The Training Ground Page 25

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  One Step Closer

  JANUARY 16, 1847

  Captain Robert E. Lee was also among the men transferred to Scott’s command. The reliable, if heretofore unspectacular, Virginian had shown a dogged brilliance during his time with Wool’s army, as if desperate to finally make his mark.

  One incident in particular stood out. Wool’s six-hundred-mile march south from San Antonio had been incident free, and the subsequent garrison duty in the Saltillo region had been cause for the occasional adventure. But on Christmas morning, just after breakfast, news of enemy troop movements reached Wool’s headquarters. Lee volunteered to act as scout, to ascertain the size of the force. He hired a local guide to show the way and rode all day and into the night searching for the Mexican army. He was soon rewarded by the sight of distant campfires. The terrified Mexican guide begged Lee to turn back. When the Virginian refused, the guide fled, forcing Lee to press on alone.

  By then, he was forty miles from Wool’s army. Yet Lee carefully rode closer to the fires, until he could clearly see a large encampment on a hill. The dingy white tents seemed to be moving. Thinking this odd, Lee edged even closer. The “tents” turned out to be a flock of sheep. The Mexican army was nowhere to be seen.

  That could have been the end of the mission, but the indefatigable Lee had been ordered to find the enemy troops, and he would not rest until he had done so. After riding into the shepherds’ camp and ascertaining the true location of the Mexican army, Lee galloped back to Wool. “The most delighted man to see me was the old Mexican, the father of my guide, with whom I had last been seen by any of our people, and whom General Wool had arrested and proposed to hang if I was not forthcoming,” he later recalled.

  Lee promptly teamed up with a group of cavalry and rode back out into the country. By this time he had been in the saddle for more than a day, with just a three-hour break to catch some sleep. Yet he would spend the next day in the saddle as well, finally locating the Mexican forces, precisely calculating their numbers, and charging back to report the news to Wool.

  That was the sort of diligent effort Lee had put forth his entire career, but now something finally came of it. Wool promoted him to inspector general of his division. Even better, Scott remembered their long-ago meeting at West Point, when they had administered final exams to the cadets. Lee was not just being transferred to the general’s command; he was ordered to join the general staff as they planned the invasion of Veracruz.

  The challenges Lee would face were many, and the logistics enormous. Veracruz would be the largest joint amphibious operation in U.S. history. Transport ships needed to be positioned, some ten thousand men needed to be loaded aboard those ships and then fed and housed, and surfboats were needed to row them ashore. Additionally, cannons, munition, and horses needed to be transported, among the myriad objects a self-sustaining force required to invade another nation. It was a great honor for Lee to be chosen. He still had yet to hear a shot fired in anger, but that seemed certain to change come the first week of March, when Veracruz would see the American army crawl out of the sea.

  TWENTY-NINE

  California

  JANUARY 26, 1847

  Lieutenant William Tecumseh Sherman was also in a place called Monterey, but nearly three thousand miles from his fellow West Pointers. One hundred and eighty-nine days after sailing from New York, the USS Lexington dropped anchor. She was roughly one hundred miles southwest of Yerba Buena, on the coast of California, in the charming mission village that shared a name with its war-torn southern cousin.

  “Swords were brought out, guns oiled and made ready, and everything was in a bustle when the old Lexington dropped her anchor,” Sherman recalled. “Everything on shore looked bright and beautiful, the hills covered with grass and flowers, the live oaks so serene and homelike, and the low adobe houses, with red tiled roofs and whitened walls, contrasted well with the dark brown pine trees behind, making a decidedly good looking impression on us who had come so far to spy out the land.

  “Nothing could be more peaceful in its looks than Monterey in January, 1847.”

  Therein lay the problem. Sherman had traveled far in search of war — down the coast of North and South America, around Cape Horn, then back up along the coasts of those same two continents — only to find that the war in California was all but done by the time he got there.

  The conquest of California was the fulfillment of Polk’s aggressive Manifest Destiny strategy and had initially been led by an eccentric and ambitious adventurer named John C. Frémont. The son-in-law of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Frémont was a brevet captain in the Topographical Corps who had been sent west to chart the Arkansas and Red rivers. However, he had somehow ended up on the shores of the Pacific, more than a thousand miles west of those rivers’ headwaters, and almost single-handedly overthrew the Mexican government at Yerba Buena. On July 4, 1846, at a party in Sonoma to celebrate the victory, he declared California independent of Mexico. The victory was sealed when a naval contingent led by Commodore Robert F. Stockton captured Monterey. Frémont was named military commandant of the region, and Yerba Buena’s name was soon changed to San Francisco.

