The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  That was all well and good for a social animal such as McClellan. But stiff, unsociable, nondrinking, nonsmoking Tom Jackson wanted a little warfare. Moving artillery pieces about the country was a duty, and he respected that, but it wasn’t war.

  One evening as he waited with the rest of Scott’s gathering army at Point Isabel on the Gulf, he walked to Captain George Taylor’s tent to find he already had a visitor, another West Pointer, Lieutenant Daniel Harvey Hill.

  As Jackson approached, Taylor nodded in his direction and asked Hill, “Do you know Lieutenant Jackson?”

  Hill looked up curiously.

  “He will make his mark in this war,” Taylor said. “I taught him at West Point; he came there badly prepared, but was rising all the time, and if the course had been four years longer, he would have been graduated at the head of his class.”

  Hill’s interest was aroused. He had graduated from West Point the summer Jackson arrived.

  “He never gave up anything,” Taylor said, “and never passed over anything without understanding it.”

  Hill found Jackson reserved and reticent at first, but the two soon warmed to one another, and Jackson proposed a walk on the beach. As they sauntered along, he became more sociable.

  “I really envy you men who have been in action,” Jackson confessed to Hill. “We who have just arrived look upon you as veterans.”

  Then he said: “I should like to be in one battle.”

  Hill, who would one day be Jackson’s brother-in-law, noticed that as he said this his face lit up, his eyes sparkled, and “the shy hesitating manner gave way to the frank enthusiasm of the soldier.”28

  Old Jack was ready. All he lacked was the battle.

  Battle was something Clarendon J. L. (Dominie) Wilson, Jackson’s postgraduation dancing partner at Brown’s Hotel, had plenty of at the moment. Wilson was more than a thousand miles from the beach where Jackson and Hill walked together. It was the middle of the afternoon in early February and Dominie was in New Mexico Territory sighting down the barrel of a six-pounder. His aim was fixed on the western wall of the large church in the Taos Pueblo. From a range of two hundred yards he was pounding the house of God with grapeshot.

  Wilson was there because the acquisition of the New Mexico and California territories was the main goal of the war with Mexico. Polk had therefore taken steps to seize them, even as he sent the main army of invasion marching toward Mexico City. As soon as war was formally declared, the president ordered Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny to proceed to those territories with an Army of the West, occupy them, and force Mexico to hand them over. It would be a massive acquisition of land, second only to the Louisiana Purchase, because the California Territory then included all of that present-day state, and New Mexico Territory embraced all of what would one day become New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming. In June 1846, Kearny set out across country with eighteen hundred troops. Making good time—about a hundred miles a week—he reached New Mexico in August, and occupied Santa Fe without firing a shot.29

  By the end of September, Brigadier General Kearny—his promotion had caught up with him on the march—felt that he had adequately conquered New Mexico and could safely get on with subduing California. Mexican political and business leaders in Santa Fe had assured him that the people of New Mexico would become reconciled to the American occupation in good time and accept it without resentment. They assured him there would be no retaliation and no overt acts of insurrection.30

  Since he believed them, Kearny divided his little army into three parts. One was to remain in New Mexico under the command of Colonel Sterling Price, a volunteer, politician, tobacco planter, and former legislator and congressman from Missouri. The second part led by Colonel Alexander W. Doniphan, another volunteer and lawyer from Missouri, was to march south and occupy Chihuahua across the Rio Grande. Kearny would take the third part to California.31

  Kearny didn’t know it at the time, but he had left Sterling Price with a problem. By December, talk of rebellion was rife around Santa Fe, despite the assurances that the Mexicans would become reconciled to the occupation. Open insurrection was in the air. On December 5, a reporter from the St. Louis Daily Missouri Republican, in New Mexico to cover the Missouri volunteers, told of treasonable letters that had been seized by the army. The letters described the province as ripe for revolt, needing only some military display from below to set it off. “It is clear,” the reporter wrote, “that the Mexicans here are very much discontented.…” The clergy “are our enemies … the wealthier classes dislike our government … the patriotic … feel mortification and pain … and the lower classes lived too long in a state of abject slavery, dependence, and ignorance, to be at once capable of appreciating the benefits conferred on them by the change of government. All are dissatisfied—the rich, the poor, the high and the low.” Even so, the reporter didn’t believe the people were so foolhardy that they would attempt a revolt. He wrote it all off as Mexican braggadocio.32

