The Training Ground

by Martin Dugard

  As the Mexican War began, Scott had been a general for three decades. No one in the U.S. Army, not even Zachary Taylor, possessed such standing. Scott had all but forgotten what it felt like to hold a lesser rank.

  In the months leading up to Veracruz, Lee watched the venerable figure prepare his battle plans. Unlike George McClellan, who was just twenty when he was assigned to Scott, Lee did not ape Scott’s mannerisms (the diminutive McClellan, for instance, took to posing for portraits with a Napoleonic hand in his tunic, as did his superior). Rather, he reveled in spit and polish, taking great pride in his personal uniform, just as his commander did.

  And he saw that Scott was substance as well as style. The general was a fiend for preparation. He had a propensity for setting up spy networks and sending his soldiers off on daring missions to gather as much information about his enemies as possible. This instilled in Lee a profound belief in reconnaissance.

  Nevertheless, Scott’s invasion plan was not guaranteed. The road between Veracruz and Mexico City was the same path Cortés’s conquistadores had followed three centuries earlier (indeed, Cortés had also landed in Veracruz), a winding track from sea level up through a series of mountain passes. The lack of alternate roads and the narrow stricture of each pass ensured that the Mexicans knew exactly which direction Scott was headed, and gave them ample time to select the optimal location to stop him in his tracks. There was also the great distance between Veracruz and Mexico City, which would make it difficult for Scott’s quartermasters to ferry bullets and food up to the front lines via wooden wagons and mules. Like Taylor in Monterrey, Scott would have to curry favor with the local population in order to keep his supply lines from being decimated by Mexican insurgents. He issued a general order that made rape, robbery, assault, and other crimes committed by American forces against the Mexican people illegal, hoping to prevent the sort of mayhem the volunteers were so infamously perpetrating in Monterrey. Scott further prepared himself by rereading Sir William Francis Patrick Napier’s three-volume History of the War in the Peninsula so he could learn from Napoleon’s failings as the commander of an occupying army in Spain.

  THE INVASION WAS scheduled to proceed on the eighth, but a blustery “norther” made for choppy seas and thundering surf. Not wanting to lose a single life during the amphibious assault (the cautionary precedent was the French invasion of Algeria in 1830, when Charles X’s army lost men to drowning while putting ashore), Scott pushed it back a day.

  At 2:00 p.m. on March 9 (coincidentally, it was Good Friday, the exact same holiday on which Cortés had landed), soldiers began lowering themselves carefully over the side of the transports, down into waiting surfboats. “The tall ships of war sailed leisurely along under their topsails, their decks thronged in every part with dense masses of troops, whose bright muskets and bayonets were flashing in the sunbeams; the jingling of spurs and sabers; the bands of music playing; the hum of the multitude rising up like the murmur of a distant ocean; the small steamers plying about, their decks crowded with anxious spectators; the long lines of surf boats towing astern of the ships, ready to disembark the troops,” one sailor aboard the sloop of war Albany wrote, describing the scene.

  It had been a year to the day since Taylor’s army had marched out of Corpus Christi looking for a fight. This time the Americans weren’t just hoping to find a battle — they were itching to start one.

  The weather was perfect, a cloudless sky and flat surf. Three miles south of Veracruz, the landing boats would be rowed directly inland to a chosen landing zone on Collado Beach, a broad stretch of shorefront lined with rolling dunes and chaparral. In the far western distance, Mount Orizaba’s snowcapped peak reminded the men that if they made it ashore safely, the path to the high altitudes of Mexico City led ever upward. For Scott, the mountain served a dual purpose, for when the setting sun dropped low enough to rest atop the mountain, the invasion would begin.

  Scott’s hoped-for twenty-five thousand troops had been reduced to a much smaller force of thirteen thousand, but it had still taken four hours to assemble the boats. When the sun and Mount Orizaba met, Scott ordered a single cannon blast fired from the Massachusetts: the attack was on.

