by John Waugh
There had been enough fire, blood, and steel to go around. Now there was only relief. McClellan sighed and said, “Here we are—the deed is done—I am glad no one can say ‘poor Mac’ over me.”25 Hardcastle, reviewing the battles that had brought Scott to the gates of the National Palace—Vera Cruz, Cerro Gordo, Contreras and Churubusco, Molino de! Rey and Chapultepec—was also glad they were over, and that nobody could say poor Hardcastle over him. But he believed many a widow and orphan would remember these battles with deep and everlasting sorrow.26
Hardcastle had been lucky. A ball through his forage cap had been his closest call. But two in the class had not been so fortunate. Alexander Perry Rodgers had joined Tom Easley on the other side. Rodgers had been the scion of military nobility; Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, the naval hero of the battle of Lake Erie, was his uncle. He had graduated thirtieth in the class, and now he was dead, gunned down at the storming of Chapultepec. Easley, now Rodgers, both dead.
For Hardcastle and his other surviving classmates, the lines of a poetic tribute written to the memory of the fallen Rodgers, if they could have read it, would have been more to the point than the victories:
Oh War! What is thy glory now!
Unwreath, unwreath the victor’s brow,
And twine the mournful cypress leaf,
Fitting a widowed mother’s grief:
Grief for her young and gallant son—
Grief for the lost, her martyr’d one—
Amid a band of brothers brave,
He rests within a hero’s grave.
Who nobly fought—who nobly fell—
Let yon red field of carnage tell:
Laid by the fiery death-shot low,
In the fierce fight of Mexico.27
Those classmates who were lead-free, or could walk and ride, entered the city in triumph with Scott. Those who had been wounded were carried in. One who entered neither lead-free nor walking was William Gardner. Against all medical probability he had survived the terrible wound at Churubusco. His accomplished slave, Moses, whom Gardner had brought from home for just such a contingency, had taken up his case and nursed him back to life. After the final surrender of the city, Gardner was carried in on a litter by four soldiers, a very different and deflated mode of entry from the one he had envisioned for himself. His litter-bearers bore him to the National Palace, where his regiment was quartered, and left him there.28
The war was not yet entirely over, for trouble had erupted in the rear. The irrepressible Santa Anna, who had been fighting gringos since the days of the Alamo and San Jacinto—for over a decade now—was bloody, but not bowed. When he fled Mexico City and abandoned it to the Americans, he turned back on Puebla and put the small American garrison there under siege, in hopes of marooning Scott. The fall rains had softened the roads from Mexico City to Puebla and they could no longer support heavy wagons. There was no hope of relief therefore from the main army at Mexico City. Help, if it was to come, must come from Vera Cruz.
A brigade commanded by Brigadier General Joseph Lane was already on the march from the Gulf. But it was still a long way off, and Thomas Childs was edgy. The brevet lieutenant colonel commanding at Puebla was a skilled and seasoned veteran. He was cold of manner, clear in judgment, and inflexible in courage. But he was also under the gun.29 Word had just come to him that Santa Anna’s legions were at that moment advancing on the threatened city. Childs hurried to the ramparts to consult with H. L. Kendrick.
There was not a man in the class of 1846 who didn’t know Kendrick. He had taught them chemistry, mineralogy, and geology at West Point. As Jacob W. Bailey’s assistant, he had shared his mentor’s merciful view of cadet academic shortcomings, and added a dimension of his own. With his easygoing blend of compassion and humor, theater and perspective, he had been the favorite of the corps. He had none of the worldwide academic acclaim of the academy’s great professors. He had only graduated in the upper third of his West Point class in 1835, not first, but the cadets loved him for his quaint manner of speech and his appreciation of the ridiculous. Now he was commanding one of Childs’s batteries at Puebla, as easygoing as ever, but a man to be relied on. Scott described him as the “the highly accomplished Captain Kendrick.”30
He was at his battery on the walls at Puebla when Childs ran up shouting, “The crisis is coming—the crisis is coming! Why don’t you fire?”
Kendrick turned to his lieutenant and said quietly, “Mr. Selden, commence firing.”
