A Gallant Little Army

by Timothy D Johnson

  After surveying the Cerro Gordo Pass and the terrain around it, Lee described it as “impassable” and “unscalable.” What he did believe was possible, however, was what Beauregard had already suggested: an attack in the vicinity of El Telégrafo coupled with an effort to get to the rear of the Mexican army. Accordingly, Scott ordered the narrow path that Lee charted to be improved and widened to make it passable for infantry and artillery. Thus the ownership of Beauregard’s information and idea for a flank attack was transferred to Lee, who would later receive the lion’s share of the credit. Scott spent April 16, a Friday, poring over the various reconnaissance reports that had come in and found them altogether thorough and valuable. With all possible information in front of him and with “the eye of a skillful general,” he formulated his plan of attack. He assigned General Gideon Pillow’s four regiments of volunteers, the First and Second Tennessee and the First and Second Pennsylvania, to attack the Mexican positions on the three ridges south of the road, and he directed Twiggs to take the bulk of his division through the rough terrain north of the road and attack the enemy left flank on El Telégrafo. Scott’s plan would placate Twiggs, who originally sought to attack, and it would give Pillow an active role while keeping him away from what Scott expected to be the vital portion of the battlefield north of the road. Thus Pillow could be made to feel as if he played a crucial role while in actuality Scott was putting him in a location where he could do no harm.23

  Scott’s battle plan was much like Beauregard’s proposal to Twiggs earlier in the week, though the lieutenant never received the credit he was due. Unlike Old Davy, who wanted to aggressively attack in front and flank at the same time, Scott’s tactics were a bit more refined and Napoleonic. Whenever he could do otherwise, Napoleon never made a frontal assault. His most common approach was to hold an enemy in check with a diversionary force in front, while maneuvering around to attack in flank and rear. Scott, a thorough student of the Corsican, followed the pattern precisely. With a thorough knowledge of the countryside, Scott decided not to do what Santa Anna wanted him to do, which was to advance directly and force his way through the gorge. Because of the strength of the Mexican position, he would, as at Veracruz, take the course of least resistance. Having the volunteers advance at the opposite end of the battle line would merely create a diversion and hold in place the Mexican units south of the road. The problem of dividing his army in the face of a superior foe Scott intended to overcome by using surprise—a surprise that would so threaten the enemy army as to prevent it from utilizing its advantage of interior lines. Looking back at the battle a month later, Lieutenant E. Kirby Smith thought that it indeed exhibited a Napoleonic flair, and in retrospect, he described the battle as “a brilliant affair.”24

  On that Friday evening, Scott met with Twiggs personally, instructing him to take his division the next morning and, with Lee as a guide, move it along the path north of the road until he was on the Mexican flank. Scott directed him to avoid a clash with enemy troops and to reach a position from which he could move on the road behind the enemy army. Upon achieving that objective, he was to stand ready and await instructions while the remainder of the army got into position. Later in the evening, after Scott’s conference with Twiggs, General Worth arrived at Plan del Río. Fearing that he would miss an opportunity to participate in the coming battle and upset that he had been left behind, he departed Veracruz on April 13 with 1,600 men and arrived late Friday evening. His presence gave the army a sizable reserve, and Scott assigned his division to follow up Twiggs’s attack so as to be in position to pursue in the event of a Mexican retreat.25

  Saturday morning, April 17, Twiggs got his division up at 4:30, and by 7:00 they were on the march. The division consisted of Brigadier General Persifor F. Smith’s brigade and Colonel Bennet C. Riley’s brigade. Although not a West Point graduate, Smith was regular army. The Princeton-educated New Orleans lawyer had been a leader in the Louisiana militia and was a veteran of the Seminole War in Florida. Now almost fifty, Smith was brave, competent, and respected. Here at Cerro Gordo, however, illness prevented him from directing his troops. In his stead, Colonel Harney acted as temporary brigade commander. The sixty-year-old Riley had been an officer in the army since 1813 and was a veteran of the War of 1812 and the Seminole War. An outstanding soldier, he would later serve as provisional governor of California.26

