However reluctant Polk was to put Scott in command—and he made no secret of his reluctance—he had made the right choice. Scott had his failings—arrogance, a taste for political intrigue, and an almost preposterous degree of vanity (he had two large mirrors placed opposite each other, the better to admire himself in uniform). But he was a first-rate professional soldier, his courage had been proved over and over again in battle, and he commanded the respect, even the awe, of his troops. He was not afraid to enforce discipline with a brutal hand, and he had the “battle sense” that is the mark of a great commander: that is, he understood at a glance where the enemy’s weak spot was, and how to pierce through von Clausewitz’s famous “fog of war.” What is more remarkable is that unlike many great generals, and despite his overwhelming egotism, Scott was an unexpectedly good listener who sought the views of those around him, and expected his officers who served on his staff to express their own opinion even when it contradicted his.
Scott was also a gifted planner. For his mission against Mexico he had proposed “the largest amphibious invasion yet attempted in history,” and certainly the most risky. He required at least 15,000 men (9,000 of them drawn from Taylor’s forces), 50 seagoing transport ships, and 140 “flatboats” to carry a “first wave” of 5,000 men, along with their artillery, supplies, and horses, from the ships to the beaches southwest of Vera Cruz, all of it guarded by U.S. warships. His incredibly detailed plans were based on the assumption that Mexico City could be reached only from Vera Cruz, rather than from the north as Taylor was attempting to do. Once ashore the troops would have to move inland as rapidly as possible to avoid “the seasonal onslaught of the dreaded vómito (yellow fever) around Vera Cruz,” and the defenses of Vera Cruz, particularly Fort San Juan Ulúa, were so strong that the force would have to land on the open beaches south of the city, then besiege or assault it successfully before moving inland. Scott’s plan did not initially anticipate capturing a harbor. The troops would have to secure Vera Cruz, a heavily fortified city, before they could be reinforced and supplied by sea. Giving Scott the number of men he wanted (he would eventually settle for 12,000) could be done only by raising nine regiments of nearly 7,000 volunteers and by stripping Taylor’s forces to the bone. The flatboats or, as they sometimes called, “surfboats” had to be made to Scott’s design in three different sizes, so they could be stacked to save space on deck. Each of them would weigh more than three tons and cost $795 to make. They were “the first specially built American amphibious craft.” Scott even specified the exact dimensions and type of wood to be used—he seemed to think of everything and to consult every expert. This was anything but a hastily improvised attack. Scott took into account everything from medical problems of men and horses to the right choice of beaches and the amount of time it would take to build the flatboats and charter the transport vessels. Given all this, it is a miracle that it took Scott only thirteen weeks from the time he assumed command, the day after Thanksgiving, 1846, to his landing on Collada Beach on March 9, 1847.
As one might expect, the prospect of being stripped of more than half his forces did not please Zachary Taylor, but neither did it reduce him to inactivity. Less than three weeks before Scott left Washington to take command of the Vera Cruz expedition, General Wool was still advancing south toward Parras from Monclova, with Captain Lee and his pioneers in the lead, hoping to place his forces in position to support of General Worth. Lee wrote to Mary on December 1 that he had made “a long hot march,” covering over thirty miles in one day before reaching water “& then it was a little saline,” over hard ground and through clouds of “lime dust”—a march so severe that 200 men “gave out” from heat prostration, exhaustion, and thirst and “had to be placed in the wagons,” and several horses and mules “were left [dead] on the road.” Inevitably, the patrician Lee compared the “haciendas” he passed along the way with the mansions at home, and noted that the proprietors had all fled, “leaving nothing but the peones to receive [us], who poor fellows are reduced to a state of slavery worse than our negroes.” He arrived at Saltillo two days before Christmas, and commented that with the arrival of General Wool’s force, General Worth had now gathered “quite a respectable force,” although he was “beginning to have faint hopes of finding any use for them,” since Santa Anna’s whereabouts were still unknown. Lee was invited by General Worth “to make his house my home,” but apparently preferred to camp with his men. He wrote to Mary on Christmas Eve that the countryside around Saltillo was “monotonous and uninteresting,” except for the mountains, which were “magnificent.” Bird life, always a source of interest to Lee, was scarce in the absence of any trees, except for “the [Mexican] partridge . . . much handsomer than ours,” and three blue birds. He was still congratulating himself on his choice of horses. Creole, his palomino, he reported, was “considered the prettiest thing in the army,” and Jim Connally had measured “one leap . . . over a gulley & said it was 19 feet.”* His second horse, the sorrel mare he had bought in Texas, despite her dainty way of going, did not mind the “weight, blankets & saddle bags, pistols, haversack & [canteen].” (Lee had a strong preference for mares until he acquired Traveller.) Jim rode his third horse, a dark bay gelding, “deep chested, sturdy & strong.” All three horses were doing fifty to sixty miles a day over hard country with no problems.
