The president exploded with anger. Now convinced that Scott’s “foolish, & vindictive” letter proved his hostility toward the administration, Polk responded in kind by rescinding Scott’s appointment to field command. News of Taylor’s victories earlier in the month at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma made Polk’s decision possible. Previously, the president thought that Taylor lacked the capacity to prosecute the war effectively, but now he revised his opinion, decided to keep Taylor in command, and relegated Scott to a desk job in Washington. Although Scott remained Taylor’s superior, he would serve essentially as a chief of staff, shuffling papers in the nation’s capital. Scott was shocked by the decision, but Polk had demonstrated that he could be as obstinate as the general—and vindictive as well. Scott had gambled on his lofty position making him invulnerable, and he had lost.
President James K. Polk. Courtesy Tennessee State Library and Archives.
Scott was out of his office on the evening that Marcy’s message arrived informing him of the president’s decision, and he quickly responded with another damaging letter. This one was not insubordinate, but awkward and silly. In an apologetic tone, he explained that he had just stepped out for “a hasty plate of soup” when the secretary’s letter arrived—his way of assuring the administration that his hours were long and incessant. He explained that he intended no ill will toward the president in his May 21 letter, and that, while he preferred field command, he would dutifully accept whatever assignment the president gave him. His attempt to smooth things over failed, and as Polk wrote in his diary, Scott “now sees his error no doubt, but it is too late.” All of the talk surrounding this incident prompted Congress to ask the administration to make public its correspondence with Scott, and the “hasty plate of soup” passage caused him considerable grief. It was the subject of many jokes around Washington and in the press. When Marcy hastily wrote a brief missive to a friend, he followed it the next day jokingly explaining, “I wrote you a ‘hasty plate of soup’ letter yesterday.” “I have been exceedingly ridiculed” over it, Scott complained to a friend, and in his Memoirs two decades later, he remembered that his political opponents “maliciously” used the phrase against him with “much glee.” Such humiliation had so defanged Scott that Marcy could boast in late June, “Scott is harmless.”6
For the time being, Taylor remained in the spotlight as the principal field commander in Mexico. Secretary of State James Buchanan spent the summer in a fruitless effort to end the war through diplomacy, and Scott went about his duties in his assigned purgatory in Washington, diligently attending to the army’s logistical needs. By October, three things had happened to rehabilitate his opportunity for field command. First, Taylor had won three battles and had occupied several towns in northern Mexico, and as a consequence of his growing hero status, he was being mentioned as a potential presidential candidate in 1848. The fact that this general, once thought to be apolitical, turned out to be a Whig caused the president to view him as a threat. Second, after his most recent victory at Monterey, Taylor had agreed to a two-month armistice and had granted to the defeated Mexican army generous terms that the administration believed to be too lenient and time consuming. These developments produced distrust and dismay in Washington. A third consideration completed the process of bringing Scott back into the president’s orbit, if only reluctantly. The realization that battlefield victories and occupied territory in northern Mexico had done little to bring the opposing government to the peace table now made it obvious that the administration needed a new strategy.
That new strategy began to emerge in late summer but took clear shape in the last half of October. Although the administration had banished Scott from field command, it had not entirely ostracized him. In fact, Polk and Marcy had depended on him heavily in conducting the war and formulating plans. With Scott as the chief military advisor, if not the catalyst, the administration began to look for a way to strike at the heart of Mexico. Several ideas had surfaced over the weeks as they considered options, and gradually the blueprint for the Mexico City Campaign emerged. The general parameters of the plan called for the capture of the port city of Veracruz, which had a population of 15,000, and, using the good roads that emanated from there to the interior of the country, march on Mexico City 260 miles away.7
Scott gave the campaign plan definitive form on October 27, 1846, when, at the request of the president, he submitted to the War Department a five-page paper called “Vera Cruz & Its Castle.” In it, he called for an invasion force of 10,000 men with appropriate cavalry and artillery. Aware of San Juan de Ulúa’s strength, he insisted that the castle posed a significant threat and was the key to capturing the city. He went on to suggest a possible attack from the land side and a willingness to use siege tactics. However, despite the importance of capturing the city and the castle, both would be of limited value by themselves. “To conquer a peace, I am now persuaded that we must take the city of Mexico, or place it in imminent danger of capture.” The plan called for an American army to march through three Mexican states, Veracruz, Puebla, and Mexico, with a combined population of over 2.3 million, or roughly a third of the country’s total. Success, Scott argued, depended on augmenting the army to 20,000 and getting it away from the coast before the arrival of the deadly yellow fever season in the spring. He understood that the army could be ravaged and debilitated without firing a shot.8
The plan impressed Polk with its grasp of both military requirements and political considerations. Now that Taylor had fallen out of grace, the president needed a general, preferably a Democrat, who could execute the new strategy and bring the war to a successful conclusion. After considering a list of available candidates and finding none of them up to the task, the president and his cabinet began to gravitate back to the architect of the plan. Scott appeared to be not just the most logical choice but, in fact, the only viable one. Daily consultations with Scott during the three weeks after the submission of his “Vera Cruz & Its Castle” paper helped convince Polk of the obvious. On November 19, he called Scott to his office and offered him command of the new army that would be raised to invade central Mexico. He admonished Scott, however, to show support for the administration. The government and the army commander must share a common confidence in each other, Polk chided. Scott agreed and pledged his cooperation. Now willing to demonstrate a sensitivity to the president’s political predicament, Scott consented to balance his officer corps with some prominent Democrats chosen by the president. Scott had worked tirelessly over the summer and fall to win the president’s confidence. He believed that his appointment was evidence that he had succeeded, and with a grateful spirit, he acted in good faith.
