The Training Ground (31 page)
As the generals made their decision, Lee stunned them all by announcing that he was headed back to Scott’s headquarters to convey the news. “During the council and for hours after, the rain fell in torrents, whilst the darkness was so intense that one could move only by groping,” Lieutenant Hunt later wrote, marveling at Lee’s journey. “It has always seemed incredible to me when I recollect the distance amid darkness and storm, and the dangers of the Pedregal which he must have traversed, and that, too, I believe entirely unaccompanied. Scarcely a step could have been taken without danger or death; but that to him, a true soldier, was the willing risk of duty in a good cause. I would not believe it could have been made, that passage of the Pedregal, if he had not said he had made it.”
Unbeknownst to Lee, Scott had sent out seven separate officers from his headquarters since sundown, hoping that at least one could make it through the Pedregal and get word to the stranded American brigades. Each messenger had returned in failure.
Lee made it through. Dripping wet and chilled to the bone, his normally immaculate uniform filthy and torn, he reached Scott’s headquarters back at San Augustin just before midnight and relayed a message from General Smith, requesting a diversionary predawn attack to keep Valencia off balance. This force would attack Valencia from the front, adding the element of surprise when Smith and the other two brigades swooped down from behind.
As Lee was explaining himself, division commanders Twiggs and Pillow came in out of the rain. They, too, had turned back after an unsuccessful nighttime attempt to march across the Pedregal to the American positions. Scott decided to send Twiggs back out, with orders to command the requested diversionary force. To do that, Twiggs had to be united with his men. Lee was the only man who knew the way, and so he was obliged to go out into the cold, wet night, this time to guide the barrel-chested Twiggs through the Pedregal. Halfway across, they found an American brigade hunkered down for the night. This would be Twiggs’s diversionary force. At 1:00 a.m. they began the slow march toward the front of Valencia’s position.
The diversionary attack was launched shortly after dawn. Twiggs had been exhausted after the late night march. It was Lee who guided the American troops into position. The place he chose was the exact same ridge where Jackson and Magruder’s cannons had been positioned the day before. As the sun rose, Mexican pickets caught sight of the Americans’ blue uniforms and opened fire. Soon, American troops could be seen racing down the hillside behind the Mexican lines, as Smith, Cadwalader, and Riley charged their men onto the enemy. It was a scenario that could not have unspooled more perfectly, nor could it have succeeded without the bravery of Robert E. Lee. Later, when Scott was asked to describe Lee’s actions that night, he was unsparing in his praise. It was, Scott said, “the greatest feat of physical and moral courage performed by any individual, in my knowledge, pending the campaign.”
Valencia’s stunned forces broke and ran after just seventeen minutes of fighting. Lee crossed to the far side of the Pedregal and found his good friend Joe Johnston “shrunk and shivered with agony” about his nephew’s death. Lee moved to offer his condolences, extending his hand to Johnston. But the fatigue, the cold, and the battle, and now this empathy toward a man he had known since their days at West Point, finally broke him. Lee burst out in tears, and together he and Johnston mourned the loss of a good young officer.
L
EE COULD NOT
linger long in his grief.
Even as the first American elements slipped into the Mexican position, Scott’s army back in San Augustin was on the move, racing up the eastern edge of the Pedregal via the San Antonio road. Lee saddled a horse and charged east down the San Ángel road toward the village of Churubusco. They soon routed a Mexican force ensconced in the Convent of San Mateo.
The Mexican army hastily retreated inside the gates of Mexico City. They jammed the causeways, a sea of men and horses racing to flee the American invaders. “The soldiers, in general, are Indians, forcibly made to serve,” noted one Mexican government minister. “These Indians have little or no concept of nationality, and no interest whatever in maintaining an order of things in which they figure only as beasts of burden. Nevertheless, it must be truthfully said that as soldiers they are really quite good, because — aside from not being cowards — they have great endurance in the campaign. They have shown that they can cross hundreds of leagues over bad roads, barefoot, badly clothed and worse fed, and this without complaining or committing any notable act of insubordination. Without doubt, if these same Indians were led by officers with good quality training and some sensibility, they would be as good as the soldiers of any other country. The trouble therefore, with the Mexican army is not with the soldiers but with the officers, who, with a few and honorable exceptions, are assuredly the most ignorant and demoralized on earth.”