  “The landing was made in whale-boats rowed by sailors of the fleet,” wrote Lieutenant Dabney Maury. “In each boat were from fifty to sixty soldiers, and it was a glorious sight to see the first division, under General Worth. The fifty great barges kept in line, until near the shore, when General Worth himself led the way to make the landing first of all, and being in a fine gig he accomplished this, and was the first man of the army to plant the American flag upon that shore of Mexico.”

  Sailors cheered from the ship’s decks. Bands played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The Mexicans knew they were coming — with so many American vessels anchored just beyond cannon range, the invasion was hardly a surprise. The residents of Veracruz crowded atop the city walls and on rooftops to watch the gringos come ashore. Mexican lancers could be seen in places along the beach, surely a harbinger of a greater hidden force. American naval guns soon drove them back.

  The soldiers were tense as they approached shore, peering into the chaparral for signs of hidden guns and men. They affixed bayonets and nervously prepared to launch themselves over the gunwales before sprinting up the beach to engage the enemy. Not a man among them had experienced an ocean landing before, so no one knew what to expect. They prayed they might race far enough forward on the sand to find some sort of protective cover. A hailstorm of Mexican musket balls would surely be aimed their way — and they knew it. With each dip of an oar blade, the soldiers could see the invasion beach looming closer and closer.

  Then it was time.

  “Without waiting for the boats to strike [the beach] the men jumped in up to their middles in the water and the battalions formed on their colors in an instant,” wrote Second Lieutenant George McClellan, who had entered West Point at the age of fifteen and recently graduated second in the class of 1846. Like Jackson, he had made his way to Mexico almost immediately afterward. “Our company and the Third Artillery ascended the sand hills and saw — nothing.”

  There was no gunfire, no cannon blasts. Utter silence and a perfectly empty shoreline greeted the Americans. It soon became obvious that the Mexican army had no plans to contest the landing. Their commander, Brigadier General Juan Morales, had withdrawn his force from the beaches and city and was now safely protected behind the impregnable walls of the castle of San Juan de Ulúa and within the city’s defenses. Morales’s retreat was deeply unexpected. Small bands of Mexican cavalry and infantry soon sallied forth to probe the American position, resulting in minor casualties on both sides, but otherwise the American encirclement went unmolested.

  Scott’s army soon prepared to move on to the next step of the invasion plan. Theoretically, it was possible to bypass Veracruz and begin marching straight to Mexico City. Yet as long as the castle was in Mexican hands, American ships would never be safe from its many guns, and Scott would always have the Mexican army at his rear, capable of harassing his men throughout the long march inland. Just as pragmatically, Scott required the great port as a means of off-loading supplies and reinforcements. The city needed to be taken.

  But he would do so through siege. The siege was a timeless military tactic, wherein a force surrounds a city or fortress that refuses to surrender, and then cuts off all movement of supplies in or out. As an offensive gambit, the siege dated back to antiquity and the building of walls around cities, but its use was coming to an end as artillery became more powerful and mobile in the Napoleonic era. Yet the tactic had worked against Veracruz before. Scott hoped it would work again.

  The plan, if all went well, would proceed in four phases: invasion, encirclement, investment, and surrender. The invasion had already gone off flawlessly, and Scott’s landing would go down in the annals of warfare as one of the most successful of its kind. Encirclement would mean just that: spreading a line of troops around the city by land, and
ships by sea, to completely surround Veracruz. No Mexican citizens or soldiers would be allowed to go in or out. Investment was the formal military term for commencement of siege hostilities, the relentless firing of cannons, slowly destroying the city’s walls and the will of its defenders and noncombatant citizens. Surrender, theoretically, was just a matter of time.

  On March 10, as Scott came ashore from the wooden steamship Massachusetts, his army made the transition from invasion to encirclement. American troops proceeded north from their landing beach to take up positions a mile west of the city walls and also block the main road from Veracruz to Mexico City. Their siege lines were seven miles long, stretching from the Collado Beach landing zone all the way north to the village of Vergana. Twiggs’s division anchored that end of the line, while Worth’s anchored the southern end, near where Scott set up his headquarters. In the center was the division led by Patterson, the unproven general and political appointee. Should his leadership, or lack thereof, allow his section to be breached, the Whig generals on either side of him would rush in to cover his ass.

