Thirteen Soldiers

by John McCain

  All hands cleared decks, carried the wounded below, and manned the guns as the two naval lines pounded each other. Macdonough himself manned a gun. So did his counterpart, Commodore Downie. Charles Black, an experienced seaman, likely manned one as well. Gunners fired at will. No orders, no battle plans directed the action now, just desperate broadsides exchanged every few minutes in the hope the enemy would be annihilated first. Hardly a mast in either fleet was undamaged. The Ticonderoga fought off attacks from a half dozen British gunboats. The battered Eagle cut her anchor lines in an attempt to escape complete destruction, exposing the Saratoga to the Linnet’s guns.

  The Saratoga’s starboard guns were knocked out of action and her masts and rigging shot away. Macdonough had her hauled about on her spring line and brought his port guns into action, pounding the British frigate mercilessly, killing Downie and several other officers. The Confiance tried to come about but was stuck and couldn’t return fire. Her stern exposed to the Saratoga’s guns, she struck her colors. Macdonough turned his guns on the Linnet, whose captain realized the hopelessness of his situation and surrendered. The British gunboats escaped, but all four of the fleet’s big ships were now American prizes.

  The battle had lasted two hours. A surviving midshipman from the Confiance wrote his mother to describe the carnage: “The havoc on both sides is dreadful. . . . Never was a shower of hail so thick as the shot whistling about our ears.” One of the marines on board the Confiance had been a veteran of Trafalgar, which he called “a mere Flea-Bite in comparison with this.” Casualties were high on both sides: fifty-seven British killed and seventy-two wounded; fifty-two Americans killed and fifty-eight wounded.

  During the naval battle Prevost’s main force had marched past the ford, but after discovering their mistake they turned around and belatedly crossed the Saranac. They were bearing down on Macomb’s left flank when Prevost saw the British fleet surrender. Fearing he could not resupply his army with the lake in American hands, he halted the attack and, ignoring the protests of his officers, marched his soldiers back to Canada.

  The exhausted survivors of the Battle of Lake Champlain, their clothes blackened with gun smoke and blood and shredded by grapeshot and flying debris, their ears deafened from the ceaseless cannonade, most of them bearing wounds, saw to the severely wounded and counted their dead. Macdonough refused the swords proffered by surrendering British officers and commended the gallantry of his defeated foes. He surveyed the damage to his ships and gave orders for the disposition of his captured prizes. He surely praised the courage and resolve of his makeshift crews and made note of those he would recommend be decorated for exceptional bravery.

  Charles Black was one of them. He had been wounded in the battle but survived. He then drifted from history until nearly three decades later, when he became a victim of the Lombard Street riots. He was a decorated hero of the War of 1812 but denied a pension by his ungrateful country. For all he suffered before and after the war, he would have known what it was to be a man equal to the dangers and hardships of war, and equal in all things—courage, ability, honor, and dignity—to the men with whom he braved them.

  JAMES LAWRENCE WAS PROMOTED to captain when he returned from South America in triumph. He had hoped to be given command of the Constitution in reward for his victory and was disappointed to learn he would command that unlucky frigate, the USS Chesapeake, instead. In May 1813 he was stuck in Boston Harbor with a green crew and a ship he didn’t want, anxious to put to sea again and fight the enemy. Commodore Philip Broke, the captain of the British frigate HMS Shannon, part of the squadron then blockading Boston, was anxious to fight too. He wanted a one-on-one battle with an American frigate and sent an American prisoner to Lawrence bearing an insulting letter challenging him to a fight. Lawrence never received it. But that hardly mattered. The Chesapeake put to sea on September 1 with orders to sail to the Gulf of St. Lawrence to interdict British supply ships. As she got underway, Lawrence could see the Shannon tacking back and forth on her own in front of the harbor, spoiling for a fight. Lawrence accepted the challenge.

  Fifteen minutes after the battle began the Chesapeake was disabled and captured and taken away to Halifax. The Shannon was the smaller ship, but her crew was more experienced and her gunnery superior. Lawrence had suffered a mortal wound from small arms fire in the battle’s first moments. Taken below deck, he told his officers, “Don’t give up the ship. Fight her till she sinks.” He died three days later.

