Thirteen Soldiers

by John McCain

  Santa Anna’s battle plan called for a simultaneous attack. One division advanced down the main road to Saltillo to attack the Americans defending the Narrows, the forty-foot-wide mountain pass. The main attack, however, occurred east of the Narrows on a flat plain fifty feet above the road called the Plateau, where Santa Anna’s three best divisions advanced east to west on the thinly stretched American left. The attack on the Narrows was repulsed easily enough by Taylor’s artillery, but the attack on the Plateau looked like it might become a rout.

  The enemy had gained the Plateau under cover of a ravine, and the lead division, four thousand strong, smashed into the center of the American lines, defended by fewer than four hundred men of the 2nd Indiana Regiment. The regiment’s commander, Colonel William Bowles, panicked and ordered retreat. His men broke and ran to the rear. A second Mexican division poured over the ravine, and the combined enemy force began pressing the regiments positioned to the right of the broken 2nd Indiana. At the base of a ridge on the far end of the American left, two dismounted cavalry regiments, Arkansas and Kentucky Volunteers, broke under fire from a Mexican battery as a brigade commanded by General Ampudia, the loser at Monterrey, swept down on them.

  “The panic was contagious,” Chamberlain remembered, “men left the ranks in all the regiments, and soon our rear was a confused mass of fugitives, making for Buena Vista and Saltillo.”

  Wool shortened his lines and deployed more artillery to the Plateau. Chamberlain and the rest of the 1st Dragoons ran down fleeing soldiers and drove them back to the line. The American left flank was on the brink of collapse, but when enemy infantry attempted to sweep around it, American flying artillery once again saved the day, as concentrated fire from several guns checked the Mexican advance.

  Taylor, fearing an attack in Saltillo, had spent the night there and returned to the field around nine o’clock with Colonel May’s 2nd Dragoons and Colonel Davis’s 1st Mississippi Rifles. By then as many as a thousand Americans had abandoned the Plateau. He ordered Davis’s regiment, reinforced by another Indiana regiment and the returning remnants of the 2nd Indiana, to fill the gap in the center of the line. May’s dragoons and two Arkansas cavalry companies stopped the Mexican cavalry from flanking the American left. More American batteries were hauled up the Plateau; they poured canister into the Mexican lines and checked the fire of the San Patricio Battalion, the infamous enemy artillery battalion comprising mostly Irish-American deserters. The American line held and regained some ground.

  The situation was still desperate, but Santa Anna, his exhausted divisions on the Plateau disorganized and seriously bloodied by American artillery, decided to surround the Americans by using his last division to take the mountain ridge above the Plateau. Taylor ordered the 1st Mississippi and the 3rd Indiana to intercept them. They surprised the Mexicans who reached the high ground and with effective, concentrated fire managed to halt the advance of the enemy infantry. With the support of an artillery battery commanded by Braxton Bragg, the Mississippians and Indianans formed a V and held their fire until a column of Mexican cavalry swept around the right of the stalled infantry advance and charged the American lines. They were brought down in a hail of rifle fire and grapeshot and finished off with bowie knives. Chamberlain, who generally disliked southerners and particularly southern slaveholders, greatly admired the courage and élan of Davis and his regiment. He provides an eyewitness account of the scene as the Mississippi Rifles, in their distinctive red shirts and white pants and with eighteen-inch bowie knives, did their worst:

  Davis’ men, profiting by the confusion caused by their terrible fire, threw down their rifles, and with frightful cries dashed on the astonished horsemen who seemed helpless now their charge had failed. Catching the horses by the bits they backed them onto their haunches and knifed the stupefied riders, who as soon as they could turned and fled with shouts of Diablo Camisa colorados! [Devil Red Shirts!]

  A sudden, passing thunderstorm resulted in a brief, unplanned cease-fire, and a feigned truce parley gave Santa Anna time to withdraw his battered division from the ridge. Taylor, overconfident in the wake of Davis’s triumph, decided to rally his forces on the Plateau for an attack. They were still greatly outnumbered, and their disadvantage was made unmistakably clear when thousands of Mexican reserves poured over the top of a ravine and turned the attackers on their heels. A general assault along the entire line by Mexican infantry and cavalry began pushing the Americans off the Plateau.

