The Training Ground (26 page)

THIRTY-THREE

Invasion

M
ARCH 6, 1847

R
obert E. Lee finally heard a shot fired in anger — and it was coming right at him.

He was at sea, of all places, when the adrenaline-inducing blast was launched. General Winfield Scott had taken his staff and engineering corps for an offshore reconnaissance of Veracruz. Lee and George Meade were among those onboard the small steamship
Petrita
as it traveled up and down the coast, observing landing locations and the Mexican defenses. When the
Petrita
came within a mile and a half of San Juan de Ulúa, cannon fire from the castle began arcing shells in their direction.

For a moment it appeared that Scott had made a stupid tactical error, for onboard were his entire general staff as well as his top engineers. They would all be lost if a cannonball struck the boat. But each of the eleven shots missed. Scott and his staff went unscathed. The invasion would proceed.

If ever there was a general whom Lee could emulate, it was Scott. A heavyset man whose military correctness had led the Texas Rangers to call him Old Fuss and Feathers, he outranked Zachary Taylor and often behaved in the manner of an older and far more stodgy individual, yet he was actually younger than Taylor by almost two years. Scott was a Virginian, like Lee, born on his family’s farm outside Petersburg on June 13, 1786. He was educated as a lawyer at the College of William and Mary but abandoned that career for the army life. Enlisting as a corporal in the Virginia militia, he rose to the rank of brigadier general during the War of 1812. Scott was taken captive after the Battle of Queenston Heights, an American debacle on the Canadian shore of the Niagara River, wherein a small British force routed the invading army. After having been returned in a prisoner swap, Scott went on to victories as a commander at the Battle of Chippewa (a second attempt to establish an American toehold on the Canadian side of the Niagara River) and then at Fort Erie in the summer of 1814, only to be wounded at the Battle of Lundy’s Lane on July 25, 1814, and forced to sit out the remainder of the war. Scott could be vainglorious and argumentative, but in the decades that followed he became a passionate student of military history (translating Napoleon from the original French in order to better understand his meaning) and wrote several army manuals. Among these were two books on infantry tactics, one written in 1830 and the other in 1840, that became standard throughout the U.S. Army. By putting that knowledge to use in the Black Hawk and Seminole wars, and by carefully cultivating power and political connections, he rose swiftly through the military. Luckily, his heroics during the War of 1812 had left him with a general’s rank at war’s end, preventing Scott from falling into that midcareer malaise so typical of the army’s officer corps between 1814 and 1846.

As the Mexican War began, Scott had been a general for three decades. No one in the U.S. Army, not even Zachary Taylor, possessed such standing. Scott had all but forgotten what it felt like to hold a lesser rank.

In the months leading up to Veracruz, Lee watched the venerable figure prepare his battle plans. Unlike George McClellan, who was just twenty when he was assigned to Scott, Lee did not ape Scott’s mannerisms (the diminutive McClellan, for instance, took to posing for portraits with a Napoleonic hand in his tunic, as did his superior). Rather, he reveled in spit and polish, taking great pride in his personal uniform, just as his commander did.

And he saw that Scott was substance as well as style. The general was a fiend for preparation. He had a propensity for setting up spy networks and sending his soldiers off on daring missions to gather as much information about his enemies as possible. This instilled in Lee a profound belief in reconnaissance.

Nevertheless, Scott’s invasion plan was not guaranteed. The road between Veracruz and Mexico City was the same path Cortés’s conquistadores had followed three centuries earlier (indeed, Cortés had also landed in Veracruz), a winding track from sea level up through a series of mountain passes. The lack of alternate roads and the narrow stricture of each pass ensured that the Mexicans knew exactly which direction Scott was headed, and gave them ample time to select the optimal location to stop him in his tracks. There was also the great distance between Veracruz and Mexico City, which would make it difficult for Scott’s quartermasters to ferry bullets and food up to the front lines via wooden wagons and mules. Like Taylor in Monterrey, Scott would have to curry favor with the local population in order to keep his supply lines from being decimated by Mexican insurgents. He issued a general order that made rape, robbery, assault, and other crimes committed by American forces against the Mexican people illegal, hoping to prevent the sort of mayhem the volunteers were so infamously perpetrating in Monterrey. Scott further prepared himself by rereading Sir William Francis Patrick Napier’s three-volume
History of the War in the Peninsula
so he could learn from Napoleon’s failings as the commander of an occupying army in Spain.