One gets a glimpse here of Lee the professional soldier, with his equipment strapped to his saddle, uncomplainingly covering fifty miles a day in blistering heat. On Christmas Day his early breakfast was interrupted by news that the enemy was approaching, and was less than thirty miles away. “The ammunition & provision train was moved to the rear. Our tents were struck, wagons packed & teams hitched ready to move at a moments [sic] warning.” Lee moved forward and lay in the grass with his sorrel mare saddled beside him, examining through his telescope “the pass of the mountain through which the road approached,” but one senses his disappointment. When Santa Anna’s army did not appear, camp was pitched again in the same place and the cooks were set to work preparing a Christmas dinner. “I was surprised myself,” he wrote to Mary, continuing his letter, “at the handsome appearance of the feast under the indulgent coloring of candlelight.” Lee, always a prolific letter writer even by the standards of the mid-nineteenth century, often reached toward the poetic, giving one a sense of that other person behind the “grim-visaged” soldier. Reading the correspondence one can imagine the talented watercolorist, the man whose finely drawn topographical maps reach the level of art, the flirtatious gentleman with a taste for light badinage with pretty young women, the grown-up who enjoyed childish fun and affectionate teasing. Who knows what it cost Lee to suppress that lighter persona? The trace of him is there in that glorious phrase “the indulgent coloring of candlelight.” It was not a phrase that would come to the pen of, say, Stonewall Jackson, still less that master of sternly matter-of-fact prose Ulysses S. Grant. It hints of the romantic personality buried deep within Robert E. Lee.
Dust clouds in the distance constantly caused false alarms about the approach of Santa Anna’s army, and a few days after Christmas, following another such report, Lee volunteered “to ascertain the enemy’s position” once and for all by making a night reconnaissance in the direction of the dust clouds. Wool gratefully accepted the offer—though it was hardly the job of an engineer to undertake night scouting in enemy territory—and ordered a company of cavalry to meet Lee at “the outer picket line” and act as an escort. Lee picked “the son of a neighboring old Mexican, who knew the country, and . . . prevailed on him to act as his guide.” Lee showed the young man his pistols and warned him that “if he played him false he should have the contents of them,” though just to make sure, General Wool held the young man’s father as a hostage and threatened to hang him if Lee did not return safely.
Lee’s cavalry escort failed to meet him in the dark, but rather than waste the hours of darkness he rode on anyway, “with no other companion than the unwilling native”—a
courageous decision, since at any moment he might run into an enemy patrol or picket line. In the moonlight Lee was able to see the tracks of numerous wagons in the road, and concluded that a foraging party might have been sent out in this direction, in which case the Mexican encampment must be nearby. Rather than return to General Wool with this rather vague report, Lee pushed forward for several miles, hoping to encounter a picket line or sentries, and after a few miles of hard riding saw campfires “on a hill not far away.” At this point his reluctant guide panicked, fearful of being taken prisoner by Mexican soldiers and “hanged as a spy or a traitor,” by no means an unreasonable thought in the circumstances. He begged Lee to turn back, but Lee was still not satisfied, and told him to stay put while he continued ahead alone. He could see what looked like tents on the hill, and rode right through a darkened village and beyond it toward a stream without being challenged. He could hear voices ahead, and pulled up his horse at the stream, where he found, to his surprise, that what he had taken for tents in the darkness was in fact only a large flock of sheep, and that he had stumbled across a group of Mexican shepherds on their way to the market in Saltillo. Although startled by the sudden appearance out of the dark of a yanqui officer in the middle of the night, they greeted him courteously and told him that the Mexican army was still on the other side of the mountains. Lee rode back to where his guide was waiting, and from there back to camp, where he found that the length of his reconnaissance had put his guide’s father in danger of being hanged. “This Mexican was the most delighted man to see me,” he remarked long afterward. It became one of the stories Lee enjoyed telling, perhaps because mistaking the sheep for tents resembles the famous scene of Don Quixote encountering a flock of sheep, with the Mexican guide as Sancho Panza.