  The reversal would likely have been decisive but for Taylor’s artillery advantage. Several batteries, including Bragg’s, pounded the attackers and turned the advance. In the middle of the fight Taylor rode up to Bragg and barked, “Double-shot your guns and give them hell,” although newspaper accounts and Chamberlain reported a more composed Taylor coolly instructing, “Give them a little more grape, Captain Bragg.”

  Chamberlain had been in several close scrapes that day, including a charge into the center of a Mexican cavalry column that had reached the Buena Vista ranch house. “Our column . . . gave a wild hurrah and charged the foe by the flank,” he recounts. “They went down under our steed’s rush, man and horse.” He had also joined a charge on the St. Patrick Battalion, which had barely avoided catastrophe when at the last moment an alert bugler sounded the call, and the dragoons swung to the right before they charged into a ten-foot-wide chasm. Chamberlain claims to have witnessed the deaths of several gallant American officers that day, including Henry Clay Jr., whose famous Whig father was the nation’s leading opponent of the war.

  When the day ended and the guns fell mostly silent, the toll on both armies was steep. Americans had lost somewhere between six hundred and seven hundred; more than a thousand had deserted. Santa Anna had more than two thousand dead, wounded, or captured. The carnage was everywhere visible: dead bodies were strewn across the landscape, some tangled together in heaps and others lying individually at a lonely remove from the comfort of friends. The cries of dying men and horses rent the air. Neither side had gained a distinct advantage. The Americans still held the field but were desperately short of ammunition and far from certain they could repulse another attack.

  An exhausted and complaining Chamberlain was ordered on picket duty that night. “It was a cold night,” he recalled, “with clouds scudding across the moon, which threw a weird light on the dismal scene. The ground was strewn with ghastly corpses, most of which had been stripted by our foes. A picket line of Mexican Lancers on white horses, was stationed not over two hundred yards in my front.”

  Santa Anna wasn’t sure his army could survive another battle either, and rather than see his command reduced further, he declared victory and left the field in the dead of night. At daylight a relieved Taylor and his army watched the last of the Mexican column disappear into the desert. The war in the north was effectively over. No other major engagements occurred there for the duration of the war; all the action was in the south, as Winfield Scott marched from Veracruz to Mexico City and became the last of several American generals to defeat the Napoleon of the West.

  THOUGH THE BATTLE OF Buena Vista ended in a stalemate, given the odds against the Americans it was rightly celebrated in the United States as a triumph, especially for Old Rough and Ready (whose contributions to the victory Chamberlain wrongly belittles). Taylor was elected president the following year, after a campaign for which “Give them a little more grape, Captain Bragg” became an unofficial slogan. Jeff Davis would also win a presidency based in large part on his courage and skill at Buena Vista, where he had been painfully though not seriously wounded in the foot. Mississippi’s governor appointed him to the U.S. Senate the following January, and in 1853 President Franklin Pierce made him secretary of war. He was elected president of the Confederate States of America in 1861, having seldom missed an opportunity to remind his fellow Confederates of the famous V, where he had destroyed the elite of Santa Anna’s cavalry.

  The army of occupation remained in northern Mexico under T
aylor’s command. So did Sam Chamberlain. But after Buena Vista his Confession offers no other accounts of historically significant battles. It becomes instead a chronicle of riotous living, of drinking, fighting, seducing, near escapes, desertion, and murder, frequently punctuated by close scrapes with “Gurillars” and occasionally by pangs of regret. He recounts most of it in an almost lighthearted tone before his story takes a decidedly darker turn. It is an amusing, offensive, ribald, exciting, and shocking tale. Some of it is probably true.

  He rescues the three Traveinia sisters the first time while on patrol, when he hears their screams and jumps his horse over a courtyard wall of their hacienda. There he finds two “rough looking volunteers” from the 2nd Mississippi Rifles about to rape the sisters and their mother and murder their elderly servant. Drawing his saber, he runs the brutes off. Naturally their hero wins the instant devotion of the mother, daughters, and gray-haired retainer. He becomes a frequent guest in their home, where he enjoys the tender affections of two of the sisters, Franceita and Delorosa. Their mother implores him to marry either daughter and leave the army to live a life of wealth, ease, and beauty, but he regretfully declines the tantalizing offer. “Honor and my strong proclivity for a military life,” he explains, “made me remain firm in my loyalty to my flag.”

