The trip to Jalapa was a short one. Along the way, they saw several places that had been prepared as defensive positions—all abandoned. Some of the paroled Mexican prisoners had already plundered their way through the town. When Scott’s army arrived, the volunteer units were marched through and beyond Jalapa to keep them out of the city and thus out of trouble. Sentinels stood guard to ensure that the angry volunteers did not enter. For the most part, however, American spirits lifted as they arrived in this “paradise.” With an altitude of 4,700 feet, crisp mountain air, and a refreshing climate, it was “one of the finest places in Mexico.” The 12,000 inhabitants cultivated the rich soil of the region, producing pears, oranges, bananas, cherries, and peaches, along with corn, oats, coffee, and rye. “Everything is plenty here,” wrote Hiram Yeager. Jalapa looked different from the previous towns that Americans had seen, especially Veracruz. Here the buildings were neat, sturdy, and clean, and all had red tile roofs. The area was covered with lush foliage and exotic, brilliantly colored flowers. It is called “the Garden of the country,” wrote W. L. Bliss, and is “one of the most delightful spots that I have ever seen in all my life.” “Jalapa is one of the prettiest places I ever [saw],” agreed Captain Robert E. Lee. Their observations of the pleasant city quickly confirmed for them the reason why Mexicans refer to Jalapa as the “Heaven of Mexico” and “Vera Cruz, the hell.”8
The Americans commented freely on their new hosts, and in so doing displayed their sense of cultural and racial superiority. They generally believed that Jalapans were more industrious, advanced, and civilized than Mexicans they had seen elsewhere, and they were particularly impressed with members of the opposite sex. “The women are very handsome,” thought Private Israel Uncapher. Another, Ralph Kirkham, wrote to his wife that the only pretty girl he had seen in Mexico was in Jalapa, and he fearlessly added, “she was pretty! Such beautiful large, dark eyes and such a graceful figure.” Later in the same letter—and perhaps remembering to whom he was writing—he added, “The Mexican women are very graceful, more so than ours; but as for being handsome, or even pretty, it is all a mistake. Nine-tenths of the people resemble the Cherokee Indians.” George McClellan disagreed, penning in his diary, “The white faces of the ladies struck us as being exceedingly beautiful—they formed so pleasing a contrast to the black and brown complexions of the Indians and negroes who had for so long been the only human beings to greet our sight.” The consensus was that Jalapa was home to some of the “most beautiful Ladies” who “dress so very gay and neat that a fellow almost falls in love with them.”9
Scott was optimistic when he arrived in Jalapa just before noon on April 20. After sending Worth’s division ahead to Perote, he made his headquarters in the governor’s palace, and the bulk of the army nestled into the garden surroundings, where it would remain for about a month. From there, the commanding general sent an upbeat dispatch to Colonel Henry Wilson, military governor of Veracruz. “Our dangers & difficulties are all in the rear between this place & V Cruz,” and he now believed that he could take all of Mexico without losing a hundred men. He instructed Wilson to forward medicine, blankets, flour, bacon, ammunition, and other supplies as soon as possible. The commanding officer of each department—commissary, medical, ordnance, and quartermasters—wrote to their corresponding chief in Veracruz with specific lists of needs for the army, and Scott ordered Wilson to give “rigid attention to those requisitions.” Jalapa was still on the edge of the yellow fever region. Scott did not intend to stay there long, and he wanted to be prepared to press on after accumulating necessary stores and seeing to the wounded. Also, for the safety of the troops, the general instructed that if a yellow fever epidemic existed in Veracruz when new troops arrived from the States, the soldiers were not to be allowed off their vessels until adequate transportation was available for their journey inland. Then they were to be brought ashore and quickly gotten out of the city.10
Back on the coast, the Veracruz garrison was stretched thin, but it worked long hours guarding the city and forwarding supplies to the army. The number of men assigned to guard the city gates and batteries was reduced from eighty-one to fifty-eight in an effort to provide more rest for the men. A week after Scott’s request, the Ordnance Department in Veracruz reported having 900 muskets on hand, and out of 4,000 captured Mexican muskets, Captain Joseph Daniels estimated that perhaps 1,500 could be made serviceable for the army if proper ammunition could be located. To supplement the food supply and to remedy such problems as spoiled bacon, 311 barrels of which had to be discarded from the Veracruz supplies, Wilson actively sought to contract with local inhabitants for the purchase of additional beef.11
