by John Waugh
To
the Halls of
the Montezumas
Scott’s immediate problem was a castle called Chapultepec. In days long gone it had been a summer residence of the Aztec emperors. Now it blocked Scott’s way to the city of Mexico, guarding the causeways that led to the capital. It had to be either seized or skirted, and Scott didn’t yet know which.
If an army had ever encountered a roadblock, this was it. Looking up at Chapultepec’s towering walls the Americans saw only trouble. It hulked there, a forbidding eminence jutting 150 feet upward on a massive outcropping of phosphoritic rock, so situated as to command every entrance to the city. Before Cortez’s time, it had been both the burying place and the palace of the Aztec monarchs, and was called the “mount of the grasshopper.” Now it was the National Military School, the West Point of Mexico, and was alive with difficulties. It bristled with dangerous approaches, protected by outworks both at its base and on its acclivities. It was the strongest fort on the American continent. Its inner walls were four feet thick and twenty feet high, mounting thirty-five pieces of artillery commanding the approaches on all sides. It was regarded as virtually impregnable.1
But it had to be taken. And it had to be taken by an army three hundred miles from its base of supply, without hope of reinforcement, without rations, short of ammunition, surrounded by a hostile population, confronted by strong works on every side, and facing an army many times its size.
Again Scott sent out his West Point reconnoitering teams; he would wait to see what they suggested.
Meanwhile there was the Molino. On the western edge of the compound that held Chapultepec was a low-lying row of strong stone buildings, huddling within a thousand yards of the castle itself. The complex, styled the Molino del Rey, had once housed a flour mill. But the Mexicans had converted it to a foundry, and reports had reached Scott at his headquarters at Tacubaya that steeple and church bells were being hammered into cannon barrels there. While he waited for his engineers to complete their assessments of Chapultepec, he would shut down this nuisance. He sent General William Worth to take the Molino and destroy the foundry and everything in it.
At about 3:00 in the morning on September 8, Worth put his command of three thousand men in motion toward the Molino across rough and rocky ground, through maguey hedges and over the embankments approaching the foundry. Five hundred of his men comprising a storming party would attack down the gentle slope leading immediately to the works. It could be dangerous for his men, a hellhole, for the terrain was “without so much as a twig to shelter them.”2
For John Gray Foster it was another day to do double duty. He was an engineer, one of the three officers of the little company of sappers, miners, and pontoners. His standing in the West Point class of 1846—fourth, just ahead of Edmund Hardcastle and only two files behind George McClellan—had won this son of a New Hampshire widow a place among the army’s elite. But West Point had made these men jacks of all the military trades. The night before, as an engineering officer, he had reconnoitered the ground and therefore knew as much about it as any man in the army. This morning, however, he was an infantry officer for the day, waiting in the vanguard of the storming party and peering through the predawn darkness at a strangely silent foundry.3
It was still dark when the first American gun bellowed, announcing callers and demanding entrance. But there was still no stirring at the Molino. The works appeared abandoned. The storming party approached cautiously, to within point-blank range. Still nothing. Then suddenly a sheet of flame burst from the Molino and a hail of bullets broke from a thousand Mexican muskets. A battery roared, raining down grape and round shot everywhere, the Mexicans themselves pouring out after it. As Foster’s classmate George Gordon was to describe the chaos, “The living, not wounded, were beaten backward into flight; the wounded, not killed, were slaughtered by lance or bayonet thrust where they fell.”4
The first volley shattered the bones in Foster’s leg below the knee, and several of his men dragged him to an obscure angle in the wall and left him there. On the strewn field the exultant Mexicans hacked and butchered until a second wave of Worth’s column rolled in past the shattered storming party and hit them full on, driving them back again into the foundry. Foster lay within the angle of the wall in pain but alive; the Mexicans had not found him.5
Outnumbered three to one and paying a terrible price in dead and wounded, the Americans eventually beat the Mexicans back for good and stormed into the Molino at about 10:00 in the morning. There they found virtually nothing—no steeple or church bells being shaped into cannon. The only thing there had been death. To the ubiquitous and slightly squeamish Hardcastle the battle had been “the most horrid sight I ever witnessed, to see the dead, the dying & the wounded stretched on every side & presenting all the ghastly images the imagination can conceive of.”6 It had been the bloodiest day of the war, and none of it had been necessary.