  He had also become the object of Private William Crane’s attention. “A powerful fellow with a bull dog’s temper,” Crane was the squadron bully. Chamberlain admits having been whipped several times in brawls with Crane and subsequently giving him a wide berth. One morning both men were ordered by their lieutenant to cut fodder for the regiment’s horses in a cornfield near Casa Blanca, the Traveinia family home, using machetes fashioned from sabers. When they arrived at the field, Crane disappeared with the wagon driver and left Chamberlain to cut the corn. As he was about his work, Delorosa appeared on the scene, and the young lovers passed an hour exchanging “loving endearments.” Suddenly Crane returned, drunk on mescal, and threatened to force himself on Delorosa. Chamberlain claimed he tried to humor Crane and dissuade him from making good on his threat, alas, to no avail.

  “Muerto! Muerto!” Delorosa shouted as the two men fought to the death. It was a fierce contest, with a drunken Crane attacking blindly and Chamberlain trying to avoid his blows until both men were exhausted. Crane thrust his blade a final time at Chamberlain, who turned it aside and stabbed Crane in the chest. “He fell with a cry more like a wild beast than a human being,” Chamberlain writes, “and for a moment tore up the earth in an impotent fury, then black blood gushed from his mouth and my foe was dead.”

  He covered Crane with fodder, cleaned himself up, and rode back to camp. Fearing the body would be discovered, he returned to Casa Blanca only to find that the Traveinias’ elderly servant, Francisco, had witnessed the fight and already disposed of the corpse. Crane was marked down as a deserter, and the killing was never discovered. Delorosa “was now in love with me more than ever,” Chamberlain records. “There is something in the Spanish blood that causes the fair sex to admire gallants who show courage and kill.” Killing Crane changed him. “My temper became more violent,” he confesses. “I drank deeply, and was ready to take up the gauntlet in the least provocation.”

  He fought yet another duel for the Traveinia sisters, this time with someone he considered a friend, his jealous company sergeant. The fight ended with a superficial but sufficiently bloody wound to the sergeant’s right forearm, at which point Francisco lassoed the wounded man around the neck and pulled him to the ground. Ten days later the sergeant and a party of dragoons arrested Chamberlain at Casa Blanca for taking unauthorized leave. A fight ensued. A trooper knocked Chamberlain to the ground with a blow to the head from his rifle butt. Francisco suffered a mortal wound from the sergeant’s saber.

  The company captain ordered Chamberlain taken to the guardhouse in chains. According to Chamberlain, he would surely have been executed for mutiny but for the Traveinias, who assiduously pressed their charms and his innocence on General Wool. Instead he was assigned the dangerous duty of carrying dispatches from Saltillo to Taylor’s headquarters in Monterrey, during which he barely escaped death at the hands of determined guerrillas in a chase scene that rivals any Hollywood invention.

  Chamberlain remained in northern Mexico after the war’s end. The Traveinias eventually disappeared from the scene, but the “long flowing hair” that “excited their admiration” apparently mesmerized a succession of señoritas. The affairs, recalled with suspicious detail considering the years that elapsed before he writes of them, involved women of high and low station, but all were in love, all were treated gallantly by their brave and handsome lover, and more than a few were the cause or victim of misadventure. His great love, the woman who might have kept him in Mexico, Carmaleita, is murdered by a bandit, El Tuerto, whom Chamberlain had wounded in a fight one night in his favorite bordello. Add to these romances numerous fandangos, brawls, life-and-death struggles, insubordination, injustices avenged, atrocities, and various other adventures, and they made for quite an exciting time for our hero after Buena Vista, even as the war, or at least its major battles, occurred elsewhere.

  He was promoted to corporal and soon after court-martialed for refusing to carry out an officer’s order to flog a man. When the officer threatened to have Chamberlain flogged, he threatened to shoot the officer if he tried. According to Chamberlain, he was found guilty, but the court, presumably out of respect for his previous service, rejected the recommended sentence of death and instead had him incarcerated fastened to a ball and chain. He was pardoned two weeks later but would spend time in the guardhouse occasionally for bouts of insubordination.

