A Gallant Little Army

by Timothy D Johnson

  Two final observations of the battle deserve notice—one from a general’s perspective, the other from that of an infantryman. From a general’s viewpoint, this was a textbook Napoleonic battle with its holding action in front and its sweeping flank attack. Lieutenant Kirby Smith thought that it had been “marked by high strategic merit, not unlike the operations of Bonaparte, first consul, among the mountains of Italy.” It had been made possible only by the skill of Scott’s staff and engineers, then the plan carefully laid out by Scott himself, and finally executed with skill and bravery by the commanders in the field. Scott was able to concentrate the bulk of his army against the weak point of the enemy, and ultimately he forced the Mexican army to fight from extreme disadvantage. Military historian Bevin Alexander, in his analysis of the leadership characteristics that make for great generals, asserted that “an enemy [that] is forced to change front, . . . tends to be dislocated and unable to . . . fight effectively.” This is exactly what Scott intended—and what he accomplished at Cerro Gordo. However, battle plans drawn up on paper mean very little to the infantryman when bullets are whizzing by, sabers are clashing, and opposing soldiers are locked in deadly combat. His perspective of battle is different. Once the troops were deployed and the shooting started, Cerro Gordo became essentially a soldier’s fight. Infantryman Hiram Yeager described Veracruz as the “science of dodgeing,” but concerning Cerro Gordo, he concluded that “dodgeing was out of the question[;] every man for himself.” An enlisted man reflected a few weeks later that the “fight at Cerro Gordo was, while it lasted the fiercest one I was ever in.”39

  The battle was over by noon on April 18, and Mexican troops fled west through Jalapa to Perote. The road was heavily strewn with animal carcasses and with dead and wounded Mexican soldiers who had tried to fend off an enthusiastic American pursuit. Along the way, retreating soldiers had shed weapons, ammunition, rations, and all sorts of supplies. In a terrible state of disorganization, the fragmented elements of the Mexican army acted in their own self-interest, eluding their pursuers and taking what they wanted from local inhabitants as they saw fit. Santa Anna, too, had fled. He narrowly escaped Shields’s flanking column, unhitching a horse from his carriage team to make his getaway. He, along with a few staff officers, spent the remainder of the day traveling west on a course parallel to but a safe distance from the main road. His abandoned carriage fell into American hands along with its contents: one of his artificial legs, food, fine wine, “highly flavored cigars,” personal papers, and several thousand dollars in cash. According to George Kendall of the Picayune, two American captains were among the ones who captured the prize, and they climbed in and found the booty. They ate the food, drank the wine, and each smoked one of the cigars.40

  As darkness fell over the battlefield, gathering and caring for the wounded continued. Dabney Maury, who had been wounded in the arm the previous day and had narrowly escaped amputation, found himself on April 18 in Plan del Río in a reed hut that was serving as a makeshift medical ward for wounded officers. Among the injured was Captain Joe Johnston, who had been wounded several days earlier. His friend Captain Lee paid him a visit and expressed for the second, but not the last, time in the campaign his pity for his friend. The first was two months earlier during the voyage, when Johnston had become terribly seasick. “[M]y poor Joe,” Lee lamented, “I can do nothing with him.” After visiting Johnston in the field hospital, Lee reported in a letter home that “my poor Joe Johnston,” who had been seriously wounded by two balls, had now had both of them removed and was “comfortable.” Captain Stevens Mason of the Mounted Rifles, like Maury a Virginian, also shared the hut, having lost a leg to a cannonball. Mason and Maury often joked and laughed about getting back home to Virginia. Another officer, George Derby, also ended up convalescing there. A recent West Point graduate and classmate of Maury’s, he had acquired the nickname “Squibob.” The fun-loving Derby talked incessantly, but beneath the surface, he was an officer and engineer of considerable talent who had finished seventh in his class. Maury apparently did not mind Derby’s constant chatter, but Johnston became quite annoyed. One day a herd of goats passed by the hut and Derby instructed a servant to go out and apprehend one of them, to which a testy Johnston responded, “If you dare to do that, I’ll have you courtmartialed and cashiered or shot!” 41