That fact was very clear as the terrified Mexicans jammed the causeway. Scott did not pursue them, preferring to seek a Mexican surrender. Just like that, hostilities ceased. Nicholas P. Trist, a commissioner representing Polk and the U.S. government, was traveling with Scott’s army to broker an armistice. On August 23, he succeeded. The deal allowed for the release of all Mexican prisoners and the delivery of supplies into the city (where, strangely, American quartermasters such as Grant would be allowed to venture to purchase provisions), with an agreement by both sides that reinforcement and strengthening of their positions were forbidden.
On September 2, Trist dictated additional terms, as stipulated by Polk: Mexico would abandon any claims on Texas and accept the Rio Grande as its northern boundary; New Mexico and California would be ceded to the United States in exchange for a cash payment; and Americans would have transit rights across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, allowing goods to be shipped from one side of the United States to the other without enduring the treacherous journey around Cape Horn.
Santa Anna said no. On September 3, his hubris restored after the break in hostilities, he once again adopted a wartime posture. Sales of provisions to American quartermasters were suspended, every Mexican soldier within a hundred miles was recalled to the city, and Mexico City’s fortifications were once again manned.
Carlos María de Bustamante, a Mexican congressman from Oaxaca, summed up the mood of the nation’s leaders. “It would be better that a conquest be completed, that the cities be reduced to ashes, than to enter into conditions which would reduce the Mexican nation to a status worse than when it had been a colony of Spain,” he wrote. “Mexico is alone, but that does not matter, nor do the reverses it has suffered as long as it maintains its constancy. That is what made the United States triumph in its war of independence, and that is what will make us triumph.”
Yet the Americans kept coming. On September 7, after Scott confirmed Mexican troop movements on the southern side of Mexico City, he ordered that Worth’s division attack the foundry at the King’s Mill, or Molino del Rey. It was rumored that church bells were being melted down to make new cannons at the heavily defended complex, which lay just one thousand yards from the hilltop castle at Chapultepec, whose formidable guns stood ready to rain fire on any American advance. “Chapultepec is a mound springing up from the plain to a height of probably three hundred feet, and almost in a direct line between Molino del Rey and the western part of the city,” Grant observed in his usual detached manner.
Molino del Rey was not one single structure, but a series of one-story stone buildings sprawling over a three-hundred-yard radius directly west of Chapultepec. The defenses ringing the complex were astonishingly powerful: Two brigades of Mexican soldiers occupied the foundry itself. The flat roof provided cover for Mexican gunners and brought back eerie memories of Monterrey for those Americans who had fought there. Sandbags lined the rooftops and the low walls forming Molino del Rey’s perimeter.
The Casa Mata, another fortified structure just five hundred yards away, was surrounded by earthworks that garrisoned fifteen hundred men. Scott rightly believed that the building was a key enemy gunpowder storage unit. Seven Mexican cannons hidden within a wall of cactus defended the gap between the two buildings. And finally, four thousand Mexican cavalry were stationed at a hacienda just a mile away, ready to ride forth at a moment’s notice.
Yet somehow, Scott assumed that the structure was lightly defended. He ordered Worth’s division of 3,250 men to capture the foundry. “I have just learned that the plan of attack is arranged,” Captain Kirby Smith wrote to his wife on the eve of battle. “A forlorn hope of five hundred men commanded by Major G. Wright is to carry the foundry and blow it up. At the same time, an attack from our artillery, the rest of the first division, and Cadwalader’s Brigade is to be made upon their line and Chapultepec, with our battalion forming the reserve. This operation is to commence at three in the morning. Tomorrow will be a day of slaughter.”
