by John McCain
His account of his adolescence is only slightly less brash, pugnacious, and immodest than his account of his wartime experiences, and shows him no less vain about his looks, physical prowess, and irresistibility to the opposite sex. Chamberlain was born in New Hampshire in 1829, and his family moved to Boston when he was seven. Raised a devout Baptist, he sang in the choir of the Bowdoin Square Baptist Church. At a local gymnasium he learned to fight and fence and acquired what he called a “muscular Christianity.” He fell under the spell of the novels of Sir Walter Scott and “longed to emulate its heros.” He confessed “without egotism” to being the favorite of the prettiest girls at his church, inciting both the jealousy of his male contemporaries and the dislike of his minister.
His devotion to a certain young lady, “a splendid Brunette, with magnificent black eyes and hair,” required him to defend her against their choirmaster’s criticism. When the choirmaster attempted to eject Chamberlain from the premises, young Sam gave him a thrashing that left the offender “prostrate, bleeding, almost annihilated.” Not long afterward he was expelled from the church, denounced by his minister as “worse than the Devil.” Then he fell in with a more worldly crowd associated with the National Theater. The National’s scene painter, Bob Jones, probably taught Chamberlain to paint. He was even closer friends with Jones’s attractive daughter, Fanny, and, in his telling, was the darling of all the ladies of the National. That was to be expected considering he was a “boy of a man’s proportion, muscles like steel, not bad looking, and very modest.”
Those attributes apparently came in handy when Chamberlain’s father died. Lacking a place in polite Boston society—and much in the way of prospects—the penniless fifteen-year-old left home to seek his fortune in the West. His journey to an uncle’s farm near Alton, Illinois, was the first of many wild adventures, each a tale of high drama, hardship, heroism, and romance. In this one the dangers and privations of winter travel by stagecoach and steamboat were relieved by occasional brawls and several amorous encounters, including an affair with a U.S. senator’s daughter, the persistent attentions of an infatuated boardinghouse landlady, and a near escape from a houseful of malarial farmer’s daughters.
He didn’t get on well with his uncle and cousins. The uncle treated him unkindly and refused to pay him a debt owed to his father. His cousins resented the attention he received from the residents of a nearby girls’ boarding school. According to Chamberlain, his eldest cousin, enraged with jealousy, started a fight. When Chamberlain knocked the boy down, his uncle attacked him with an ax. Seizing the weapon, Chamberlain nearly buried it in the old man’s head before the screams of several witnesses from the boarding school brought him back to his senses. He left Alton the next day for St. Louis, and a few weeks later for New Orleans, where he “indulged all kinds of dissipation.” He found work in Baton Rouge and remained there some months, until his affair with the young wife of an elderly Creole planter came to her vengeful husband’s attention, and he caught a steamboat to St. Louis and from there back to Alton.
The war with Mexico had begun by then, and in June 1846 Chamberlain joined a local volunteer company of river town toughs, the Alton Guards. By his account he was the most capable and well-liked soldier in the company and would have been elected captain had not a self-professed killer of a local abolitionist promised to spend a hundred dollars on whiskey and taken the honor from him. In the months before the Alton Guards departed Illinois for Texas, Chamberlain helped put down a mutiny, came to the favorable attention of his commanding general, and tried manfully but ultimately unsuccessfully to resist the proffered intimacies of a pretty girl engaged to another soldier.
The company embarked for New Orleans and then on to San Antonio. By the time Chamberlain arrived in Texas, he had been attacked, robbed, and nearly killed by a fellow soldier, briefly resumed a love affair with an acquaintance in New Orleans, nearly died of malaria contracted while aboard ship in the Gulf of Mexico, and suffered terribly on the overland march to San Antonio. Too ill for service, he was mustered out of the army and given money to return to Alton.