T
HE INVASION WAS
scheduled to proceed on the eighth, but a blustery “norther” made for choppy seas and thundering surf. Not wanting to lose a single life during the amphibious assault (the cautionary precedent was the French invasion of Algeria in 1830, when Charles X’s army lost men to drowning while putting ashore), Scott pushed it back a day.

At 2:00 p.m. on March 9 (coincidentally, it was Good Friday, the exact same holiday on which Cortés had landed), soldiers began lowering themselves carefully over the side of the transports, down into waiting surfboats. “The tall ships of war sailed leisurely along under their topsails, their decks thronged in every part with dense masses of troops, whose bright muskets and bayonets were flashing in the sunbeams; the jingling of spurs and sabers; the bands of music playing; the hum of the multitude rising up like the murmur of a distant ocean; the small steamers plying about, their decks crowded with anxious spectators; the long lines of surf boats towing astern of the ships, ready to disembark the troops,” one sailor aboard the sloop of war
Albany
wrote, describing the scene.

It had been a year to the day since Taylor’s army had marched out of Corpus Christi looking for a fight. This time the Americans weren’t just hoping to find a battle — they were itching to start one.

The weather was perfect, a cloudless sky and flat surf. Three miles south of Veracruz, the landing boats would be rowed directly inland to a chosen landing zone on Collado Beach, a broad stretch of shorefront lined with rolling dunes and chaparral. In the far western distance, Mount Orizaba’s snowcapped peak reminded the men that if they made it ashore safely, the path to the high altitudes of Mexico City led ever upward. For Scott, the mountain served a dual purpose, for when the setting sun dropped low enough to rest atop the mountain, the invasion would begin.

Scott’s hoped-for twenty-five thousand troops had been reduced to a much smaller force of thirteen thousand, but it had still taken four hours to assemble the boats. When the sun and Mount Orizaba met, Scott ordered a single cannon blast fired from the
Massachusetts:
the attack was on.

“The landing was made in whale-boats rowed by sailors of the fleet,” wrote Lieutenant Dabney Maury. “In each boat were from fifty to sixty soldiers, and it was a glorious sight to see the first division, under General Worth. The fifty great barges kept in line, until near the shore, when General Worth himself led the way to make the landing first of all, and being in a fine gig he accomplished this, and was the first man of the army to plant the American flag upon that shore of Mexico.”

Sailors cheered from the ship’s decks. Bands played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The Mexicans knew they were coming — with so many American vessels anchored just beyond cannon range, the invasion was hardly a surprise. The residents of Veracruz crowded atop the city walls and on rooftops to watch the gringos come ashore. Mexican lancers could be seen in places along the beach, surely a harbinger of a greater hidden force. American naval guns soon drove them back.

The soldiers were tense as they approached shore, peering into the chaparral for signs of hidden guns and men. They affixed bayonets and nervously prepared to launch themselves over the gunwales before sprinting up the beach to engage the enemy. Not a man among them had experienced an ocean landing before, so no one knew what to expect. They prayed they might race far enough forward on the sand to find some sort of protective cover. A hailstorm of Mexican musket balls would surely be aimed their way — and they knew it. With each dip of an oar blade, the soldiers could see the invasion beach looming closer and closer.

Then it was time.

“Without waiting for the boats to strike [the beach] the men jumped in up to their middles in the water and the battalions formed on their colors in an instant,” wrote Second Lieutenant George McClellan, who had entered West Point at the age of fifteen and recently graduated second in the class of 1846. Like Jackson, he had made his way to Mexico almost immediately afterward. “Our company and the Third Artillery ascended the sand hills and saw — nothing.”