  Just two months before Lawrence met his end, the USS Hornet sailed into New York Harbor with its full ship’s company and the HMS Leopard’s captured officers on board. Before the men of the Hornet returned to war; before a regiment of African American troops distinguished themselves in the Battle of New Orleans, the last major battle of the war, earning the praise of Major General Andrew Jackson; before African Americans, who had fought for their country bravely, had returned to the society that degraded, ostracized, and enslaved them; before the navy discouraged their continued service; before they would come to their country’s aid again in America’s war in Mexico; before they fought in the war that would end slavery; before all the injustices and indignities afflicted on African Americans after the War of 1812; before Charles Black was dragged from his home and beaten nearly to death; before all that tragic history, for a brief moment on land the officers and crew of the USS Hornet were brothers-in-arms and the toast of New York City.

  Lawrence and his officers were feted at a dinner in Washington Hall, given the “freedom of the city,” and presented with a silver plate commemorating their victory. The Hornet’s petty officers, marines, and seamen were entertained in an adjoining ballroom. After the dinner the entire ship’s company walked to a theater, where they had been invited to attend the performance of a popular play. Lawrence and his officers were seated in the theater’s boxes, while the crew filled the entire pit. The audience stood to applaud the happy sailors, who “seemed to cheer everything” and “roused the house by their jollity and applause during the performance.”

  Probably few if any of the members of that audience had been to war or understood the bonds that are forged in war. They might have been somewhat taken aback by the boisterous camaraderie of the Hornet’s sailors. At least one eyewitness was astonished to see the sailors taking pleasure in each other’s company. “The crew marched together into the pit,” he observed, “and nearly one half of them were negroes.”

  Brevet Brigadier General Samuel Chamberlain, adventurer, painter, memoirist, and decorated veteran of two wars.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Adventure

  Sam Chamberlain was a flawed hero of the Mexican-American War, whose tale inspired the novelist Cormac McCarthy.

  SAMUEL EMORY CHAMBERLAIN WAS A scoundrel in many people’s opinion, including his own. He titled his rollicking, handwritten account of his experiences in the Mexican-American War and with the gang of cutthroats he said he rode with My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue. The self-deprecation is appropriate for an author who paints himself as a choirboy, a patriot, and a brave man but who was also a racist, a religious bigot, a braggart, a murderer, a serial seducer, and a deserter. He defended the honor of women whose virtue he gladly compromised. He protected from atrocities Mexican civilians he disparaged as “greasers.” He clearly invented some of his adventures. Yet, allowing for creative exaggeration here and there, Chamberlain’s descriptions of the horrors and thrills of war are convincing and compelling, as are the watercolors he painted that illustrate his manuscript. In the words of the military historian John Eisenhower, Chamberlain’s Confession is “the most vivid recording of what a soldier would see and feel as he trudged down from San Antonio, Texas to Buena Vista, Mexico.”

  No scene in the book is more thrilling than Chamberlain’s account of the harrowing urban combat of the Battle of Monterrey, Mexico. “Old Rough and Ready,” General Zachary Taylor, had defeated the Mexican Army in the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma in Tex
as. As word of his victories spread across the country, thousands of men from all parts of the United States responded to Taylor’s call for volunteer regiments to join his army. Like Chamberlain, most were in their teens and early twenties. Many left home for the first time, some for a life immeasurably harsher, cruder, crazier than life at home. Many would have their first taste of liquor. Many would lose their virginity. Many would kill for the first time and watch their friends be killed. They joined the army anticipating thrills and triumphs, which they would find along with terror and hardships and brutality and boredom and disease and death. Disease would kill more of them than the enemy would, and often kill them more horribly. They would discover that war’s thrills are indistinguishable from its terrors, and glory is usually a state of exhausted relief. But for some men, men such as Chamberlain, war, with all its horrors, is still the adventure of a lifetime.