He remained in San Antonio instead, fell in with a very rough crowd, and hung out in a gambling den, where he watched a Texas Ranger, John Glanton, kill another Ranger with a bowie knife. After witnessing its deadly effectiveness, Chamberlain bought a bowie knife for his own use, and during a quarrel over money stabbed a friend with it. He was thrown in San Antonio’s “Old Spanish Jail,” where he spent several unpleasant days. He later wrote, “The wretches incarcerated with me, their horrid bestial orgies too revolting for belief, drove me in my weak state insane.”
His friend recovered from his wound and gallantly declined to press charges, and Chamberlain was released from jail sick with fever and delirious. He recovered thanks to the care of a local doctor, whose kindness Chamberlain repaid by resisting the advances of his amorous sister.
After his convalescence he reenlisted, this time in a cavalry regiment of the regular army, the 1st Dragoons, part of General John Wool’s army, stationed in San Antonio. They were still in San Antonio when Old Rough and Ready’s army took Monterrey. Two days after Monterrey fell, Wool, with orders to take to the city of Chihuahua in northwestern Mexico, marched his army south, and Sam Chamberlain finally went to war.
After he crossed the Rio Grande, Wool determined that Chihuahua, which would have entailed several hundred miles of desert marching to reach, was an impossible objective and proposed to Taylor that they join armies. Chamberlain claims he was one of six dragoons in a scouting party commanded by a Lieutenant Carlton that carried Wool’s dispatch to Taylor. Here he reports his first taste of battle. It was a brief one, a surprise encounter with a “crowd of fierce Gurillars [guerrillas].” The lieutenant ordered a charge with sabers drawn. Chamberlain confesses his heart was “in my throat choking me,” but he gave a good account of himself. “I parried a lance thrust,” he recalls, “a black savage face was before me for an instant, my horse crushed another, and another under foot, then another, and I came out of the dust surprised to find myself alive and unhurt.”
The entire party of dragoons was unscathed, though the same could not be said for the “Gurillars.” Separating fact from fiction in Chamberlain’s recollections can be a tricky business, though there’s no evidence to suggest he fabricated this story or his role in the scouting party that made contact with Taylor’s forces. The late historian William Goetzmann, who edited the definitive edition of My Confession and is the leading authority on our colorful hero, believes history corroborates more of Chamberlain’s account than it disproves. That Chamberlain describes his “maiden charge” as a more frightening than thrilling experience recommends its honesty, but skepticism is always warranted when evaluating his war stories.
Wool’s army had reached the city of Monclova, 120 miles northwest of Monterrey, when he sent his proposal to Taylor. The dispatch reached Taylor on November 8, 1846, just as Taylor decided to move his part of his army south to Saltillo. He welcomed the additional troops. He would need them.
President James K. Polk was angry with Taylor for offering the Mexicans terms at Monterrey that were more in the nature of a truce than a surrender. He also considered Taylor, correctly, a political rival. (The general would be elected Polk’s successor in the next presidential election.) He offered a new command in Mexico to Major General Winfield Scott, who would land an army at Veracruz on the central coast in March and move on Mexico City. Nearly two-thirds of Taylor’s army would be transferred to Scott’s command.
Taylor opposed not only the reduction of his army but the strategy of conquering all of Mexico. He believed the occupation of northern Mexico would eventually convince the Mexican government to agree to American peace terms and territorial demands. He divided his army to garrison various northern cities, including Saltillo, where he had sent General Worth’s division. Wool proposed to occupy Parras, ninety miles west of Saltillo, and his army entered the city unopposed on December 8.
While Taylor established a chain of strongholds in the north, the self-styled Napoleon of the West, General Antonio López de Santa Anna, who had returned to Mexico from exile in Cuba in the summer of 1846 and seized power again, had begun assembling an army of twenty thousand in San Luis Potosí, three hundred miles to the south. When Taylor received word in December that Santa Anna’s army was preparing to march north, he decided to concentrate his forces in Saltillo. Wool’s division made the 130-mile march to Agua Nueva, twenty miles south of Saltillo, in three days, which in Chamberlain’s estimation was “an achievement unparalleled in history.” Taylor joined Wool in Agua Nueva in January, while Worth’s division remained in Saltillo for the winter.
