The noose continued to tighten around the city with each passing day. When Scott heard reports that ships were sailing into nearby Antigua with supplies bound for Veracruz, he ordered the navy to cut off the entire coastline from outside contact. And the navy’s efforts were effective. On March 20, two American ships captured a French vessel trying to run the blockade. This came after another French ship had successfully slipped through during a storm, anchored at the castle, and unloaded its cargo of black powder. The angry Americans thought it poetic justice that the vessel wrecked while trying to leave the harbor in the choppy waters. Also on March 20, some brave Mexicans came outside the city in an effort to gather cattle and drive them into the city, but Americans opened fire on them, wounding two and sending them scampering back to the safety of the walls. Already some Americans were beginning to hear stories coming out of the city about Mexican discontent over the war. Let those who made the war fight it, some were rumored to say.9
It was just the kind of attitude—disillusionment and discontent—that would bode well for relations between the American army and Mexican civilians when Scott put his pacification plan into action. Scott was as yet unaware of just how disgruntled the general population had become with their government’s efforts to pay for the war. With financial difficulties mounting, acting president Valentín Gómez Farías devised a plan to use the extensive wealth of the Catholic church to help finance the country’s defense. In January, he and his government in Mexico City issued a statement to the effect that it would mortgage 15 million pesos’ worth of church property to serve as collateral for needed revenue. This confiscation of church property stirred opposition from both clergy and laity, and the resulting protest caused the government to enact strict regulations forbidding citizens from gathering in the streets of the capital. The growing animosity between soldiers and civilians peaked in late February, when Farías ordered four of Mexico City’s national guard battalions to march to Veracruz to reinforce the army there. Members of these units were staunch defenders of the church, and because they generally came from upper-class elements of society that enjoyed polka dancing, they were often referred to as polkos. Most people suspected that the marching order was motivated more out of a wish to get these potentially disloyal troops out of the capital than by a desire to assist Veracruz. Thus, several days after Farías’s order, several military units within the capital rose up against the government in what was called the “Polkos Rebellion.” Santa Anna, still reeling from his Buena Vista defeat and trying to portray it as a victory, rushed to Mexico City in March to reassert his authority and bolster the crumbling power of the civil government.10 It was this growing sense of anger and hopelessness among the Mexican people that would serve to complement Scott’s pacification plan as his campaign progressed.
Siege of Veracruz. From Donald S. Frazier, ed., The United States and Mexico at War (New York: Macmillan, 1998). Reprinted by permission of The Gale Group.
Not only was Scott unaware of all that was going on in the Mexican capital, he also was in the dark about events in his own capital. On March 21, he wrote to Secretary Marcy expressing his dismay at not having received any information from Washington regarding war measures that were before Congress or the shipment of his anticipated but still missing matériel. Thus far, Scott had not received resounding support from the administration. He expected to march into the interior of the country with 20,000 men, but he had only half that number. Surprisingly, the administration had not seen fit to inform him of the passage of the Ten Regiment Bill the previous month, which Congress hoped would ease the manpower shortage. Now Scott was in the theater of war with mounted troops who had no mounts and a shortage of artillery. Some of Scott’s men blamed the well-known icy relationship between general and president for the inadequate transports, troops, and supplies that had plagued the campaign. Captain Anderson, a friend of Scott’s and the future commander of the federal garrison at Fort Sumter, lamented that Scott’s forethought and planning had been “cruelly . . . thwarted” by the administration’s lack of support. Given the magnitude of his operation and all that had gone wrong, the general obviously thought it strange that the War Department had not communicated with him in two months, and he said as much to Marcy. Ultimately Scott found his own ways to cope with these frictions of war.11