Lee had ridden forty miles during the night, but after only three hours of sleep, he set off again on a fresh horse, and rode much farther until he had acquired definite information about the whereabouts of the Mexican army. The incident apparently made an impression on General Wool, who made Lee his “acting inspector general,” and it taught Lee a lesson he never forgot about the value of pertinacity in reconnaissance, and the importance of not paying too much attention to exaggerated reports of the strength or the nearness of the enemy until they had been reliably verified. Despite numerous reports that the Mexican army was in sight—as many as 20,000 men were said to have been observed—Santa Anna was in fact still encamped over 100 miles away in San Luis Potosí; the dust storms had been caused by the wind or by patrols of American cavalry.
Wool’s forces were ordered to proceed a few miles farther south from the area around Saltillo to Buena Vista, where they supported the troops General Taylor had gathered. Lee busied himself fortifying the new camp in addition to his duties as acting inspector general, but he was ordered on before the climactic battle in northern Mexico on February 23, 1847, when Santa Anna finally advanced with 14,000 men to attack Zachary Taylor’s army of 5,000 men at Buena Vista. The Mexicans were crushingly defeated in a battle that assured Taylor of a hero’s welcome when he returned home, and nomination as the Whig candidate for the presidency in the 1848 election. Still, his victory did not open up the way to Mexico City from the north.
Lee’s departure from Taylor’s army was a consequence of the running battle between General in Chief Scott and Major General Taylor in the months before Buena Vista over Scott’s demand for a substantial part of Taylor’s forces for the landing at Vera Cruz, to which President Polk had already agreed. Scott needed the regulars serving under Taylor to provide a disciplined core for the volunteers and militiamen, and the moment he reached Brazos Santiago, near the mouth of the Rio Grande, he wrote in detail to Taylor specifying the units and numbers of men he required, and ordering Taylor to take up a “defensive” line on the Rio Grande. Although Scott couched his demand in such ponderous courtesy that it would have read like irony coming from anyone else, he made no secret of the fact that he regarded Taylor as an amateur commander, as well as a subordinate, and that he regarded any attempt to reach “‘the Halls of Montezuma’ via Monterey and San Luis Potosi [as a] blunder.”
The quarrel between the two generals, each of whom hoped to be the next president, was aggravated by the fact that Scott’s “confidential” letter to Taylor, which contained all the details of the planned landing at Vera Cruz, went calamitously astray—the officer carrying it was “inveigled” into a small town near Monterey and killed, so the letter with all Scott’s plans was taken by the Mexicans, with the result that Santa Anna read it before Taylor received a second copy. A second problem was that Scott had “appointed a meeting with Taylor” at Camargo, upstream from Brazos Santiago, but because Taylor had not received the letter informing him of the meeting, he was away when Scott arrived. Scott would describe this later as “a great disappointment,” since he had hoped to discuss all this face-to-face and “harmonize operations” with Taylor. In fact, not knowing that his letter had been taken, Scott regarded Taylor’s failure to attend the meeting as a deliberate insult from a general of lower seniority, and returned fuming to Brazos, having given the orders to transfer more than half Taylor’s army, and offered Taylor a choice between remaining where he was with a smaller force or accepting command of a division under himself. “I had now,” Scott wrote in his inimitable style, “without the benefit of the consultation sought, to detach from the army of the Rio Grande such regular troops as I deemed indispensible to lead the heavier masses of volunteers and other green regiments, promised for the descent on Vera Cruz and the conquest of the capital—leaving Taylor a sufficient force to maintain the false* position at Monterey, and discretion to contract his line to the Rio Grande, with the same means of defense.” Taylor’s reaction, when he was finally informed in full detail of the “stripping” of his forces, Scott described as “gentle regret,” but in fact Taylor was furious, and when he returned to the United States after the war he pursued a public feud with Scott that lasted until Taylor’s own untimely death in the White House, caused by overindulgence in cherries and cold milk on a hot day. Since Scott survived him by sixteen years, he had plenty of time to get in the last word, and among other things accused Taylor of being “unhinged” by “the gantlet of universal cheers and praise.”