Selden was mystified. He looked out beyond the parapets and saw nothing. “What am I to fire at?” he asked.
“Oh, fire at the crisis,” Kendrick said.
Selden shrugged and canted the guns in the general direction of nowhere and commenced firing.31
Riding with Lane in the rescue brigade was another familiar face. Ambrose P. Hill, the Virginian who had fallen ill in his third-class year and been sent to the class behind, had finally graduated. He was a year late getting to Mexico, but now he was there on the road to Puebla, sent to fill the vacancy left in Magruder’s battery when his former classmate, Tom Jackson, moved up to replace the fallen Lieutenant Johnstone.
Hill projected a colorful profile in Mexico from the start. On the national road to Puebla he wore a flaming red flannel shirt and a pair of coarse soldier’s trousers tucked into red-topped boots. An outsized pair of Mexican spurs clinked at his heels and his head was shaded by a broad-brimmed sombrero. Packed together at his slim waist were a long artillery saber, a pair of large horse pistols stuffed into leather holsters, two revolvers crammed into one belt, and a large butcher knife jammed into another. “As villainous a looking rascal as ever threw a lasso,” he said of himself. “You would never have recognized us for civilized Americans … a more brigandish looking a motley was never seen.”32 No Mexican was safe.
Lane’s brigade had set out from Vera Cruz on September 19 to relieve the garrison at Puebla. It was wholly unaware of what it might encounter along the way, other than the heat, which was stifling. Water was selling on the road at five dollars a drink and men were dropping from dehydration and fatigue.33
Hill at any moment expected an ambush. He had never seen a country more favorable for one in his life. The road on each side was edged by an impenetrable chaparral so dense that an enemy could lie in wait wholly concealed. A twenty-power magnifying microscope couldn’t have picked them out. Why they were not attacked baffled Hill; he expected it around every bend in the road.34
In truth, Santa Anna was waiting in ambush at a precipitous mountain pass on the national highway near a town called Huamantla. The Americans, dodging the ambush, pushed into the town where they fought a fierce engagement, defeated the Mexicans, and rolled on toward Puebla. They arrived in sight of the spires of the city on October 12, and that afternoon lifted the siege. Hill, the well-armed West Pointer, was among those commanding the guns that convinced the Mexicans the war was really over.35
It had been a most satisfactory war, meeting all of George McClellan’s and Tom Jackson’s expectations. It hadn’t met all of William Gardner’s or Dabney Maury’s or George Derby’s or John Foster’s, since they had nearly been killed and either carried through it on a litter or sent home. But Gardner spoke for them all when he said: “The idea of 10,000 men marching through a hostile country upon a capital containing upwards of 200,000 inhabitants, defended by 30,000 troops equipped with 100 pieces of cannon, and fortified by both nature and art! The capture of the city of Mexico under such conditions was a feat of arms to astound the world.”36 Maury agreed. The war, he said, was “a fine experience for our troops. It was actively pressed … and was a series of victories without check, until the capital was captured and peace was made.”37
From the beginning of the war to the end some one hundred thousand men, regulars and volunteers, had gone into the American army, but at no time did more than fourteen thousand fight in any one battle, Scott entered the valley of Mexico with only nine thousand men and was not reinforced until after
the city fell. Taylor and Scott in Mexico—and Kearny in New Mexico and California—had worked a military masterpiece. Cortez hadn’t done it any better.
In every battle fought the Mexicans were superior—often overwhelmingly so—in numbers of troops, in numbers of artillery, in weight of metal thrown, and in numbers of small arms. They had a superior cavalry and they fought gallantly. So why had it been so easy, so quickly won against such heavy odds, so successful?
There had simply been an overwhelming superiority on the American side in the numbers and weight of military skill. The Mexicans were outgeneraled and outmaneuvered from the top and outfought from the bottom. But it may have been in the middle that the war was so easily and effortlessly won—by the solid core of West Pointers who formed the backbone of the army’s officer corps.