After securing the army in its new camp, Scott sent wagons and litters along with a heavy guard back to Plan del Río to bring up the wounded. The return trip took two days, and it was unpleasant for both the wounded and the litter bearers. The National Highway, although mostly paved, was by no means smooth, and while it made for easy marching, its uneven surface was magnified by the wooden wheels of a wagon. Private Thomas Tennery from Illinois had been shot through both legs during Shields’s flank attack, and he rode up to Jalapa in a wagon with three others, an experience that he described as being “jostled almost to death.” Being carried on a stretcher by weary, stumbling comrades was not much better. “Poor fellows! They suffered very much,” remembered Joseph R. Smith. Dabney Maury, who had thwarted a doctor’s attempt to amputate his arm, returned with the wounded and was well enough to walk, but Joe Johnston remained in bed and required daily care. Maury visited him daily, but Preston Johnston, a nephew, was his most assiduous caregiver. Before leaving Jalapa, General Scott visited the hospital and made a point to talk to each man, inquiring about his health, his unit, and the like. About Johnston, Scott reportedly said, he “is a great soldier, but he has an unfortunate knack of getting himself shot in nearly every engagement.”12
Many of the soldiers had a low opinion of the army’s medical staff. The doctors who accompanied the volunteer units did not have to meet the same stringent requirements as the regular medical doctors, and the resulting difference in care was predictable. Also, unit commanders often assigned the worst soldiers and the misfits to work as orderlies. Furthermore, the hospitals were usually dank, unsanitary places where one was more likely to catch a disease rather than be cured of one. A common problem in Mexico was the infestation of maggots in wounds, especially the stumps of amputated limbs. Under such conditions, staff members, working long hours under adverse conditions, tended to be rude, callous, and disrespectful to the soldiers. On visiting one hospital, a soldier became depressed to see the once energetic youth of the patients waste away, “exposed to the carelessness of nurses and attendants and daily insulted by ruffians.” While in Jalapa, news arrived in one of the Pennsylvania regiments that seemed to confirm their contemptuous feelings. Two of their sick friends had been left behind in Veracruz and had died. The doctor had refused to discharge one of them when he became ill because he said the man was not serious enough to justify it. Later, when his condition worsened, the same doctor judged him too serious to discharge because he would not survive the trip home.13
Disease rapidly became a concern in the army by late April and early May. Even though yellow fever was no longer a primary concern, doctors still had to contend with malaria, dysentery, and measles. Dysentery and diarrhea sapped the body of necessary fluids, and all too often, thirsty soldiers then drank from dirty, bacteria-infested ponds. The volunteer units compounded the problems through their own ignorance of basic sanitation. They rarely saw to proper drainage and they often lacked adequate protection from the elements, with the result being that their camps usually became “miasmic sink-holes of filth and squalor.” Dysentery was often fatal, but it frequently took a long time to claim its victim—months or in some cases years. There were still veterans, who, having contracted the disease in Mexico, were dying in 1849. For all soldiers who served in Mexico, there was an 11 percent mortality r
ate from disease.14
While in Jalapa, Scott showed courtesy and respect for local sensibilities at every opportunity. When a Mexican colonel who had been wounded at Cerro Gordo died, he provided an elaborate funeral for his fallen foe. Scott, Twiggs, and other U.S. officers attended the somber affair, at which five priests presided and an American band played. “It was a splendid pageant,” thought Uncapher, and the effort to honor one of their countrymen was “much to the satisfaction of the people,” recalled Richard Coulter. But Americans mocked their opponents, as was the case when a troop of dragoons happened on one of Santa Anna’s nearby estates. There they found an outbuilding that housed the general’s fighting cocks, and they picked two out of the group. One, a “fierce looking rooster . . . not so large as some but with game sticking out all over him,” they named General Taylor. The other, a “heavy but clumsy bird, with but little fight in him,” they designated Santa Anna. When they turned the birds loose on each other, General Taylor struck several quick blows, and Santa Anna disengaged “as fast as his two legs would carry him.” General Taylor was “crowing right lustily” as, no doubt, were the dragoons.15
