The Training Ground (7 page)
Nor did most Americans know that the Mexicans were divided into five separate armies, each focused around a region of the country. Nor that the cavalry, which they could so clearly hear across the river, were the Mexicans’ most elite corps, composed of nine regiments (each broken into four squadrons that were made up of two companies of roughly thirty-five to fifty-five men), or that the horsemen were extremely well armed, often carrying an arsenal of pistols, sabers (with long blades designed for slashing, making them ideal weapons for soldiers on horseback), lassos (ideal for capturing a man and dragging him to death), a blunderbuss-style shotgun known as an
escopeta,
and a nine-foot-long lance — a weapon that had first been used prominently by William the Conqueror’s troops at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and had seen little design change since the Middle Ages. “The Mexican soldiery,” reported the
Times
of London, are of “middle stature, or below it, small-boned, slightly built, graceful, with a smooth, soft, glossy skin, scarcely any muscle, no visible sinews, and of extremely light weight. He can be agile for a short time, but is constitutionally indolent. This is the Mexican Indian from the interior. The soldiers of mixed blood, partaking of the more northern races, and of old Spain, are stronger, rather sinewy, and capable of more continued exertion.”
Longstreet visualized the battle in his head and liked what he saw. “We looked with confidence for a fight and the flow of blood down the salt water,” he wrote enthusiastically.
On the morning of March 20, a Mexican officer splashed across the river on horseback. Captain José Barragan carried with him a proclamation that had been circulated to Mexican citizens, ordering them to take up arms against the American soldiers. The proclamation was glorious and poetic, issued by Mexican general Francisco Mejía in Matamoros. It went on to say of the Americans that “posterity will regard with horror their perfidious conduct” and that “the flames of patriotism which burn in our hearts will receive new fuel from the odious presence of the conquerors.” In closing, it referenced Mexico’s national War of Independence and promised the Mexican people that “the cry of Dolores and Iguala shall be re-echoed with harmony to our ears, when we take up our march to oppose our naked breasts to the rifles of the hunters of the Mississippi.”
Captain Barragan promised Taylor that if his army tried to cross the river, the Mexicans would have no choice but to use force. And then, before mounting his horse for the ride back to his own lines, Barragan warned the Americans to turn around.
Taylor’s response was not at all what the Mexicans had hoped for.
Rough and Ready
M
ARCH 21, 1846
B
arragan might as well have insisted that the Americans attack immediately, for his defiant words had that very effect on Old Rough and Ready. The American commander brusquely ordered that the Rio Colorado be crossed. At 10:30 on the morning of March 21, one day after Barragan’s visit, Taylor commanded four companies of infantry to wade the salty river (thanks to the Colorado’s close proximity to the Gulf of Mexico) and assault the Mexican positions. It would be the first time since the War of 1812 that American troops had battled another regular army. The honor of leading the two-hundred-man force was given to Captain Charles Ferguson Smith. Grant knew Smith well: the dignified and fearless Philadelphian had been commandant of cadets when Grant was at West Point.
Smith’s men wore a red stripe down the side of their uniform trousers as they splashed into the river, the stripes signifying that they were artillery soldiers trained to do double duty as infantry. These “redlegs” were supported by their gunnery brethren as they waded farther and farther into the brackish water, until it grew so deep that their stripes and sky blue tunics were underwater and only their heads and forage caps were visible. The men held their muskets high over their heads, keeping the barrels and cartridges dry but rendering Smith’s troops defenseless against Mexican sharpshooters, which was the brutal, awful point of Taylor’s sending such a small force across: to draw enemy fire. The moment such an attack commenced, American artillery would respond with their cannons, but not until then. Smith and his men were as exposed and vulnerable as a group of soldiers could ever be.
Grant, Longstreet, and the rest of Taylor’s army were arrayed up and down the bank, mesmerized by the sight. No one dared speak; the silence on the American side was complete. “This was perhaps one of the most exciting hours of my life,” wrote Captain Kirby Smith, West Point class of 1826. “All, from the General-in-Chief to the smallest drummer boy, felt morally certain that we were on the verge of a fierce and bloody conflict, yet I saw no one who was not cheerful and apparently eager for the game to begin.”
It was a false alarm. “I do not remember that a single shot was fired,” Grant wrote, remembering the disappointment.
“When they were halfway over and not a shot fired, the disappointment of the men was shown from right to left in muttered curses,” noted an obviously disgusted Smith.
The Mexicans were bluffing. In a ruse designed to thwart the American advance, a very small corps of musicians had been moving from position to position, blowing trumpets night and day. “They gave the impression that there was a large number of them,” Grant realized later, “and that if the troops were in proportion to the noise, they were sufficient to devour General Taylor and his army.” The Mexican lancers were long gone by the time the Americans waded across, having taken their creative band of buglers with them. “The Mexicans had no artillery,” rationalized Longstreet, “and could not expose their cavalry to the fire of our batteries; they made their formal protest, however, that the crossing would be regarded as a declaration of war.”
