The battle was still far from decided as Longstreet came over the wall, clutching the Stars and Stripes. Iowa had recently been added to the Union, and the flag now showed twenty-nine stars. But the tall and athletic Virginian, who had fought in every major battle of the war except Buena Vista without suffering so much as a scratch, was hit in the thigh by a musket ball. Right next to him was Lieutenant George Pickett, the fun-loving goat of West Point’s 1846 class who had secured his appointment to the academy through the help of Abraham Lincoln’s law partner. Longstreet handed him the colors before they could touch the ground, and it was Pickett who carried the American flag into Chapultepec Castle. Racing for the flagpole under heavy enemy fire, Pickett lowered the Mexican tricolor and, in one of the war’s seminal moments, raised the Stars and Stripes so that everyone for miles around immediately knew the outcome of the battle.
At that very instant, on a nearby hillock, a group of Irish American deserters were far from thrilled to see Old Glory snapping in the breeze. The San Patricios had gone over to the Mexican side early in the war and had become heroes among their new comrades for their ferocious conduct under fire. But the Patricios had been captured at the Battle of Churubusco and sentenced to death by Scott. Rather than kill them immediately, the general had decreed that the thirty men be positioned so that they faced Chapultepec as the battle raged. Each prisoner stood atop the bed of a mule cart (one man was legless and sat atop a mule), hands tied behind his back, ankles bound together, and a noose cinched tightly about his neck. The other end of that rope was affixed to a hastily constructed gallows. The raising of the American flag was the signal for the executioner to whip the mules forward, sweeping the carts out from under the Irishmen’s feet and hanging them.
Meanwhile, from the National Palace in Mexico City, a sullen Santa Anna could clearly see that very same flag. “If we were to plant our batteries in hell, the damned Yankees would take them from us,” he vented to General Ampudia as they looked out into the distance. They could see Mexican soldiers fleeing Chapultepec. It was a scene of panic and disarray, the causeways jammed with emotionally broken men running for their lives toward Mexico City.
“God,” Ampudia replied, “is a Yankee.”
FORTY
Conquest
SEPTEMBER 13, 1847
The Mexico City that now stood before the American army was a far cry from the island fortress the Aztecs had created so long before. Three centuries of Spanish rule had transformed it into a New World version of a fine European city, with plazas, grand citadels, towering cathedrals, boulevards broad enough for a fine military parade, and a population numbering nearly two hundred thousand. It was as if a majestic slice of Spain had been built directly on top of the former Aztec sanctuary.
The embattled nature of Mexico City’s inhabitants was one variable that had not changed. In the days leading up to Chapultepec, they had heard repeated admonitions from the Catholic clergy to take up arms against the American heretics. Horror stories about American atrocities at Buena Vista, Monterrey, and Veracruz were enough to make old men sharpen their knives and hatchets, and even send women and little children to the rooftops, lugging heavy stone pavers to be thrown down onto the invaders. A portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron saint, had been paraded through the streets as part of a religious procession. And Santa Anna, who had been reviled by Mexico City’s people after his failure at Cerro Gordo, was now cheered wherever he went.
Fortified customs houses, known as garitas, stood at each of the many gates situated around the city walls. These were the Mexicans’ last line of defense — choke points that would force the Americans to funnel through narrow passages where they might easily be thwarted. But Santa Anna had depleted the garitas blocking the western and southwestern approaches to the city when he shifted the bulk of his army to the city’s southeast quadrant. The Americans had great hopes of overwhelming the city’s western approaches by thrusting immediately from Chapultepec into the city.
Quitman’s division now raced up the Belén causeway, which had been precisely engineered to form a straight line from the main gate of Chapultepec to the Belén garita, on Mexico City’s southwest corner. Church bells pealed the signal for citizens to prepare for battle. As Quitman, the Mississippi volunteer general, and his troops charged pell-mell up the crowded causeway, residents of Mexico City clambered onto their rooftops to witness the titans’ approach. The Americans wore threadbare uniforms, and Quitman had somehow lost a boot during the action. So what the Mexican people saw was not a spit-and-polish corps of conquerors, but a band of filthy, unshaven men led by a shoeless officer on horseback.