At 3:00 a.m. on September 8, Worth’s men quietly jogged into position. Grant, with Garland’s brigade, was on the far right end of the American lines. A shortage of officers accounted for his being pressed into combat. When the Mexicans didn’t return fire during the initial artillery salvo, and there was no sign of Mexican soldiers anywhere, Worth ordered the fire halted. Clearly the foundry had been abandoned. Worth ordered Wright’s advance party to charge.
Smith’s gut prediction soon proved all too true: it was a day of slaughter. The Mexicans had not retreated but were merely hiding. General Simeón Ramírez had concealed his soldiers and artillery so well that when Wright’s men raced toward the foundry, they were torn apart in the same violent manner in which American cannons had so often torn apart the Mexicans. Not only were the Americans forced to retreat after thirty brief minutes of firing, but the casualties were horrendous. Mexican troops brazenly took aim at the American wounded during the lull in the battle, shooting helpless men where they lay, even as lancers galloped forth to spear the bodies and slash the throats of others.
The Americans attacked repeatedly over the next ninety minutes, searching for some way inside the foundry’s heavy locked iron gates. Over to the far left of Worth’s lines, First Lieutenant Thomas Jackson galloped forward with a complement of flying artillery. His timing was impeccable: their deadly fire stopped a Mexican cavalry attack.
It was Garland’s men on the right flank that finally broke through a gate and breached the foundry, working as a series of small units fighting independently of one another. Grant was among the first in the door. He was in the thick of the fighting, leading men from building to building, flushing out Mexican resistance. He was later commended for his “gallant and meritorious conduct.”
Scott, meanwhile, rushed reinforcements into the field as soon as he discovered his tactical error. The Americans finally took Molino del Rey after the two-hour battle (Casa Mata was attacked late in the action and exploded when a magazine caught fire), but at great cost: 116 dead, 671 wounded, and 22 missing. Brevet Colonel James McIntosh lost 44 men and 104 horses in one span of ten seconds.
For their part, the Mexicans suffered the loss of roughly 2,000 soldiers, with another 685 taken prisoner. Among the American fatalities was Captain Kirby Smith, who had so prophetically predicted the battle’s exorbitant body count. He was shot in the face while climbing over a wall into an enemy gun position.
But even Captain Smith — who had shown the depth of his pre-battle fears by closing his final letter to his wife with the words, “I am thankful you do not know the peril we are in” — had understated the outcome: American losses amounted to a staggering one-fourth of Worth’s division. And the men had been slain for little gain, for the Americans found a few paltry cannons inside Molino del Rey. Instead of masses of destructive weapons, they found great mounds of grain, so vital to feeding the vast Mexican army.
Worth’s division retreated to their former positions. It was clearly an American victory, but the retreat left Grant furious. He had by now seen enough war to know good tactics from bad and was more than comfortable venting his frustrations at the way good men had died unnecessarily. Of the twenty-one officers that had begun the war with the Fourth Infantry, just Grant and a handful of others remained. His evolution from timid young lieutenant to future general was complete. He could see the entire battlefield in his head, and he struggled to analyze his mixed emotions about Scott’s tactics. No longer were generals revered elder men in Grant’s estimation; they were very fallible human beings making choices that affected the lives of thousands. His journeys as quartermaster, seeking to feed the army, had allowed him to see the topography on a daily basis and had led him to form his own views on the optimal way to attack Mexico City. He wrote in a letter:
You can see the difficult and brilliant work our army has been doing. If Santa Anna does not surrender the city, or peace be negotiated, much more hard fighting may be expected, as I foresee before the city is captured. My observations convince me that we have other strong works to reduce before we can enter the city. Our position is such that we cannot avoid these. From my map and all the information I acquired while the army was halted at Puebla, I was then, and am now more than ever, convinced that the army could have approached the city by passing around the north of it, and reached the northwest side, and avoided all the fortified positions, until we reached the gates of the city at their weakest and most indefensible, as well as most approachable points. The roads and defenses I had carefully noted on my map, and I had communicated the knowledge I had acquired from Mexican scouts in our camp, and others I met at Puebla who were familiar with the ground, to such of my superiors as it seemed proper, but I know not whether General Scott was in possession of the information. It is to be presumed, however, that the commanding General had possessed himself of all the facts.