  Twiggs’s division marched up the National Road from Plan del Río until, coming to the appropriate point east of the gorge, Lee directed the column to turn right into the rough terrain to the north. It was here at the spot where the troops veered off the main road that Lieutenant Thomas Claiborne of the rifle regiment got his first look at Lee. General Scott was there too, and he and Lee were sitting on their mounts conversing. Lee “looked in the fullest vigor of manhood, a most striking figure dressed in a shell jacket with gold lace, mounted on a fine horse, which he sat with superb grace. . . . He impressed me then in a manner I could not forget.”27

  During the previous day, engineers had worked to clear brush and improve the path so that not only troops but cannon could be moved to the flank. The rolling hills and ridges made the progress slow. Some of the “chasms . . . were so steep that men could barely climb them,” recalled Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant. The topography, along with vegetation, low-growing mesquite trees, and chaparral, shielded much of the path from view, except for a stretch of about thirty feet with no cover. When they reached that point, Lee wanted to take a few minutes to pile up brush along this section, so as to further conceal the Americans’ movement, but Old Davy did not want to halt his men and did not see the importance of the suggestion. But Lee’s advice was prudent. As a precaution, a body of Mexican troops had occupied La Atalaya, and, as Lee feared, they spotted the Americans in the distance as they filed past this opening in the terrain. Now amply warned, the Mexicans prepared the hill as a defensive position while Twiggs brought his division around.28

  By late morning, Twiggs had his men in position seven hundred yards from the Mexican flank. Continuing along his present course, he would have to turn left to regain the National Road, which as yet lay too far away to see. Rather than trust his guide who had reconnoitered the entire area, Twiggs wanted to get his bearings and locate the enemy flank, so he decided to send a company to occupy a nearby hill and take a look around. He called for Lieutenant John Gardner, a company commander in the Seventh Infantry Regiment, and in his usual gruff voice, he ordered him to “go up there and see if they are occupied.” Now able to see this movement, the Mexicans responded by pushing some of their own units forward, and a general engagement began. Twiggs’s instructions had been to work his way toward the National Road for a surprise attack, but now after carelessly giving away his flank march, he brought about a brisk fight that fully alerted Santa Anna that an American column was moving in strength to the north. Gardner’s company became pinned down when the enemy “opened a strong fire upon us,” but Harney rushed forward in relief with the Mounted Rifles and the First Artillery (both units fighting as infantry without horses or cannon). Together the Americans pushed the Mexican force back to its fortified position on La Atalaya, then, stopping to catch their breaths, waited for orders.29

  They did not wait long, for orders soon came from Harney to advance and seize the hill in their front. They sprang forward and rushed toward La Atalaya, “hollering and yelling” as they went. Under heavy fire, the Americans charged up the northeast slope of the hill, some stopping occasionally to get off a shot. At one point, in the midst of all of the noise and confusion, Lieutenant Claiborne looked to one side and saw a soldier “loading [his musket] mechanically” and firing without aiming. Looking ahead again, he saw a sergeant coming back down the hill, clutching his wounded left arm. The men should fall back, he yelled to Claiborne over the noise of battle. No sooner had he spoken than a “debonnaire” and “handsome” young lieutenant named Earl Van Dorn came up, tied a white handkerchief tightly around the sergeant’s bleeding arm,
and continued up the hill. With shouts of encouragement from their officers, the men pushed their way to the top and swept into the makeshift Mexican works, breaking their line and forcing enemy soldiers to run from the summit down the back side of the hill. Near the front of the charging Americans was the young engineer officer, Lieutenant George Derby, who was known in the army as a practical joker, a young man who loved to have fun at someone else’s expense—but this was no laughing matter. As he rushed across the top of the hill, he shot and wounded a Mexican officer, told him to lay still and no one would hurt him, then continued in pursuit.30

  Having gained the crest, a captain asked Twiggs how much farther they should charge, to which the crusty old general retorted, “Charge ’em to hell!” So the lead units of the American attacking force ran down the back side of the hill, chasing the Mexicans, who were scampering into their next fortified position on the brow of El Telégrafo. This aggressive pursuit proved to be a mistake. The Mexican soldiers could not resist such tempting targets on the exposed southwest slope of La Atalaya, and they opened a blaze of fire that pinned down many of the Americans. All along the hillside, men scurried for whatever cover they could find as casualties began to mount. Claiborne dove into a goat trail, hoping its shallow depression would shield him from enemy fire. A few feet away, he saw a man crouched behind a bush and yelled to him to get out of there. The soldier pointed to a nearby corpse and yelled back, “He tried to get away.”31 Neither of them went anywhere for a while.

