The Training Ground (9 page)
Fort Texas
M
AY 3, 1846
T
he stranded soldiers defending Fort Texas left their tents to shave as the regimental drummers beat morning reveille. “We had just commenced washing, etc., before going to work, when the batteries of the enemy opened, and their shots and shells began to whistle over our heads in rapid succession,” a young lieutenant named Napoleon Jackson Tecumseh Dana wrote to his wife, Sue. “They had commenced in real earnest, and they fired away powder and copper balls as if they cost nothing and they had a plenty of ammunition.”
Infantry soldiers sprinted to man the parapets while artillerymen raced to their cannons. Lieutenant Bragg and his complement of field artillery took aim at the Mexican positions as the four eighteen-pounders under the command of Captain Allen Lowd fired onto the enemy batteries. Each big gun weighed more than two tons. Standing on the breastworks, looking across the Rio Grande, the American troops could clearly witness the destruction their superior artillery rounds were inflicting. One enemy cannon exploded into the air in pieces, leaving the brains and torn limbs of dead and wounded men littering the ground.
A half hour after the two sides began trading fire, a brown-haired sergeant named Weigart became the first official American casualty of the war. He was peering out at the enemy when a piece of grapeshot blasted through his chin and exited the back of his head. Weigart dropped facedown. Hair and blood matted the gaping hole in his skull. A sergeant standing nearby mistook Weigart’s body for that of an Irish soldier named Shea, who had a profound reputation for cowardice. “Shea is killed, sir,” the orderly sergeant informed his commanding officer in a shaking voice. “No, I ain’t, sir,” cried out Shea, standing up from the spot where he’d been hiding.
The captain ordered that Weigart’s body be dragged to a hospital tent. An hour later, a second Mexican shell scored a direct hit on the hapless sergeant’s corpse, entirely severing head from body. A party was sent out to bury the remains in the dark quietly that night, exiting the fort to dig a grave alongside a wall that could easily be seen by Mexican troops. The work was perilous — they could have been captured and taken prisoner at any time — but the men got the job done and returned to the relative safety of their beleaguered earthworks, which in reality weren’t much safer.
The nighttime silence along the Rio Grande came after a pummeling day of fighting. The din along the river had been tremendous. American gunners fired more than 350 cannon rounds, so many that they had to stop shooting after six hours for fear of running out. The Mexicans, meanwhile, lobbed more than 1,200 rounds on the earthworks. Wrote Dana, “We could not answer their guns anymore but keep our means for an emergency, and as they did not do us the least injury in that six hours firing, we concluded that it was unnecessary to throw away any more of our powder and shot unless they materially improved their firing. . . . We treated all their noise with silent contempt, and our men screened themselves from the shot and slept on their arms.”
Key to the fate of the American soldiers was their army’s return. Fort Texas was sturdy enough, holding up spectacularly to the bombardment, with little damage to show for the hours of punishment. Yet the fact remained that the trapped Seventh would run out of food and ammunition if Taylor didn’t arrive soon. No matter how effective the cannons inside the fort might be, or how inefficient the Mexican gunners, the U.S. soldiers could not endure indefinitely. The siege would break them. Sooner or later the Seventh would either starve to death or be forced to surrender.
The situation took a hearbreaking turn for the worse at midmorning on the fourth day. Major Brown was making his daily rounds of the defenses. It was a normal walk-through: shells burst all around; his men dodged incoming artillery, staying low and pressing their bodies against a wall whenever they heard the telltale whine that signaled a new attack.
Brown paused to direct a squad building a bombproof shelter, ignoring cannonballs whistling all around him. In a brilliant example of war’s sudden surprise, a Mexican howitzer shell blasted into his right leg, tearing away everything below the midthigh. Shredded muscle and jagged lengths of bone marked where the limb had been severed. Two soldiers, stunned by what they’d just witnessed, hoisted Brown off the ground and carried him quickly into the hospital tent. The military surgeon had seen few injuries in his career, let alone a shattered leg. Moving quickly, knowing that immediate treatment was the key to saving Brown’s life, the surgeon reached for the box containing his amputation scalpels and bone saw. A crowd gathered in the sweltering tent to console their commander. They believed the fort would surely fall if Brown’s fortunes took a turn for the worse. “Men, go to your duties,” Brown reassured the dumbstruck soldiers. “Stand your posts. I am but one among you.”