  Each of these officers experienced different results from their Cerro Gordo wounds. Within a few days Johnston departed on a litter. He was carried all the way to Jalapa, where he continued to recuperate before returning to active duty. He, of course, went on to be one of the highest-ranking officers in the Confederate army, but he lost his command to Lee in 1862 after suffering another wound. Maury also recovered, and in June, when he was well enough to travel, he was sent back to the United States, arm in sling, to recruit for the army. At Louisville, Kentucky, a man asked Maury if it was true that he had been wounded at Cerro Gordo, to which Maury responded in the affirmative. “Well, come, please, and take a drink with me,” the man said, and upon entering the bar at the Galt House, instructed the bartender to give Maury “the best you have in the house, no matter what it costs.” Like Johnston, he later became a Confederate general, seeing service at Pea Ridge, Vicksburg, and Mobile, and after the Civil War, he founded the Southern Historical Society and served as a diplomat. Derby went on to see extensive duty in the West, where he became a noted explorer and surveyor for the army. He was in California during the gold rush and later helped open the Arizona Territory with his exploration of the Colorado River. His wit was on full display once when dining in a San Francisco hotel. He watched with curiosity as the proprietor cut a slab of beef into ever smaller pieces, and at length he inquired as to why the man was serving such small portions. The owner responded that he did not have much and he wanted to make it go as far as possible. Derby then retorted that in that case, he would take a large piece because he was on his way to San Diego and thus could make it go as far as anyone. Mason, who talked so much about getting back home, died of his wounds three weeks later.42

  There were many other victims of the battle, particularly Mexicans, whose names are forgotten to history. Private Richard Coulter from Pennsylvania recorded in his journal that the western slope of El Telégrafo down which the Mexicans fled was strewn with bodies. It was “an ugly sight; men shot in every position.” Mexican women, wives and girlfriends who accompanied the army, soon started to arrive to care for the wounded and captured, particularly atop the hill where many of the Mexican wounded had gathered. Enemy bodies continued to lie throughout the battlefield, and within a couple of days, “the smell was very bad.” 43

  After pursuing the enemy as far as Jalapa, Dick Ewell returned to the battlefield in the evening to be with his brother. The pain from Tom’s abdomen wound was unrelenting, and Tom expressed the desire to die rather than continue to endure. He knew his wound was fatal and was resigned to his fate. To Dick he said that “he hoped his great sufferings might be an expiation for his sins.” Tom lived until about 1:00 A.M. on April 19—about sixteen hours. Shortly before his death, his legs became numb, and when he passed away, he did so with such “calmness” that Dick, who was by his side, could not even tell when he had taken his last breath. Dick procured a coffin, and brother and friends buried him near the spot where he fell. At least Tom and those around him knew he was dying; one Pennsylvania volunteer had a very different experience. He was wounded on April 18 and under a doctor’s care for a week and a half after the battle. On April 29, the doctor declared him fit for duty and ordered him back to his post, but on April 30, he died.44

  How to handle the 3,000 or more enemy captured posed an immediate logistical problem for Scott and his army. The day after the battle, the commissary department issued pork and bread to the prisoners as well as to the women who were attending them. Despite caring for their immediate physical needs, many of the American soldiers nevertheless viewed their captives with disdain. Coulter referred to one huddled group of them as “a pro
miscuous crowd.” Thomas Barclay called them “a miserable looking set,” and his attitude toward officers was no better: “The officers appear to be as great scamps as the men.” Ultimately, Scott chose to parole the prisoners as he had done at Veracruz. It was well known within the U.S. Army, however, that many of the Veracruz prisoners had violated their parole and that most likely so too would those captured at Cerro Gordo. However, as Barclay speculated, “Gen. Scott considers it easier to take them prisoners again than to lead and guard them.” Some of the Mexicans, including two generals, chose to remain prisoners rather than accept their parole, and Scott ordered that they march under their own recognizance to Veracruz and report to the military governor Colonel Henry Wilson. Once in the port city, Wilson locked them in the castle.45