As the band struck up “Yankee Doodle” and the rest of Taylor’s force began to wade the Rio Colorado, Grant spent hours keenly observing the nuances of military logistics. “The troops waded the stream, which was up to their necks in the deepest part,” he noted. “The bank down to the water was steep on both sides. A rope long enough to cross the river, therefore, was attached to the back axle of the wagons, and men behind would hold the rope to prevent the wagon from beating the mules into the water. This latter rope also served the purpose of bringing the end of the forward one back, to be used over again.” Concluded Grant: “In this manner the artillery and transportation of the ‘army of occupation’ crossed the Little Colorado River.”
For a junior officer, this was vital knowledge. To learn about war at West Point was valuable. But to actually be out on the Texas plains, watching as men stood in the cold river hour after hour, straining to successfully maneuver a vast caravan of supplies and animals, was another thing entirely. This was the sort of immediately practical information Grant might be called upon to impart if it ever came his turn to lead an army into battle. Grant studied the crossing so thoroughly that he could clearly recall its details almost forty years later.
B
Y MARCH 28
, Taylor’s army had reached the Rio Grande. Mexico, the land that had haunted their dreams and conversations for two years, lay on the opposite shore. The river was muddy and thin. The current veered between sluggish and deceptively fast. Cotton grew wild on the banks, its puffy white buds nestled in among the mesquite and palmetto. The thriving city of Matamoros fronted the river on the Mexican side. The houses were made of wood and bricks. Its entire population of a few thousand citizens stood on their rooftops to peer across at Taylor’s arriving army. American soldiers could hear the peal of church bells and even watch with longing as the young local girls came to the river and undressed to bathe.
Taylor’s camp was on a dusty patch of freshly tilled farmland, just inland from a bend in the river that thrust itself like a sharply pointed finger into the Mexican landmass. The Americans bivouacked in full sight of the Mexican army, daring them to provoke an attack. A pole was stuck upright in the fertile soil, and the Stars and Stripes was raised with great ceremony and blowing of horns. “For the first time this banner waved proudly before our forces, as if taking possession of what by every title properly belonged to us,” wrote a Mexican officer, watching from Matamoros. “The soldiers of the army of the North were incensed in observing this insult of the enemy. Their cry was for the contest, and they beseeched their General to permit them to avenge the outrage.”
But while his troops were inside the city’s fortifications and armed for battle, Mexican general Mejía forbade any attack unless the Americans tried to cross the river. Taylor, who had no intention of doing any such thing, ordered his men to pitch those familiar white tents in a square formation, with their supply wagons positioned in the center for protection.
In this way, the two armies faced off, waiting to see who would make the first move.
“M
Y DEAR JULIA
,” Grant began his letter the next day. He missed her terribly and longed for a reunion. When he was with Julia, Grant was at his best. But with this great distance between them, he now found himself at loose ends. “A long and laborious march and one that was threatened with opposition from the enemy, too, has just been completed, and the Army now in this country are laying in camp just opposite the town of Matamoros. The city from this side bears an imposing appearance and no doubt contains four to five thousand inhabitants.”
Grant didn’t know the true size of the Mexican army, nor that the Americans’ foes enjoyed a formidable advantage. But it didn’t take a military genius to realize that Taylor’s forces were relatively small and that the nearest source of fresh ammunition and food was thirty miles away on the Gulf of Mexico, where ships were being offloaded at a place called Port Isabel, which the Mexicans had evacuated. With little trouble, the Americans in both places could easily be surrounded and cut off. In many ways, Taylor’s army was in a position very much like that of the Alamo defenders, which had fallen ten years earlier that month.
Taylor immediately ordered the construction of a proper defensive structure. Designed by Captain Joseph K. F. Mansfield, a Connecticut-born engineer who had specialized in fort building for two dozen years, it would be laid out in a roughly rectangular shape, with six diamond-shaped bastions on which to mount cannons thrusting out from the edges and corners. The structure would be capable of housing eight hundred men, with walls nine feet high and fifteen feet wide, made of thickly packed dirt and timber. A moat measuring twenty feet wide and eight feet deep would ring the perimeter. Fortified subterranean chambers would provide safe storage for ammunition. The men would live in tents pitched on the small parade ground, out of range of rifle fire but not of the long, parabolic lob of an artillery shell.
The days soon took on a predictable schedule. Each morning began with reveille, assembly, and roll call. Morning mess was from 6:30 to 7:30, after which construction began. Known as “fatigue” work, daily manual labor with a shovel or pickax was a constant part of a soldier’s routine (officers did not share in fatigue work), even in times of peace.