While work parties constructed the gun emplacements, naval personnel continued to shuttle supplies from ship to shore. When weather permitted, they worked from 4:00 A.M. to 10:00 P.M., but after the norther hit on March 12, coming and going on the beach slowed considerably for several days as wind and rain continued. Soldiers just made do with what they had. Some of the regular troops became angry when volunteers plundered supplies as they landed on the beaches. The opinionated Lieutenant Hill not only expressed his resentment toward the volunteers’ actions, but he also vented with an acrimonious passage concerning the officers of the Quartermaster Department. By this time, American vessels were steaming north of the city and offloading supplies near Vergara, where Twiggs’s division occupied the trenches, and according to Hill, most of the quartermaster officers assigned to the area did little of their assigned tasks: “There are fifteen of the officers of this Department at this place all neat trim young men but only two of whom can be got to do anything.” Apparently their own comfort concerned them more than bringing supplies ashore. “’Tis a fact,” Hill continued, “that they had men employed in building houses for themselves before one fifth of the ordnance was landed and before a large portion of the troops had tents.” Some soldiers went over a week without tents.12
For several days after the landing, units remained on half rations because so little had been brought ashore. “I came very near starving,” remembered William Higgins. Consequently, many of the men took matters into their own hands. One day some Pennsylvania volunteers headed inland to search for cattle, and after going about a mile and a half, they ran across another group with the same objective. Together they killed a cow and divided the beef between the two parties before heading back to camp. One of the Pennsylvanians, Richard Coulter, built a fire when he got back, then cut himself a steak and proceeded to cook it, only to have it stolen by a stealthy comrade when he turned his back. He went to bed without dinner that night, but two days later, some of his companions went out, shot two cows, brought them back to camp, and made steaks and soup for the entire company. Evidently Coulter got his fill. A naval officer who had come ashore erected an awning, then treated himself and fellow officers to roasted chicken, no doubt obtained from a nearby home. Although such episodes violated Scott’s orders, they were numerous enough to adequately supplement the soldiers’ rations, as evidenced by Private William Johnson from South Carolina, who reported one week after the landing, “Beef plenty, nothing to do but cook and eat.” Other items added some variety to the diet, whether it was cornbread purchased from local inhabitants or a more exotic meal like the one cooked by Lieutenant Thomas Ewell, brother of future Confederate General Richard Ewell. Fellow officer Thomas Claiborne came upon Ewell one day and found him boiling an iguana in a tin cup. It was a great delicacy in Jamaica, Ewell assured him, but upon tasting the dish, Claiborne’s “stomach rejected it.”13
Sometimes soldiers took more than food. On their first Sunday ashore (March 14), a group of soldiers spent the day “robbing the Ranchos of asses, horses, mules, chickens, etc.” But because they needed most of the animals taken for hauling supplies, they thought that their actions were “justified by stern necessity.” Unfortunately, the foraging sometimes led to looting. The members of one unit encamped close to a ranchero within days had “carried off everything that they could lay their hands upon.” Some new recruits of the Second Artillery along with a few sailors journeyed several miles to the town of Medellin and “committed atrocities of every kind.” Even General Twiggs engaged in such behavior. He took food and wine from a nearby ranchero, and after distributing the wine to his men, they became “noisy and turbulent.” One regular offic
er, Lieutenant Hill, bemoaned such actions with the following diary entry: “Most deplorable are the evils of war. Plundering an enemy leads to carelessness and looseness in morals.”14
Work on the batteries continued, and Scott believed that he would be ready to open his bombardment by March 22. Additional ordnance had arrived on March 19, but the continued shortage of heavy guns forced an improvisation. On March 21, Scott met with Commodores David Conner and Matthew Perry, who had just arrived with orders to relieve Conner of command, and the three discussed the need for additional firepower. The capable and ambitious Perry agreed to provide the army with six heavy guns that would be carried ashore and mounted as a new battery to add to those already under construction, but he stipulated that only naval personnel could man them. Scott acceded to the navy’s desire to share in the military glory, and construction of the new battery began immediately under Captain Lee’s supervision. The army called it Battery Five, but the navy referred to it as the Naval Battery, a name that more clearly defined ownership. It consisted of three 32-pounders that weighed three and a half tons each and fired a solid iron ball, and also of three 68-pound shell guns with a range 2,500 yards.15
