All hell broke loose. Mexican cannons focused their shells on the naval battery, which was more exposed owing to its position atop the dunes. “I wish you could hear one of these huge projectiles in the air as they are coming, and see the scattering they make. The roar they make may be compared to that of a tornado, and every man within a quarter-mile of the spot where they strike thinks that they are about to fall on his individual head. The consequence is, that there is a general scampering to and fro,” wrote one American, “and so deceptive is the sound that one is just as apt to run directly towards as from them.”
Battery Number Five responded in kind, firing alongside their four army counterparts, aiming heavy solid shot and exploding shells into the heart of the city. Blasts landed in the main plaza, and huge chunks of the city’s wall were torn away. The primary purpose of the American barrage was to destroy the Mexican forts within Veracruz, and their powder magazines in particular. But the precise location of those forts was hard for the gunners to pinpoint. It was inevitable that the shells would take the lives of civilians. Most were residents, but the city was also home to visiting diplomats from Britain and France who had foolishly refused to leave, forgetting that there was no diplomatic immunity from a cannonball. These noncombatants huddled in their homes, terrified of stepping outside. Mexican soldiers placed protective sandbags around the damaged walls of their forts and were unable to break away from the fighting to offer relief or protection.
Wrote Napoleon Dana, “Our immense shells would fall through the tops of houses, go through both stories, and then, bursting, would shatter the whole house, throw down walls, and blow two or three rooms into one. Doors and windows are blown to pieces all over the city. Some houses had as many as a dozen ten-inch shells burst in them. One of their splendid churches is completely ruined inside. Several ten-inch shells fell in among the altars, and a number of 42-pounder shot went through it. These splendid altars, costly and old oil paintings, cut-glass chandeliers and large vases and shades, gilt and silver work, ornamental flowers and drapery, priests’ robes and church linen, books, bricks, mortar shot, and pieces of shells formed one confused mass of fragments, the most costly work of a costly Catholic tabernacle, totally destroyed.”
The dying were often left unattended, and the dead littered the streets. Two women breastfeeding their babies on the steps of a church were killed by the first shells of the siege, and all four bodies would go untouched for days. One family of seven took refuge together in their house and were all killed at once by the same exploding shell. Priests would not step into the crossfire to administer last rites, and there was no hospital to speak of. Artillery fire from the army and constant broadsides by the naval vessels at sea made for an endless barrage, slowly reducing the city to rubble. Civilian casualties rose quickly to a hundred and kept on climbing. Veracruz was being laid to waste.
On the night of March 23, American cannons scored a direct hit on a Mexican storehouse, setting fire to the city. Flames shot up into the night, whipped by a harsh norther. Just as the wind abated and the fire had been put out, the American cannons resumed firing. The lethal Paixhans were scoring direct hits on the walls and houses of the city, landing with such force that the effects were clearly visible from a mile away. The only thing slowing the American guns was the Quartermaster Department’s inability to ferry ammunition to the batteries. Mules pulling the wagons were exposed to Mexican cannons and often stubbornly refused to go forward when a shell landed too near. On the night of the twenty-fourth, that problem was solved by a massive resupply effort under cover of darkness, so that on the morning of the twenty-fifth, every American gun was once again clobbering Veracruz. “Nothing but a continuous roar of artillery can be heard,” wrote one American. “Above the roar of the cannon a dense smoke is rising, plainly pointing out the scene of this conflict. For close work — for hand-to-hand combat — Monterey was far ahead of this. But for grandeur and sublimity this far exceeds any attempt that has ever yet been made by the American arms.”
On March 25, the Mexicans sent forth an emissary proposing that women and children be allowed to leave the city. Scott refused. A sharp wind raked Veracruz that night, a gale so terrifying that one veteran U.S. naval commander called it one of the worst he’d ever seen. The city’s homeless residents struggled to find shelter, and the American soldiers camped in the field struggled in vain to stay dry as they lay down upon the sand. Some divisions had tents; others camped in the open. Officers and soldiers alike were filthy and tired and, except for the very busy gun crews, growing grumpy and bored as the siege wore on. “We are out here in the sand beyond the reach of the city and the castle, and we can see all that is going on from our little hillocks without being exposed at all. It is true that we are in a very uncomfortable fix still, having no tents and no baggage,” Dana wrote home that day. “I am now so accustomed to sleeping with my clothes on that I do not know how it feels to go to bed regularly. I have not had off my pants to go to bed for a month, and I pulled off my coat and boots night before last for the first time in a fortnight.”
