Doniphan had reached Taylor’s camp early in May 1847. Two months earlier Winfield Scott had landed his army on the coast of Mexico, just south of Vera Cruz.
Well fortified and garrisoned by more than four thousand soldiers, Vera Cruz was the gateway to Mexico City, Scott’s ultimate objective. His troops came ashore on March 9, 1847. The landing was the first amphibious operation conducted by the United States military. By selecting beaches to the south of the city, Scott’s army of twelve thousand men met no opposition during the vulnerable transition from sea to land. The success of the endeavor spoke well of the planning Scott and his staff had conducted and of the skill of the American navy.
Purposefully, Scott eschewed a formal assault upon Vera Cruz. Instead, he brought heavy guns ashore and laid siege, opening fire on March 23. His artillery pounded the city continuously for seven days. Blockaded seaward by ships of the United States Navy and on land by soldiers of the U.S. Army, the Mexican troops in Vera Cruz had no hope of success. They soon surrendered, on March 29. Only 19 Americans had been killed. Their opponents lost approximately 180, many of them civilians.
Scott lost no time in departing Vera Cruz, heading west to the Mexican capital. He was anxious to avoid the onset of yellow fever, which on the hot and humid coastal plain was always present and often deadly. A small number of troops were left in the city. Throughout the remainder of the war, Vera Cruz would remain the port of entry for American reinforcements and supplies.
To reach Mexico City, Scott chose to march along the route taken by Cortés in 1519. This would take his army through the town of Cerro Gordo. There, Santa Anna, now president of the republic, as well as commander in chief of the army, had deployed some twelve thousand men in a strong defensive position. To his right were steep cliffs overlooking a river. To his left were high hills. The road to the capital ran through the hills. Conditions favored the Mexicans. Scott had but eighty-five hundred men and would be attacking troops well positioned and well armed.
The American commander organized a multipronged assault, one thrust of which was to strike at Santa Anna’s rear. This strike was made possible by daring reconnaissance conducted by an army engineering officer who somehow found a path around the Mexican left flank. The officer’s name was Robert E. Lee. The attack took place on April 18, 1847, and well before noon, the battle was over. Scott’s forces crushed those of Santa Anna. Sixty-three Americans were killed and 337 wounded. The number of Mexican casualties is uncertain, although it was no doubt large. More than 1,000 Mexican soldiers were captured, among them 5 generals. Santa Anna himself escaped, but the wagon carrying coin for his soldiers did not.
At Cerro Cordo Winfield Scott had won a great victory. But his objective was to occupy Mexico City, so he continued west, reaching the city of Puebla on May 28. With a population of seventy-five thousand, the town was among the most important in Mexico. At Puebla the Americans were two-thirds of the way to the capital. Their army numbered about six thousand, although many of these soldiers were in the hospital, unfit for combat. With volunteer brigades leaving for home, with the requirement to garrison towns along the way, and with the constant presence of men too sick to fight, the size of Scott’s army fluctuated even as reinforcements arrived from Vera Cruz two hundred miles away. Among the reinforcements to reach Puebla were twenty-four hundred regulars commanded by a brigadier general, Franklin Pierce. He and his troops joined up with Scott on August 6.
The next day the Americans broke camp. To hold Puebla, Scott left behind four hundred soldiers. With them were medical personnel attending eighteen hundred men. According to U.S. Army records the troops Winfield Scott took out of the city numbered 10,738. Their goal was to march about a hundred miles through enemy territory, attack a fortified city with a population of two hundred thousand people, and defeat in battle an army three times their size. In Great Britain the duke of Wellington, no stranger to military campaigning, is said to have deemed Scott’s position hopeless.
Accompanying Scott and his army was an American diplomat. With the capture of Vera Cruz Polk and Secretary of State James Buchanan thought the Mexican government might be amenable to discussing an end to the conflict. So they appointed Nicholas P. Trist to find out. Trist was the chief clerk of the Department of State, a lowly sounding title perhaps, but in reality the second-ranking official in the American Foreign Ministry. His résumé was impressive: Trist had studied law under Thomas Jefferson, had served as Andrew Jackson’s private secretary, and had been U.S. consul in Havana.