The surgery was brutal yet delicate. The amputation utensils were removed from their case. They were clean but not sterilized, the concept of infection being then unknown. Likewise, there was no pain relief to offer Brown, just a jolt of medicinal whiskey and either a stick or a chunk of leather on which to bite down. Amputation victims were known to thrash wildly during the operation, so two strong men restrained Brown’s arms after he was lowered onto the surgical table. His left leg, the good one, was lashed to the table so that he would be unable to twist his body or kick as the surgeon sliced into him.
A tourniquet was cinched around the femoral artery. The surgeon then snipped away loose muscles and tendons from the end of the destroyed leg. He wielded a very long and slender scalpel, taking care to leave a flap of skin big enough to cover the stump. Next the surgeon cut into the meaty end of Major Brown’s thigh, slicing clear down and around the bone.
He reached for his saw. Rather than cut off the femur’s shattered tip, the surgeon pushed the muscle away from the femur until three inches of thigh bone were revealed. That way, after he had sawed it off, two to three inches of muscle would lie between the end of the bone and the flap of skin, ensuring that the femur wouldn’t poke through the end of the stump once Brown was sutured. Later, when he was fully healed, a wooden prosthetic leg would be fitted over the major’s amputated limb, allowing him to walk again.
The surgeon, according to procedure, used his right hand to hold the saw, placing his left index finger directly on the bone to serve as a cutting guide. The work proceeded relatively quickly: Brown’s femur was sawed off, arteries and veins were sutured, water (also unsterilized and perhaps bearing a touch of Rio Grande mud) was splashed on the wound, and then the flap of flesh was sewn over the stump.
Once the surgeon finished, he ordered that Brown be carried down into the safety of the underground ammunition magazines. Brown would recover in the sweltering, airless room until the siege ended. This postoperative recovery setting was hardly ideal, and Brown’s chances of survival, like that of his fort, depended upon Taylor’s hasty return.
A few hours later, Mexican general Arista sent four officers to broker a surrender. They informed the lonely men of Fort Texas that a large enemy force had blocked the road between Fort Texas and Port Isabel. The Seventh was unlikely to be rescued or resupplied, stated Arista’s emissaries, and should surrender now before they began the long, slow death from starvation and dehydration that often accompanied a siege. Brown’s replacement as fort commander was Captain Edgar S. Hawkins. Arista gave him one hour to make his choice.
Hawkins was a forty-five-year-old New Yorker who had the dubious distinction of having required six years to graduate from West Point (which he had entered at the tender age of thirteen). He had spent most of his career in garrisons along the American frontier. So he possessed ample experience in hostile border environments such as the one in which he now found himself. Hawkins listened closely as an interpreter who spoke very poor Spanish read the Mexican demand; then he called a council of his officers before issuing a response. Among them were the artillerymen Bragg and Lowd, Captain Joseph Mansfield, the fort’s designer, and Dana. The council quickly made its decision.
“My interpreter is not skilled in your language,” Hawkins sent word to Arista, in a tone both defiant and courteous. “But if I understand you correctly, I must respectfully decline to surrender.”
Arista’s furious reply was to launch the most withering artillery barrage the Americans had seen so far. Shrapnel and shells dropped on Fort Texas like summer rain. The U.S. tents, pitched carefully along the inside walls of the fort, were shredded by the flying metal. One piece of shot flew just over Captain Hawkins’s head while he ate breakfast. A single artillery shell pierced three horses that were standing side by side, killing them all. One soldier had a shell explode beneath his feet and escaped unharmed. Another experienced the odd sensation of having a shell roll over his back. He, too, was unharmed.
In fact, despite the intensity of the barrage, the only casualties were fifteen horses and the military band’s drums and brass instruments, which were smashed by a direct hit on the chest in which they were stored.