  Captured personnel were only part of the problem; confiscated hardware created additional difficulties. The Americans captured at least 4,000 muskets and some forty cannon. The muskets were dealt with by bending the barrels and breaking the stocks, some of which the soldiers used to fuel campfires. Scott took one Mexican battery for the army’s use but had no means of transporting the rest. We are “embarrassed with the pieces of artillery—all bronze—which we have captured,” he wrote to Secretary Marcy. He had most of the cannon spiked and left behind, but when he learned that one of the captured pieces was named “El Terror del Norte Americano,” he ordered it, along with five others, shipped back to the States as trophies.46

  Later some soldiers paused to reflect on what they had witnessed at the Battle of Cerro Gordo. In mid-May, Barna Upton wrote such a reflective letter to his brother: “Four weeks ago today (Sunday!) While you were engaged in the worship of God at church—I was in a foreign land witnessing and participating in a scene of wholesale carnage and bloodshed.” What irony he must have felt to consider that instead of “listening to prayer and songs of praise to our Creator I heard only the thunder of hostile cannon the rattleing of musketry, the clashing of shell, the groans of the wounded men, and the shouts of victory as the victors rushed onward trampling on . . . fallen foes.” In a poignant passage that illustrates the loss of innocence that soldiers experience, Upton admitted that he was not “by nature” intended to be a soldier, but after Cerro Gordo, he was “astonished at the calmness and almost indifference which I now experience, in walking over a battlefield . . . [and] seeing hundreds of our fellow beings cut down instantly in the bloom of manhood, and laying in heaps on every side.” Then in a passage that reflects his idealism and religious commitment, he went on to write, “how strange and inconsistent is the idea of thousands of intelligent men, meeting together to mangle and kill each other.” 47

  chapter six

  Jalapa

  Garden of Mexico

  Scott must now be near Jallapa. . . . He would give any thing to get ahead of Old Zack, but his ridiculous fears of “a fire in the rear” lost him a position which he will never be able to regain.

  —William L. Marcy, Secretary of War

  “The war is nearly up,” exulted W. L. Bliss, predicting that he would be in the Halls of the Montezumas in two weeks. Cerro Gordo was “the greatest victory ever won by the Americans in Mexico,” bragged Jacob Hoffer to his parents. Even Scott, basking in the recent victory, wrote to Taylor proclaiming that “Mexico has no longer an army.” Optimism abounded as Scott put Worth’s division back in the lead for the remaining fifteen miles to Jalapa. On April 19, Worth’s men took up the march in a steady rain. For the next few days, the rest of the army collected itself and filed away from Cerro Gordo, leaving behind a small garrison at Plan del Río to care for the wounded. Their march afforded them grisly sights of the recent carnage, and along the way, they saw ample evidence of the shattered enemy army. “Dead Mexicans lay along the road, & dead horses & mules literally putrified the air,” while disabled guns and smashed carriages served as a grim clue of the areas of most desperate fighting. Limbs were scattered about while decaying bodies “torn and mangled by cannon balls, [lay] . . . half devoured by the beasts and birds of prey.” Vultures circled overhead and perched on trees and bushes throughout the area. By one soldier’s count, two hundred Mexican corpses remained atop El Telégrafo four days after the battle. “The smell . . . is sickening,” wrote a volunteer.1

  The defeat came as such a blow to the Mexicans because it was so unexpected, and as its news spread, so too did panic and confusion. Lieutenant Isaac Stevens said that the “decisive blow” at Cerro Gordo came on the “Mexicans like a thunderbolt.” It was made all the more difficult to accept given Santa Anna’s prebattle boasting. Many Mexicans wondered in disbelief how the outnumbered Americans could hand their army such a thorough drubbing. Some suspected Santa Anna of treachery and thought that perhaps the outcome of both of the battles at Buena Vista and Cerro Gordo had been prearranged. “Bribery & corruption” must be the motive. After entering Jalapa, George Kendall reported that “the Mexicans here, one & all, denounce Santa Anna for a coward, a traitor, & everything else that is bad.” Some citizens, when asked about their chieftain, “will draw their hands across their throats showing what they would do with him.” Sergeant Thomas Barclay summed up the Americans’ attitude when he penned in his journal that the Mexicans “are now dispersed and dishonoured. A plentiful and healthy country is now in our possession and the road is open to the City of Mexico.”2

