The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  It was also where George McClellan was. His thirst for honor and distinction ran as deep as Jackson’s. But this was one of those days. The engineering company had been busy since dawn, hewing out the passage across the Pedregal under Lee’s supervision. When Lee sent for Magruder’s guns to support the attack on Valencia, it had been McClellan’s job to place Old Jack’s battery in position. When the job was done and the troops began to move on Valencia’s entrenchments, the engineers dropped their tools, tethered their pack mules, and joined the fighting.7 Two horses had already been shot from under McClellan that afternoon, and he had been knocked down once by canister, which had struck the hilt of his sword.8

  Despite all this effort and peril, the assault was going nowhere, and word had come down that the Mexicans were bringing up reinforcements in strength. By nightfall the Americans were stalled before Valencia, who was so surprised and pleased not to have been driven off that he mistook it for a victory. As the guns fell silent he ordered up music and champagne and began awarding brevet promotions all around.9

  The Americans shrugged and said maybe tomorrow would be better. As Valencia celebrated, a brigade under Colonel Bennett Riley filed quietly into San Geronimo, on the road behind Valencia’s entrenched position, between him and San Angel. In the night Riley was joined by a second column under Persifor F. Smith. Valencia didn’t know it, but his rear was in jeopardy.

  Smith wanted to attack immediately. But night had closed in now with total and impenetrable darkness, and it had started to rain. The assault was therefore put off until three o’clock the next morning, and in the rain and blackness the Americans began laying the groundwork. Although Valencia was aware of none of this, Santa Anna was uneasy. He sent word for his lieutenant to pull out of his exposed position. But Valencia, who detested Santa Anna, scorned the order. Hadn’t he just won a magnificent victory against the hated gringos? Santa Anna shrugged and pulled back into his own entrenchments at Churubusco, leaving Valencia to drink his champagne, make his toasts, and award his brevets.10

  The Americans listened as the celebrating Mexicans reveled and sang the night away, their musicians striking up drunkenly, playing halfway through “Hail Columbia,” then stopping and starting again.11

  The rain began to fall about seven or eight o’clock that night, a torrential, drenching downpour. But William Gardner hadn’t been this comfortable in days. His little company was assigned picket duty, and he and his captain had found a deserted house, which they had converted into headquarters for the guard. It apparently belonged to a priest and its charm included a well-stocked pantry. The two officers had just dined on stewed chicken, honey, chocolate, brandy and water, and hard bread. The departed padre had thoughtfully left a soft mattress with pillows and blankets, which the two officers could alternate sleeping on. There was nothing to complain about in point of lodgings—no three classmates huddled together for warmth, no fleas. This was soldiering in style.

  Gardner might have known it was too good to last. He had scarcely begun his turn on the mattress when one of the engineering officers and General Twiggs’s adjutant general arrived in search of an escort to protect a reconnaissance. Gardner turned out of his warm, dry quarters with a small command and plunged into “the most unpleasant night I almost ever saw.” As he and his men plodded along through the rain, he learned of the plans to storm Valencia’s position in the morning before daylight. Riley’s infantry brigade, in which Gardner was an officer, was to lead the assault.

  Gardner welcomed the news. He knew the storming party was in for a bloody morning, but he still felt relieved. The idea of being cannonaded all the next day without being able to return a shot was “rather too much for my equanimity.” If he was to be killed he wanted it to be at close quarters, and not have his head knocked off by an unseen enemy half a mile away.

  At about 3:00 in the morning—it was now the twentieth—the three regiments of Riley’s command started for their position on Valencia’s left flank, and Gardner was with them. A dense early morning fog had drifted in overnight,12 and it was close to daylight when they reached a position about five hundred yards behind the Mexican camp. The Mexicans were still unaware of their presence. Indeed, many of them, newly promoted, were also hung over. As day broke, the storming party—some nine hundred men, artillery and infantry—formed into two columns.