And still the siege continued. In just four days, the Americans had leveled Veracruz. They did so dispassionately. Between them, the four army batteries fired sixty-seven hundred mortar and cannon rounds — almost a half-million pounds of munitions. Artillery Lieutenant Thomas Jackson was in command of a gun crew, as were fellow West Point graduates A. P. Hill, Abner Doubleday, J. B. Magruder, and Joseph Hooker. Sam Grant was fond of venturing forth to watch the gunners in action and was nearly killed when a Mexican shell struck an adobe building in which he and P. G. T. Beauregard had taken cover. Both men were shaken up, but neither was seriously hurt.
Captain John R. Vinton, of the West Point class of 1817, was one of the few American gunners killed. He stepped from a gun pit and was struck on the side of his body. The cannonball glanced off him and didn’t so much as break the skin, but the men around Vinton could hear the wind being knocked out of him, and then watched as he keeled over.
Four members of the naval battery died far more violently: they were standing out in the open to observe the siege when a single cannonball tore off all their heads.
That lone naval battery had fired a staggering eighteen hundred cannonballs and exploding shells in just two days — this despite running out of munitions at 3:00 p.m. on the twenty-fourth and having to wait until morning before being resupplied by sea.
At sunrise on March 26, the terrifying norther continued to rake Veracruz. The wind was so severe that some twenty sailing ships were ripped from their anchors and run up onto the beach. By sunset, however, that harsh gale was stiffening a white surrender flag: the Mexicans had finally quit. Scott’s terms were just as generous as Taylor’s had been at Monterrey: no prisoners of war; all Mexican troops were free to leave their weapons and march out of the city unmolested. By March 29, the Stars and Stripes was flying over Fort San Juan de Ulúa. Scott had lost just thirteen men, with fifty-five wounded. Mexican fatalities were never tallied but numbered just below a thousand soldiers and civilians. Scott’s invasion of Veracruz was the largest-ever landing of American troops on foreign soil and would not be surpassed until June 6, 1944 — D-day.
Despite that remarkable achievement, the Mexican people were unbowed — and unimpressed. “The Americans should not even speak of the bombardment of Veracruz. The walls of Veracruz are in no way strong or impregnable,” one Mexican journalist wrote. “More than 500 innocent children, women, and old people perished under the enemy cannonade, and the valiant garrison under General Morales had to submit to a capitulation, because the entire city would have been ruined and all the innocents sacrificed to no avail.”
The writer concluded with a disgusted nod to the changing face of warfare: “A military action which relied solely on the superiority of the missiles should not even be mentioned.”
Scott soon assembled a list of men to be commended for their “noble services” during the battle. Lee was on it. Colonel Totten, his d
irect superior, was soon dispatched to Washington to deliver news of the victory. When Major John L. Smith, the senior man, then became ill, Lee was instantly elevated to a position as Scott’s senior engineer.
MEADE, ON THE other hand, was all but forgotten. As the navy spent its days off-loading munitions and supplies, and the army steeled itself for the dramatic march to Mexico City, the topographer had been ordered home. “I found myself at Veracruz a perfect cipher; the major, three captains, and one lieutenant I had over my head depriving me of any opportunity I might otherwise have of distinction,” he groused in a letter to Margaretta. Meade was known to be deeply fond of Zachary Taylor and was something of a rogue among the topogs in Veracruz, owing to the fact the orders had not yet been cut reassigning him to Scott’s command. He had fallen into a military limbo, still technically under Taylor’s authority while physically in Scott’s theater of war. Meade had complained about his inactivity to General Worth, who in turn demanded an explanation from Major William Turnbull, the ranking topographer. Turnbull shrugged, saying that he had more than enough topographers to do the limited jobs to which his unit had been assigned.