The capital of the Republic of Mexico was situated just west of three large lakes. To the north was Lake Texcoco, largest of the three. To the south lay Lake Chalco. Between them were extensive marshlands. The third lake was to the northwest of Lake Chalco and called Lake Xochimilco. To the west of this lake was El Pedregal, a stony hard lava field difficult to transit. The simplest way into the city was over causeways that crossed the marshes. However, easy to defend, these would be difficult if not disastrous for any attacking force to utilize.
On the advice of his engineers, among them not just Lee but a George B. McClellan, Scott chose to attack from the south, skirting around Lake Chalco and moving northwest, with Lake Xochimilco on his right. On August 17, his troops occupied the town of San Augustin, just nine miles from Mexico City.
Not unreasonably, Santa Anna had expected Scott to approach from the north. When he learned of the Americans’ movements, he redeployed his forces, moving General Gabriel Valencia’s army to meet the threat from the south. With four thousand troops Valencia moved into a position between two villages, Padierna and Contreras. He expected El Pedregal to complicate the expected American attack. It did, but it did not prevent it. Elements of Scott’s army crossed the lava field and defeated Valencia’s force. Santa Anna was not pleased. He ordered that Valencia, who had disobeyed an order to withdraw, be shot. Yet Santa Anna could have done better himself. At one time during the battle the Americans were vulnerable to a strike by the Mexican commander in chief’s men, who were positioned just north of Valencia’s. But Santa Anna stayed put. He thus missed an opportunity to inflict a decisive blow against Winfield Scott.
The battle was fought on August 20 and was over by noon. It was a stunning victory for the Americans. They killed some seven hundred of the enemy and captured more than eight hundred. Additionally, they took possession of substantial numbers of guns, mules, and other military supplies. As one scholar of the war, Robert Selph Henry, put it, Valencia’s army “had ceased to exist as a military unit.”
But Padierna, or Contreras as it is sometimes called, was only the first of two battles fought that day. The second would be far bloodier.
North of Pedregal was a small river, the Churubusco. The Mexicans had established a strongpoint at one of its bridges and at the Convent of San Mateo nearby. At both locations, Mexican artillery was in place, manned by Irishmen who had deserted from the American army. Known as the San Patricios, these men would fight hard, aware of the consequences should they be captured.
That afternoon the Americans attacked. In three separate actions, Scott’s army frontally assaulted the bridge and the convent. The army also struck at Mexican forces north of the river, crossing another bridge to the west that was undefended. Winfield Scott committed everything he had to this fight. At first the attacks were repulsed. Yet the Americans kept coming, with the bayonet often the weapon of choice. In time, despite fighting hard, the Mexicans gave way. Scott’s army had triumphed again.
But the cost to the Americans was high. The battles of August 20, 1847, had resulted in 1,016 casualties, most of them at Churubusco. The dead numbered 138.
For the Mexicans the day—it was a Friday—was a disaster. Santa Anna’s army had been crushed. Four thousand Mexican soldiers were killed or wounded. Three thousand were taken prisoner. Santa Anna and the remnants of his force withdrew to the outskirts of the capital city itself. There they waited, expecting the American commander to regroup and attack again.
/> Instead, Scott proposed a truce.
He reasoned that it might encourage the Mexican government to discuss how to end the war, a view concurred with by Nicholas Trist. Moreover, further bloodshed would be avoided and the needs of the army better served. Scott’s healthy soldiers needed to rest. His wounded needed attention. Both were in need of supplies, particularly food. So the general offered a cease fire, knowing that, if need be, his army could easily engage the enemy once again.
The Mexicans accepted Scott’s offer. On August 20, the two sides signed an armistice. The agreement called for a cessation of hostilities and an exchange of prisoners. It forbade military reinforcements and permitted the Americans to secure supplies from within Mexico City.