  Even as he wrote, Mexican insurrectionists were laying plans to make him a false prophet. One company of insurgents was preparing to strike from a church in Santa Fe. Another was to assemble in the valley of the Tesuque north of town. In the dead of night, at a signal from the bells on the church towers, the conspirators were to swarm into the streets, seize the guns, and massacre the Americans. The governor, Charles Bent, and Colonel Price were to be captured. This unchristian and murderous stroke, planned for the week before Christmas, was postponed to Christmas Eve. Then three days before it was to come off, the wife of one of the conspirators, dreading the inevitable bloodshed, informed Price. Some of the leaders were apprehended, and the rebellion appeared suppressed. When Lieutenant J. W. Abert of the army’s topographical engineers arrived in Santa Fe two days before Christmas, the plot was the talk of the town. Sentinels had been posted in every direction. Field pieces and heavy guns were parked in the plaza, everything was in a state of preparation, and everybody was nervous.33

  Among the American officers spending this unsettling yuletide in New Mexico were Brevet Second Lieutenants Wilson and Oliver Hazard Perry Taylor, both of the class of 1846 and now with the First Dragoons. They watched as the New Year came in and the situation went from bad to worse. On January 14, Governor Bent left Santa Fe for Taos, and in the early morning of the nineteenth, when snow covered the ground, the town was asleep, and it was as cold as Iceland, a cabal of Pueblo Indians and Mexicans forced their way into the governor’s house and massacred him and five others, including Taos Sheriff Stephen Luis Lee and circuit attorney James W. Leal. That same day the bloodshed spread to Mora, Arroyo Honda, and the Rio Colorado.34

  News of the massacres reached Colonel Price in Santa Fe the next day, and with it word that an insurgent army was approaching the capital, gathering adherents along its line of march. Price sent to Albuquerque for a company of First Dragoons and a regiment of Missouri mounted volunteers. Without waiting for them to arrive, he marched out on January 23 to meet the enemy, joined by a company of mounted volunteer “avengers” led by Governor Bent’s law partner, Felix St. Vrain. Price’s little force of 353 men was accompanied by four mountain howitzers.

  They found the insurgents in force early in the afternoon the next day near the town of Cañada, and in the fight dislodged and scattered them. Four days later the dragoons and the regiment of Missouri mounted volunteers from Albuquerque caught up with Price at Luceros on the Rio del Norte. With them were Wilson, trailing the six-pounder, and Taylor. Now Price’s force was at full strength, nearly five hundred rank and file.

  They knew the insurgents were dug in on the steep slopes of the mountains that rose on each side of the cañon entrance to the town of Embudo. Since the road to Embudo wouldn’t support artillery or wagons, Price detached dragoon Captain John H. K. Burgwin with about 180 men to handle the matter. Wilson, unable to take his six-pounder, but just as unable to stay behind, volunteered to go as a private soldier in St. Vrain’s company o
f avengers. Taylor, in his accustomed rank, commanded one of the Dragoon units. At the pass, Burgwin threw out flanking parties on either side of the mountain pass where some six hundred to seven hundred insurgents waited. The fight didn’t last long; soon the enemy were in full retreat, bounding along the steep and rugged sides of the mountains for Embudo “with a speed that defied pursuit.” When Burgwin reached the town he was met only by a handful of city officials with a white flag.

  When the detachment finished its work and rejoined the main force at Trampas, Price set out over the mountain through the deep winter snow and entered Taos on February 3. There the soldiers found the enemy holed up in the nearby Pueblo, and immediately opened on them with their batteries. Since his ammunition wagons had not yet arrived, and since all hands were nearly frozen by the cold and paralyzed by fatigue, Price ordered the firing stopped after about two and a half hours and called it a day.

  Next morning the army was up and at it again, this time bringing the Pueblo and its church under a cross fire. When Price saw that neither Wilson’s six-pounder nor the howitzers were making any kind of impression, he ordered the church stormed. That didn’t work either. A few small holes were opened with axes in the western wall of the church and the roof was set afire, but that was all, and it cost Captain Burgwin his life.