In late January Chamberlain and a small party of dragoons were escorting Wool to a meeting with Worth, when Wool ordered them to investigate the gunfire they had heard as they rode by a mountain ridge. They climbed to the top of the ridge and discovered “a greaser, shot and scalped, laying on the ground yet alive,” feebly trying to fend off vultures. They could hear the shouts and cries of women and children emanating from a cave some distance away, and they ran toward it.
Inside they found a “den of horrors.” A hundred or more notoriously undisciplined and brutal Arkansas volunteers, or “Rackansackers,” as they were called, were “yelling like fiends” as they butchered men, women, and children. Chamberlain counted more than twenty dead and described the survivors “clinging to the knees of their murderers and shrieking for mercy.” He and the other regulars took positions outside the cave and aimed their carbines at the entrance as their sergeant ordered the Rackansackers to surrender, which they did grudgingly. The dragoons marched the murderers down the mountain at gunpoint and then returned to the cave with the division’s surgeons. Chamberlain reports that no one was ever punished for the atrocity.
Earlier that month a young lieutenant carrying orders from General Scott transferring most of Taylor’s army to his command had been in an encounter with a Mexican patrol. His killers had confiscated Scott’s missive and delivered it to Santa Anna, who was delighted to learn his enemy’s intentions and that Taylor would soon be left with an army a quarter the size of his own and comprising mostly volunteers. Of course, knowing that Scott intended to land a large army at Veracruz and march on the Mexican capital, Santa Anna should have focused his attention there rather than on Saltillo. But the chance of an easy victory that would enhance his political stature proved irresistible to Mexico’s Napoleon.
Scott had also ordered Taylor to withdraw from Saltillo and pull back to Monterrey the remains of his army of occupation. Taylor, angry about the loss of much of his command and confident that Santa Anna would attend the greater threat from Scott’s army, disregarded the instruction. Advance units of Santa Anna’s army left San Luis Potosí on January 28, 1847. By February 2 the entire force was headed north. It was a long, miserable march over mountains and desert. Santa Anna lost as many as five thousand of his twenty thousand soldiers to desertion, illness, and death. Despite their losses, however, the Mexicans still vastly outnumbered Taylor’s army, which now mustered fewer than five thousand.
Santa Anna’s lead division reached Encarnación, thirty miles south of Agua Nueva, on February 17, and a few days later the rest of his army assembled there. Reports from a deserter that Santa Anna’s army was nearby reached Taylor, and at daylight on February 20 he sent out a reconnaissance party of four hundred cavalry, including the 1st Dragoons and a company of Texas Rangers. Chamberlain’s squadron was the advance guard.
The squadron reached the crest of a hill and looked across a plain to a ranch house situated at the base of a mesa, where Chamberlain could see a few Mexicans milling about. He also saw an immense dust cloud rolling along the top of the mesa, which he attributed to the movement of a large army. The dragoons seized the ranch house and placed the Mexicans there under guard. Chamberlain was posted as a lookout on top of the ranch’s tallest structure, where he kept a worried vigil on the progress of the dust cloud. The rest of the American column soon reached them. Their commander, Colonel Charles May, whom Chamberlain despised, climbed up to the lookout and dismissed the dust cloud as most likely raised by a cattle herd. Chamberlain argued it was more likely “caused by the march of troops.” Colonel May ridiculed the assertion but nevertheless sent search parties to investigate.