By the fourth day of the Fort Texas siege, morale was finally dropping low. Troops were becoming more and more disheartened. Ammunition and food were running out. All eyes scanned the horizon for Taylor’s return. Yet they saw nothing.
Then they rejoiced at a most wondrous sound.
Amazingly, after what seemed like an endless week of waiting, the men “heard cannonading about eight miles away, and immediately knew that the general was on the move and had met the enemy.” It was Friday. Their siege was six days old. At long last, the reinforcements were close.
Yet their hopes were premature — and they knew it. Between Fort Texas and Taylor lay a massive Mexican force. Taylor had wanted his wide-open fight. He was about to get it. The lonely men of Fort Texas could only pray that he would win.
Clash
M
AY 8, 1847
G
rant could not see Fort Texas, but he could clearly see the Mexican army. They were three-quarters of a mile away, porched across the horizon like condors, half-hidden by a dense copse of chaparral on a plain known as Palo Alto. Their sharpened bayonets and polished brass cannons reflected the afternoon sunlight. The Mexican uniforms were a wild palette of colors and designs, plumes and epaulets, from the green and red of the lancers to the infantry’s dark blue and yellow. There was, in fact, nothing uniform about them, for every unit adorned itself with a different design and color scheme. They would have been ridiculous if they weren’t so deadly: Grant estimated that they numbered six thousand or more, with the cavalry on the right and left sides of their lines and seven units of infantry in between.
Grant chose to focus his analytical powers not on fashion, but on the Mexican weaponry, his spectacular numeric disadvantage, and basic tactics: to Grant’s right was the road leading back to Fort Texas. On the far side of the road was thick chaparral. In front of Grant and the Americans was a rolling, grass-covered prairie, pocked here and there by small ravines. On the opposite side of the prairie was more chaparral, a line of trees — and a vast array of shiny Mexican bayonets. Presumably, the Mexicans had several cannons camouflaged in all those trees and mesquite, but Grant could only make out shapes that may or may not have been artillery.
Grant and the other American troops stood in shoulder-high Indian grass, the fierce yellow sun burning their faces. They were exhausted, having slept poorly the night before. “The mosquitoes seemed as thick as the blades of grass on the prairie, and swarmed and buzzed in clouds, and packs of half-famished wolves prowled and howled about us. There was no need for the sound of reveille. The wolves and mosquitoes, and perhaps some solemn thoughts, kept us on the
qui vive,
” Longstreet vouched for their long night out in the open. Then, no excuses, it was up at dawn to resume the march to Fort Texas. They drowsily marched the one-lane road in a dusty column of men, mules, oxen, horses, wagons, and cannons that stretched for three miles.
At two in the afternoon, when reports confirmed that Mexican troops had blocked the road, General Taylor ordered his army to assemble for battle. The six infantry regiments spread abreast across the prairie in close order, with artillery units positioned between them. He placed the eighteen-pounders at the very center. Instead of traditional solid cannonballs, the big guns were being loaded with rounds of canister and grape.
A canister round was essentially a long tin cylinder packed with lead or iron balls, each the size and shape of an eyeball. When the cylinder was slid into the cannon’s muzzle, the fit was snug, with just one-tenth of an inch difference between the diameter of the gun tube and the width of the cylinder, a measurement known to artillery specialists as windage. The instant the cannon was fired, the force shoved the balls forward against the tip of the cylinder, which was destroyed as the spheres burst through the tin and sprayed from the cannon like large shotgun pellets. Maximum effective canister range was four hundred yards, but as with a shotgun, canister rounds were most deadly when the target was very close. Sometimes two rounds were fired from the same barrel at the same time. Known, most literally, as double canister, this especially lethal method of killing was often saved for times when the enemy loomed too close for comfort, like those terrifying moments when a position was on the verge of being overrun.