Meanwhile, Worth’s division was delayed at Chapultepec for several hours. Many of the men ransacked the castle in search of plunder and liquor. It was late in the afternoon as they proceeded, as best they could, up the San Cosmé causeway to Quitman’s far left. San Cosmé traveled due north before turning sharply to the right to enter the city.
Jackson was one of the few soldiers who had not stopped fighting when the castle fell. As he had dashed up the San Cosmé causeway, Mexican soldiers fleeing back into the city had clogged the road, slowing his advance. Jackson solved the problem by firing his six-pounders into the mob to clear a path. “Every shot told on the huddled and demoralized thousands of Mexicans,” wrote one officer. “But their fire back upon the thirsty, pursuing Americans was harmless.”
Jackson later told his sister that he felt no guilt or sadness about shooting men in the back and perhaps killing those innocent civilians who had gotten caught in the crossfire. His actions would not go unnoticed, and even Scott would soon publicly confront Jackson about how he had “slaughtered” those Mexicans. Yet Jackson did not care. “What business had I with results?” Jackson wrote defiantly to his sister. “My duty was to obey orders.”
Finally, Jackson’s advance was halted when a complement of two thousand Mexican cavalry under General Ampudia rode out from the city to challenge the invaders. Jackson, now joined by Magruder, quickly unlimbered their guns. “A rapid fire was opened on the Mexicans, who retreated without attacking the artillery,” noted one officer.
Only then did Jackson stop to wait for Worth. “It was not,” wrote one American, “judged prudent to proceed further.”
GRANT, TOO, WAS impatient to be inside Mexico City. He was now moving up the San Cosmé road toward Jackson’s position. Rather than travel on the causeway, he and the rest of Garland’s detachment followed a parallel route beneath the arches of a city aqueduct. They encountered pockets of Mexican resistance but pressed forward. “When opposition was encountered our troops sheltered themselves by keeping under the arches supporting the aqueduct, advancing an arch at a time,” Grant remembered. But at the point where the causeway turned sharply to the right, “our progress was stopped for a time by the single piece of artillery and the infantry occupying the housetops back from it.”
Grant remained calm. As Jackson directed his flying six-pounders at that lone Mexican gun, Grant set out by himself to find a way around it, soon coming upon another Mexican position.
“West of the road from where we were, stood a house occupying the southwest angle made by the San Cosmé road and the road we were moving upon. A stone wall ran from the house along each of these roads for a considerable distance,” wrote Grant. “I watched my opportunity and skipped across the road and behind the south wall. Proceeding cautiously to the west corner of the enclosure, I peeped around and, seeing nobody, continued, still cautiously, until the road running east and west was reached. I then returned to the troops and called for volunteers. All that were close to me, or that heard me, about a dozen, volunteered.”
Grant safely led these men up the road, ordering them not to fire, lest they give themselves away. In this way, they stealthily crept up on the Mexican positions. Jackson’s cannons had succeeded in their chores, and Grant was equally successful in his impromptu flanking movement. The Mexicans, catching sight of the approachin
g U.S. soldiers and having no more artillery support, fled back into the city.
At the San Cosmé garita, however, the Mexicans made a stand. If Worth had simply raced from Chapultepec right after it fell, he would have found the garita undefended. But he had lingered to take on more ammunition and had then had to fight off a last-ditch charge by fifteen hundred Mexican lancers who had ventured forth from the city. So it was 4:00 p.m. when his men finally got under way. As Chapultepec had fallen at 9:30 in the morning, Santa Anna had finally realized his great tactical error and guessed — correctly this time — that the bulk of the American forces would be entering the city at San Cosmé. Men and weapons had been rushed to the garita, and by the time Worth’s men approached, three cannons (including a twenty-four-pounder) and three fresh battalions now manned the roofs and hid inside the arches of the aqueduct. The Americans’ path was completely blocked.
