The Training Ground Page 7

  Tensions escalated after Mexican patrols captured, and then returned, two American scouts. On April 10, Quartermaster Trueman Cross ventured out of the camp for an ill-advised solitary horseback ride through the countryside and never came back. The aging veteran of the War of 1812 had been sick, and many thought he might have fallen off his horse. But rumors of a less accidental demise gained credence when one of the patrols sent to find his body was ambushed and an American officer, Lieutenant Theodoric H. Porter, was killed. Porter was a popular man, the son of a naval commodore and seemingly destined for a greatness all his own. (Back in Corpus Christi, he had been the actor who objected to performing opposite Grant in The Moor of Venice.) No one knew for certain whether bandits or a Mexican army patrol had killed him, but the young lieutenant’s murder was a cause for shock and quiet fury. Many soldiers were incensed that an infantry officer had volunteered to do a chore more suited to cavalry and snobbily acted as if he had it coming. Others saw Porter’s death as an omen of things to come. Convinced that there was no way Taylor’s puny force could defeat the Mexicans, these overnight cowards swam the Rio Grande in the dead of night to desert. Many were Irish Catholic immigrants who sympathized with the Mexicans because of their shared faith and felt themselves religiously persecuted in the predominantly Protestant U.S. Army. American sentries had standing orders to shoot all deserters on sight — but only while the deserters were still in the river. If the deserters reached the other side, they were safe; shooting them once they’d reached Mexican lines would be an act of war.

  On April 11, Major General Pedro de Ampudia paraded into Matamoros with a two-hundred-man escort of light cavalry. Ampudia was a Cuban-born Spaniard with a pronounced paunch, deep circles under his eyes, and a long, white goatee that contrasted sharply with the black hair atop his head. He was respected if not beloved. Ampudia had crushed a citizens’ rebellion in the Yucatán in 1841 and an uprising in Tabasco in 1844, where he shot all of its leaders — though not before ordering their throats slashed. The Americans could hear the echoing bong of church bells and the celebratory firing of muskets that accompanied Ampudia’s arrival, giving the moment a raucous feel. Three days later, an infantry force of twenty-two hundred under Major General Anastasio Torrejón joined Ampudia’s men. The newly arrived Mexicans confidently aimed cannons across the river, directly at Taylor’s new fort. At the same time, as if to accentuate American weakness, Colonel William Whistler, the commander of the Fourth, was arrested for repeatedly stumbling through the ranks shit-faced drunk — no minor accomplishment in an army where alcohol was the universal salve.

  And still — despite the manic pace of the new fort’s construction, the Mexican troop buildup, the desertions, the disappearances, and the deaths — Grant kept trying to convince himself there wouldn’t be a war. Even when a fresh batch of reinforcements and supplies arrived from Port Isabel during the second week of April, he thought it was just saber rattling. The American camp was within easy reach of Mexican cannons in Matamoros, yet not a single shot had been fired. As Grant saw it, the two armies were at the epicenter of an overblown international crisis, with the world watching and waiting to see which side blinked first. Someone would have to back down.

  “My Dearest Julia,” Grant wrote on April 20, craving a reunion with his fiancée. “Everything is quiet here. We are only separated by a narrow stream from one of the largest cities in Mexico, yet not a soul dare cross. Everything looks belligerent to a spectator but I believe there will be no fight. Occasionally they make a threat, but as yet their threats have all ended in bombast. It is now the opinion of many that our difficulty with Mex will be settled by negotiation and if so I hope my dear Julia to hear the Fourth Infantry ordered to the upper Mississippi before the end of warm weather.”

  Privately, Grant wondered what would happen if he was wrong. There was talk that captured Americans would be marched to prisoner-of-war camps hundreds of miles south. There were also rumors that opposition general Ampudia was fond of boiling prisoners’ heads in oil.

  Grant found solace — and denial — in the reality that Mexico and the United States were not actually at war. So while the Mexicans “hovered about in such great numbers that it was not safe to send a wagon train after supplies,” it was easy to blame the deaths of Porter and (presumably) Cross on bandits or accidents and not soldiers and to believe that there had been no real hostilities. With an optimism born of lovesick naïveté, Grant continued to hope that the dispute could be settled diplomatically.

