The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  Down we went through the whistling balls and crashing grape, men dropping here and there, the wounded groaning, but nobody scared, and with a tremendous yell we gained the ravine and commenced the ascent of Sierra Guarda [El Telegrafo].

  A fire, close, heavy and continued, from 1800 muskets was opened on us, but the ascent was so extremely precipitous that it afforded us protection, for most of the balls passed over our heads. The whistling was terrific, the air seemed alive with balls, but we went on cheering and returning the fire now and then, when we stopped for an instant to rest. At last we came to the highest crest within ten rods of their first breastwork. We gave one fire, then Col. Harney shouted with a voice like a trumpet, “Forward, boys! Forward! Remember the dead! And give it to ’em.” Away we went.

  The Mexicans saw us coming. Nothing could withstand such a charge, they gave one fire and ran. We followed, clambered up over the breastwork, chased them from the tower, over the hill, turned their own pieces on them, and the Sierra Guarda was ours. Up went the American flag and down came the Mexican.

  It was at this moment that a retreating party going down turned and fired. I had discharged both pistols and was standing on a little knoll directing a cannon at this same party, when I felt myself struck—I fell in the arms of a kind fellow, named Buttrick of the rifle regt. who has been with me night and day ever since. The victory was complete, seeing us in the rear the whole army surrendered and Santa Anna ran away. We took 5 Generals, 30 Cols., 5000 men, 30 pieces of Artillery and thus ended the greatest fight of the age, probably.

  I had my wounds dressed and at 5 o’clock was brought down to this place in a litter.38

  The ball struck Derby in the left hip, turned on the bone, and careened around the thigh. There it took up permanent lodging, the surgeon deciding that any attempt to remove it would be dangerous.39

  By 10:00 in the morning the Mexicans were in full flight up the Jalapa road, and General Scott was on the battlefield congratulating Colonel Harney and grieving over the killed and wounded. It is believed apocryphal, but nonetheless in character, that the following exchange took place when the great general saw his stricken young staff topographer lying on the field among the fallen:

  Scott: My God, Darby, you’re wounded!

  Derby: Yes, General Scatt.

  Scott, bristling: My name is Scott, not Scatt.

  Derby: And my name is Derby, not Darby!40

  What really happened when Scott found him lying wounded on the field, by Derby’s own account, was this:

  The general took his two hands warmly in his own large ones and said: “Why, my poor boy, have they hit you too?”

  Colonel Harney, standing by Scott’s side, recounted the circumstances, and the general after staying with him five or ten minutes, left, saying, “Mr. Derby, I’m proud of you, Sir.”41

  The general was proud of many of his brave boys that day and he mentioned them in his official report to Washington. Four members of the class of 1846 were singled out for particular praise for courageous service under fire: Derby (twice, once for being “actively employed” and once for being wounded), Seymour, McClellan, and Hardcastle.42

  Early that morning from his convalescent tent at Plan del Rio, Maury heard the sound of the battle raging. Then he heard the cheerful strains of “Yankee Doodle” drifting in from the passing band escorting Mexican prisoners to the rear. He knew the battle had been won.

  Later in the morning he was transferred from the hospital tent to a spacious reed house in the village. It was airy and comfortable there and he still had his arm. His roommate was Joseph E. Johnston, one of the topographical engineers, who had been badly shot in a daring reconnaissance on the national road in front of Cerro Gordo six days earlier. Johnston was celebrating, somewhat painfully, his battlefield promotion to lieutenant colonel. Later in the day, Maury’s captain, Stevens Mason, was also brought in, his leg carried away by a cannon ball. In terrible pain, he would soon die of blood poisoning.

  Despite this, the days passed in relative serenity at the reed house until one day Dr. Cuyler approached Maury and said confidentially: “Maury, there’s a young fellow, Derby, across the street, lying wounded among the volunteers, who says he is a classmate of yours and wishes to come over here.”

  Cuyler hesitated. “I would not agree to it without consulting you, for he is a coarse fellow; but I don’t like him to be among the volunteers.”