Scott said as much. “I give it as my fixed opinion,” he said, “that but for our graduated cadets the war between the United States and Mexico might, and probably would, have lasted some four or five years, with, in its first half, more defeats than victories falling to our share; whereas in less than two campaigns we conquered a great country and a peace without the loss of a single battle or skirmish.”38
Scott struck this theme repeatedly. At a dinner in Mexico City in December he said that but for the science of the military academy, “this army, multiplied by four, could not have entered the capital of Mexico.”39
At Contreras, Scott had been so exalted by yet another act of military prestidigitation by his engineers that he had exclaimed: “If West Point had only produced the Corps of Engineers, the Country ought to be proud of that institution.”40
It wasn’t just the engineers. The regular army was for the most part officered by West Pointers at all levels below the rank of general—none of them as yet wore stars. It was the first conflict in which academy graduates had the opportunity to prove themselves. Five hundred twenty-three West Pointers fought in the war; 452 of them won brevet promotions, 49 were killed and 92 wounded. They made the war the most efficient in U.S. history—thirty encounters fought and all of them won in less than a year and a half, forty thousand Mexicans taken prisoner, a thousand cannon captured, ten fortified strongholds and a capital city vanquished.41
The most newly minted of these West Pointers, the class of 1846, had shone. Fifty-three of them, virtually the entire class, went to the war. Thirty-seven, well over half, were breveted for gallantry, several of them more than once. Two of them were killed. Two others died. Eleven were wounded. One was captured. A handful were conspicuous in battle. Jimmy Stuart, who was gaining an army-wide reputation as a hell-for-leather dragoon, volunteered five times to serve on five separate attacking parties in five of the six battles he was engaged in. He was breveted twice—to captain.42
Nor was he atypical. Atypical had been Tom Jackson. It appeared as if the dogged, persevering Jackson, who had toiled so hard on his march through the files at West Point, hadn’t yet stopped trying to rise to the top of the class. It was as though nobody had told him they had graduated. Jackson was breveted three times in Mexico: to first lieutenant at Vera Cruz, to captain at Contreras and Churubusco, and to major at Chapultepec. Nobody in the war was breveted more. Hold a battle and Jackson would win a brevet. Battle, it seemed, gave him no anxieties. His only worry as so many were falling about him was a fear that he wouldn’t adequately perform under the danger, and that his conduct would not be as conspicuous as he desired. The crucible of fire seemed to exalt him. The hotter it got the better he liked it. He became conscious that in the midst of the chaos of battle all of his faculties sharpened and became picture clear, and that he had perfect command of them all. The country boy from Jackson’s Mill appeared to be a born fighter.43
General Pillow twice called him the “brave Lieutenant Jackson.” General Worth called him “gallant” at Chapultepec. His captain, John Magruder, said of him that “if devotion, industry, talent, and gallantry are the highest qualities of a soldier, then he is entitled to the distinction which their possession confers.”44
In Mexico City Scott held a celebratory levee. As Jackson approached in line and his name was called, the general drew himself up to his full formidable height and thrust his hands behind his back.
“I don’t know that I shall shake hands with Mr. Jackson,” he roared sternly.
An embarrassing hush fell on the room.
“If you can forgive yourself for the way in which you slaughtered those poor Mexicans with your guns, I am not sure that I can,” Scott said.
He then held out his giant hand to the blushing and confused young brevet major.
Jackson’s former classmate John Gibbon said: “No greater compliment could have been paid a young officer, and Jackson apparently did not know he had done anything remarkable till his general told him so.”45
If what Jackson had done did not seem remarkable to him, the things he had seen in the war did seem so. “I have since my entry into this land,” he wrote his sister Laura, “seen sights that would melt the heart of the most inhuman of beings: my friends dying around me and my brave soldiers breathing their last on the bloody fields of battle, deprived of every human comfort, and even now I can hardly open my eyes after entering a hospital, the atmosphere of which is generally so vitiated as to make the healthy sick.”46 Jackson had found that while battle exalted him, war did not.