Before Scott sent him back to Washington, Colonel Totten had seen to it that the prime assignments fell to men under his command and not to the Topographical Corps. Now, the duties of mapping and forward reconnaissance that Meade had done so well since Matamoros were being turned over to men like Lee. Meade groused that Totten “wishes to make as much capital for his own corps, and give us as little as possible.”
In the midst of a monumental invasion, with a rugged and potentially bloody stretch of road between the American army and Mexico City, and at a time when experienced cartographers would be vital to analyzing the lay of the land, Meade was being told that there was nothing for him to do.
He was ordered home. Meade was not happy about the transfer. There was the slightest whiff of failure to his homecoming, for so few other officers were leaving the front. “What will you say to my return?” he wrote his wife. “And what will your dear father say? I will frankly acknowledge that I had a most anxious time in making up my mind what to do. I, however, reasoned, that it was my intention, from the first moment I left you, to perform my duty and remain so long as duty required me, but to retire whenever I could do so honorably, and could not retire in a more honorable manner than I have done.”
Meade’s departure was swift, even if his journey home was not. He boarded the steamship Alabama on March 31, stopped two days in Tampico and a third on Brazos Island, and then endured another twenty-four hours stuck on a sandbar at the mouth of the Mississippi. His ten-day trip to New Orleans should have ended six days earlier, but the duration gave Meade plenty of time to reflect. Although there was little chance that he would see combat again, this did not sadden him. Meade knew that there would be no more significant warfare in northern Mexico (insurgents and bandits had taken to harassing American supply columns and lone American soldiers) and was afraid that his commanding officer would reassign him to Monterrey, where the work would be administrative. And he was also afraid of being posted somewhere out on the Great Plains, surveying wagon trails in the middle of nowhere. The postwar promotions would go to the warriors, and the personal connections that arose from being part of a large army on the move would benefit those soldiers even more.
Meade knew that, and he struggled to find a silver lining to the cloud that had just thrown a shadow over his career. It was not a cloud of shame, for he had performed his job admirably and with courage. Rather, it was a cloud of bad fortune, sending him back to the safety of Washington at a time when the men of West Point were finally getting the chance to be soldiers.
Meade set those thoughts aside and allowed himself to dream of being home. And when he did, Meade was eager to be with his wife and children after more than a year’s absence. “Rest assured,” he wrote Margaretta from New Orleans, “I shall leave no exertion unspared to hasten the moment when I shall hold you and my ever dear children in my arms.”
THIRTY-FOUR
National Road
APRIL 8, 1847
The weather was blazing hot, tempered ever so slightly by a fresh sea breeze. Just a little more than a week after the fall of Veracruz, Scott had ordered General David Twiggs to march his division on to Mexico City. Their first stop would be Jalapa, seventy-four miles inland, at an altitude of 4,680 feet. From a military standpoint, the march presented major obstacles in the form of a river crossing (the Río Antigua) and mountain passes at Plan del Río, Cerro Gordo, and Corral Falso. Each of these presented a potential bottleneck of American troops and offered the Mexicans prime opportunities to thwart the invasion.
Thomas Jackson was among the twenty-six hundred men and two batteries of flying artillery setting out from Veracruz. An advance screen of dragoons rode before them to suss out the terrain. They were an army in a hurry, and each man was stripped down to the essentials of uniform, canteen, bedroll, and weapons. Extra baggage was forbidden, and each company was limited to three tents, to be used only for the sick or the wounded and for the protection of weapons in case of rain.