  Meanwhile, Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny, who had led a force of dragoons west from Fort Leavenworth in June, successfully captured the Mexican outpost at Santa Fe on August 18. He then left behind an occupying force and marched three hundred dragoons overland on mules toward Southern California, departing on September 25. En route, they encountered the legendary mountain man Kit Carson, who was racing east with news from Frémont that American forces had already conquered California. Kearny immediately transferred the dispatches to one of his officers, pressed Carson into service as a guide, and sent two hundred dragoons back to Santa Fe, thinking that the less volatile conditions in California called for a smaller force.

  Over the two months of travel that followed, Kearny’s force suffered horribly. Their route took them through the great Mojave and Sonoran deserts of the American Southwest. Their mules died beneath them from lack of water and vegetation. The men became skeletal as their rations were reduced. When Kearny’s depleted column finally arrived in the verdant scrublands outside San Diego, a chance encounter with Mexican forces saw eighteen of them slaughtered and another thirteen mutilated by lances and sabers. The Battle of San Pasqual was the first American defeat of the Mexican War. Just as disturbingly, it signaled a shift: the Mexicans had regained control of portions of California.

  But Kearny managed to hook up with American naval forces in San Diego on December 12. Working in conjunction with naval commodore Robert F. Stockton, Kearny’s soldiers marched north and captured Los Angeles on January 10, 1847. After that, the battle became one of pride, as dueling forces settled the matter of California’s American military leadership. Kearny, under orders from Washington, claimed that he was military governor; Stockton backed Frémont.

  That was the only semblance of conflict Sherman discovered upon arriving in Monterey. Now he would be fated to spend the rest of the war keeping the peace in a quiet, beautiful, and — with a mere twenty thousand Spanish and American residents — extremely underpopulated territory.

  Just as during the Seminole Wars, William Tecumseh Sherman seemed destined to remain on the periphery of yet another conflict, left to hear of the action secondhand, through the accounts of his fellow West Pointers. Slowly, and despite his best efforts to enjoy the beauty of this new land, Sherman settled into a deep and lasting depression.

  THIRTY

  Taylor Stands Alone

  FEBRUARY 22, 1847

  It was George Washington’s birthday, a most patriotic day to every American soldier. The Mexican request for surrender arrived at 11:00 a.m. An officer on horseback, flying a white flag, galloped toward the American lines. But it was not the Mexicans who were giving up. Rather, Santa Anna’s messenger carried a letter requesting that Taylor’s forces throw down their weapons and throw up their hands. “You are surrounded by 20
,000 men,” the demand read in Spanish, forcing Taylor to yell for a translator, “and cannot in any human probability avoid suffering a rout, and being cut to pieces with your troops. But as you deserve consideration and particular esteem, I wish to save you from a catastrophe, and for that purpose give you this notice in order that you may surrender at discretion under the assurance that you will be treated with the consideration belonging to the Mexican character; to which end you will be granted an hour’s time to make up your mind, to commence from the moment when my flag of truce arrives at your camp.”

  Taylor appeared to have little choice. General Santa Anna had done the impossible, marching his 21,533 men and twenty-one pieces of artillery hundreds of miles north from San Luis Potosí across a barren and almost entirely waterless wasteland. He now prepared to slaughter Taylor’s depleted force.

  Santa Anna had exerted a cruel discipline on the march, shooting anyone attempting to desert. But he had promised his army that they could loot the American corpses after the battle. Now, their long march finally done, the impoverished Mexican soldiers thirsted for their promised riches. Many of these same Mexican troops had marched out of Monterrey in disgrace five months earlier. There was little doubt that the Mexicans had come seeking revenge. Should the Americans surrender, they would be stripped of their belongings and perhaps their lives. Taylor’s men chose a name for the grisly fate awaiting them: getting “lanced.”

  Davis and the First Mississippi anchored the far left — and most vulnerable end — of the American line. Placing the Mississippi regiment at the far left was evidence of Taylor’s trust in Davis’s leadership. Of all his units, Taylor had personally requested that the First Mississippi remain under his command when other troops were being stripped away. Davis had since become closer than ever with the general, privy to his confidences and anti-Polk opinions.