  It all seemed a little incongruous to Gardner. Those nine hundred troops, he mused, were about to attack this entrenched army with its twenty-seven pieces of ordnance and at least six thousand infantry, to say nothing of the unnumbered lancers with their pointed spikes. It seemed certain to him that two-thirds of the attacking force would be mowed down before they could get close enough to use their bayonets.

  As the Americans crossed a deep barranca filled with two feet of water, the Mexicans finally saw them. It had an immediately sobering effect. Things began to happen. Gardner noted “a devil of a hubbub in their camp” and a frantic rush to arms and horses.

  Near the top of the hill behind the Mexican position the attacking party halted for a moment to close up. At the top they halted again to catch their breath. Then it came, the first volley of fire from enemy infantry hastily thrown out to meet them. The storming column didn’t return the fire, but stood up in the face of it—“as if they were throwing apples instead of lead at us,” Gardner marveled—and marched forward for some twenty or thirty yards. There they halted again to deploy. During all this time not an American soldier had fired a shot. Gardner wondered at the coolness of the men, for they were dropping all about him and none of them lifting a musket.13

  Two field pieces that the Mexicans had hurriedly run out on the left front suddenly opened fire. A hail of grape flew uncomfortably close over Gardner’s head. He could see that if the Mexican gunners got the range there would be trouble. The guns had to be silenced.

  He interrupted his captain, who was occupied deploying his troops, to suggest that he charge the guns immediately. But the captain didn’t have time, so Gardner offered to take part of the company and lead the charge himself. As he and his little force rushed forward, the guns bellowed again, and again the grape flew just over their heads. They broke into a sprint; they might not be so lucky if the guns got off a third shot.

  Gardner found himself immediately in a fierce hand-to-hand struggle with the gunners and a small squad of Mexican infantry, and was instantly in trouble. A Mexican soldier parried a blow with his musket and swept the sword from Gardner’s hand. As his attacker lunged forward with his bayonet, a musket roared at Gardner’s ear and the Mexican dropped, shot by one of Gardner’s men—not an instant too soon.

  Now Gardner saw that the Mexican gunners were attempting to reload to fire again. But abruptly, instead of firing, they fled. Gardner leaped to the guns and swung them around intending to hurl grape at their retreating backs, when the truth dawned on him. What the soldiers had been doing was driving spikes into the vents of the guns; the cannon were useless.

  Gardner stopped to rest. He badly needed a breather. He saw now that the American line had been deployed and the assault was under way.

  “Hurrah for the class of 1846!” a voice shouted, and a hand slapped him on the back.

  George McClellan was grinning at him through the chaos. The engineers again were omnipresent. Another officer was with McClellan—a small swarthy lieutenant whom Gardner had never seen before.

  “Mac, who’s your friend?” the stranger asked.

  There on the field amid the chaos McClellan did the honors: Beauregard, this is Gardner, a classmate from West Point. Gardner, this is Beauregard of the engineers.14

  The Mexicans had had enough. They and their general, whose new-won glory had faded so suddenly with the dawn, were fleeing up the road toward San Angel. As they ran, Persifor Smith, who had wanted to do all this the night before, drew out his watch, consulted it, and said: “It has taken just seventeen minutes.”15 Valencia’s army had been as utterly destroyed in those seventeen short minute
s, Lieutenant Richard Ewell thought, “as though each man had been summoned to the other world.”16

  The happiest men on the field were from the Fourth Artillery. They recognized among the abandoned Mexican artillery two guns that belonged to them, but had been captured by the Mexicans at Buena Vista. Hardcastle found it affecting, “to see the officers & men of this reg’t … embracing these engines of destruction, as they would an old friend.”17

  Hardcastle had little time to savor this touching scene, for Scott was pushing the pursuit. Elements of the army were at that moment on the road to Churubusco, hard on the heels of the retreating Mexicans.