  That was not to be.

  On April 23, Mexico secretly declared war on the United States. On April 24, Major General Mariano Arista arrived in Matamoros to relieve Ampudia as commander of Mexico’s Army of the North. The red-haired Arista, who spoke fluent English and had once lived along the Ohio River very close to Grant’s hometown, wasted no time showing why he had been entrusted with such a conspicuous command. By three o’clock that afternoon, Taylor’s scouts were reporting that Mexican forces were mobilizing to cross the Rio Grande upriver and downriver of the new fort. Dragoon patrols soon trotted out of the American camp to see if the rumors were true. Grant, like the rest of the infantry, stayed behind. It had been a somber afternoon. There had been a funeral procession for Colonel Cross, whose body had been found, stripped and battered almost beyond recognition. The scene was made all the more wrenching by the sight of Cross’s distraught son, who was also a soldier, marching alongside the flag-draped casket, and Cross’s horse being led to the grave site. The animal was draped in black, with Cross’s empty boots placed backward in the stirrups, according to military custom, signifying a horse whose rider has died.

  The time for mere saber rattling was past. War between the United States and Mexico was about to begin.

  FOUR

  Fields of Fire

  APRIL 25, 1846

  Captain William Joseph Hardee, a southern Georgian by birth, was tall and lean, with pale blue eyes and a courtly manner — as well as a modish French cut to his upturned mustache and thick billow of narrow beard that made the ladies swoon. The epitome of the dashing cavalry officer, Hardee was certainly no pencil-pushing engineer. He was a warrior through and through, fiery and opinionated, educated in the military arts at West Point, infatuated and engrossed by the smartest ways to trap and kill men. Hardee was one of those select souls who would be utterly lost when there was no war to fight, predestined to spend his life as a mercenary or a tactician for hire, anything to apply his considerable mental and physical prowess to making the world a better — or, depending upon which side you were on, more violent — place in which to live.

  Since having graduated from West Point in 1838, he had already put this knowledge to use during two years of fighting the Seminoles in Florida with the Second Dragoons. His daring and intellect had come to the attention of no less than American secretary of war Joel Roberts Poinsett, who ordered Hardee to the elite French military school at Saint-Maur for courses in advanced cavalry tactics. Of the 637 officers currently serving in the U.S. Army in April 1846, few had greater tactical awareness.

  So Hardee’s first instinct, as the men of the Second Dragoons approached the large rancho on the Rio Grande to investigate rumors of Mexican troop movements in Carricitos, was to be cautious. There was just one gate leading in and out of the property, which meant that once he and the rest of the cavalry entered, they could easily be trapped. In fact, the opening wasn’t a gate at all but a narrow passage through an impenetrable tangle of scrub grass and mesquite that surrounded the ranch house on three sides. The fourth side, of course, was the Rio Grande itself. The river here was wide and swift and an unsound avenue of escape. To Hardee’s trained eye, the ranch was a place where an army could easily be penned in and slaughtered.

  The smart move would have been to send a small scouting party inside to search for the Mexican troops, while holding the bulk of the mounted force outside the ranch to keep a sharp eye out for a surprise attack. But Captain Seth Thornton, Hardee’s c
ommanding officer, was unworried, convinced that there were no enemy soldiers in the area. He ordered his entire outfit, sixty-three men in all, to follow him into the ranch so that he might question the owners.

  Hardee was bone-tired. The dragoons had ridden through the night, traveling almost forty miles in the darkness. They had stopped only to grab a few hours’ sleep and breakfast, then mounted up once again at dawn. Now they were drowsy and impatient, eager to make a cursory pass through the bottomlands along the river before trotting back to tell Taylor that the rumors were false.

  Hardee was the son of a son of a soldier, with a grandfather who had fought in the Revolutionary War and a father who had served in the War of 1812. He knew that fatigue made men lower their guard, even in war, when the need to be vigilant was greatest. So despite his lack of sleep, he grew nervous as the train of dragoons rode through the narrow gap in the mesquite. “The whole guard entered in single file, without any guard being placed in front,” he noted, “or any other precautions taken to prevent surprise. Captain Thornton was prepossessed with the idea that the Mexicans had not crossed, and if they had, they would not fight.”

