting them from sending further reinforcements to block Worth’s advance.

  The Mexican batteries answered loud and clear. “At daylight,” Grant wrote with understatement, “fire was opened on both sides and continued with, what seemed to me at that day, great fury.”

  The advantage was clearly with the defenders. Hidden within La Tenería and the Black Fort were thirty cannons — all of them trained on the spot five hundred yards across the open plain where American bodies were pressed as flat as humanly possible against the wet soil. Only a lip of earth stood between them and those Mexican cannons.

  Grant could take it no longer. “My curiosity got the better of my judgment, and I mounted a horse and rode to the front to see what was going on.”

  A GREAT DEAL was going on, all over the battlefield. Worth’s division, for instance, was finally reaching its objective. “We started to place ourselves in the position of the Saltillo road,” Second Lieutenant George Gordon Meade wrote to his wife, “by which we should cut off the retreat of the enemy and have an eye to the advance of his reinforcements, said to be daily expected.” Among his troops were three infantry divisions: the Fifth, the Eighth, and the Seventh. Pete Longstreet was in the Eighth, his men marching in a narrow picket line. Dana was in the Seventh. Meade rode close to Worth as part of the Topographical Corps, the general’s indispensable guide to the landscape and defenses that lay just ahead. Meade was famished. He had been caught out with the rest of the two-thousand-plus force during the rainy night. He had slept as best he could, wrapped in his trusty cloak, which was made waterproof by its india-rubber lining. The lack of campfires had prevented the troops from cooking even a simple evening meal. Now his stomach rumbled and a deep chill lingered in his bones.

  Up at the very front of the taut column, the Texas cavalry served as the advance guard. They were followed closely by the three units of infantry and two more of flying artillery.

  The twin summits loomed above Meade’s left shoulder — Independencia closest and Federación on the far side of the river. The fortress on that peak belonged to the local archbishop. Like the Black Fort on the opposite side of Monterrey, it had been given a nickname by the American forces — in this case, quite logically, the Bishop’s Palace. At 6:30 hellfire rained down from the fortified sanctuary; a horse was killed, a wagon was struck, and a soldier in the Fifth Infantry lost his leg. Yet the American flanking movement had taken Worth’s men farther and farther west of the city, pointedly ensuring that the Americans were just beyond truly effective artillery range. The Mexicans helped out by using solid rounds that lacked explosive charges. The balls of iron were more a nuisance to the Americans than anything else — a reminder to look lively and pay attention. When Meade had ridden out with Major Mansfield as part of the initial Monterrey reconnaissance, the Mexicans had been so accurate that a passing cannonball whooshed within two feet of Meade’s pant leg — and almost crushed the nearby Zachary Taylor. The Mexican gunners may have had inferior munitions, but they were no amateurs.

  The Texans, hungry after the miserable night, had ridden ahead and then dismounted to eat from a cornfield. Just north of the Saltillo road, they chose a poor time and place to stop. “As we were turning the corner of the road entering the valley, the enemy showed himself with a large cavalry force, some two thousand, with some five hundred infantry, evidently intending to dispute our passage,” wrote Meade.

  Those two regiments of Mexican cavalry — the Jalisco Lancers and Guanajuato Lancers — launched a sudden attack.

  As the Texans hurried back to their mounts, Longstreet took the initiative and led his men forward to counterattack. His quick action gave the Texans time to take cover near a wooden fence and begin firing straight into the Mexican horsemen. “The Mexican cavalry charged on our people most gallantly, but were received with so warm a fire as to throw them into confusion,” Meade exulted.

  The Mexican lancers pulled back to regroup. Meanwhile, Worth’s two batteries of flying artillery charged toward the front of the American column and unlimbered their cannons. Within minutes the six-pounders were hurling canister rounds into the massed Mexican horsemen. The carnage was instant, maiming and killing men and horses. Blood, lances, and plumed stovepipe shako hats littered the ground; the morning air was rent by the screams of dying men and animals. Among the fallen was Lieutenant Colonel Juan Nájera, the commander of the Jalisco Regiment.

  The attack had been nothing less than a suicide charge. “The infantry and a portion of the cavalry retired towards the town, but twelve hundred of the cavalry went in the direction of Saltillo, and have not been heard from since,” wrote Meade. As Mansfield had predicted, the Mexican
army was in full defensive mode, ill prepared to venture outside Monterrey’s city walls. That a single horse regiment had lost one hundred men, with another three hundred wounded, before fleeing to fight another day was an indication that the battle for Monterrey was no place for their cavalry.