  Wool’s army didn’t receive word of the war’s end until June 1848. Many of the men of the 1st Cavalry, including Chamberlain, believed they had enlisted only for the duration of the war and expected to be mustered out now that peace had been declared. Most of them, however, ended up being transferred to the command of Major Lawrence Graham, who was to lead an expedition from Mexico. More than a few dragoons were incensed, but not Chamberlain. He claims he was looking for a new adventure, and an expedition to California fit the bill. He soon changed his mind, however. Graham was a drunk and a cruel and incompetent commander. He took an intense dislike to Chamberlain and abused him constantly, even stringing him up by the thumbs and nearly killing him.

  Chamberlain’s Confession descends into a netherworld of wickedness and terror when he deserts the army after Graham’s expedition arrives in Tucson. He joined a notorious gang of scalp hunters led by John Glanton, the former Texas Ranger whom Chamberlain had seen kill a man in a San Antonio saloon, and the mysterious and malevolent Judge Holden. The gang slaughtered its way through Sonora and Arizona before most of its members were massacred by Yuma Indians. Chamberlain was among the few survivors. So was Judge Holden, who, among other depravities, molested and murdered children. The Confession ends with Chamberlain wandering the Mojave Desert chased by the devil incarnate, Holden. It’s the end of the line for the Boston choirboy who went to war looking for adventure and lost his soul.

  We’ll leave that part of Chamberlain’s story unexplored. The story of the Glanton Gang requires a book of it own. In fact, it has one, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, who based the novel on Chamberlain’s account of the gang’s exploits, and the character of the kid on Chamberlain himself. It is probably fiction based on fiction. Most likely Chamberlain didn’t ride with the Glanton Gang but had read about them and incorporated (and no doubt embellished) their legend into his good-boy-gone-bad moral tale. He was determined to be an entertaining writer, even if he could not be a reliably honest one. “ ‘My Confession’ is a form of history,” Goetzmann writes, “an historical narrative that is so detailed and so plausible as to create its own reality.” For all its embellishments and inventions, Chamberlain’s “history” manages to convey a paradox of war: that it is an adventure unlike any other, an adventure that thrills and torments in equal measure.
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  We do know that for a time after the war Chamberlain prospected for gold in California. He later traveled across the Pacific and returned to Boston in 1854 at the age of twenty-three, engaged to Mary Keith, a Canadian he had met on his travels. They wed the following year and had three daughters, to whom he gave the misspelled names of three of his Mexican mistresses: Carmeleita, Dolorios, and Franceita. He worked at several undistinguished occupations until the outbreak of the Civil War, when he enlisted in the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry.

  He was a good officer, brave and competent. He fought in dozens of battles, including Gettysburg. He was wounded several times, once quite severely. He was taken prisoner and exchanged. He was decorated for bravery, promoted to lieutenant colonel, colonel, and eventually brigadier general, and given command of the regiment. The aristocratic Charles Francis Adams Jr., grandson and great-grandson of presidents, called the lowborn, colorful Sam Chamberlain “the best officer the regiment ever had.”

  After the war he briefly commanded the 5th Massachusetts Volunteer Cavalry, an all-black regiment. He took them out west to Texas and the Rio Grande, where our hero had first taken up arms for his country and embarked on a tale worthy of Walter Scott’s pen that he had imagined for himself.

  In civilian life he was appointed warden of two Massachusetts prisons and a Connecticut prison, where he gained a reputation for brutality. He lived in Barre, Massachusetts, after he retired, collected Bibles and antique weapons, and was considered a devoted family man. He died in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1907.

  It took him most of the remainder of his life to handwrite and illustrate My Confession, producing four copies, one for himself and one for each of his daughters. He must have hoped it would bring him the renown he had risked and sacrificed much to earn. Alas, he would never be as famous or as admired as his cousin, Joshua Chamberlain, hero of Little Round Top, governor of Maine, and chancellor of Bowdoin College. But no veteran of any American war has ever left a record of his exploits quite like Sam Chamberlain’s memoir.