Though ravaged by the bombardment, in some ways occupied Veracruz had been lovely, and after their bland shipboard diet the men had exulted in delicacies like oysters, fresh tomatoes, eggs, and lemonade. But the soldiers were glad to be away. Yellow fever had a gestation period of just three to five days, and already many men were getting sick, thanks to their weeks of exposure to the elements — and to the mosquitoes in particular. They drank little alcohol for fear of weakening their immune systems and falling prey to el vómito or to the diarrhea they had come to know all too well back on the Rio Grande. Each soldier, even the hardheaded volunteers, had begun to treat disease with the same cautious fear as they would the enemy. But for some it was too late, and American corpses began to pile up. (Some 1,721 Americans would have been killed in combat and 4,102 wounded when the war in Mexico finally came to an end, but an astonishing 11,562 would have succumbed to disease or accidents.)
Contrarily, Jackson, the quiet hypochondriac, was feeling not only well but better than he had in a very long time. “I probably look better than I have in years,” he wrote to his sister.
Jackson had been busy during the siege. There had been no time for advanced artillery training after his West Point graduation, but he had been more than adequately educated on the sands of Veracruz. Jackson’s battery was on the front lines, his commanding officer John Bankhead Magruder. “Prince John,” who had built the theater at Corpus Christi and fought at Resaca de la Palma before being reassigned to the recruiting service for several months, had been promoted to captain in June. His gregarious personality, imposing physical size, pronounced lisp, and determination to be in the thick of every battle made Magruder a flamboyant and deeply charismatic leader. He was also a strict disciplinarian, which made him an ideal commander for Jackson, whose zeal for rules and restraint bordered on the fanatical.
For Jackson there had been great satisfaction in the destruction of Veracruz, which he saw as a necessary step toward defeating Mexico. He had not been shaken in the least when an enemy cannonball missed him by just a few feet, and he was more than content to deflect glory onto the artillery commanders who had already plied their craft with steady brilliance under Taylor’s command. “That portion of praise which may be due to me must of course go to those above me or be included in the praise given to the army,” he wrote Laura.
The aftermath brought out yet another side of Jackson’s very complicated personality. He was known by many for the twang of his backwoods Virginia accent, and by his West Point brethren for his determination to succeed at all costs. But there was also an outspoken side to Thomas Jackson, one that few soldiers ever saw, for he preserved his sharpest comments for his letters home. “This capitulation has thrown into our hands the strong hold of this republic and being a regular [siege] in connection with other circumstances must in my opinion excel any military operations known in the hi
story of our country,” he wrote Laura. Jackson could not and would not understand the logic of releasing enemy prisoners. “I approve of all except allowing the enemy to retire that I can not approve of in as much as we had them secure and could have taken them prisoners of war unconditionally.”
What might have been seen as a cold heart was, in fact, canniness. Rumors were flying that General Santa Anna was racing back from Buena Vista with the remainder of his army to confront Scott. The Mexican soldiers from Veracruz were sure to flee westward toward their military brethren, where they would be rearmed and sent straight back into battle. Jackson realized that in the long run, keeping prisoners now would save lives later.
The rumors were true: Santa Anna had marched straight from Buena Vista to Mexico City, seized control of the Mexican government in order to quell the growing dissent at his performance in the field, and then on April 2 hurried his troops east toward Jalapa, which was not only the American’s intermediate destination, but also the location of Santa Anna’s personal hacienda.
Santa Anna arrived in Jalapa on April 5, and after a two-day reconnaissance, he chose the mountain pass at Cerro Gordo, as the site where his army would position themselves and throw the Americans back into the sea.
Now, a day later, Jackson marched toward this showdown. He had been with Worth’s division during the siege, stationed on the southern end of the American line. But Worth would linger a few days more to serve as temporary military governor of Veracruz. Elements of his division were being divided between other generals. Now Jackson was commanded by Twiggs, the towering and somewhat dim-witted Georgian with the prebattle bowel superstitions.
Jackson’s performance at Veracruz had resulted in a promotion to full second lieutenant. He was eager to continue his upward advance by making a name for himself in another battle. But the National Road was a twisting route, and if battle came, it was hard to imagine that artillery would be as effective as infantry, for its mobility would be minimal when the passage turned mountainous. Many of the men were making the situation more precarious by falling behind during the march, thanks to the heat and an overall lack of fitness, making them a perfect target.
The Training Ground Page 28