  Major General William J. Worth. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  And that open road to the capital is just what the government feared. When the discouraging news of the battle arrived, the Mexican Congress sprang into action, passing legislation that forbade the executive branch (Santa Anna) from opening negotiations with the United States government, especially if they involved the cession of Mexican land. Distrustful of Santa Anna, the legislative body took more vigorous steps to prosecute the war and at the same time tried to enlist the British government to act as an arbitrator. Meanwhile, Santa Anna engaged in the kind of political maneuvering to which he was so adept. Knowing that he faced growing opposition in the Congress, he submitted his resignation, but worded it in such a way as to suggest that if accepted, it would be because Congress was opposed to the staunch resistance that he advocated. On learning that the government would likely accept his resignation, he withdrew it, publicly exclaiming that it was news of his pending abdication that had emboldened the Americans to advance further.3 While it strove mightily to resist, the Mexican government possessed neither the trust nor the sympathy of many of its citizens. The impact that Cerro Gordo had on Mexico was political and psychological as well as military.

  In Scott’s army, Lieutenant E. Kirby Smith thought that the battle would teach the “bigoted fanatics” among the Mexican leadership of the “futility of waging war against us & cease prating about national honor.” But he and others mistook the defeatism of the citizenry as an indication that the government was in complete disarray. Kendall admitted that he had no solid news from the capital, but “an intelligent Spaniard” told him that the “most unparalleled distress prevails” there. This, some Americans thought, presented an opportunity to rush to the capital and seize control. Worth thought that the army could be there by the end of May. Raphael Semmes thought that Scott should hasten to Mexico City while the enemy army was reeling and unable to offer resistance, and that a failure to do so could only be a result of the general’s lethargy.4

  However, while Scott had remedied many of his transportation needs, insurmountable logistical problems would have accompanied such a rapid march. Even if the reports of government disorganization were true, that was, for Scott, sufficient reason not to advance. His goal from the beginning was to win a peace, and that could only be accomplished through authoritative negotiations with a stable and intact Mexican government. Also, Scott intended to fight only as long as it took to win a peace settlement, and with his sword and olive branch approach, he deemed it imperative to give the Mexicans time after each battle to meet his olive branch with one of their own. Throughout the campaig
n, Scott never hurried, but always allowed Mexican authorities to regain their balance in the hopes that they would extend a peace offering. Indeed, during his brief stay in Jalapa, Scott half expected to receive a proposal from Mexico City. Just the previous month, Roswell Ripley, an artillery officer who would later become a Scott critic, wrote in a letter home a passage that demonstrated an instinctive understanding of what the commanding general was doing. While encamped in the siege line south of Veracruz, he wrote to his mother of his desire for a rapid conclusion of the war, which might be possible with the quick capture of Veracruz and a rapid march inland, if we “are careful to give the Mexicans an opportunity to keep up a Government with whom we can treat.”5

  In its efforts to resist the Americans, the government in Mexico City began to actively promote exactly what Scott hoped to avoid. Less than two weeks after Cerro Gordo, the interim president, Pedro María Anaya, signed an order to create a light corps or a cadre of irregulars to engage in unconventional warfare against the invaders.6 With its army in disarray, the government hoped to foment a guerrilla war that could hinder, if not entirely halt, the American advance, and it pinned its hopes on citizens of influence and wealth to raise and lead these quasi–national guard units. As envisioned by the government, a wealthy man would recruit a unit of about two hundred partisans and outfit them with the necessary equipment and supplies at an estimated cost of 24,500 pesos. Of the seventy individuals who applied and received authorization by the government to raise such units, nearly half (thirty) were located in the three states where Scott’s army operated: Veracruz, Puebla, and Mexico. However, such a cadre system made personal wealth a prerequisite for citizens who wanted to resist the Americans. Thus, rather than serve as a unifying plea, Anaya’s decree only exacerbated social divisions that already existed along class lines, thereby preventing a guerrilla strategy from reaching its full potential.7 It would take several weeks for this new development to affect the movement of troops and supplies, but Scott met the growing threat with calmness and skill as he marched deeper into the interior of the country.