When it was over the Americans withdrew to Tacubaya and in effect handed the empty Molino back to the Mexicans. An angry General Worth wanted to storm the accursed castle itself, on the spot. But Scott wasn’t ready; his engineers weren’t finished.7
The war ended for Foster at the Molino. After the battle he was found and rescued, but his wound was so severe that further service was out of the question. He hadn’t counted on this. A violated calendar didn’t square with his well-ordered engineering mind. Being shot, he said, had not been “foreseen in my calendar of futurities.”8 The wound, teamed with debilitating attacks of dysentery, everybody’s enemy, compelled him to leave Mexico. He was borne home an emaciated and feeble shell of a son to his widowed mother’s plain little one-storied cottage overlooking the mills and the river at Nashua, New Hampshire. He wouldn’t be going on after all to the halls of the Montezumas with Legs Smith, George McClellan, and Company A.9
Death continued to hover about him for weeks. Only months later could he write McClellan that it appeared he would live after all. His friend and classmate was relieved. “The last news we had heard from you, through Stewart, S.S.,” McClellan answered happily from Mexico City, “were that your physicians had given you up as a gone coon.”10
Four days after the bloodletting at the Molino, Scott was ready for Chapultepec. The engineers had reported, he had met with his generals, and he was convinced the castle must be attacked head on. His artillery therefore began shelling it in preparation on the morning of September 12. The engineer company, now without Foster, constructed the siege batteries the night before, and made reconnaissances on the San Cosme causeway over which General Worth’s division was expected to enter the city when the castle fell.
The night before the cannonading began was an anxious one—“more like the Noche Triste11 that the Spanish invaders under Cortes had passed in the Aztec capital than we had ever before known,” thought George Gordon. It was a relief to him when with the first light of dawn the batteries opened up on the castle.12
The plan was for a column under General John A. Quitman to assault the castle’s southeastern front, as General Gideon Pillow attacked from the western side. Quitman, a politician-general from Mississippi, was to approach up the Tacubaya road to the strong batteries at the base of the rock, over the exterior walls, and up the declivity to the castle. Pillow was to approach through Molino del Rey across an open field, over a line of ditches and entrenchments, through the cypress grove to the base of the rock, then over a redan halfway up the declivity to the castle. Two scaling parties of two hundred picked men each—one of whom was Jimmy Stuart, who volunteered for everything—were to swarm up the castle walls on ladders.
The main attack was to be on the castle’s western wall under Pillow. The Voltigeurs, a crack unit commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Joseph E. Johnston, now fully recovered from his wound and from George Derby’s coarse wit, was to lead the advance through the cypress grove to the base of the rock. As it halted and re-formed there, the storming party was to pass through to the front and scale the
walls. To prevent the Mexicans from being reinforced from the city, and to hold the Mexican cavalry at bay on the left, Scott deployed two regiments of infantry under Colonel William Trousdale.13
On the morning of the thirteenth shortly after eight o’clock, the American cannonade ended and the assault began.
Tom Jackson was with Trousdale on the left, in very public trouble. He was stuck in a ditch with his guns, in full view of the American army and under fire by the Mexicans. Magruder had sent him forward to support one of Trousdale’s infantry divisions, and from the moment he arrived he had problems. A Mexican field piece protected by a breastwork was raking the road from end to end. Heavy cannon fire from the heights was raining down on him. Nearly all of the horses in his battery had been killed or wounded. His men, understandably discouraged, had taken cover. The infantry, except for a small escort which continued to try to hold its ground, had disappeared.