  Maury smiled knowingly and cheerfully agreed that Squibob must be brought over at once. A cot was laid in the hall next to his own, and that was the last peaceful moment he and Johnston were to know in that reed house. The serenity was soon in tatters. Derby kept up an incessant torrent of coarse wit that utterly disgusted Johnston. The sober-minded lieutenant colonel suffered it in stoic silence for as long as he could. When one day a herd of goats passed by outside and he heard Derby order his servant to capture a kid from the flock and bring it on in, his patience snapped.

  “If you dare to do that,” he hissed through clenched teeth, “I’ll have you court-martialed and cashiered or shot!”43

  With the road now cleared, the army resumed its march on up the national highway toward Jalapa, carrying with it the wounded on litters. As they approached that beautiful city, about forty-five hundred feet above the Gulf, a rapid and magical change came over the landscape. Raphael Semmes, a young naval lieutenant traveling with the army on a mission for the navy, compared it to the effect of a scene change in a theater. The lifeless cactus and chaparral landscape gave way abruptly to a lush Eden. For two miles leading into the city the road was flanked by dense continuous hedges of shrubs and wild vines heavy with flowers and alive with the song of birds. The air was scented with the exquisite aroma of “the most delicious of perfumes.” The city itself, embowered among the hills, seemed to Semmes “a delicate mosaic set in a massive frame of emerald.”44

  When a friend of George Derby’s from home heard that the wounded lieutenant was being carried there, he wrote Mrs. Derby reassuringly that Jalapa was “one of the most delightful, & healthy places in the western world.” There was no better place for George to convalesce.45

  That, then, was also the place for William Gardner, who had finally been ordered out of Vera Cruz. In company with his black slave, Moses, he set out unescorted through the seventy-five guerrilla-infested miles between the fortress city and Jalapa. It was not a healthy thing to do, but healthier than waiting in Vera Cruz for el vomito. The two lone riders, master and the slave he had brought with him from home, arrived miraculously unmolested after two days’ hard riding. Again with the army, Gardner rejoined his company in the Second Infantry Regiment.46

  The army’s stay in Jalapa was to be regrettably short. Scott was now forced by circumstances to suspend the war temporarily. The enlistments of four thousand of his volunteers—nearly half of his small army—had expired; he must send them home and await reinforcements. He decided that the waiting should be done at Puebla, closer to the ultimate target than Jalapa. So the army was soon on the move again.

  Not leaving with it, however, and mortified by that fact, was Tom Jackson. His artillery company was being left behind to garrison Jalapa. For anybody else, duty in that paradise might have been a welcome thing, with its happy climate and stunning señoritas. For Jackson, however, it was a ghastly setback. “I throw myself into the hands of an all wise God,” he wrote disconsolately to his sister Laura, “and hope that it may yet be for the better.” He told her he suspected it may have been the all-wise Providence’s way of “diminishing my excessive ambition; and after having accomplished His purpose, whatever it may be, He then in His infinite wisdom may gratify my desire.”47

  Jackson intended to help the process along. His desire was to be where the fighting was, and since it wasn’t to be at Jalapa, he had to get out of there. Looking for any way to return to the main army, he heard of a vacancy in Captain John B. Magruder’s battery. For the average young artillerist this was an assignment from hell. Magruder was
the devil to get along with. He kept his men in a constant state of turmoil with a trigger temper. But wherever there was a fight Magruder was generally there. Jackson liked that about him and therefore applied at once, bending all of his energies to win the assignment.

  He was soon rewarded. However, it meant that he, like Gardner, must now make his way to the army through the guerrilla-plagued countryside. He was not far out on the road to Puebla with his small escort when he was set upon by an unsuspecting band of Mexican bandits. It was a gratifying development. Here Providence from His infinite bounty was rewarding Jackson with another battle. In a short hand-to-hand fight, he and his detachment routed the attackers, killing four of them and capturing three.48

  Puebla, “that ancient and beautiful city of the angels,” sat on the national road 150 miles from Vera Cruz, 75 miles from the city of Mexico, seven thousand feet above the Gulf. It was a handsome city of churches, domes, and spires that “seemed to sleep in silent but princely grandeur upon the soft velvet bosom” of a valley of uncommon fertility and beauty.49 Washed by a fine flowing stream, it was, with its eighty thousand inhabitants, Mexico’s second largest city. The army of invasion occupied it on May 15 and settled in to await the reinforcements and for the war to resume. For three months they waited, and the government sent down a special envoy, Nicholas P. Trist, to attempt to work out an accommodation that would avoid further fighting altogether.