  Price then ordered Wilson to bring his gun around to the west wall. And that is where he now stood, cannonading the church with his six-pounder.

  At about 3:30 in the afternoon, Wilson was ordered to run his gun up closer, to within sixty yards of the church. From there he fired ten more rounds, pounding away at the holes Burgwin had opened in the walls. His point-blank fire soon widened a practicable breach, and he ran the gun up to within ten yards and poured in three more rounds of grape. At his side all the way and gazing with him into the mouth of the breach was Taylor, his Yankee classmate from Rhode Island. Wilson lit a shell and hurled it into the gaping breach, and the two classmates, together with Lieutenant Alexander B. Dyer of ordnance and a small storming party, instantly followed it in. Through the thick smoke inside, they caught a fleeting glimpse of the enemy beating a retreat through the gallery without firing a backward shot.35

  The fight was over. The class of 1846’s two representatives in New Mexico had just put down the Taos Rebellion.

  That City

  Shall Soon

  Be Ours

  George McClellan stood before Vera Cruz, but his fight was not yet either with the mosquitoes or the Mexicans. It was with the fleas. The sand hills before the ancient walled city were alive with fleas. Dabney Maury had never seen so many. “If one were to stand ten minutes in the sand,” he marveled, “the fleas would fall upon him in hundreds. How they live in that dry sand no one knows.”1

  McClellan and Legs Smith, the two officers of the pick and shovel brigade, had erected a telling fortification against this irritating army. They greased themselves all over nightly before bedtime with salt pork, and climbed into canvas bags drawn tight about their necks. They looked like men ready for a sack race and probably smelled worse, but they slept flea-free and were the envy of the less well equipped. Perhaps the fleas did not eat McClellan and Smith in the night, but they compensated for it by devouring Maury and everybody else who had no canvas bag.2

  The fleas were penance, after a fashion, for the unexpected lack of Mexican opposition to the American landing at Vera Cruz. The armada carrying Scott’s army had rendezvoused in the roadstead at the Lobos Islands 120 miles north of the fortified city in late February 1847. From there, on the second of March, it had sailed for Antón Lizardo a dozen miles below Vera Cruz. Arriving three days later, the transports dropped anchor to shouts and cheers. On March 9, off Los Sacrificios, the island in the bay at Vera Cruz where Cortez had landed in 1520, wave after wave of surf boats packed with soldiers and rowed by sailors bobbed toward the beach. And from the city there was only silence.

  The setting for the invasion was majestic. Mount Orizaba, the great sleeping volcano, the “mountain of the star,” broke from its veil of haze and stood in magisterial relief against the cloudless March sky. Everything that day stood in bold relief. There was no stealth to this landing, no effort to creep in unseen and unheard. National airs blared across the bay, regimental colors snapped in the breeze, and boat after boat landed to exultant huzzahs.3 Tom Jackson was bowled over. It was one of the most thrilling sights he had ever seen.4

  Winfield Scott, who had seen other military extravaganzas in his time, was more worried than thrilled. An uglier coming invasion was tugging at the edge of his concern. He was running late and the yellow fever season, the time of the dreaded “el vomito,” which always hit Vera Cruz with a vengeance in the spring, couldn’t be far behind. It, not the Mexicans, was the most powerful potential defender of Vera Cruz.

  He must therefore hurry. He must seize the fortress city as soon as possible and be on his way into the healthier interior. But he mustn’t try to go too fast. Despite the need to hurry and despite the urgent insistence by some of his generals that he storm the city immediately, Scott decided to lay siege instead. It would take precious time, but it would save lives and he was going to need all the men he could muster for battles yet to come.

  By midnight on the ninth, the 13,500-man army was ashore, and still there had been little opposition—only the fleas. It was not until that night that the Mexicans opened a steady drumfire on the invading force, which was by then rapidly deploying over the sand hills behind the city. Scott’s forces quickly straddled the national road leading in from the interior and sealed off all communications, food, and water from the outside. By the thirteenth the city was thoroughly invested, and the mortars had begun coming ashore. The engineers worked around the clock as the army waited.