  Hardee rode in the rear of the column and was the last man to enter the rancho, or “plantation,” as he thought of it, having grown up on an estate known as Rural Felicity, deep in cotton country. Here, the main house was two hundred yards inside the “fence,” which was made of thick natural vegetation covered in thorns. Hardee trotted his horse up to the porch. He knocked. No one was home.

  The dragoons spread out to search for someone who might answer questions about troop movements in the area. “At last,” Hardee wrote, “an old man was found.” Thornton rode over to question the elderly gentleman. The morning was calm. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary — for a moment or two. But then one of the dragoons turned to the east and saw a most terrifying sight: Mexican soldiers, too many for him to count, and all marching smartly toward the Americans. “The cry of alarm was given, and the enemy were seen in numbers,” Hardee later wrote, with a great deal of understatement. The Georgian whirled his horse. A sixteen-hundred-man contingent of Mexican cavalry, light infantry, and sappers had surrounded the rancho and were pouring in through the lone entrance. The Second Dragoons weren’t just trapped; they were moments away from being annihilated.

  Thornton, acting quickly, led a frantic charge toward the gate. It was their only hope of escaping alive. The attack failed as soon as it began, with the Mexicans firing several rapid volleys at the approaching horsemen. Thus the men of the Second Dragoons, one of the army’s most elite fighting forces, panicked. All sense of organization was lost. They galloped their horses up and down the fence, desperate to save themselves. Unit brotherhood was a thing of the past. Thornton led the retreat, such as it was, racing along the perimeter, frantically searching for a second opening. The Mexican firing never ceased.

  Hardee galloped his horse to Thornton, thinking he had a solution — the only solution — to their life-and-death dilemma. Both were young men, on the cusp of thirty. They had been together at West Point and had fought alongside each other in the Seminole Wars. They had learned a great deal about warfare in their short lives, but nothing had prepared them for being surrounded by a fighting force that outnumbered them thirty to one, trapped inside a preposterous natural barrier, with absolutely no way out.

  Hardee caught up to his classmate. Their horses were at full gallop as he screamed that their only hope was to dismount and hack through the chaparral barrier with their cavalry sabers. Thornton seemed to agree, but with the resignation of a commanding officer who had lost all control: the terrified dragoons had refused when Thornton ordered them to stand and fight. There seemed little chance they’d listen now.

  Nostalgia was a thing of the past. Hardee took control. “The direction which Captain Thornton was pursuing would lead to the certain destruction of himself and his men, without possibility of resistance, [so] I turned to the right and told the men to follow me. I made for the river, intending to either swim it or place myself in position of defense.” Twenty-five men followed Hardee down to the Rio Grande. They had no other choice: if they wanted to live, the river was their only way out.

  Yet swimming was out of the question. The river was shallow near the bank, with a muddy bottom so soft that the horses began sinking down into the muck. Venturing farther out — whether in the saddle or on foot in an attempt to swim — might mean getting hopelessly stuck, making horses and riders easy targets for even the most pitiful enemy marksman.

  Hardee spun away from the Rio Grande. The time had come to stand and fight. He could hear the battle raging near the farmhouse. Thornton and his men were being cut down, but the Mexican infantry hadn’t yet advanced to the river, giving the Georgian time to plan. He assembled the dragoons, lining them abreast along the riverbank, then checking each man’s armament, one by one, to make sure that they were prepared for battle. Each had started the day with the standard weaponry issued to all American cavalry: an 1840-model cavalry saber, a single-shot pistol, and an 1843-model breech-loading carbine (loaded from the rear of the barrel, as opposed to tamping a charge down from the forward opening).

  Hardee was shocked to discover that many soldiers had dropped their weapons during the retreat. Theirs would be, unfortunately, a suicide charge. “Almost everyone had lost a saber, a pistol, or carbine. Nevertheless, the men were firm and disposed, if necessary to fight to the last extremity,” he noted.