It would turn out to be a detachment of Mexican cavalry. Santa Anna’s army was still concentrated at Encarnación, though not for long. But that wasn’t known when, just after May dismissed the possibility, Mexican horsemen became visible on the mesa and “the setting sun glittered on a long line of lance blades.” In Chamberlain’s telling, May lost his head, yelled and cursed and countermanded his own orders as they prepared to defend the ranch. At ten o’clock, after all but one of the scouting parties had returned, they decided to abandon the ranch and make a run for Agua Nueva, chased by a column of enemy cavalry. They reached camp at dawn, having ridden eighty miles in twenty-four hours and been fired on, fortunately to no effect, by their own picket lines. May reported to Taylor, and Chamberlain and his comrades retired to their tents for a few hours’ sleep.
They were roused by bugle call at nine o’clock and fell in with the rest of the army as it marched out onto the plain in front of Agua Nueva. Major Benjamin McCulloch, who commanded a company of Texas Rangers and had led the scouting party that hadn’t returned with the rest of the column, had just returned. He had slipped into Santa Anna’s camp and now reported that the Mexican Army was no more than a day’s march away. Taylor proposed to meet them on a broad, flat plain, ground that would play to the enemy’s advantage and where the Mexicans could flank and envelop the outnumbered Americans. Fortunately Wool persuaded a reluctant Taylor to fall back twelve miles to a more defensible position in a mountain pass called La Angostura (the Narrows), the entrance to Hacienda Buena Vista, a vast cattle ranch. The narrow pass and very rough ground in front of it would offset some of the attackers’ advantage. The army moved out at midday. Chamberlain’s squadron brought up the rear of the column. An Arkansas cavalry regiment remained behind to transport the army’s supplies.
Not long after they arrived at La Angostura, Chamberlain and his comrades were ordered back to Agua Nueva, where, he reports, they found the Rackansackers gathered around campfires, “some sleeping, others playing cards, none at work.” The dragoons quickly loaded twenty wagons with supplies and sent them to the rear just as they came under fire from Mexican cavalry. The Arkansans panicked and fled. The dragoons, according to Chamberlain, kept their cool, torched the remaining depots, and retreated in good order.
Santa Anna arrived at Agua Nueva the next morning, February 22, found it evacuated, and pushed on to La Angostura. Taylor, who had spent the night in Saltillo, returned to the field at noon. He reminded his soldiers it was George Washington’s birthday and told them to give a good account of themselves that day to honor the father of the nation. “The men cheerd,” Chamberlain recalled, “hats were thrown up and all seemed ‘eager for the fray
.’ Poor fellows, one fourth never left the ground alive.”
At one o’clock the vanguard of the Mexican Army came into view. At three an enemy officer approached the American lines under a flag of truce. He presented Taylor with a letter from Santa Anna, courteously recommending an American surrender to avert a “catastrophe.” Taylor declined the offer. According to Chamberlain, who claimed to have witnessed the exchange, Taylor told his chief of staff to “tell Santa Anna to go to hell,” but the aide drafted a more diplomatic refusal.
Diplomatically expressed or not, it’s unlikely Taylor’s obduracy greatly disappointed Santa Anna, who enjoyed a three-to-one numerical advantage. It would take him the rest of the day, however, to arrange the disposition of his forces, who were exhausted from marching sixty miles in two days. Taylor, realizing that Santa Anna wasn’t quite ready to fight, returned again to Saltillo for the night. Other than an inconclusive exchange of fire that afternoon, the Battle of Buena Vista, the bloodiest and most consequential battle of the war, wouldn’t begin until the following morning.
Both armies spent a miserable night in freezing rain, but with dawn came pageantry, excitement, and dreams of glory, followed inevitably by terror, confusion, and death. “I doubt if the Sun of Austerlitz shone on a more brilliant spectacle than the one before us,” Chamberlain writes, referring to the site of Napoleon’s victory over the empires of Russia and Austria. The enemy was magnificently arrayed, with fine new uniforms, burnished brass, plumed helmets, six thousand cavalry horses stamping and snorting, glittering lances, and a procession of priests bestowing final blessings on kneeling soldiers. Then “smoke arose from a battery a mile and a half off, and a thirty-two pound solid shot plumped into the road near the pass and the conflict commenced.”