Grape was a larger and equally lethal antipersonnel round that had greater range. When first designed for the siege of Constantinople in 1453, the balls had been packed in a small burlap sack that was tied with string, making the armament resemble an oversize bundle of grapes, hence the name. By the nineteenth century, a metallic container divided into three sections had replaced the sacks. Each section was packed with sawdust and three cast-iron balls roughly the size of a man’s fist. Because of its size, grape was used in the larger-diameter barrels of siege and fortress cannons. In the case of Taylor’s army, that meant the eighteen- and twelve-pounders. Grape rounds worked on the spray-and-maim premise — and with devastating effect. They could easily disable a man from nine hundred yards away.
Taylor’s plan was to open the battle by peppering the Mexican ranks with canister and grape. If all went well, the scattershot armament would not only kill and disfigure a large number of his opponents but also cause the Mexican soldiers to panic and break ranks. In the confusion that followed, his infantry units could rush into the breach and do their business.
The Mexican forces maintained their position as the Americans slowly marched forward through the tall grass. Taylor’s all-important cannons were pulled by pack animals, with the guns themselves mounted on spoke-wheeled carriages. The lethal eighteen-pounders were not normally used in the field — they were cumbersome and hard to move, ill suited to the speed of battle; Taylor only had them along because they had just arrived on a boat from New Orleans, and he was transporting them from Port Isabel to Fort Texas. They were a liability, so heavy that six yoke of oxen were required to pull each gun forward, and the animals’ deliberate plod had set the pace at which Taylor’s army moved during the march to Palo Alto.
Grant, somewhat absurdly, was still in denial. “Even then, I did not believe they were going to give battle,” he later admitted. He was shortly disabused of his ignorance. Once the Americans closed to within two-thirds of a mile, the Mexicans fired, “first with artillery and then with infantry.” As expected, the Mexicans had hidden their British-made nine-pound cannons in the chaparral, disguising their precise location to achieve maximum surprise. The combination of cannon and musket fire sent a fabulous din through the air and was meant to rattle the Americans. It didn’t work. Taylor’s men held their fire and moved forward.
The open prairie favored a cavalry battle, but that was a fight Taylor knew he would lose. His dragoons were outnumbered two to one. Combine that superiority with the entrenched Mexican artillery and infantry, and the American horses and troops could be slaughtered by the bushel. So while it wasn’t glamorous, and it wouldn’t make for great copy in all the Washington newspapers, Taylor intended to fight a defensive battle, using his artillery to even the odds. His instincts were in opposition to the most bedrock of American tactical philosophies (borrowed, like most other U.S. military beliefs, from the French) — that aggressive tactical offensives would always win out over an entrenched enemy. “A general who waits for the enemy like an automaton, without taking any other part than that of fighting valiantly, will always succumb when he shall be well attacked,” the French military theorist Baron Antoine-Henri Jomini had written in his widely read 1838 treatise
Summary of the Art of War,
the bible of American military thinking. But Taylor had learned his trade well in four decades of soldiering. His battle plans were dictated not by a manual but by his own gut instincts.
Unfortunately for the Mexicans, their leaders weren’t as adroit as Taylor. There were three hard-and-fast rules about the use of solid cannonballs, known well by every artillery officer in the field: never fire solid shot until the infantry is within a thousand yards; make sure the battleground is covered with trees and rocks, to increase the odds that balls will ricochet unpredictably; and use solid cannonballs when the enemy is marching in close formation for the most lethal effect.
The Mexican artillery violated two out of the three.
They started by firing too soon. If Arista had waited until the Americans were closer, the Mexican cannons could have done horrendous damage to Taylor’s formations, which were marching into battle upright and close together, in the manner of Europe’s great armies. But Arista was overconfident and eager. He misjudged the Americans, believing they would panic and break ranks, and as a result he commenced the artillery barrage when they were more than twelve hundred yards off. The cannonballs dropped harmlessly to earth, far short of their targets. He had also chosen his armament poorly, firing puny bronze four-pounders that — even if they somehow reached enemy lines — lacked lethal firepower. As for any ricochet danger, there was none: the tall prairie grass was so pliable that the cannonballs passed straight through, like a hot knife through butter, or bounced along in such linear paths that they were easy for even the most slow-witted soldier to dodge.