As proof that Scott’s pacification plan worked, the inhabitants freely mingled with the foreigners, showing an indifference and lack of hostility that surprised the Americans. Markets were open as usual, especially on Sunday, when the streets filled with vendors selling red peppers, cabbage, fruits, eggs, chickens, tomatoes, rice, and other delectable supplements to the soldiers’ rations. The prices were high, but the variety was a welcome change to standard army fare. Meanwhile, the commissary department bought large quantities of supplies from the surrounding rancheros.16 The attitude was business as usual, at least for a segment of the community, and both the Americans and the Jalapan merchants benefited. This would be a typical scene for occupied Mexican cities. However, it would be simplistic to assert that the favorable environment was entirely due to Scott’s pacification policy, for he benefited greatly from a latent class conflict that predated the war.
It also would be too simplistic to say that all Mexicans succumbed to this army of invaders. The way that locals responded to the foreigners often depended on their status in society. A sailor named William Harrison was posted at Veracruz for much of 1847, and he made numerous excursions into the city, talking to as many of the residents as possible in an attempt to improve his Spanish. In so doing, he learned much and detected a pattern of Mexican attitudes that seems to hold true when compared with other accounts. He found that most of the upper class, those privileged Mexicans who were comfortable with things as they had been previously, fled Veracruz, and those who remained “do not, if possible, show themselves in the streets.” When they did come out, they gave every passing American “such a scowl & look of hatred as to leave no doubt in the mind of the latter as to what would be his fate, if the other had his wish.” The lower class—beggars, leperos, and the like—were perfectly indifferent to the American presence. Likely their lot in life made them so disposed. The “merchants, tradesmen, mechanics,” however, “seem in their glory. Such a harvest they never had. Heretofore, their customers have been an impoverished set, but now . . . the city is filled with American troops, most of whom have money to spend.” This industrious middle class, which benefited financially from the American presence, constituted the majority of the polite, welcoming natives. This class distinction was borne out by Lieutenant Daniel Harvey Hill’s observations. While serving in northern Mexico the previous year, rancheros had told him of their “bitterness” toward the rich, the military, and the clergy, causing Hill to conclude that “we are fighting the Army and the Aristocracy not the people of Mexico.”17
Despite the heavy hand of punishment that threatened those who broke Scott’s martial law order, violations did occur. On one occasion, the troops assembled in Jalapa to witness the whipping of four soldiers, three volunteers and one regular, for robbery. A punishment of thirty-nine lashes had been ordered by the strict Colonel Thomas Childs, whom Scott had appointed military governor of the town. Many of the volunteers who gathered had “a general feeling of disgust . . . that such a punishment could be inflicted under the laws of our country.” Seeing “free born Americans tied up and whipped like dogs . . . in a foreign land” was sobering to behold, and the penalty tended to result in sympathy for the criminals. Although many American soldiers regarded Scott’s law and order policies as unfair, they were not entirely one-sided. While in Jalapa, he issued General Order No. 127, which made all local alcaldes responsible for tracking down and punishing bandits and guerrillas in their areas. Failure to do so would result in a $300 fine.18