It was Grant who noticed that a local church overlooked the enemy positions. It “looked to me as if the belfry would command the ground back of the garita San Cosmé,” he wrote. Seizing command of the situation, Grant persuaded an artillery unit to dismantle one of their lightweight mountain howitzers. Taking the long route to the church, they were forced to carry the cannon through a series of chest-deep swamps. When he finally arrived at the church, Grant politely knocked on the door. A priest answered. “With the little Spanish then at my command, I explained to him that he might save property by opening the door, and he would certainly save himself from becoming a prisoner, for a time at least: and besides, I intended to go in whether he consented or not. He began to see his duty in the same light that I did, and opened the door, although it did not look as if it gave him special pleasure to do so,” Grant later wrote.
The gun was hauled up the belfry’s narrow wooden steps, piece by piece, then reassembled in the steeple. Grant then gave the order to open fire. The results were immediate. “Shots from our little gun dropped in upon the enemy and created great confusion. Why they did not send out a small party and capture us, I do not know.”
Grant and the artillery specialists kept right on firing. Worth’s forces soon saw the value in outflanking the Mexican positions. The twenty-four-pounder was knocked out of commission shortly before 5:00 p.m., and a group of U.S. Marines successfully climbed to the roof of a three-story house behind the enemy position and decimated the Mexican infantry and baggage mules with a display of precision musketry.
Worth ordered his men to halt and to settle into their new positions for the night. Over at the Belén garita, Quitman’s men were doing the same. He sent one of his staff officers, Lieutenant John Pemberton, to bring Grant to him. “He expressed his gratification,” Grant wrote simply of his meeting with Quitman.
LEE ENTERED THE city long after Grant and Jackson, via the very same route. He had spent the day riding back and forth from the various battlefields to Scott’s headquarters, not wishing to anger the general again by failing to provide a steady stream of reports. There had still not been any time to sleep. By the time he and Scott began riding down the San Cosmé causeway, he was struggling to stay awake in the saddle. Just as he and Scott reached Worth’s position, Lee fainted.
And that was how, after months of bravery and daring, Robert E. Lee’s Mexican War came to an end. At 1:00 a.m. the next morning, Santa Anna opened Mexico City’s jails and freed every prisoner. At the request of the city fathers, who did not wish to see the horrors and destruction of Veracruz inflicted upon their city, he then evacuated with his army and fled to the village of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
By 4:00 a.m., Mexico City’s authorities had sent a delegation to Scott, requesting terms of surrender. As the sun rose over the capital the following morning, the American flag was raised over Mexico’s National Palace. Scott slept there that night, guarded by a squad of U.S. Marines, in what was also known as the Halls of Montezuma.
Sam Grant could finally rest easy and make plans for his eventual return home — because, after so many battles and so much uncertainty about his future, that day would now soon come. He reflected with pride on his service and that of his army brethren: “I had gone into the battle of Palo Alto in May, 1846, a second lieutenant, and I entered the city of Mexico sixteen months later with the same rank, after having been in all the engagements possible for any one man and in a regiment that lost more officers in the war than it ever had present at any one engagement,” wrote Grant. “I would not have the anniversaries of our victories celebrated, nor those of our defeats made fast days spent in humiliation and prayer. But I would like to see truthful history written. Such history will do full credit to the courage, endurance, and soldierly ability of the American citizen, no matter what section of the country he hailed from, or in what ranks he fought. The justice of the cause which in the end prevailed, will, I doubt not, come to be acknowledged by every citizen of the land, in time.”
FORTY-ONE
Fourth of July
JULY 4, 1848
It was a Sunday. Rain had fallen during the night, tamping down the midsummer dust that so often drifted over Washington’s undeveloped riverfront. As the crowd of thousands flocked to the Mall in front of the Capitol, there was a “delicious freshness to the air,” in the words of one local paper.