  The lines were vital to a successful siege. The less porous they were, the better. Scott’s initial goal was to prevent any of the 15,000 residents or 3,360 Mexican soldiers from exiting the city, and to prevent Mexican irregulars from riding to their rescue. Once the line was sealed, the next step to a successful siege was to cut off necessities vital to daily living. The city’s water supply came from a series of ponds and marshes that fed into a stream at the southwest corner of the city, which in turn filled the cisterns of Veracruz. Scott ordered the stream blocked. When the cisterns ran dry, the good people of Veracruz would begin the agonizing process of death by dehydration. The tropical climate would only hasten their anguish.

  Scott’s plan then called for cannons to be positioned south of the city and to lob shells into the Mexican defenses. It was imperative that these cannons begin firing as soon as possible. Scott was fearful that the seasonal yellow fever — el vómito, in local slang — would soon spread along the Mexican coast. Initially contracted by a mosquito’s bite, yellow fever was viral and easily passed between humans who remained in close proximity to one another — such as soldiers. The symptoms were horrendous, ranging from severe flu to severe hepatitis, profuse fevers, internal bleeding, and then a black, gut-wrenching vomit. An epidemic of yellow fever presented as great a threat to Scott’s army as the Mexican guns.

  The general knew firsthand the insidious effects disease could have on an army: cholera had swept through his troops as they traveled toward the front lines of the Black Hawk War, cutting a force of one thousand down to two hundred in a matter of weeks. For this reason, Scott had not seen action in that conflict.

  Now, fearful that a similar devastation might strike his much larger army, he was eager to be off the beach and climbing into the mountains, where yellow fever did not exist.

  But another fierce norther blew through Veracruz before the heavy ordnance could be rowed to shore. All the Americans could do was sit and wait for the ocean to calm — or for the unlikely possibility that the Mexicans would surrender without a fight. Boredom, that by-product of any siege, set in as the days adopted a sameness: there was intense heat from sunrise until 10:00 a.m., when the sea breeze shifted direction and began blowing onshore to cool the men. The men often passed the time reading, with many of the troops favoring patriotic books about the great George Washington (Washington books had come into vogue during the war) or an elocution primer called the United States Speaker, which contained patriotic speeches that fired their hearts with the glory of their cause. At night came thick clouds of mosquitoes and sand fleas. It was the fleas that bothered the troops most of all. “I have never seen anything like those Vera Cruz fleas. If one were to stand ten minutes in the sand, the fleas would open up on him in the hundreds. How they live in that dry sand no one knows,” marveled one officer, who then noted the bizarre extremes some men went to in battling the fleas. “The engineer officers, G.W. Smith and McClellan, slept in canvas bags drawn tight about their necks, having previously greased themselves in salt pork.”

  Like Scott, America’s officers and men were clearly eager to be away into the mountains.

  On March 17, after five days of stormy weather, the skies cleared. Scott’s force finally received heavy artillery. The ten mortars, four 24-pounders, and smattering of howitzers were set in the sand and aimed toward the castle. Scott had also succeeded in borrowing six large guns from the navy, thinking that he could use the additional firepower. He gave Lee personal command over their emplacement: too far from the castle and they would pose no legitimate threat, but too near and they were within range of the enemy guns.

  On the surface it was an unusual gesture. Lee was not an artillery specialist, and his position among Scott’s four-officer “little cabinet” of close advisers (Lee, Colonel Ethan Allen Hitchcock, Colonel Joseph Totten, and the general’s son-in-law and chief of staff, Henry Lee Scott) would seem to make him ill suited for frontline work. But the job was actually a test, with Scott giving Lee the opportunity to shine or fail. Lee’s many thankless years of building fortifications and otherwise laboring in engineering anonymity had prepared him well for the challenge. He chose a risky location, high and exposed, but with a clear view down into the city that would effect maximum damage. Lee was boldly willing to risk his reputation on the site and eagerly awaited the arrival of the big guns.