In May 1848, when a treaty of peace was ratified in which Mexico at last handed over the California and New Mexico territories to the Americans, the victorious army returned down the national road to Vera Cruz and home. The little company of sappers, miners, and pontoners returned to West Point on June 22, wearing long beards and marching in triumph on the plain behind George McClellan—brevet Captain McClellan now. The band played a Mexican march, and in the path before the superintendent’s quarters they were halted and hailed as heroes. That night the old north and south barracks were lit in celebration, the lights forming the word “Victory” and shining, as George Derby would have said, “like a plebe’s waist plate.”47
It had indeed been a perfect war. The class would not see another like it again.
Indian
Country
It was deadly, this pas de deux on horseback that Clarendon J. L. (Dominie) Wilson was stepping off with the Navajo Indian chief. Better the stag dances on the plain or the barefoot back-step with Old Jack at Brown’s Hotel. Better a few bars of the Benny Havens drinking song than the dreaded slap of the bowstring and the keening of the arrow he was now hearing. Better a quadrille in 2/4 time than this lurching dance of death.
For twenty jumps of their horses Wilson and his fierce, painted enemy were locked in their high-stepping embrace. Wilson pointed his muzzle-loading single-shot pistol at his tormentor and fired. His horse plunged just as he pulled the trigger, and the powder in the pan of his flintlock scattered to the wind. The arrow shot at the same instant by the Indian grazed Dominie’s chest and carried away the button of his fatigue jacket.1
This is what it had come down to after that perfect war in Mexico. There was nothing of the poetry of that other conflict in this one, none of the romance, none of the brilliant strategy and creative reconnaissances, none of the flawless execution, none of the triumphant stormings and endless string of victories. There was nothing clear-cut about this war Wilson and some of his classmates were now waging. It was just a series of death-dealing pas de deux on the prairies, deserts, and mountains of the West and the everglades of the South, against an unchivalrous enemy who fought by no rules ever taught at West Point. These were the Indian Wars, in which “the front is all around, and the rear nowhere.”2
This is where many members of the class of 1846, more than a score of them, had now gone—to fight in this frontless, rearless war in the West. Not all of them went this time, as nearly all had gone to Mexico. A handful had left the army, or would leave it before the end of the 1850s. George McClellan would leave, to become a railroad president. Tom Jackson would leave to become a professor of na
tural and experimental philosophy and artillery tactics at the Virginia Military Institute. Who of his classmates would have predicted that?
A handful would stay in the army in the East to practice the profession they had been trained for—engineering. A few would go to join the Great Reconnaissance, the exploration of that 960,000 largely trackless square miles of new territory they had all helped win in the Mexican War.
But a score or more of them would climb into the saddle, and to the quick-stepping strains of “The Girl I Left Behind Me” and “The Bold Soldier Boy,”3 ride off with Dominie Wilson to fight the Indians who still believed all that land was theirs.
Before the Mexican War, white settlement in the United States ended at a line that ran from Texas in the south to Minnesota in the north. The territory west of that line was peopled by 160,000 Indians, and little else. Half of those Indians were of the Five Civilized Tribes, benign as their title implied, and confined to what was then known as the Indian Territory and is now the state of Oklahoma. They were generally what many Indians weren’t—settled, peaceful, agricultural, and slaveholding. In the remaining Louisiana Purchase territory lived another seventy-five thousand Indians, mostly nomadic and not so peaceful, warring with whites and with one another.4
Overnight the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ending the Mexican war ceded the United States nearly a million new square miles of territory. And it more than doubled the number of Indians in the equation. Four hundred thousand Indians capable of putting forty thousand highly skilled fighters in the field now stood in the way of any plans the white man might have to pacify, plunder, or settle this new-won land.5
The white man had plans—big plans, big dreams, big profits—in mind. The ink was hardly dry on the treaty when gold was discovered in the sand of the American River near Sacramento, complicating everything. The trickle of settlers trekking west swelled instantly to a torrent. Armies of gold seekers swarmed out onto the transcontinental trails to answer the siren call. They stampeded across what had been the Permanent Indian Frontier, demanding that the Indians who still believed it to be their country by treaty, step aside and let them through. They demanded, where necessary, that the government protect their aspirations by force.