Most infuriating to the Mexican gunners, though, was that they had the third rule on their side but it didn’t matter. The Americans didn’t panic, nor did they break ranks. They marched forward, maintaining close formation in order to concentrate their musket-firing power, and offering the Mexicans a prime target all the while. Yet even when the clumped Americans came within range, the weak and avoidable cannonballs had no effect.
Taylor, riding Old Whitey, called a halt when the two armies were separated by just five hundred yards. He wore a floppy palmetto hat to keep the sun off his face, and a plug of tobacco bulged in his cheek. As always on the battlefield, Taylor’s bearing was nonchalant, as if all the shooting and dying were some sort of casual affair he had mistakenly stumbled upon.
Yet Taylor was far more intense than he liked to let on. Scrutinizing his army, he quickly decided he didn’t like the positioning of his artillery. He ordered the gunners to wheel their cannons just a little farther forward, and so they rolled closer to the Mexican lines: the twelve-pound howitzers, which fired a dangerous high-trajectory shot, the lighter six-pound flying artillery, and even the mammoth eighteen-pounders.
Then each of the seven-man gun crews began its dark ballet: the tampion, or lid, was removed from the muzzle; the gun leveled and aimed; the powder wad and round shoved down into the muzzle with a rammer; the primer placed into the gun vent; a lanyard uncoiled and stretched to its full length, the gunner always holding this firing mechanism in his right hand. The men didn’t have to think about what they were doing, for they had practiced this again and again, more times than they could remember. They worked as one, with fluid precision, their every movement preceded by a barked command, from “Take implements” to “Ram” to “Heave,” then “Ready.”
The final instruction, that fatal barked command they all awaited, was “Fire.” The gun crews sweated in the heat, their hearts racing as they prepared to blast men into pink mist for the first time.
Taylor ordered his gunners to do their job.
Grant could only admire the brutal demonstration. “The infantry stood at order arms as spectators, watching the effect of our shots upon the enemy, and watching his shots so as to step out of their way. It could be seen that the 18-pounders and howitzers did a great deal of execution.”
Indeed. “Every moment we could see the charges from our pieces cut a way through their ranks, making a perfect road,” Grant added, describing the gruesome effects of canister and grape. “Their officers made an attempt to charge us, but the havoc had been so great that their soldiers could not be made to advance.”
Up and down the rows, Grant and his fellow West Point alumni got their first taste of war. Longstreet, over on the far left, dropped back with the Eighth Infantry to protect that flank from a charge by Mexican cavalry. “Prince” John Magruder, the flamboyant lieutenant who had designed the theater back in Corpus Christi, was right up front with the First Artillery, lobbing cannon rounds. Lieutenant George Gordon Meade, serving as a messenger for Taylor, galloped his horse across the battlefield from one command to another.
Grant was surprised to discover that he felt no fear. In his usual detached manner, he became so absorbed in watching the war that he behaved as if he were not part of it. He was bemused by the sight of overly eager American soldiers firing their Model 1822 flintlock muskets at targets several hundred yards away — a distance well beyond their range and design. Indeed, the musket was so inaccurate that it worked best when fired in volleys, into tight bunches of enemy at close quarters, then followed up by a bayonet charge. Firing from more than fifty yards away was a waste of powder and ball — or as Grant put it, “a man might fire at you all day without your finding out.”
Once the Americans were close enough that the Mexican artillery could do real damage Grant’s personal detachment evaporated as men around him began to fall. “Although the balls were whizzing fast and thick around me, I did not feel a sensation of fear, until nearly the close of firing a ball struck close to me, killing one man instantly. It knocked Captain [John] Page’s under jaw entirely off and broke in the roof of his mouth,” Grant wrote. “The under jaw is gone to the wind pipe and the tongue hangs down to the throat. He will never be able to speak or eat.”
The Mexican forces knew that movement was the key to victory — in particular, movement toward the all-important American supply column. The wagons were parked to the rear of the battlefield, guarded by an American cavalry outfit under the command of Captain Charles A. May. If nothing else, the Mexican forces were determined to capture those wagons or at the very least set them aflame and render them worthless.