Under more normal circumstances, the morning would also include sick call, general assembly, and drill, before an hour break for lunch at noon. This would then be followed by a second fatigue call. At 6:00 p.m. would come dress parade and an evening roll call, followed by dinner. The drummer’s tattoo at 9:00 would be the invitation to one final roll call, then taps and lights out. But the urgency to build Fort Brown meant that almost all drill and assembly was dispensed with. Days and nights were a continuum of reveille, mess, fatigue call, taps, and sentry duty.
Construction proceeded at a feverish pace. A thousand men at a time dug into the earth and heaved their shovels of dirt into the great piles that slowly took on the shape of Mansfield’s design. There were days when thunderstorms turned the soil into a muddy quagmire, and others when heat and ungodly Texas humidity made the dawn-to-dusk work schedule seem punitive. Yet construction never stopped, not for any reason.
Taylor delayed all travel to Port Isabel for supplies until the fortress was complete, fearing that he lacked the manpower to split his forces in order to simultaneously defend a supply train and his tenuous position on the Rio Grande. In the meantime, cavalry patrols rode out in search of Mexican scouts or some other such sign that the enemy was planning to cross the Rio Grande upriver and mount a surprise attack. American scouts heard rumors from local residents that six hundred Mexican dragoons had crossed on March 29. Whether they were in Texas, had returned to Mexico, or had actually crossed at all was anyone’s guess. That dangerously large body of horsemen was never found.
Tensions escalated after Mexican patrols captured, and then returned, two American scouts. On April 10, Quartermaster Trueman Cross ventured out of the camp for an ill-advised solitary horseback ride through the countryside and never came back. The aging veteran of the War of 1812 had been sick, and many thought he might have fallen off his horse. But rumors of a less accidental demise gained credence when one of the patrols sent to find his body was ambushed and an American officer, Lieutenant Theodoric H. Porter, was killed. Porter was a popular man, the son of a naval commodore and seemingly destined for a greatness all his own. (Back in Corpus Christi, he had been the actor who objected to performing opposite Grant in
The Moor of Venice.
) No one knew for certain whether bandits or a Mexican army patrol had killed him, but the young lieutenant’s murder was a cause for shock and quiet fury. Many soldiers were incensed that an infantry officer had volunteered to do a chore more suited to cavalry and snobbily acted as if he had it coming. Others saw Porter’s death as an omen of things to come. Convinced that there was no way Taylor’s puny force could defeat the Mexicans, these overnight cowards swam the Rio Grande in the dead of night to desert. Many were Irish Catholic immigrants who sympathized with the Mexicans because of their shared faith and felt themselves religiously persecuted in the predominantly Protestant U.S. Army. American sentries had standing orders to shoot all deserters on sight — but only while the deserters were still in the river. If the deserters reached the other side, they were safe; shooting them once they’d reached Mexican lines would be an act of war.
On April 11, Major General Pedro de Ampudia paraded into Matamoros with a two-hundred-man escort of light cavalry. Ampudia was a Cuban-born Spaniard with a pronounced paunch, deep circles under his eyes, and a long, white goatee that contrasted sharply with the black hair atop his head. He was respected if not beloved. Ampudia had crushed a citizens’ rebellion in the Yucatán in 1841 and an uprising in Tabasco in 1844, where he shot all of its leaders — though not before ordering their throats slashed. The Americans could hear the echoing bong of church bells and the celebratory firing of muskets that accompanied Ampudia’s arrival, giving the moment a raucous feel. Three days later, an infantry force of twenty-two hundred under Major General Anastasio Torrejón joined Ampudia’s men. The newly arrived Mexicans confidently aimed cannons across the river, directly at Taylor’s new fort. At the same time, as if to accentuate American weakness, Colonel William Whistler, the commander of the Fourth, was arrested for repeatedly stumbling through the ranks shit-faced drunk — no minor accomplishment in an army where alcohol was the universal salve.
And still — despite the manic pace of the new fort’s construction, the Mexican troop buildup, the desertions, the disappearances, and the deaths — Grant kept trying to convince himself there wouldn’t be a war. Even when a fresh batch of reinforcements and supplies arrived from Port Isabel during the second week of April, he thought it was just saber rattling. The American camp was within easy reach of Mexican cannons in Matamoros, yet not a single shot had been fired. As Grant saw it, the two armies were at the epicenter of an overblown international crisis, with the world watching and waiting to see which side blinked first. Someone would have to back down.
“My Dearest Julia,” Grant wrote on April 20, craving a reunion with his fiancée. “Everything is quiet here. We are only separated by a narrow stream from one of the largest cities in Mexico, yet not a soul dare cross. Everything looks belligerent to a spectator but I believe there will be no fight. Occasionally they make a threat, but as yet their threats have all ended in bombast. It is now the opinion of many that our difficulty with Mex will be settled by negotiation and if so I hope my dear Julia to hear the Fourth Infantry ordered to the upper Mississippi before the end of warm weather.”