  But there was trouble ahead. A force under General Twiggs found it first, at the convent at Churubusco. From that house of the Lord, nothing godlike was coming, only sheets of deadly fire. This was indeed a strange convent in every way. Santa Anna had converted it to a very worldly purpose, surrounding it with a fieldwork, pocking it with embrasures and platforms for cannon, and crenelating it to accommodate musketry. Only 350 yards away he had created a tête-du-pont, a fortified bridge solidly and scientifically constructed with wet ditches, embrasures, and platforms for large armament. The river running past this fortification was straight, deep, and wide, and lined with Mexican troops for several hundred yards.

  It was this bridge and convent, abristle with firepower, that Twiggs ran into as he hurried up the road to cut off the Mexican retreat. For the first time in the campaign, Scott decided on a frontal assault. He was eager to keep up the momentum from the seventeen-minute victory at Contreras. But very soon his army had its hands full, for Santa Anna was making a fierce stand.

  Hardcastle by now had come up from Contreras, and he and Captain Henry Wayne were riding through a cornfield on the right of the Mexican position. Their job was to reconnoiter the ground over which one of the brigades was proposing to attack. Lifting his glass to his eyes for a better look, Hardcastle saw a foreign object coming directly for them at high speed through the cornfield. He spurred his horse quickly to the right as the cannonball whistled past, not more than three feet from his head. Close-flying shot was getting to be an occupational hazard with Hardcastle.

  He and Wayne looked at one another, and Wayne shrugged and said, “A miss is as good as a mile.”

  By now grape, canister, and musketry were showering in on the Americans from the convent and the tête-du-pont. Churubusco was shrouded in smoke. The din was ear-shattering, “one continual deafening thunder.”18

  William Gardner’s regiment was there, and he was with it. They had come up from Contreras, and Gardner now stood before Churubusco in a tall field of corn in full tassel and roasting ears.

  Leading about thirty men of his company, he emerged cautiously from the corn into an open space. There were no other American troops in sight. But he soon saw that there were Mexicans. Just ahead beyond a ditch bordered by a thick row of native maguey plants was a long line of Mexican infantry within musket range. Conceding that he could do nothing against such odds, Gardner ordered his men to make for the ditch. As they ran, the Mexican soldiers opened up on them, felling a few of Gardner’s men and riddling the tough maguey leaves with bullets. In the ditch Gardner caught his breath and braced himself for the attack he knew was surely to follow.

  When it didn’t come, Gardner began to consider what he must do next. He knew that if nothing else, they must get out of that ditch. Ordering his men to stoop low and keep the maguey plants between them and the Mexicans, they bolted toward another clump of trees some distance to the right, reaching them without a loss.

  They had not been there long when Captain Louis Craig of the Third Infantry came up from another direction with his company, exultation shining in his eyes.

  Gardner jumped up in alarm. “Where are you going, Craig?” he asked.

  “I am going to advance through that clump of woodland to the front,” Craig replied.

  “How strong are you?” Gardner asked.

  “One company,” said Craig.

  Now just hold on, Gardner told him, pointing to where he had just been, and telling him of the strong line of Mexican infantry waiting beyond the wood. Even if they joined forces, Gardner argued, they would be altogether too weak to effect anything. He suggested instead that they wait for Craig’s regiment, or Gardner’s, or both. But Craig was either too intoxicated with the success of the morning, had lost his head, or didn’t believe Gardner. At any rate, he refused to listen and ordered his company forward.

  As little as Gardner’s judgment sanctioned the movement, he couldn’t permit Craig to march alone to be massacred, so he immediately ordered his own men to fall in with the crazed captain’s. The two officers led their men forward, rushing through the woods and emerging in the presence of the Mexican troops—very much to Craig’s surprise, but not at all to Gardner’s.

  Then Craig said something even more surprising than anything he had said so far:

  “Don’t fire! The Mexicans are about to surrender.”

  The next thing Gardner felt, after astonishment, was the bullet. As it struck, he staggered backward and toppled into the corn. His first sergeant rushed to his side, picked him up, and began to carry him off. The pain of being lifted was so intense that Gardner ordered the sergeant to leave him and rejoin the command.