  The Americans were seven miles south of Saltillo, near a sprawling stone hacienda known as Buena Vista. The estate was gorgeously situated on a vast plain, with undulating columns of buttes and ravines arrayed before it. The soldiers were mesmerized by the splendor of their surroundings. “Nature was there in her grandeur and her power,” wrote one officer. “And as far as the eye could reach, the peaks of the Sierra Madre were towering in the skies.”

  THOUGH BEAUTIFUL FROM a distance, the terrain was treacherous and windswept up close, its loose soil lacking in vegetation. Taylor’s scouts had warned him of the Mexican advance just a few days earlier. After the initial shock of realizing that his worst fears were about to come true, Taylor had ordered his army to fall back from their encampment farther south at Agua Nueva. He retreated up the road eleven miles until he found the place where he would make a stand. Taylor, working closely with General Wool, judiciously positioned his small force. The crags and plateaus offered natural defensive positions. A mountain pass known as La Angostura provided a perfect location to place the right side of his line, for the land west of it was far too rugged for an army to traverse. Taylor installed artillery and two regiments in the pass, the Third Indiana and the First Illinois. His remaining regiments, including cavalries from Kentucky and Arkansas, spread out across a mile-long plateau that extended like a long tongue eastward from the Angostura pass. Davis and the First Mississippi were at the far end of the plateau. Thanks to that daunting terrain west of La Angostura, the Mexicans would have no choice but to attack Davis’s end of the line.

  Despite Santa Anna’s boast that his forces already had the Americans surrounded, his army was merely arrayed in a broad arc in front of Taylor’s troops. Yet his words weren’t too far from the truth: encircling the Americans would be as simple as making a sweep around Davis and marching straight on to Buena Vista. There he would block the road that ran directly through Angostura, into Buena Vista, then on to Saltillo, and into Monterrey. This was the same road Worth’s men had battled for on September 20. The Americans had traveled back and forth along the span countless times in the months since. Now the combination of Santa Anna’s troops and the terrain would imprison the Americans.

  The Mexican messenger was Major Pedro Vanderlinden, a surgeon. As commanding general, it was Taylor who drafted the reply to Santa Anna’s demand. The major dutifully galloped back to the Mexican lines and presented it to Santa Anna. The wording had been altered by Major Bliss (Taylor’s actual language had been laden with expletives), but the intent remained no less direct: “In reply to your note of this date, summoning me to surrender my forces at your discretion, I beg leave to say that I decline acceding to your request.”

  Battle was imminent. Wool rode up and down the lines, rousing his division and even the volunteers by invoking the memory of the venerated Washington. The sun was shining brightly, but the air was biting cold. They were upholding a “sacred trust,” Wool told the volunteers, by doing battle on the first president’s birthday. The American soldiers responded with thunderous cheers, and regimental bands broke into “Hail, Columbia.” Wool “nerved the hearts of the soldiers,” in the words of one Massachusetts volunteer. Small in numbers, but mightily determined to stand fast, the Americans braced for the Mexican onslaught.

  They didn’t wait long. As Wool was exhorting the Americans, Catholic priests marched in a long procession before Santa Anna’s forces, offering a benediction to the Mexican troops as regimental bands played somber martial music in the background. As soon as the priests finished, the Mexicans attacked. The time was 3:00 p.m. The action began with the firing of a single cannon. That was the signal for squads led by Mexican generals Ampudia and Mejía to begin the predictable move toward Davis and the left side of the American line. Sunlight gleamed off their polished bayonets. The air was filled with the clatter of hooves and the creak of gun carriages being dragged into position. Those two Mexican generals were proud and used to getting their way. They had been humiliated by Taylor three times. Buena Vista marked the beginning of their redemption.

  The deep valleys and rocky plateaus made for slow movement. A cold wind whistled up the valley when darkness fell. It began to rain. Muzzle flashes continued until long after sunset. Both sides rested in the field and waited for morning to come again — everyone but Davis and the First Mississippi. Taylor was concerned about his supply depot back in Saltillo. He ordered the First to pull back and march there as a defensive gesture. Finding nothing wrong, the Mississippi Rifles slept a few hours and marched back to Buena Vista at first light.

  THIRTY-ONE

  The Hacienda

  FEBRUARY 23, 1846

  The 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.