  Major Edwin V. Sumner, realizing that some of his comrades were trapped, brought forward reinforcements from the Rifle Regiment to cover a withdrawal. Sumner, a veteran with twenty-eight years’ experience, was from Massachusetts, and he later gained notoriety as a corps commander in the Union army. “He was of the old school, rugged and stern, honest and brave,” wrote Thomas Claiborne. “He detested frivolity, was austerely sober, and always reminded me of Cromwell’s best puritan soldiers.” His bravery on this day, however, resulted in a serious wound to the head. A musket ball hit the star on his cap, slowing its momentum before hitting his forehead. He recovered from the wound, and as a result of it acquired the nickname “Old Bull.” The story became embellished over time to the point that later accounts asserted that Old Bull was so bull-headed that the bullet bounced off of his skull.32

  Despite the danger, most of the Americans made it back up to the crest of La Atalaya, and the subsequent lull allowed time for Harney, the commanding officer on the scene, to care for the wounded. Derby went back to check on the wounded Mexican officer, whom he had instructed to lay still, only to discover that he had been killed by another American soldier. Lieutenant Dabney Maury, a Virginian and West Point graduate, received a serious wound in the left arm during the assault, requiring a friend to help him to the rear. A surgeon examined the wound and concluded that it required amputation. “You’ve a very bad arm,” said the doctor. “I shall have to cut it off.” Upon hearing the grim diagnosis, Maury gestured to a more seriously wounded soldier lying nearby and suggested that the doctor take care of him first, and, with that distraction, made his getaway. On a borrowed horse, he rode back to Plan del Río, where he presented himself to another doctor, John Cuyler. “We can save that arm,” Cuyler told him. Maury replied, “Do it at all risks. I will die before I will lose it, and I assume all responsibility.” Maury indeed recovered, his arm intact, and later rose to the rank of major general in the Confederate army, commanding troops in the trans-Mississippi and western theaters of the Civil War. The doctor who saved his arm went on to serve in the medical department of the Union army, retiring as a brigadier general in 1882.33

  The sharp fighting resulted in about ninety American casualties, but it was over by noon. In the afternoon from within the Mexican lines atop El Telégrafo came the shrill blast of trumpets that announced their intentions to resume the fight. Simultaneous with the sound of the horns, there emerged from the brow of the hill a line of Mexican soldiers arrayed for battle, advancing down the hill and toward Harney’s men on La Atalaya. George Wilkins Kendall from the New Orleans Picayune newspaper had attached himself to the army and was on hand at Cerro Gordo. Along with a few other Americans, he had crept down, under cover of trees and bushes, into the valley between the two hills and recorded the scene that unfolded. “[S]oon we could see a long line of infantry marching down the steep hillside & making directly for the height now occupied by Col H. & his small but gallant band.” Kendall thought that the furious noise might, all by itself, be “sufficient to drive every Yankee completely from the heroic & sacred soil of Mexico.” And as the enemy soldiers pressed on, “louder came the blasts from the trumpets.” In the valley between the two hills, the Mexicans stopped to dress their lines and, by all appearances, prepare for a charge up La Atalaya.

  Atop La Atalaya, Harney had the Seventh Infantry, the Rifle Regiment, and the First Artillery—not overwhelming numbers. To make his situation more precarious, he had detailed some of his men as litter bearers to carry the wounded to the rear. So just as the Mexican lines stopped to form for the final assault, “Col H. improved the occasion to play off a regular trick upon them.” With his position partially hidden by the curvature of the terrain, Harney stood up in view of the enemy below and “commenced a harangue which would have served for an army of 20,000 men. . . . ‘Don’t shoot yet!’” Harney bellowed, “‘wait till they come closer, & then give them h-ll! Don’t draw a trigger, I tell you—double charge those cannons, there, with grape & cannister, & wait till I give the word. I don’t want one of them ever to get back alive!’” According to Kendall, Harney’s shouting could have been heard from a mile away, and after some of the English-speaking Mexicans translated the speech to some of their officers, they turned their men around and marched back up El Telégrafo.34