Jackson could not disappear, nor did he want to: Providence willing, he intended to return the enemy fire. However, it meant getting a gun over the deep ditch that cut across the road, and he was having to do it alone. He had lifted one of the guns over, but he needed help to take it any farther. He strode up and down the shot-swept road in front of the army, prodding and exhorting his cowering command.
“There is no danger!” he pleaded as a cannonball caromed between his legs, “See! I am not hit!”
His men stared at him with skepticism. Even General Worth could hardly bear to watch. He sent an order to Jackson to retire and Jackson sent word back out of the smoke that it would be more dangerous now to withdraw than to stand fast. If the general would give him fifty veterans he would attempt to capture the breastwork instead.
The help came in the person of John Magruder himself, who lost his horse on the way but reached the road unhurt. There he found that Jackson had wheeled the gun in position with the help of a sergeant who had been moved by his example, and was already loading and firing at the enemy battery in a muzzle-to-muzzle shootout. Magruder helped hoist a second gun over the ditch, and Jackson’s men, taking heart, rallied. In time, and by Jackson’s sheer will, the Mexican gun was overpowered and the breastwork stormed.14
As Jackson was putting on this show, Colonel Johnston and his Voltigeurs were sweeping through the cypress grove toward the castle, and it was hard going. Every tree hid an enemy. Every gun on the castle wall showered down grape and canister. An incessant storm of musketry erupted from behind every rock and breastwork. Through all this the Voltigeurs and the other regiments supporting the assault converged over ramp and lunette until they were at the ditch at the base of the castle’s inner wall.
Even in an undertaking as well planned as this one, there was bound to be a glitch. When the members of the scaling party arrived as planned, they discovered that the ladders had been left behind. After a brief moment of consternation, they were sent for and brought up and all hands from all commands then at the wall leaped into the ditch and struggled to plant and mount them.
Lieutenant Lewis A. Armistead, first into the ditch, was immediately wounded. A step behind him, bearing the colors of the Eighth Infantry, bounded Lieutenant James Longstreet. And beside him, last in his class at West Point but first at Chapultepec, was George E. Pickett. A musket ball struck Longstreet, and as he fell Pickett caught the falling colors and carried them on over the wall into the castle. General Scott watched appreciatively as “streams of heroes” followed.15
Within the walls the storming party met the fierce will of the Mexican defenders, including cadets of the National Military Academy who had vowed to fight to the death. But the momentum of the assault was overwhelming. A foothold was quickly won, doors were battered down, and cadet vows were fulfilled. As the hand-to-hand fighting raged below, Pickett carried the colors on to the top of the castle.
On the field below, between Molino del Rey and the castle, Pickett’s classmate, George Gordon of the Mounted Rifles, looked up and saw the Mexican flag fall from the heights.
“There goes the flag!” he shouted.
“Huh?” said his commander, Major Edwin Vose Sumner.
“There goes the flag!” Gordon repeated.
“Shot down, I suppose!” Sumner growled.
Then, before their eyes, the stars and stripes slowly rose and snapped free in the breeze over the castle.
“There goes the flag!” shouted Gordon again. Beside him he became aware of a grunting cheer rumbling up from within the battle-beaten major. Officers and men all around broke into a shouting, sword-waving, cap-throwing mob.16
General Scott also watched and saw and listened and heard. One after another, regimental colors were flung from the upper ramparts with long-continued shouts and cheers. Scott thought how this must send a shudder of dismay all the way into the city of Mexico. No scene, be believed, could have been more animating or glorious.17
It was glorious, but it wasn’t over. The morning was only half done and Scott’s intention was to make that splendid city his before the day was finished. The army immediately started up the causeways toward the gates of the city.
As George Gordon galloped with the Rifles down the road along the northern wall of the castle, he passed Tom Jackson. His classmate was staring dejectedly through the smoking debris at the corpses of six of his horses, dead in harness. Gordon had never seen such woebegone sorrow on a human face.
“Well! Old Jack,” he shouted as he galloped by, “it seems to me you are in a bad way.”
Gordon caught his classmate’s laconic reply over the clanging sabers and pounding hoofs.