Polk, however did not. Just the day before, he had told Democratic Senator Thomas Hart Benton that if he could get Congress to approve the creation of the rank of lieutenant general, he would appoint Benton to supersede Scott. The following month, Polk confided in his diary that appointing Scott was actually “a choice of evils”—or more precisely, a choice of Whig evils. Benton was a former militia officer and veteran of the War of 1812, but his primary qualification was political status. Polk apologized to fellow Democrats for the political makeup of the army’s officer corps, and he lobbied key senators for weeks, but in the end, he lacked adequate support to make his scheme a reality.9
The campaign strategy that Scott had articulated resulted from an eighteenth-century mind-set. He possessed extensive knowledge of warfare from a time and place when wars were limited in nature and fought for limited objectives. The Polk administration’s chief goal, the acquisition of land, was a limited objective, and Scott’s approach to achieving it was limited as well. He nowhere mentioned or planned the destruction of the Mexican army, nor did he devise a strategy to overthrow the Mexican government. His plan was to apply steadily graduated levels of pressure until the enemy agreed to stipulated terms. Thus, he used terminology like “conquering a peace,” not “conquering the enemy.” And although his plan called for an in
vasion and a march on Mexico City, he left open the possibility of ending the war by merely placing the capital in “imminent danger of capture.” Understanding Scott’s war of moderation at the outset helps bring into clearer focus his motivation during the campaign to stop military operations after every battle. Winning on the battlefield and moving his army a step closer to Mexico City represented leverage, and Scott intended to apply just enough leverage to conquer a peace. Any more than that was militarily unnecessary and unnecessarily bloody. Evidence of Scott’s moderate approach would become apparent as the campaign unfolded.
This aspect of the Mexico City Campaign was backward looking, but there was another facet that was forward looking. Scott was ahead of his time in contemplating how to deal with a potentially hostile citizenry as his army marched through Mexico. He understood the need to enforce strict discipline among soldiers in a foreign land for two reasons: to maintain the honor of the army and to pacify the inhabitants. Reports that came out of northern Mexico indicated that men in Taylor’s army had engaged in all manner of atrocities, including rape and murder, and ample evidence indicated that volunteers were more frequent offenders than regulars. Such conduct could only create hostility among the Mexicans, who might then retaliate by rising up in a guerrilla war. The problem for Scott was that Congress had not anticipated an American army operating outside the borders of the United States. Therefore, it had never included in Articles of War provisions for punishing soldiers for crimes that were already punishable under civil law. But civil courts could not try Americans soldiers for offenses committed outside the United States. Scott had been contemplating this dilemma since summer, and his solution was to use martial law. Wherever his army went in Mexico, martial law would be in effect, outlawing assault, murder, rape, robbery, disruption of religious services, and destruction of property. Soldiers who violated these strictures would be tried in a military court and dealt with severely. Martial law was the centerpiece of a sophisticated pacification program, and it indicated his commitment to a strategy of moderation. The administration responded to Scott’s unprecedented martial law proposal with a mixture of apprehension, skepticism, and, in the case of the attorney general, alarm, none of which deterred the general.10
Martial law was but one part of a dual approach to maintain order and pacify the Mexican countryside. The second, and complementary part, of Scott’s plan was to purchase food and supplies from the Mexican people rather than resort to forced requisitions, which was common practice among invading armies. Taking what the army needed by force or allowing individual soldiers to freely forage on the general populace would constitute a dangerous practice that certainly, as Scott knew, would alienate the Mexican people. It would also foster the kind of reprisals that had already occurred in northern Mexico, where Taylor’s men had not been held to the same standards that Scott envisioned for his army. The administration had encouraged Taylor to purchase his supplies in the early months of the war, but now the cost of the conflict presented a growing political problem in Washington. Scott, however, would not succumb to cost-cutting pressure from the administration. The erudite Scott conceived his two-part pacification strategy as a result of his study of the Napoleonic Wars. He was well aware of Napoleon’s mistakes when France invaded Spain in 1808 and Russia in 1812, and he was determined not to repeat them.11
Scott needed an army to begin his campaign. He got it from two sources: newly authorized volunteer units and the transfer of a sizable portion of Taylor’s army. The former caused delays and the latter caused animosity. Scott requisitioned from Taylor’s command 4,000 regulars and 3,250 volunteers, ordering them to rendezvous at two locations on the coast, Brazos near the mouth of the Rio Grande and Tampico farther south. From those points, they would be transported to Lobos Island sixty-five miles below Tampico, where they would meet the new regiments and from which the entire army would make its descent on Veracruz. But losing the bulk of his command meant that Taylor would have to assume a defensive posture while the focus of the war (and of the public’s attention) shifted to another theater of operations. He was not happy, nor were many of his men, to learn of the transfer of some of his best units. A junior officer in Taylor’s army, Dabney Maury from Virginia, was in Monterey when he heard that Scott intended to take many of Taylor’s men away. “This caused much talk among us,” he noted, “for Taylor had won the unbounded confidence and love of all of us, while Scott was sneered at as ‘Old Fuss and Feathers.’” All of this naturally meant that Taylor was being relegated to a secondary role, which convinced him that Polk and Scott were conspiring against him.12