  Soon, Meade and the other Americans were not just taking and holding but crossing beyond the Saltillo road. This sealed the Mexican army inside the city. Worth ordered a messenger to gallop back toward Taylor with the news that “the town is ours.”

  The time was early, shortly after 8:00 a.m., and the message as premature as the day was young. Controlling the Saltillo road was a fine accomplishment, but it was no guarantee that the Americans would enter Monterrey, let alone take the city.

  Meade rode alongside General Worth as the commander devised a strategy. Worth had a reputation for behaving impulsively, but now he remained collected. “We were on the Saltillo road beyond the gorge through which it passes into town, and . . . this gorge was heavily defended by artillery on the tops of those hills, and by a strong work around the Bishop’s Palace, on one hill, and a redoubt opposite, on the other.” The dilemma was whether it was smarter to send an assault force up the slopes of La Independencia and La Federación, or simply to continue sweeping around to the southernmost side of the city, probing for a more vulnerable place to enter.

  Worth appraised the battlefield with his veteran eye, focusing on the enemy’s control of the high ground. “The examination,” the general later wrote, revealed “the impracticability of any effective operations against the city, until possessed of the exterior forts and batteries.”

  Worth had to alter his plans if they were to stand any chance. “It now became necessary to take those heights before we could advance upon the town,” Meade later remembered, breaking the situation down to its simplest terms in a letter home. The hills would be assaulted, one at a time, regardless of the human cost.

  Shortly after noon, Captain Charles Ferguson Smith and his red-legged infantry — the same men who had so bravely waded the Rio Colorado five months earlier — forded the Santa Catarina and then began clawing their way up Federación’s rocky slope. This time they were joined by two hundred Texas Rangers.

  The gritty force took fire from the moment they stepped into the river and then became pinned down as they climbed. Worth ordered the Seventh Infantry to move forward and reinforce them. “Up the hill we went with a rush, and the Texans ahead like devils,” Dana wrote Sue, trying to sound fearless. “On we came like an irresistible wave. Nothing could stop us.”

  AT THE SAME time, on the opposite side of Monterrey, the Fourth Infantry was still being held in reserve, back by the three siege guns. An affable Georgian and the son of a Revolutionary War major general, General David E. Twiggs (“a grand looking old man, six feet two in stature, with long flowing white hair and a beard which hung over his broad breast like Aaron’s” was how one officer described him) would normally have been in command of the First Division, but he had inadvertently taken an overdose of laxative before the battle, believing that a bullet would pass through his body without harm if his bowels were properly loosened.

  Lieutenant Colonel John Garland had assumed command of Twiggs’s division. Garland was a capable man and had served in the military for more than three decades. But he had never led a charge, and now his brave leadership was undermined by bad tactical decisions. As he cautiously led eight hundred soldiers of the First Division forward under withering fire from the Black Fort and La Tenería, the open plain left his men unprotected, with nowhere to take cover. The units fragmented into smaller groups as they ran forward. The Maryland and District of Columbia volunteers veered too far to the left, toward La Tenería, and were soon subjected to an even greater profusion of artillery and musket fire. Almost all of them lost their nerve. They turned and fled back to Walnut Springs, leaving just one commander and a band of seventy men to press onward into the city.

  On the right side of Garland’s advance, the regulars pressed on, advancing slowly toward the city walls. La Tenería rose to their left and the Black Fort to the right. The plan was for Garland to make his way into the city and then meet up with Major Mansfield, Taylor’s superscout, who would have sneaked into Monterrey to conduct yet another reconnaissance. Mansfield would help lead the way through the maze of streets so that they might attack La Tenería from the rear.

  Grant arrived in the small depression behind Taylor’s big guns. He was on horseback, still studying the battle as a passive observer. He could hear gunfire from inside the city as Garland’s men began a series of street battles on their way to La Tenería. Reinforcements were clearly needed. Taylor decided on a two-pronged response: the Third Division, which included Jefferson Davis and the Mississippi Rifles, would charge directly at La Tenería, and Grant’s Fourth Infantry would simultaneously rush forward to reinforce Garland. “I had been there but a short time when an order to charge was given,” Grant noted. “Lacking the moral courage to return to camp — where I had been ordered to stay — I charged with the regiment.”