  The wait was wearing and tedious, and most of the young subalterns from the class of 1846 were broke. George Pickett was more fortunate than some. He had fifty cents in his pocket when one day he met his classmate William Gardner on the street.

  “Gardner,” Pickett said, “would you like a julep?”

  It was a preposterous question. Of course Gardner would like a julep.

  So they adjourned to a popular fonda and found it crowded with other “subs” as thirsty as and poorer than they, and all of them willing to be invited to the bar. Pickett and Gardner looked about for a time, conscience-stricken, not wanting to order drinks for themselves in front of the others, but perishing from thirst and prevented by poverty from treating the crowd. Finally Pickett rapped for attention and addressed the room of hopeful and faintly expectant faces.

  “Fellows, I have asked Gardner to take a drink, and I am simply bound to have one myself. Now, if anyone can squeeze any more liquor out of that coin,” throwing it on the table, “let him step up and imbibe!”

  But juleps were twenty-five cents each, and nobody knew how to squeeze another drink from Pickett’s coin. So the two drank in peace, free of a condemning conscience.50

  By August 7 the reinforcements had arrived, Scott’s army was again ten thousand strong, and the peace negotiations had broken down. That morning the army began to file out of Puebla up the national road through the mountains toward the city of Mexico. The long wait was over. The four divisions left Puebla a day apart, with the little company of sappers, miners, and pontoners in the van. The long column was supported by four field batteries, a brigade of cavalry, and a siege train.

  They marched on toward the city of Mexico, through clear, cold mornings and under the hot midafternoon sun, past cultivated fields of corn on every side. Beyond the fields, in panoramic view, loomed “the sublime mountains, their white shining summits buried for thousands of feet in eternal snow and ice.”51 From that high elevation the soldiers could look, as Jackson had on the road from Jalapa, and see “the clouds below me and the rain descending from them, and above them all clear and calm.”52

  Beyond the pass at Rio Frio on the fourth day of the march, more than ten thousand feet into the clouds, they began to catch their first glimpses of the ancient city of the Aztecs through openings in the trees. As they descended the long western slope, the valley of Mexico, the magnificent basin that was once Montezuma’s seat of empire and was now the capital of the Mexican people, broke full upon their enchanted view. Scott stood with his army, riveted as his soldiers were by the beauty of what he saw. The valley’s majestic lakes, sparkling under a brilliant sun, seemed to him from the distance like pendant diamonds. The beautiful steeples of the city, with Popocatepetl looming ten thousand feet above them in the background and seeming near enough to touch, filled his mind with reverential awe. He was entranced.

  “That splendid city,” Scott thought to himself, “soon shall be ours!”53

  The

  Seventeen-Minute

  Victory

  It was a cold night in the little Mexican village of Cordova, much colder than it had been down in the lower elevations, although it was the middle of August. The three classmates had but one blanket each, so they pooled the three they had and were soon snuggled under them together, warm and comfortable.

  Cordova was a long way from West Point, but these three had been close friends for a long time, and had shared a lot more than blankets. They had been section mates in many of their classes at the academy and had graduated only a few files apart in the bottom twenty. All three were Southerners. William Gardner was a Georgian, David Rumph (“Neighbor”) Jones was a South Carolinian, and Tom Easley was a Virginian.

  “Well, fellows,” said Gardner cheerfully, “here are three of us together, and according to the law of chance, one of us will get knocked over in the impending fight. I wonder which one of us is destined to make a permanent settlement in Mexico?”

  It was evident to everybody that serious fighting was at hand. The Mexicans had yet to challenge the American advance since it had entered the valley, even though it was now approaching the gates of the city of Mexico. But the Mexicans were there in force, outnumbering the small invading army by three to one. There was bound to be bloodshed soon.