Moving the guns ashore was a major project involving close to 1,500 men. The site chosen for the battery was seven hundred yards from the city (about a hundred yards closer than the other batteries) and just opposite Fort Santa Barbara on the southern side of the city’s wall. The guns had to be hoisted out of the ships with tripods, then carried ashore and mounted on a large pair of wooden wheels for transportation to the designated spot. It took two hundred men with drag lines to pull the cannon, and Scott ordered this part of the task done after dark to maintain secrecy. Men of Pillow’s brigade comprised the work parties for the Naval Battery, and all went well except for an episode involving an African American sailor who, while drunk, pulled a knife on a Tennessee volunteer. When a scuffle ensued over the infantryman’s musket, the Tennessean shot him in the shoulder, inflicting a mortal wound. It would be two days after the beginning of the bombardment before the Naval Battery was ready to open on the city, but everyone believed that upon completion, it would be “the most important Battery we have from its proximity to the city and the commanding position it ocupies.”16
While work continued on the land batteries, the navy played an important role. Vessels daily steamed in close to exchange fire with the city and castle batteries. One soldier reported that twice on March 21, the city appeared to be on fire, and on another day, gunboats approached to within six hundred yards and sparred with the castle guns for over an hour without losing a ship. Perry’s goal was to project firepower and also to distract attention away from the ongoing work on the land batteries. He was partially successful, but not entirely. Mexican guns continued to hurl both shot and shell at the American line, firing over 170 rounds on March 19.17
While construction of the Naval Battery would continue until March 24, some of the other batteries were either finished or nearing completion on Monday, March 22. They comprised a variety of guns: 10-inch mortars, 8-inch cannon, 24-pounders, Paixhan guns. Roswell Ripley was certain that when “our bull dogs [are] at work . . . Shells will fall . . . thick & fast,” and Hiram Yeager thought that when the bombardment started it would take “less than two hours . . . [to] destroy the city.” At 2:00 P.M. on March 22, Scott sent a note into Veracruz addressed to General Juan Morales, the governor general of the city, calling on him to surrender to avoid a bombardment. Scott’s message was courteous, but he demanded a response within two hours. Morales responded with an equally gracious note stating that it was his responsibility to defend the city and the castle.18
At the expiration of the two hours, Scott ordered his chief of artillery, Colonel James Bankhead, to open fire. Like Scott, Bankhead was a Virginian, and like Scott, he had entered the army in 1808 and fought in the War of 1812. As captains, he and Scott had become involved in a minor seniority dispute in 1809, but the issue did not have lasting consequences, which was not always the case with disagreements involving Scott. At Veracruz, the commanding general relied heavily on Bankhead and trusted his decisions and ability, and the colonel fulfilled the general’s expectations, for he later would be promoted to brigadier general for gallantry and meritorious conduct during the siege.19
At 4 o’clock, the thundering boom of artillery filled the air as Bankhead opened with a battery of 10-inch mortars followed by guns of varying calibers. In all, three batteries and a total of seventeen guns unleashed their fire on the city from land, and they were joined by seven naval vessels from Perry’s fleet that steamed in close enough to again lob shells into the city. One was the light-draft but well-armed Spitfire commanded by Lieutenant David D. Porter, a former midshipman in the Mexican navy and a future Union admiral. The Spitfire scored several direct hits in the heart of the city. Mexican batteries returned fire from their concealed positions in the city’s fortifications, and the castle batteries opened on the naval vessels. The fire was continual on both sides for the next five hours, but, according to Lieutenant Kirby Smith, the enemy fired three rounds for every one fired by the Americans. The noise was deafening, and soon both the city and the American lines were enshrouded in smoke.20