  So it was that Sam Grant and Jeff Davis rode into battle together.

  “As soon as the troops were out of the depression they came under fire from the Black Fort,” Grant wrote. The Fourth was totally exposed, with no place to take cover on the flat plain. The Mississippi Rifles and the First Tennessee were farther to the left, temporarily screened from the Black Fort’s guns. “As they advanced they got under fire from batteries guarding the east, or lower, end of the city, and musketry. About one-third of the men engaged in the charge were killed or wounded in the space of a few minutes.”

  The losses were horrendous, with hundreds of American bodies maimed and pierced by a relentless stream of flying metal — rounds of grape and canister musket balls and pulverizing barrages from the Black Fort’s eighteen-pounders. “We were being enfiladed,” one astonished Maryland volunteer would later write, choosing a chilling military term that described troops’ being exposed to gunfire along the entire length of their formation. It was slaughter — and for the first time in the war, Americans were on the receiving end.

  Grant and the Fourth retreated to get out of range, moving parallel to the city walls instead of fleeing backward. “When we got to the place of safety the regiment halted and drew itself together — what was left of it.” In the midst of it all, he thought of his dearest Julia and his love for her.

  Grant was one of the few saddled members of the Fourth; even the regimental adjutant, First Lieutenant Charles Hoskins, was on foot. The thirty-two-year-old Hoskins was an 1836 graduate of West Point who had spent much of his career in frontier outposts such as Kansas and Oklahoma. Grant had known him since their time at the Jefferson Barracks. Not only did Hoskins outrank Grant and carry the regimental colors, but he was also in poor health. Grant offered up his horse. Hoskins graciously accepted, not bothering to command Grant to return to Walnut Springs or even register surprise that his regimental quartermaster was in the thick of the charge instead of tending to the company mules. It was understood that Grant would remain at the front.

  Desperate to be mounted when the next charge came, Grant scrambled to find a horse. He “saw a soldier, a quartermaster’s man, mounted not far away. I ran to him, took his horse and was back with the regiment in a few minutes. In a short time we were off again; and the next place of safety I can remember being in was a field of cane or corn to the northeast of the lower batteries.” Hoskins — and Grant’s original horse — were nowhere to be seen, and the lieutenant soon learned why. “The adjutant to whom I had loaned my horse was killed, and I was designated to act in his place.”

  Temporarily at least, Grant was no longer a quartermaster. With the Fourth now having lost a third of its officers and men, he was responsible for carrying the regimental colors into Monterrey.

  It was shortly before eleven in the morning as the Fourth rested up for the next charge, finding relative comfort and cover in the shelter of some low ho
uses on the edge of town. They could hear the musket fire as the First Mississippi, off to the far left, stormed the bastion at La Tenería. Mexican general Mejía had just reinforced the former tannery with 140 more light infantry and an additional cannon.

  Davis was on foot. The high-strung Tartar was safely back at Walnut Springs with Davis’s longtime slave Jim Green. Three hundred yards out, the First Mississippi came under attack and took cover to return fire. Davis’s men were flustered by the brand-new experience of having men shoot at them, and it showed most of all in their marksmanship. Despite the Whitney rifles’ superior range, the First Mississippi’s bullets weren’t killing any Mexicans. “Damn it,” Davis griped to one of his officers, pacing back and forth behind his lines, “why do not the men get nearer to the fort? Why waste ammunition from such a great distance?” But it was not the gap between the Mississippi volunteers and their enemy that was the problem: Davis’s regiment was “seeing the elephant,” as American soldiers described that first overwhelming whoosh of combat. They were not turning in panic, as most of the Maryland and District of Columbia volunteers had during Garland’s attack, but they were also too timid to press the battle.

  Davis was so sentimental that he sealed letters to Varina with a kiss, but on the battlefield he swore a blue streak, despite having repeatedly promised his wife that he would quit using profanity. Now he screamed at the Rifles to move forward, each well-chosen word designed to terrify and motivate even the most timid planter or banker-cum-soldier. The First Mississippi heeded his command until, 180 yards from the fort, they threw their bodies to the ground once again, pinned down by Mexican fire. “ Now is the time,” Davis fumed. “Great God, if I had thirty men with knives I could take that fort.”

  The First Tennessee was to their right. Together they made an imposing force, but they had to act immediately.