Scott hoped that with the guns silent, Trist would be able to negotiate a peace treaty. But the diplomat was unable to do so. The Mexicans were not yet ready and the American terms were too stiff. Meanwhile, Santa Anna, a genius of sorts but not an individual to be trusted, had begun rebuilding his army (a task for which he showed extraordinary aptitude) and enhancing Mexican defenses, two activities expressively forbidden by the agreement. Whether the Mexican general ordered that supplies to the Americans be limited is unclear, but they were not as easily obtained as Scott had hoped. On September 6, 1847, the American commander notified his counterpart that the truce was no longer in force.
Two days later American artillery opened fire, in support of infantry that was marching into battle. Their targets were two stone buildings situated outside the capital city. These were known as Molina del Rey and Casa Mata. The former was a foundry Scott believed to be manufacturing cannons. The American force was no small detachment. In total it numbered 3,250 men. One of them, Captain Kirby Smith, wrote his wife the night before that “tomorrow will be a day of slaughter.”
It was. The Mexican defenders were well deployed and, as they so often did, fought tenaciously. As the Americans surged forward, General Peña y Barragán organized two counterattacks. These failed, and after hard fighting, Scott’s forces, led by Brigadier General William Worth (who, after the war, would give his name to a fort in Texas near the future city of Dallas), carried the day. Worth’s men suffered terribly: 653 were wounded, 117 were killed, in total nearly one-fourth of the attacking force. Those who survived, and Kirby Smith was not one of them, were ordered to return to their base. General Scott had envisioned the attack as a raid, not as an assault to win and hold ground. Later, both American commanders learned that no capability to construct cannons existed at the Molina.
The next target for American artillery was the fortified, rocky ridge called Chapultepec. Two hundred feet high, it dominated the landscape. At its top were several buildings that once had served as the summer palace of the Spanish viceroys. In 1847 they constituted the Mexican military college where young cadets learned the art and science of warfare. Chapultepec was significant, not as a military objective, but as the very symbol of the Mexican Republic. To capture it would signal an American victory. To lose it to the invaders would mean Mexican defeat and dishonor.
The battle for Chapultepec was to be the climax of the war.
On September 12 the American bombardment began. It lasted fourteen hours. The Mexican commander on the ridge, Nicolás Bravo, a hero of the effort in 1821 to oust Spain, called for reinforcements. Santa Anna, believing Chapultepec to be vulnerable, denied the request. He preferred to save his rebuilt army for a last-ditch defense of the city itself.
Scott carefully planned his attack. He feinted an assault from one direction and struck from two others. His troops stormed up the muddy slopes. Fighting was fierce, often hand-to-hand. More than once quarter was neither sought nor given. One American lieutenant, James Longstreet, fell wounded. The flag he was carrying was picked up by a fellow officer, George Pickett. The Mexicans fought hard. But the Americans kept coming. They were unstoppable. Two hours after it began, the assault was over. Scott’s army controlled Chapultepec, at a cost of 834 casualties.
Mexico had lost the battle, and the war. But it had gained a legend. The cadets of Chapultepec had fought the Americans and died for their country. Their heroism would never be forgotten. Today, as in the past, los niños héroes de Chapultepec are celebrated throughout the Republic.
The Americans also gained something memorable. Among the troops assaulting Chapultepec were forty United States marines. Fighting hard, they had reached the top of the ridge, entering what the hymn of their beloved corps would term “the halls of Montezuma.”
The bloodshed did not stop with the American capture of Chapultepec. Scott’s army pushed on, entering Mexico City. There, as at Monterrey, men fought house by house, street by street. Destructive and bloody it was, but the battle was over by the end of the day. The Americans controlled the capital of Mexico.
Instead of a last-ditch defense of the city, Santa Anna chose to leave. Within the city and at Chapultepec he had lost some eighteen hundred men. Seeing no hope of winning, he and a still substantial number of men evacuated the city. Santa Anna hoped there would be another battle, one that he might win and so turn the tide. No such battle would occur. A few skirmishes perhaps, but no further engagements wherein armies clashed. The Mexican War was over. The United States had won, and decisively so.