  It hadn’t been more than fifteen minutes since the American soldiers had marched onto the ranch. The battle itself was just five minutes old. Riderless American horses galloped in circles, their empty saddles attesting to the dragoons’ decimation. Thornton, miraculously, had escaped into the chaparral unseen. He now hid there, dust-covered and dripping sweat, peering through the thorns and bramble as Hardee and his men prepared to mount the final cavalry charge of their lives. Mexican horsemen ringed the chaparral to prevent Hardee’s escape. The infantry of Brigadier General Anastasio Torrejón walked haughtily to the river, guns leveled, ready to finish the Americans off.

  Hardee reverted to his training.

  It didn’t take a tactical genius to see that a charge would be futile. He and his men were surrounded and barely armed. The dragoons would be cut down in a hail of musket fire the instant they spurred their horses. He’d heard the rumors about Mexicans treating prisoners atrociously during their battles with the Texans, but Hardee knew what he had to do. “I went forward and arranged, with an officer, that I should deliver myself and my men as prisoners of war, to be treated with all the consideration to which such unfortunates are entitled by the rules of civilized warfare.”

  With that, Hardee surrendered.

  Bodies of American soldiers littered the ranchland as Hardee was marched to General Torrejón. One second lieutenant, a classmate of Longstreet’s named George T. Mason, lay dead in the green spring grass, a sword clutched in his right fist, killed as he tried to fight his way off the battlefield rather than surrender.

  Hardee saw no sign of Thornton.

  NOT ALL OF the dragoons had been slain, much to Hardee’s relief. In addition to his small force, twenty more men were in Mexican custody. When Hardee finally met face-to-face with Torrejón, he was prepared for the worst.

  Torrejón was a mestizo. He had a hard and unattractive face and possessed a reputation for cunning and for setting traps. Hardee now knew that all too well. But Torrejón was also compassionate. The battle was through. He saw no need to butcher the Americans. Torrejón sent the prisoners back to Matamoros, where they were treated with cordial respect. Thornton was captured several days later and joined Hardee as a prisoner of war. They were lodged in a large hotel, where life was amazingly luxurious. Not only did they dine regularly with General Ampudia — the man reputed to boil heads in oil — but the Mexican army paid them a daily allowance equal to half their regular pay. General Arista “intended to supply all our wants himself,” wrote Hardee in a letter that
was sent across the river to Taylor. “These promises have already been fulfilled in part.”

  In fact, Hardee was living better than he would have on the American side of the Rio Grande, eating fresh food instead of salt pork out of a barrel, sleeping in a real bed instead of on a muddy bedroll, and having a roof over his head to keep him dry when thunderstorms came. This peaceful reverie would soon come to an end. Thanks to Thornton’s inept tactical blunder, Taylor dashed off an urgent message to Washington, asking for immediate reinforcements. The missive confirmed the news that President Polk had awaited so eagerly: “Hostilities may now be considered as to have commenced.”

  FIVE

  Call to Battle

  MAY 3, 1846

  To the brothers in arms along the Rio Grande, no triumphal call to battle marked the Mexican War’s official beginning. Nor did they have the benefit of an elaborately worded decree. The precise moment when each man realized that Mexico and the United States were shooting at each other in earnest was, in fact, unique. For Captain William Hardee, it came as Torrejón sprung his trap. General Zachary Taylor’s war began when he sent the courier galloping away from camp with that vindicating message for President Polk. And for Lieutenant Sam Grant, the first war of his young life began at dawn on a Sunday, as he lay sleeping.

  It was just moments before the regimental bugler would blow reveille. Once again Grant huddled in a grimy white tent on a fly-choked Texas beach, but instead of Corpus Christi, it was the coastal supply depot of Port Isabel. The fort was finally finished. Taylor had marched the bulk of his army twenty-seven miles east to the Gulf of Mexico. His stated intent was to pick up provisions and armament — which he would indeed do. But the maneuver was also Taylor’s cagey attempt to draw the Mexicans away from the fort. He wanted to fight them out in the open on a proper battlefield, rather than in what it was increasingly apparent was an Alamo-like setting that robbed the Americans of mobility and cavalry.