Despite Scott’s efforts to soothe Taylor’s ruffled ego, the latter avoided a meeting with the commanding general when he arrived on the Rio Grande in December. Without assistance from Taylor, Scott issued marching orders to the various units in Taylor’s army, then waited for several weeks at Brazos for troops to arrive. During his extended stay along the Rio Grande, tension resurfaced with the administration as a result of two events. One had to do with a newspaper article wherein Polk’s friend, Senator Benton, claimed to be the originator of the idea to seize Veracruz and march on Mexico City. After reading it, Scott wrote an angry letter to Marcy reminding the secretary that the plan “was derived from me!!” Then, perhaps because he was outside Washington and somehow felt beyond the president’s grasp, he boldly lectured Marcy that “this is, from a high quarter, opening a fire upon my rear.” Benton’s actions, Scott continued, constitute “a crossfire, upon rear & front, with a vengence.” This letter came only days after a conciliatory one to Marcy in which he had expressed his gratitude for the confidence the administration had shown in him. “It shall be justified in my public & private acts,” he assured Marcy. “I laid down whiggism,” he explained, and “I have felt very like a Polk-man.” Whatever honeymoon might have existed between the general and the president, however, would soon end.13
The other source of friction concerned the commander of the Second Dragoons, Colonel William S. Harney. Scott had ordered him to send seven troops of cavalry to the coast and remain with his other three troops under Taylor’s command. The high-spirited and brave Harney could also be vulgar and insubordinate. His cruelty was well known within the army, the result of his inhumane treatment of Indians during the Seminole War in Florida and from an incident in 1844 in which he beat an enlisted man almost to death for refusing to dig a latrine. For the latter, he was court-martialed and suspended from the army for four months. The previous summer, he had run afoul of one of his superiors for insubordination. Harney was anxious to distinguish himself in Mexico, so now he defied Scott’s orders and proceeded to the coast with his troops. For this latest infraction, his division commander filed charges against him, and the court ordered him reprimanded. However, at this point, Scott magnanimously stepped in and changed his order to allow Harney to join him on the coast. The commanding general noted that Harney was “influenced by a laudable desire to lead his regiment into battle.” Because Harney was a Democrat, Polk, after hearing about the pending court-martial but before knowing the outcome of the case, ordered Marcy to send Scott a chastising letter demanding Harney’s reinstatement to command. Polk charged that Scott had acted “arbitrarily” and in a way that revealed his political bias. It was Polk, however, who had acted with prejudice.14
Scott left some of his men at Brazos to await transports and proceeded on to Tampico, where he found a sizable number of volunteers and regulars preparing to sail for Lobos Island. Shops and grog houses of every description provided ample opportunities for party and vice. During his brief stay in Tampico, Lieutenant George McClellan reportedly enjoyed champagne dinners, parties, and fandangos attended by numerous officers like George G. Meade and John Magruder, both future Civil War generals but on opposite sides. At one such event, Meade informed his wife in a letter that he enjoyed dancing with English- and French-speaking ladies, but those who spoke Spanish held no attraction for him. He assured her that “to the Mexican gir
ls, . . . I had but little to say. There was no beauty, and the prettiest girls would not have been noticed in one of our ball rooms.” When Scott arrived, he found the guardhouse full of soldiers who had been arrested for intoxication, fighting, insubordination, and a host of other offenses. So, to maintain discipline, he issued General Order Number 20, which declared martial law.15
Scott had hoped to land his army at Veracruz by this time, but delays caused by a lack of supplies, horses, artillery, and shipping caused a daily revision of the invasion date. Now in mid-February he needed to bring his army together at Lobos as quickly as possible. Already volunteer regiments were arriving there. Consequently, after only a few days at Tampico, he prepared the troops for departure. On February 19, he drafted orders in typical Scott fashion—fastidious and with attention to every detail. On boarding the ships, equal numbers of troops were to be assigned to each side of the vessel, and no one was permitted “to loiter or sleep on the opposite side.” His instructions included a demand for “frequent fumigations . . . between decks,” using either brimstone with sawdust or nitre with vitriolic acid. In the event that one of the severe storms called northers arose, Scott also gave instructions, and in so doing gave meaning to his moniker “Old Fuss and Feathers.” “In bad or heavy weather, the men . . . will remain steadily at their assigned quarters; nor are they, when the ship careens, to shift their position.”16
A Gallant Little Army Page 3