  The pick and shovel brigade was in demand everywhere, opening roads through the hills of sand and chaparral, destroying aqueducts that gave Vera Cruz its water, making general reconnaissances, erecting batteries, trenches, and camouflaged approaches. It was work that had to be done for the most part under fire.5

  But George McClellan was having the time of his life. On the sixteenth he returned to headquarters with his clothes ripped and torn, a grin on his face, and an exuberant account of the workday on his lips. He and his party had been under Mexican musket fire most of the day. Thank God they couldn’t shoot straight.6

  The engineers had to watch for bullets from both directions. They were in greater danger now of being shot by their own advance sentinels as they returned to their lines in the night than by the Mexicans. As they approached they shouted, “Don’t shoot, we are American officers.”7

  If Mexican bullets were not felling the sappers and miners of Company A, Mexican fever was. Its main victim was Captain Swift. He had rejoined the company at Vera Cruz, but he was still unwell, and after a few hours in the merciless sun, he was finished. Passing permanent command of the company to Lieutenant Smith, he sailed sick and dying for home. About the time his little company entered Vera Cruz in triumph later in the month, he arrived in New Orleans and twenty-four hours later was dead.

  But war goes on. Even before Swift left, a fourth officer had joined the company, another figure familiar to McClellan—the large frame, the ungainly walk, the genial disposition, the well-organized mind, the New Hampshire accent. His classmate John Gray Foster, separated from him on the final merit role by only two files, was now one of them.8

  By 2:00 in the afternoon on March 22, seven mortars were in place and frowning on Vera Cruz. Three more would be on line the next day.9 It was enough firepower to start the siege. As his army stared expectantly at the sixteen domes within the whitewashed walls of Vera Cruz and on the massive castle of San Juan de Ullúa bristling in the bay beyond, Scott sent a summons for the city to surrender. For thirteen days the Americans had not fired a shot, while the city had “belched forth its sulphurous contents in almost continual discharges of heavy mortars and paixhans.”10 It had been a drain on their nerves and a tax on their
patience.

  At 4:00 P.M. the city sent back word that it would defend itself to the last extremity. At 4:15, therefore, the American batteries opened fire, the shouts of approval from the army drowning the roar of the guns. The bark of those “faithful bulldogs” was sweet music to their ears. Like “hungry lions in search of prey,” one soldier wrote, the mortar shells went “howling” to their mark. The batteries in the city answered in a blazing sheet of fire.11 Lieutenant Edmund Lafayette Hardcastle, of the class of 1846, watched in awe, stunned by the “one continual thunder of artillery.”12 His classmate, Parmenas Taylor Turnley, saw it by night and called it “one of the grandest scenes in warfare.”13

  Artillery wasn’t Edmund Hardcastle’s job. He had arrived in Mexico with George Derby, his longtime section mate at the academy, and both had been assigned to General Scott’s staff as topographical engineers. But he had nothing to do at the moment, the army was short of artillery officers, and he knew how to command mortars—he had learned it at West Point. So at 4:00 the next morning he and Derby reported to the batteries and were soon commanding guns aimed at Vera Cruz.

  In the night, the Mexicans slackened their cannonade. But as the sun rose over the sand hills, they opened up once more with a “terrible fire.” At about 10:00 in the morning their bombardment fell off again, but not its American counterpart. Peering through the smoke over his two mortars, Hardcastle saw that the shells from the American guns were bursting with ruinous effect in the city—tumbling steeples, shattering roofs, setting houses afire, and hurling immense fragments in the air.

  By afternoon the enemy shot was coming down on the trenches as heavily as ever. Hardcastle’s battery was barricaded behind a breastwork erected by Captain Robert E. Lee and the ever-present engineers, but it was not shot-proof. Between firings, Hardcastle counted the cannon balls that had penetrated the embankment in front of him and were either visible or about to fall through. There were more than he cared to think about. He remembered uneasily that on the first afternoon of the cannonade an officer and a soldier had been killed at this same battery. As if to remind him, a cannonball hurtled through the narrow three feet of space that separated him from the captain of the battery. Both men, bending over at the time attending their duties, straightened and looked at one another, grateful for small favors.