Captain Robert E. Lee was one of those officers transferred to the Vera Cruz expedition, once more demonstrating his ability to land on his feet, and to get where he wanted to go without seeming to make an effort. It is not clear whether or not Scott asked for him personally, but they were fellow Virginians and Scott knew and respected Lee—the War Department was a small place in those days, and they would have met frequently while Lee was the right-hand man of the chief engineer. Never one to dawdle when duty called, Lee left on January 17, 1847, for the 250-mile journey to Brazos, riding his mare Creole, and accompanied by Jim and his other horses.
Brazos was an ill-defined and shifting island amid the sandbars that obstructed the mouth of the Rio Grande, and had been transformed into a military supply depot and tented camp for thousands of soldiers arriving by ship from ports from New Orleans to New York. For the moment General Scott was there, “fuming at every wasted hour and writing vigorous letters to all whom he accounted guilty of delaying the start of his expedition.” Lee was immediately accepted as a member of Scott’s general staff and one of the general in chief’s inner council, and assigned to quarters on board the U.S.S. Massachusetts, the flagship of the fleet, on which Scott himself would be sailing. He would be sharing a cabin with his friend and classmate from West Point (and a future Confederate general) Joseph E. Johnston. It was a huge and immediate jump up from Lee’s previous post as one of General Wool’s engineers, and an opportunity to see strategy directed at the highest level, for Scott was not a commanding general who kept his hand close to his vest where his headquarters was concerned, and he expected all the members of his staff to keep themselves fully informed of his intentions and concerns.
To Scott’s dismay, the fleet wa
s not assembled and ready to sail until February 15. Not all the surfboats had arrived yet, but Scott was anxious to be under way—it was imperative to take Vera Cruz and advance from the coast to higher ground inland before the yellow fever season began in April. The window of opportunity was narrow, and could not be missed without grave consequences. Three days later they anchored off the Mexican port of Tampico, about halfway between Brazos and Vera Cruz, where most of the army, about 6,000 men, were encamped. Tampico had been taken by the navy as part of the blockade of Mexico’s eastern seacoast, and Scott, followed by his staff, came ashore the next day to a thunderous salute and the kind of full-scale, formal military parade he relished, although he prudently avoided mounting the horse that had been provided for him, and chose to review the troops on foot—Scott was already developing the bulk that would eventually preclude his mounting a horse at all. From the sea Tampico looked pleasant, but it was actually a maze of squalid, narrow streets, with “impoverished” inhabitants, few of them pleased at having their city occupied indefinitely by Americans. Lee spent a day examining the town’s fortifications, and tried the famous Mexican hot chocolate, which was too bitter for his taste. There appears to have been a lot of drunkenness before the troops boarded the transport ships, but we can be sure that Lee, at any rate, did not try the native tequila, given his prejudice against spirits.
On February 19 the fleet sailed again, this time for the shelter of the Lobos Islands, about 120 miles north of Vera Cruz, where some of Scott’s troops were already encamped, and which he had chosen as the “general rendez vous” for the remaining supply ships and transports. Scott had been informed by “old shipmasters” he had consulted in New Orleans that his ships might shelter from the dreaded “northers” in the lee of these islands, so he decided to “lay for a few days” until “the greater part of the troops and material of war expected had come up with [him].” What he does not say is that an outbreak of smallpox on board one of the ships prevented him from embarking more troops from this barren and treeless island, or that the voyage from Tampico had run into a fierce storm—exactly the kind of “norther” he was hoping to avoid—that rendered men and beasts seasick for two days, a horror for the horses, and not much better for the troops. Lee was one of the few officers who “possessed sea legs” and remained unaffected, but his cabin mate Joe Johnston was horribly seasick.
Clouds of Glory Page 18