There was no gunfire, no cannon blasts. Utter silence and a perfectly empty shoreline greeted the Americans. It soon became obvious that the Mexican army had no plans to contest the landing. Their commander, Brigadier General Juan Morales, had withdrawn his force from the beaches and city and was now safely protected behind the impregnable walls of the castle of San Juan de Ulúa and within the city’s defenses. Morales’s retreat was deeply unexpected. Small bands of Mexican cavalry and infantry soon sallied forth to probe the American position, resulting in minor casualties on both sides, but otherwise the American encirclement went unmolested.

Scott’s army soon prepared to move on to the next step of the invasion plan. Theoretically, it was possible to bypass Veracruz and begin marching straight to Mexico City. Yet as long as the castle was in Mexican hands, American ships would never be safe from its many guns, and Scott would always have the Mexican army at his rear, capable of harassing his men throughout the long march inland. Just as pragmatically, Scott required the great port as a means of off-loading supplies and reinforcements. The city needed to be taken.

But he would do so through siege. The siege was a timeless military tactic, wherein a force surrounds a city or fortress that refuses to surrender, and then cuts off all movement of supplies in or out. As an offensive gambit, the siege dated back to antiquity and the building of walls around cities, but its use was coming to an end as artillery became more powerful and mobile in the Napoleonic era. Yet the tactic had worked against Veracruz before. Scott hoped it would work again.

The plan, if all went well, would proceed in four phases: invasion, encirclement, investment, and surrender. The invasion had already gone off flawlessly, and Scott’s landing would go down in the annals of warfare as one of the most successful of its kind. Encirclement would mean just that: spreading a line of troops around the city by land, and ships by sea, to completely surround Veracruz. No Mexican citizens or soldiers would be allowed to go in or out.
Investment
was the formal military term for commencement of siege hostilities, the relentless firing of cannons, slowly destroying the city’s walls and the will of its defenders and noncombatant citizens. Surrender, theoretically, was just a matter of time.

On March 10, as Scott came ashore from the wooden steamship
Massachusetts,
his army made the transition from invasion to encirclement. American troops proceeded north from their landing beach to take up positions a mile west of the city walls and also block the main road from Veracruz to Mexico City. Their siege lines were seven miles long, stretching from the Collado Beach landing zone all the way north to the village of Vergana. Twiggs’s division anchored that end of the line, while Worth’s anchored the southern end, near where Scott set up his headquarters. In the center was the division led by Patterson, the unproven general and political appointee. Should his leadership, or lack thereof, allow his section to be breached, the Whig generals on either side of him would rush in to cover his ass.

The lines were vital to a successful siege. The less porous they were, the better. Scott’s initial goal was to prevent any of the 15,000 residents or 3,360 Mexican soldiers from exiting the city, and to prevent Mexican irregulars from riding to their rescue. Once the line was sealed, the next step to a successful siege was to cut off necessities vital to daily living. The city’s water supply came from a series of ponds and marshes that fed into a stream at the southwest corner of the city, which in turn filled the cisterns of Veracruz. Scott ordered the stream blocked. When the cisterns ran dry, the good people of Veracruz would begin the agonizing process of death by dehydration. The tropical climate would only hasten their anguish.

Scott’s plan then called for cannons to be positioned south of the city and to lob shells into the Mexican defenses. It was imperative that these cannons begin firing as soon as possible. Scott was fearful that the seasonal yellow fever —
el vómito,
in local slang — would soon spread along the Mexican coast. Initially contracted by a mosquito’s bite, yellow fever was viral and easily passed between humans who remained in close proximity to one another — such as soldiers. The symptoms were horrendous, ranging from severe flu to severe hepatitis, profuse fevers, internal bleeding, and then a black, gut-wrenching vomit. An epidemic of yellow fever presented as great a threat to Scott’s army as the Mexican guns.

The general knew firsthand the insidious effects disease could have on an army: cholera had swept through his troops as they traveled toward the front lines of the Black Hawk War, cutting a force of one thousand down to two hundred in a matter of weeks. For this reason, Scott had not seen action in that conflict.

Now, fearful that a similar devastation might strike his much larger army, he was eager to be off the beach and climbing into the mountains, where yellow fever did not exist.