  Additional foul weather delayed the arrival of the navy’s thirty-two-pounders. Soldiers instead focused their attention on positioning the army’s cannons a half mile south of the city. There would be four batteries in all. It was rough and sweaty work, muddy at times, conducted amid clouds of mosquitoes and flies, scorpions, biting ants, fleas, and the raging humidity that followed every break in the weather.

  At 4:15 p.m. on March 22, shortly after the Mexicans rejected Scott’s demand for a surrender, American mortars dropped the first exploding rounds into the city. The mortars were stamped with the initials GR, for Georgius Rex (King George): they had been seized from the British general Burgoyne at the Battle of Saratoga, during America’s Revolutionary War, and were still more than effective seven decades later.

  U.S. Navy ships opened fire, focusing their guns on the castle and receiving heavy fire in return. Neutral British and French vessels bobbed offshore, watching the action but never joining in. The pounding continued all evening but ceased as night fell.

  The six navy guns finally arrived onshore on the twenty-second. Lee, who had almost been killed three nights earlier when an American sentry mistakenly fired at him and singed the sleeve of his jacket with the bullet, got to work immediately. His job was to oversee their emplacement and then turn them over to the naval gun crews for the bombardment. The cannons consisted of three 32-pounders weighing more than three tons and three French-made 8-pounders known as Paixhans. The 32-pounders, which would be the largest guns ever used in a siege, fired a solid chunk of shot capable of knocking down thick walls and crashing through to underground ammunition bunkers. The Paixhans were smaller but perhaps far more deadly. The invention of the French general Henri-Joseph Paixhans twenty years earlier, they were known for their extreme horizontal accuracy and for the lethal 68-pound exploding shells launched from their barrels. During a naval battle, these shells would spray shrapnel across an opposing ship’s decks, maiming and killing sailors, while simultaneously slashing holes in sails and shredding rigging and masts. In close naval combat, they could be aimed directly at an enemy’s gun ports, with the intention not only of killing the gun crews but of ripping open a hole in the side and sinking the ship. Paixhans were so adept at lacerating a battleship’s wooden hull that they would change the course of naval warfare. Gone would be vulnerable wooden vessels; in their place would be warships constructed from iron.

  Lee knew full well that if he did his job, collateral damage in the form of dead civilians was likely to ensue. But he had never been in combat or seen the aftermath o
f a siege. The destructive power of military weaponry was still an abstract concept, to be gleaned from textbooks. He approached the gun emplacement as just another engineering task, albeit with higher stakes.

  Lee’s guns were officially known as Battery Number Five. He positioned them seven hundred yards south of the Mexican position. They were carefully concealed within a network of sand dunes just to the left of the army batteries. Working in a driving wind that sandblasted his exposed skin, he supervised several hundred soldiers as they dragged the mighty guns from the beach and then over the dunes. The work was slow and frustrating. At one point a set of railroad tracks that went nowhere blocked their path. As they drew closer to the chosen position, a particularly vile form of mesquite, with thorns so large that they were actually longer than the branches on which they grew, drew blood as it ripped at their clothes and flesh.

  Meanwhile, Lee had ordered the construction, atop a low hill and nestled among the mesquite, of deep gun pits that were seven feet wide and covered with a thick protective roof. “The large cannon stand on a high platform, with their muzzles sticking out of the embrasures towards the city,” was how one American soldier described the typical gun pit. He went on to describe a “deep hole in the trench, slanting double roof of plank and timber, upon which are three tiers of bags, filled with earth or sand, to protect it from the bombs of the enemy.”

  The naval gun crews were unused to digging. They chafed at building the fortifications, arguing they were so far from the city that there was no need. Lee was sure of himself. He coolly ordered the sailors to take up shovels and pickaxes alongside their army brethren and to lean hard into their labors.

  The task was completed within twenty-four hours. On the morning of the twenty-fourth, Lee transferred control of Battery Number Five to the navy’s Captain John Aulick — and not a moment too soon: as the naval artillery crews were sponging the last bit of sand from the guns’ barrels, Mexican scouts spotted the emplacement.