  General Taylor crossed the Rio Grande and entered the undefended city of Matamoros on May 18, 1846. His light, horse-drawn, or “flying,” artillery had carried the day at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma. Transportation and supply problems kept him in Matamoros longer than planned, as did the time it took for new volunteers to muster into his army and for short-term enlistees to be transported home. He didn’t begin to move west until late July and didn’t reach Monterrey for another two months. Some of his army traveled by river on crowded steamers, and some made a long, dusty march in sweltering heat to the little town of Camargo on the mudflats of the lower Rio Grande, where Taylor established a supply base. There his soldiers, weakened by the heat and unsanitary conditions, became sick with malaria, yellow fever, and dysentery. As many as fifteen hundred of them would die from disease.

  In the middle of August, Taylor organized over sixty-five hundred soldiers, roughly equal numbers of regulars and volunteers, into two columns and marched them to Monterrey, 120 miles to the south. He left seven thousand men behind, many of them too sick to fight. He left his heavy artillery behind too rather than haul it over the mountainous roads.

  The Mexican Army of the North, under the command of General Pedro de Ampudia, had a combined strength of over six thousand regulars and three thousand militia. Monterrey was well situated on a vast flat plain, snug in a bend of the Rio Santa Catarina, with the towering Sierra Madre guarding its southern and western approaches. Ampudia had strengthened nature’s defenses outside the city’s walls. An unfinished cathedral with high, black stone walls, dubbed the Citadel, loomed over the northern road manned by several hundred Mexican defenders and artillery. An earthwork fort built on the site of an old tannery, La Tenería, guarded the northeastern corner of the city, with the river to its east and clear fields of fire to the north. Fort Diablo protected the eastern approach. On the western side two fortified hills, Independence and Federation, shadowed the road to Saltillo, Ampudia’s resupply route. Taylor believed capturing the heights, with their forts and heavy cannon, was the key to the conquest of the city.

  The American Army reached the northern approach to Monterrey on September 19. As Taylor surveyed the situation, cannons fired from the Citadel, and Mexican cavalry galloped onto the plain, hoping to entice the Americans to fight within range of the Citadel’s guns. Instead the nonchalant Taylor moved his army to a campsite in a pecan grove on the banks of a creek, mistakenly named Walnut Springs, three miles northeast of the city. He ordered the city’s defenses reconnoitered and made plans for an attack the following afternoon.

  He would divide his force in two. Brigadier General William Jenkins Worth would lead one division, with another mounted division in support, in a sweeping hook to the west to attack Federation Hill, then the fortifications on Independence, and cut off the road to Saltillo. Taylor would lead the rest of his army in a diversionary attack on the city’s east side.

  Worth’s division, twenty-seven hundred strong, marched out of Walnut Springs at two o’clock on the afternoon of September 20, hoping to hide his movement behind high ground. But enemy soldiers on the higher of the two hills, Independence, soon spotted the advance, and Ampudia ordered the hills reinforced. Worth’s column made camp at six o’clock that night and resumed their march at dawn. A force of two hundred Mexican cavalry attacked the column as it approached the Saltillo Road around six in the morning. They were quickly rebuffed by a regiment of mounted riflemen from west Texas, known as Texas Rangers.

  The Americans reached the foot of Federation Hill early that afternoon, and about eight hundred men, led again by Texas Rangers, made the steep ascent under fire. Five hundred Mexicans gave battle but were quickly routed and retreated in poor order to a fort on the eastern side of the hill. By day’s end the defenders had abandoned Federation altogether for the higher elevation and stronger fortifications of Independence, leaving their artillery behind.

  Events had not gone as well for General Taylor. He had launched his diversionary attack as soon as he heard Worth’s guns open fire that morning, ordering two regiments to approach La Tenería and Diablo, which he expected would discourage Ampudia from reinforcing his defenders on the western hills. It didn’t work. When Taylor realized the Mexicans weren’t reacting to his ruse, he decided to make a genuine assault on the city’s eastern defenses. To do so the two regiments commanded by Colonel John Garland had to cross five hundred yards of open ground, exposed to fire from the Mexican guns at the Citadel and La Tenería. As they rushed across the flat plain, concentrated fire from Tenería’s guns and musket fire from the rooftops in the city devastated the column, inflicting heavy casualties and causing confusion and panic.