They had come to witness the laying of the Washington Monument’s cornerstone. Local ferries and other transportation services had lowered their rates just for this special ceremony, which had begun early that morning with a grand parade and the pealing of church bells. The people came from near and far — local dignitaries, representatives of various Indian tribes, members of Congress and the judiciary, and names now synonymous with America’s earlier generations: Mrs. Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, the wife of Alexander Hamilton; Mrs. Dolley Payne Madison; Martin Van Buren; Sam Houston; John Quincy Adams; and Millard Fillmore. A forty-year-old bald eagle that had been in attendance when the legendary Lafayette visited nearby Alexandria in 1825 now perched atop a temporary archway. It was during his 1824–25 return to the United States (during which he had paid a poignant visit to the widow of Light-Horse Harry Lee and met a teenage Robert E. Lee) that the French general had presided over the dedication of the Bunker Hill Monument in Massachusetts. The eagle represented not just America and Lafayette’s visit but also the spiritual continuum between America’s early years of independence and the bold new future that now lay ahead. As if to remind one and all of the bird’s importance, it had ridden into the city on a stone wagon, as part of the grand procession, perched atop the 24,500-pound block of Baltimore marble that would soon become the cornerstone.
“In a hollow spread with boards and surrounded with seats the crowd gathered. Around two sides of this space were high and solidly constructed seats, hired out to spectators, covered with awnings, and affording a favorable position for seeing and hearing,” wrote one newspaper account. “From 15,000 to 20,000 persons are estimated to have been present, stretched over a large area of ground from the southern hill, gradually sloping to the plain below.”
Unbeknownst to most in attendance, the U.S. Senate had ratified the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that morning, formally bringing an end to the Mexican War. Worth’s division, with Grant still among its members, had finally marched away from Mexico City on June 12, marking the end of the capital’s American occupation. Now, with the treaty’s ratification, the war was truly done.
Almost all of Polk’s demands had been met: Texas and all the lands west to the Pacific were now part of the United States, in exchange for fifteen million dollars, with the Rio Grande now specified as Texas’s southern boundary. The lone exception was that the United States had failed to secure control of transit rights across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which the British had magically finagled for themselves through deft diplomatic maneuvering. Nonetheless, America’s Manifest Destiny was complete.
For that reason, and for the powerful emotion accompanying the commencement of construction on the long-delayed Washington Monument, the Fourth of July, 1848,
as one Washington newspaper noted, was truly “one of the most splendid and agreeable Washington has ever witnessed.”
THE WRITER DIDN’T even know the half of it. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo’s biggest prize was California, with its deepwater ports and abundant natural resources. Now, as Lieutenant William Tecumseh Sherman prepared to celebrate the Fourth of July clear across the continent from Washington, those riches were about to take on a brand-new meaning. Sherman was working for the military governor of California, Colonel R. B. Mason, a stern yet fair individual who had been appointed when Kearny was ordered to take over as military governor of Veracruz. “I remember, one day in the spring of 1848, that two men, Americans, came into the office and inquired for the Governor. I asked them their business, and one answered that they had just come down from Captain Sutter on special business, and they wanted to see Governor Mason in person,” wrote Sherman, who ushered them into Mason’s office and then returned to his duties.
But Mason came to the door a moment later and summoned Sherman back into his office. A pair of dull yellow rocks lay atop a pile of papers on Mason’s desk. “What is that?” Mason asked him.
Sherman hefted one of the rocks. “Is it gold?” he asked.
It was. And soon Mason and Sherman struck out from Monterey, on their way up to an outpost known as Sutter’s Fort, in Sacramento. When they stopped at San Francisco, the soldiers were shocked to see the city almost empty of men. As they moved inland up the long, broad river delta that would take them to Sutter’s Fort, they saw that mills and shops in towns along the way were deserted and that farmers were allowing cattle and horses to wander about aimlessly in mature fields of wheat and corn, trampling and ruining the crops. Clearly, news of gold at Sutter’s Mill had already spread throughout northern California.
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