Most soldiers tried to show respect for their hosts, especially when it came to their religious practices. Many Americans, particularly immigrants from Ireland, were Catholic and attended mass with the Jalapans, but for the majority who had Protestant backgrounds, Catholicism was a different and sometimes strange religion. Captain Joseph Smith penned this succinct opinion of Catholicism in a letter home: “And then their religion! Such superstitious mummery and idolatry!” Some soldiers commented on the “rakish look” of the priests who “live on the fat of the land” and who ignored the church’s mandate of sexual abstinence. They are supposedly celibate, wrote John Dodd, “but unless common report belie them, they make up for it.” Robert Anderson concluded that the priests were corrupt and afflicted some of the best families in the country, making “love at the same time to mother and daughters.” The church seemed to maintain its wealth by drawing from the poverty-stricken masses. Anderson wrote to his sister that the power of the church is what had kept the country together, “and the church is even more corrupt than the state.” A general feeling among the soldiers was that the Mexican government and the Catholic church constituted a twin tyranny, both serving to keep the people impoverished and ignorant. Robert E. Lee thought that the country would be better if “free opinions of government & religion” were introduced and “the power & iniquity of the church” were broken.19
Among Zachary Taylor’s troops in northern Mexico, news of the Battle of Cerro Gordo began to arrive in the early days of May. Initial rumors brought the depressing but inaccurate news of a Mexican victory and of the capture of Generals Patterson, Smith, and Twiggs. Some accounts even claimed that both Santa Anna and Scott had been killed. But as additional reports came in, a very different picture emerged, as they learned that Scott had turned the Mexican army in a brilliant flanking movement. With some exaggeration, William Fraser wrote in his diary that Scott had crossed a river and “placed his whole army in rear of the Mexicans.” One of Taylor’s colonels, Henry S. Lane, thought that the victory at Cerro Gordo “will place Scott on high ground as a general.” In Washington, Secretary Marcy thought that even though Scott wanted to outshine Taylor, his “ridiculous” letter writing cost him too much.20
Scott’s and Taylor’s was not the only rivalry in the army. In the weeks after the battle, several officers expressed discontent over the official reports of the engagement and the lack of credit they had received. Lieutenant Pierre G. T. Beauregard had already felt slighted when Colonel Joseph Totten’s report of the Veracruz siege failed to single him out for recognition as the engineer who selected the spot for the placement of three of the batteries. Now friction erupted over the Cerro Gordo reports. Worth, whose division was reduced to acting as the reserve, thought that Scott’s summary of the battle was too glowing and that both Pillow and Twiggs deserved censorship. In a letter to a family member, he called the commanding general’s report “a lie from beginning to end.” Colonel Bennet Riley also felt slighted because his division commander, General Twiggs, failed to properly acknowledge the role of Riley’s brigade in storming El Telégrafo. His dissatisfaction was such that he requested a court of inquiry to vindicate his men—a request that Scott denied.21
Finally there was Lieutenant Roswell Ripley, who, with herculean effort, succeeded in positioning a howitzer south of Río del Plan to protect Pillow’s f
lank, only to have his gun’s utility nullified by Pillow’s last-minute change of plans. Just getting his gun into position had been a great feat, but Scott’s official report did not recognize his contributions, and he wrote to army headquarters to inform the general of the discrepancy. Scott informed the lieutenant that his contributions would be brought out more fully in a subsequent report, but no such follow-up account appeared. After the war, Ripley, still wanting credit for what he mistakenly believed to be a significant contribution to the battle, wrote directly to the War Department. Pillow, by that time a staunch ally of Ripley’s, likewise wrote an accompanying letter to Marcy to set the record straight. With so many officers, from the commanding general down, seeking credit and fame (and perhaps a political future), rivalries and disputes became the rule rather than the exception as the campaign wore on, creating a friction that ultimately fractured the chain of command. As historian Otis Singletary put it, the United States fought two wars in Mexico, “one against the Mexicans and the other within the American military establishment.” Captain Robert Anderson of the Third Artillery clearly voiced his opinion about soldiers who tried to ensure that they received a place of prominence in after action reports. After Veracruz surrendered, Major George H. Talcott approached Colonel William Bankhead, commander of Scott’s artillery, “importuning” the colonel to highlight his actions in the trenches during the siege. Anderson wrote, “I would cut my tongue out before I would allow it to commit so great an act of indelicacy.”22
A Gallant Little Army Page 16