  During the afternoon General James Shields’s brigade (Patterson’s division) arrived to reinforce Twiggs’s division. Shields, a thirty-seven-year-old Irishman, had served in the Illinois state legislature and as a justice on that state’s supreme court. He performed admirably at Cerro Gordo but was a failure as a Union commander fifteen years later. He had appeared at Scott’s headquarters three days earlier to protest rumors that his brigade would be held in reserve in the upcoming battle. It was not the first time Shields had complained to the commanding general about a subordinate role in the army’s movements. Scott yielded, and now Shields arrived on the American right to reinforce the flanking column. It was a role that almost cost him his life.35 In the vicinity of La Atalaya, Twiggs now had almost 5,000 men with which to renew the fight on the morrow.

  That evening, General Scott sent written orders to the various parts of his dispersed army with instructions for the next day. Twiggs commanded the bulk of the army. Scott gave him two objectives: seize the road in the enemy’s rear so as to cut off their retreat to Jalapa and capture and hold El Telégrafo so as prevent Mexican guns on that hill from enfilading the flanking column. To the rear or the American left, Pillow was to get his brigade of volunteers in position opposite the three artillery laden ridges south of the road by early morning. Upon hearing the noise of battle in Twiggs’s sector, Pillow was to attack the ridges and “pierce” the enemy’s line of artillery. Worth, who had left Veracruz late and had arrived the previous evening with 1,600 men, was to follow Twiggs’s division and join in the pursuit. Scott’s written orders turned out to be a phenomenally accurate prediction of the next morning’s events. “The enemy’s whole line of intrencments & batteries will be . . . turned, early in the day tomorrow—probably before 10 o’clock A.M.” He ordered his cavalry to be in the National Road out of range of Mexican guns and ready to pursue by 9:00. Then he went on to assert that the retreating enemy force would be pursued for several miles “until stopped by darkness or fortified positions.”36 What Scott wrote twelve hours in advance proved to be a nearly exact blueprint of the way the battle would unfold.

  The Seventh Infantry and the Rifles slept as best they could on La Atalay
a that night while Lee and Captain Gustavus W. Smith directed a work party in the construction of a battery emplacement. It would be a laborious task, but during the night, the Americans intended to pull two howitzers and a 24pounder up to the top of La Atalaya to add to their firepower for the next day’s fight. Lee, after indicating where he wanted the battery located, instructed Smith to oversee the work of preparing gun mounts. The ground was rocky and digging was difficult as a work party attempted to throw up an embankment and build platforms. Smith and other engineers had marched twenty-four hours since the previous night to get to Plan del Río on April 17, arriving at 11:00 P.M., hours after the fighting had ended. It must have been sometime after midnight before he found Lee on the right flank and started to work. At 3:00 A.M., he was too exhausted to continue, so he summoned another officer who was sleeping at the bottom of the hill to come take over.

  Upon being relieved, Smith began his weary trek down the hill, and while walking along, he dozed off. While upright but still slumbering, he stumbled on the uneven ground, fell forward, and landed on top of a dead Mexican soldier; the corpse’s face, “eyes wide open, within a few inches of mine.” Before he could come to his senses and get to his feet, he heard a stampede of men rush by, followed by a familiar voice shouting in the darkness. It was Lieutenant Peter V. Hagner yelling at the men to stop. Smith hopped up and helped bring the men under control before inquiring what had happened. They had been detailed earlier in the night to pull one of the cannon up La Atalaya and had left their muskets at the bottom of the hill. Using drag ropes, they inched the piece slowly up the slope until they reached a point where their path was blocked by trees. While the trees were cleared, the men rested. They all, having fallen asleep, became startled when someone shouted that the Mexicans were upon them, and they leapt to their feet and took off down the hill to retrieve their weapons. The officers calmed the rumor-induced panic, restored order, and eventually the way was cleared for the work to continue.37