  Things got even worse when, intending to take the tannery from the rear, the surviving attackers entered the city. Americans had no experience with urban combat, and the warren of narrow, twisting streets hid dangers behind every wall and on every rooftop. The Americans marched in tight column formation, crowded between rows of adjoining stone houses that obstructed their sightlines. They were easy targets for the Mexican rifles that opened up from above and in cross fires from windows. When they reached intersections, hidden artillery batteries tore into them. When Taylor reinforced them and sent a battery of flying artillery to their aid, it proved little use against the protected batteries and heavy stone walls that shielded the enemy.

  By dusk, with his troops terrorized, bloodied, and exhausted, and some of his best officers among the many casualties, Taylor ordered a retreat. The Americans had managed to take Tenería in a frontal assault led by a Mississippi regiment commanded by Colonel Jefferson Davis, and they still held it after Taylor withdrew his battered force from the city to regroup.

  The next morning Worth’s division stormed Independence Hill and by late afternoon had captured the last and strongest fortification, a former bishop’s palace known as the Obispado. The rout convinced General Ampudia to pull back his men from other defensive positions outside the city to reinforce defenders within the city. The final assault on Monterrey began just after dawn the following day, September 23. Worth’s column attacked from the west, and Taylor’s forces again entered the city from the east. They now had bitter experience with urban combat, and, as American soldiers can always be relied on to do, they had adapted their tactics. They wouldn’t march again in tightly squeezed formations or rely on maneuvering their flying artillery down Monterrey’s treacherous streets. They advanced from house to house, battering down adjoining walls to rout out defenders with rifle, bayonet, and bowie knife. It was slow, wearying, hand-to-hand fighting, and it worked. At midnight Ampudia signaled that he wished to negotiate his surrender. By the following afternoon the Battle for Monterrey was over.

  IT HAD BEEN A bloody affair for both sides. Americans had suffered five hundred casualties, the Mexicans a little fewer than four hundred. Among the Americans who survived the fierce fight for Monterrey were men who would figure prominently in the history of America’s Civil War, serving on both sides of the fratricide: Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant, Albert Sidney Johnston, George Meade, James Longstreet, Joseph Hooker,
Braxton Bragg, and a dozen or more other distinguished commanders.

  Although his would not become as prominent a name as these, Sam Chamberlain would also prove himself a brave and capable commander in the Civil War. Among his brother officers and enemies at Monterrey, he left the most vivid account of their bloody experience. In Chamberlain’s telling, after taking Independence Hill and the Obispado, he and the Texas Rangers

  found ourselves in a hornet’s nest; every house was a fort that belched forth a hurricane of ball; the flat roofs surmounted by breastworks of sand bags were covered with soldiers who could pour down a distructive fire in safety, the windows of iron barred “Rejas” [grilles] were each vomiting forth fire and death. On we went at a run, stung to madness at not being able to retaliate on our hidden foes, we gained a large square, the “Plaza de la Capella,” when artillery opened on us with canester! The heavy stone wall of a churchyard was embrasured for their guns, while a scaffold was erected from which infantry were posted who kept up a constant fire. Our men were falling fast, and not a Mexican hit; they were all under cover, our fire was only waisted on their stone walls. I was close to Col. [Samuel H.] Walker when a column of Mexican Infantry came round the corner of the church and at double quick charged us with the bayonet. We were in a tight fix, not twenty rangers were in the square. Fortunately our arms were all loaded and we made every shot tell, but we were compelled to give ground.

  Riveting stuff, despite the poor spelling, and a very convincing account of the action, as are Chamberlain’s paintings of the battle. That’s quite an accomplishment, considering Chamberlain was about three hundred miles away when the battle occurred. He would fight in other battles in the war, most notably at Buena Vista, and there is evidence to corroborate many of his other war stories. But it’s no small part of his roguish charm and the pleasure of his extraordinary book that the reader can never be certain which accounts are his own, which are based on the record of other people’s experiences, and which he made up entirely.