“ ’Pears I am!” he said.18
Jackson’s depression was anchored in his frustrated desire to be off down the causeway himself, to the San Cosme gate, Scott’s intended main line of assault on the city. But he wasn’t going to get there this way. To replace his dead horses with others would take time, too much time. The war would be over. He knew that most of the horses hauling his ammunition caissons, which had been sequestered in the rear, had escaped unhurt. So he put an idea to Captain Magruder. To save time could he hitch his guns to the limbers of those caissons instead? Magruder quickly agreed and in an instant Jackson made the switch and he and his two guns were careening toward the San Cosme gate.19
He soon came up on two other young West Pointers as eager for military glory as he—D. H. Hill, with whom he had walked on the beach at Point Isabel, and Barnard Bee. When Magruder pulled up with more men, but no other guns, he found these three hotheads clamoring to continue the pursuit. This was a little pushy even for Magruder, whose own hotheadedness was legendary. Worth’s division, which Scott had assigned to storm the San Cosme gate, was still far behind, and the chance of losing the two guns under such exposed circumstances was too much to risk. The three officers lobbied hard and Magruder soon gave in; it was not in his makeup to dodge danger. Jackson, who had already had a morning of mornings, thundered on and was soon throwing metal at a brigade of Mexican cavalry at the gates of the city.20
Not far away was George McClellan, taking a different route to the same place. Legs Smith’s plan was to bore a corridor through the walls of the houses that ran along the left side of the causeway, making a continuous covered approach to the Mexican position. The engineer company, with McClellan in the lead, was attacking wall after wall in house after house with picks and crowbars. By late afternoon the corridor had reached a three-story building within forty yards of the Mexican works. An hour before sunset American soldiers, “as if by magic,” appeared on the roof and began pouring a deadly musket fire into the enemy garrison.21
Two gates to the city lay beyond Chapultepec, the San Cosme gate on the left and the Belen gate on the right, and the route to both was over elevated causeways. Scott’s intention was to concentrate his main attack on the most vulnerable of these gates—the San Cosme—and the assignment had fallen to Worth.
General Quitman was to approach the Belen gate warily and only in a threatening manner. He failed to do either, an
d was soon in an unexpected pitched battle for control of the gate. Lieutenant Beauregard, who was there, found it to be “emphatically a hot place,” from which few who were present escaped without some kind of wound or another, including himself.
The most original hit of the day, perhaps of the war, was taken there by Cadmus Wilcox. The genial third-to-last finisher in the class of 1846 had landed a position on Quitman’s staff and now found himself in the middle of that emphatically hot place. A Mexican musket ball hammered into the side of the Colt’s revolver hanging from his left hip and spun him around. Dazed and bruised, but otherwise unhurt, he picked up the musket ball and looked at it. It was flattened to the thickness of a dollar by the impact. Clearly stamped on one side of this bullet-turned-wafer was the name of the maker of Wilcox’s pistol and the place where it was made.22
By nightfall, the two gates had fallen after hard fighting. The only thing now standing between the American army and the city of Mexico was the citadel, where the Mexicans had taken refuge. Scott pulled up. There had been fighting enough for a day; the final attack must wait until tomorrow.
But the fight had gone out of Santa Anna. At daybreak a flag of surrender came over the American lines, and Scott was told by a delegation from the city that the Mexican army had left in the night. What Scott called “the second conquest of Mexico” was over. The city was his. At 7:00 in the morning the U.S. colors were hoisted over the halls of the Montezumas. Later that morning Scott entered the city under a brilliant sun at the head of the cavalry, the bands blaring. “Hail Columbia,” “Washington’s March,” “Yankee Doodle,” and “Hail to the Chief” proclaimed his coming.23
Lifting his eyes to the balcony of the National Palace, Scott saw the flag of the Mounted Riflemen unfurled to the breeze. A smile of pride broke across his broad face. Removing his hat and bowing low, he shouted, “Brave Rifles! Veterans! You have been baptized in fire and blood and have come out steel.”24