  Gardner’s question made Tom Easley uncomfortable.

  “Shut up, Gardner!” he snapped. “You and Jones may enjoy such speculations on future events, but I’ll be dogged if I do!”1

  A few nights later, on August 18, William Gardner’s sleeping arrangements were less desirable and congenial. He was in a church in Xochomilco in the valley of Mexico and his bedmates were fleas, more fleas than he cared to think about. He was more pestered by them than he had ever been in his life, and that was saying something, for he had been in the sand dunes at Vera Cruz just like everybody else. It was a relief the next morning to leave them behind.2

  The expected battle was near, and it had all come down to Contreras, a little town beside a twisted no-man’s-land called the Pedregal. The army had come up on Ayotla on the national road approaching Mexico City and found Santa Anna again, strongly entrenched just as he had been at Cerro Gordo. And just as at Cerro Gordo, a frontal attack simply wouldn’t do. So Scott veered south. The Mexicans swung around to meet him, and when he reached San Agustín he found them still blocking the road. Seeing that Scott did not intend to attack up the causeways leading to the city—not just yet anyhow—Santa Anna began to fortify the bridge and church at another little village called Churubusco, north of Contreras.

  By now Santa Anna knew that Scott had a preference and a talent for flanking movements. But standing in the way of any such a movement now, like a malignant growth, was the Pedregal. If anything, it was less passable than the terrain Scott had somehow negotiated at Cerro Gordo. The Pedregal was as pure an unpassable piece of land that an army was ever likely to see. It was a barren stretch of terrain that looked as if a tumbling sea of molten rock had instantly congealed. It was fissured, pocked with caves, and bristling with jagged outcroppings. Only occasional stunted trees and clumps of bushes clung to life in an otherwise lifeless piece of desert.3

  There was a jagged mule path wending through the Pedregal, but nothing over which an army could hope to pass. Nevertheless, Santa Anna was leery. He had been once burned. He sent one of his generals, Gabriel Valencia, down to San Angel toward Contreras, just in case the Americans did find some way through that twisted region and tried to advance on Churubusco up the road on its other side.

  Something like that was just what Scott h
ad in mind. But how to get around the Pedregal—or through it? It was another job for his West Point engineers. Robert E. Lee, who seemed to have a knack for finding passages through impossible places, was soon deep in the Pedregal looking thoughtfully at the mule path. As was generally the case, he saw opportunity there, and returned to tell Scott that with a great effort a road good enough to let the army through might indeed be scratched out. The engineer company with its picks and shovels was called up.

  Valencia, meanwhile, had not only gone to San Angel, but beyond it, and then beyond San Geronimo along the outer edge of the Pedregal to a point just above Contreras. There he dug in. That was where the Americans found him in the midafternoon on August 19 when they emerged from the Pedregal. Valencia was beyond where Santa Anna really wanted him to be, but he was strongly entrenched in the foothills with six thousand troops and more than twenty pieces of heavy artillery. To get on to the city of Mexico, therefore, required first getting around Valencia. All progress abruptly halted. There was nothing to do but attack.

  That was easier said than done. Tom Jackson learned that truth very early. His artillery battery caught the full wrath of Valencia’s guns, and Lieutenant John Prestone Johnstone, in command of the battery, was mortally wounded, his leg torn away by a shot from an eighteen-pounder. Jackson assumed command of the three guns, but there was little he could do with them. He was thoroughly and completely pinned down. Nevertheless, with his limbers and caissons sheltered in the rocks behind, he worked his guns furiously from a hollow as best he could. It was futile; he was too far away for his guns to do damage, and Mexican metal was flying thick and fast. Its immense superiority in weight would simply overwhelm him if he attempted to venture from his cover.4

  Still, this was where Jackson wanted to be. It was far better than being back in Jalapa boning Spanish, which is what he had been doing before he caught on with Magruder’s battery.5 This was more like it. This was action. It wasn’t that Jackson loved war. Indeed, he deplored it. But if there had to be war and he had to be in it, then he wanted to be in the middle of it. He thirsted for distinction and distinction was to be won only in the thick of the fighting.6