“The battle now rages, the scene is grand,” reported Stevens Mason. For most of the Americans, especially the young lower-grade officers, the bombardment offered a spectacular sight of fire and explosions. The sight of shells whizzing through the sky, crossing each other in midflight, and visible at night by their burning fuses, presented a fascinating scene for young soldiers. Those who had helped construct the gun emplacements were particularly interested in witnessing the effects of their handiwork. Lieutenant McClellan, who had worked on Batteries One and Three, crept up beyond the artillery to a position as close to the city as possible so as to observe the impact of the American fire. Later he remembered that “the effect was superb.” Kirby Smith described it to his wife as “a sublime spectacle,” and Hiram Yeager simply recorded, “God what a sight it was.”21
Mingled with the roar of cannon and the blasts of explosions were screams from the citizens of Veracruz. Despite the distance, some of the soldiers claimed to “distinctly hear the wailing of human voices in the city” and likened the cries to defiant displays of “their bravery, and indifference.” Perhaps some of what the soldiers heard actually came from Mexican inhabitants who lived in scattered houses and suburbs on the outskirts of the city and outside the walls. Some of these, erroneously believing that Santa Anna had defeated Taylor at Buena Vista, supposedly sang the praises of the Mexican general after the bombardment started. Some of the U.S. soldiers evidently were indifferent to the brilliant display or quickly tired of watching it, because one officer reported seeing some of the men going about their business, singing, and playing musical instruments.22
Neither civilian casualties nor collateral damage, as it is now called, evoked universal sympathy from the Americans. The primary objective of the bombardment was to destroy the fortifications ringed around Veracruz and knock holes in the wall to facilitate an assault, should one later be deemed necessary. However, Hill estimated that nine out of ten shells actually landed inside the city, doing unknown damage to nonmilitary targets. Most soldiers apparently did not care, or simply did not make the distinction that is possible now with precision-guided munitions. Indeed, Chauncey Sargent recorded in his journal on the second day of the bombardment that “every shot [from one battery] entered the city, and with good effect.” In his Memoirs, Scott, displaying more sensitivity, asserted that in attempting to silence the enemy guns and breach the wall “a portion of our shots and shells . . . unavoidably penetrated the city and set fire to many houses.” Although civilians were not intentionally targeted, the natural danger of war made them, as far as Scott was concerned, occasional, if unintentional, victims.23
The fire remained continuous on both sides until 9:00 P.M., when the gunboats retired and the castle guns ceased. After that, only the land b
atteries, both American and Mexican, continued all night, but at a slower rate of fire. On the first day of the bombardment, American casualties, according to Bankhead, amounted to a few wounded and one killed—a light toll except for the unfortunate death of Captain John R. Vinton. A native of Rhode Island and a West Point graduate with thirty years’ experience, Vinton was universally respected and widely regarded as one of “the most accomplished officers in the army.” He had been commanding Battery Three, and while rising up over the parapet to observe the accuracy of his guns, a shell struck him and killed him instantly. Accounts differ as to where he was hit because there was no visible wound or contusion on his body. Some of the soldiers thought he had been hit in the head, some said it was in the side, and one version even surmised that the shell had actually missed him, but, in a strange anomaly, killed him when it passed close by—killed by “the wind of a shell,” it was said. A blow to the head was most likely. Ironically, Vinton had written a letter to his mother the previous month expressing concern that the Mexicans might not fight, thus depriving him of an opportunity for “exploits and honors.” He further added that if it was his lot to die, he would do so “cheerfully.” To honor his memory, fellow officers gathered that evening, and Scott gave a touching and “eloquent” eulogy—“every heart was full, every eye glistened.” He was temporarily laid to rest among the sand dunes behind Veracruz, but the following year, friends sent his remains home. Today he is interred in the Swan Point Cemetery in Providence, Rhode Island. Comrades recovered the unexploded shell that took his life, disarmed it, and sent it with his body, and it currently rests atop his grave.24
A Gallant Little Army Page 6