Winfield Scott entered Mexico City on September 14, 1847. He had accomplished what he had set out to do. He had taken Vera Cruz, defeated the Mexicans at Cerro Gordo and Contreras, won victories at Churubusco and Chapultepec, and captured the Mexican capital, all in seven months. And he had done so with a relatively small army. Scott had done what a senior commander must do: he had planned, organized, and directed. Others would do the actual fighting. Winfield Scott had performed brilliantly. That few Americans remember him today detracts not at all from his accomplishment.
With Santa Anna gone, the civic leaders of Mexico City met with Scott. Together they arranged the American occupation of the capital. This would last until June of the following year, and was relatively peaceful. Scott himself departed in February.
Once the fighting essentially was over, Nicholas Trist entered center stage. His job was to negotiate a peace treaty. In doing so, he faced several obstacles, two of which were substantial. The first was that the Mexican government was far from organized. Securing legitimacy for discussions with the Americans was difficult, much less agreeing on terms. The second obstacle was more straightforward. Trist was recalled by Polk. The president thought that the emissary’s long stay in Mexico conveyed the message that the United States would do practically anything to nail down a treaty. Polk, through Buchanan, ordered Trist home.
Nicholas Trist then did something extraordinary. He ignored Polk’s directive. Trist reasoned that the best chance for successful negotiations lay with him already there and at work. So he stayed put. In time, the Mexicans came to the table and they and Trist produced a settlement. It is called the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo after the town in which it was signed.
The treaty established the boundary between Mexico and its northern neighbor. Additionally, the agreement called for the latter to pay the former $15 million for the lands ceded to the United States and to assume payment of certain claims filed against Mexico. Not surprisingly, as Trist had negotiated from a position of strength, terms of the treaty were favorable to the United States. As for the Mexicans, they just wanted the Americans to leave.
Angry with Trist, Polk nonetheless submitted the treaty to the U.S. Senate. Approval was not a foregone conclusion. Some senators wanted even more territory, some less. Some wanted slavery prohibited in the lands gained. To this, senators from the South predictably objected. Some simply wanted to embarrass Polk, as he and “his war” no longer were popular.
Debate in the Senate lasted eleven days, during which there were thirteen roll call votes. Finally, on March 10, 1848, the treaty, in modified form, was brought to a vote. It passed thirty-nine to fourteen. The Mexican Chamber of Deputies and Senate agreed to the same text in May.
&nb
sp; On June 19, 1848, amid great fanfare, the Stars and Stripes were hauled down in the center of Mexico City. Replacing the American flag was the green, white, and red banner of the Republic of Mexico. Control of the city, and therefore of the country, reverted to those to whom it belonged.
Why did Mexico not win?
Throughout the conflict Mexico enjoyed several advantages that might have led to victory: On the battlefield the Mexicans usually outnumbered the Americans. They were well armed and not lacking in courage. Indeed, Mexican troops fought hard and with skill. Moreover, they were defending their homeland, a situation that often serves to motivate soldiers. So why did they not defeat the Americans? The answer lies in the skill of their military commanders. The Mexican generals, particularly Antonio López de Santa Anna, were not up to the tasks entrusted to them. They failed the test of leadership.
Why did the Americans win?
The Americans won their war with Mexico because the United States Army performed superbly. At the top were two generals who were expert at their trade. Zachary Taylor both inspired his men and positioned them to win. Winfield Scott organized and led an expedition into the heart of enemy territory and did so brilliantly. In the middle were the lieutenants and captains, many of them graduates of the newly established military academy adjacent to the Hudson River. At West Point these young officers learned skills that served them well at Monterrey and Buena Vista, Cerro Gordo and Chapultepec. Many of these officers—Grant, Longstreet, Lee, and Meade among them—would be heard from again. At the bottom ranks of the U.S. Army were the ordinary soldiers. They were regulars and volunteers, two distinct groups that rarely held the other in high regard. But in battle, each fought tenaciously, matching the courage of their Mexican counterparts.
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