  As Gardner lay bleeding in the corn, the fighting raged on. The stalks above his head were soon shredded by musket fire, as the maguey leaves had been. The Mexicans overwhelmed the small detachment, as Gardner knew they would, and began murdering all of the Americans lying wounded on the field. However, they failed to see him lying in the corn.19

  The fighting around the convent and the tête-du-pont continued to roar on. Escopet balls whistled over the heads of the army and cannonballs continued to sing through the corn.20 When the breakthrough came, it was at the tête-du-pont. In a final rush it was stormed and seized, and its defenders broke and fled. Artillery was then brought to bear on the convent, which surrendered before it also had to be taken by storm.

  It had been triumphant, but terrible, thought Hardcastle. He had been everywhere on the field. The engineer officers had been used as extensions of the major commanders throughout the battle—Scott and the other generals frequently dispatching them to points in the field beyond their personal control. There the engineers found themselves handling emergencies in the name of the commanding general himself. Such was the regard in which the West Point engineers were now held that the second-level commanders cheerfully obeyed their orders, no questions asked, no matter how junior they were.21

  How Hardcastle escaped without taking a bullet was a mystery to him. “Men were shot down on all sides of me,” he wrote his uncle, “& the messengers of death flew about me in all directions.” He had a great horror of being wounded, but he thought that he would willingly have taken a musket ball just to get out of the scrape honorably. But here he was out of it, and unscratched as well. But his heart was sickened by what he had seen.22

  Perhaps one of the things that had sickened him was that brief moment when soldiers of the Second Infantry Regiment emerged from the cornfield and his classmate, Tom Easley, and a dozen soldiers under his command were gunned down by a volley of musketry. It had been Easley, under the warm covers at Cordova a few nights before, who hadn’t wanted to hear William Gardner’s morbid speculations on future events. Now Easley was dead—the one among the three after all who was destined to make a permanent settlement in Mexico.23

  The loss of this member of the class of 1846 caused sadness as high up in the army as the general in chief himself. Scott in his official report spoke of Easley as that officer “of great merit,” who fell “gallantly” before the convent. Scott also officially noted that Lieutenants McClellan, Foster, Reno, and Hardcastle, the two engineers, ordnance officer, and topographer from the class, had “shared in the glory of this action.” But they, unlike Easley, still lived to tell about it.24

  After the firing stopped, Gardner continued to lie in the corn
field, until in the eerie quiet his sergeant and three men from his company came looking for him. They placed him gently on a blanket and using it as a stretcher, carried him to a small nearby house and laid him on the floor. Already there, not surprisingly, was a severely wounded Captain Craig. Gardner’s wound was severe in the extreme. The musket ball had penetrated his body near the medial line at the edge of the chest bone, followed an upward and oblique course, passed near the heart, and stopped “the Lord only knows where.” The surgeon considered his case so hopeless he decided not to probe for the ball. There was little likelihood that Gardner would survive the night.25

  It was 5:00 in the afternoon when the battle ended, and the Americans were now within five miles of the city of Mexico, its spires and steeples in full view. The prize was within their grasp. But the army was also exhausted. It had fought and won two major battles that day. It needed rest. So Scott called a halt. During the night a flag of truce came out of the city, and two more the next day, and Scott entered into an armistice to permit the Mexican government to negotiate a peace.

  Hardcastle hoped with all his heart that the negotiations would succeed. “I have seen fighting enough,” he said. “I have seen blood enough spilt.”26

  It became apparent after two weeks of negotiations by President Polk’s peacemaker, Nicholas Trist, that Santa Anna didn’t really share Hardcastle’s longing for peace. The embattled president used the cease-fire as a breather to beef up his defenses. If Santa Anna was outgeneraled by Winfield Scott in battle, which was clearly the case, it was the other way around in an armistice. After Trist tried fruitlessly for two weeks to make peace, Scott prepared in early September to get back to doing what he did best—make war.