The Training Ground (18 page)
Polk was getting his revenge as president. To the disgust of the regular army corps, he had begun appointing Democrats from the volunteer ranks to fill openings for new senior officers. Though Colonel Jefferson Davis had not been appointed by Polk, they were members of the same political party and shared a close bond. This combination of high rank, volunteer status, and Democratic allegiance, as well as Davis’s unequivocal support of Polk, threatened to make him a pariah at Walnut Springs.
The saving grace was Taylor. His army had arrived in Monterrey eleven years, almost to the day, after the death of Sarah Knox. This sad anniversary marked a pivotal moment in the reconciliation between Davis and the general, an unlikely chance for redemption and healing that neither one could have anticipated. The regular army’s officer corps may have distrusted Davis, but Taylor did not — and that was enough. The Mississippi Rifles would not be in the first wave of attackers, yet they were a definite part of Taylor’s strategy for seizing Monterrey.
Taylor’s battle plans were born on the evening and night of September 19. That day’s armed reconnaissance under Brevet Major Joseph K. F. Mansfield, the brilliant career engineer who had earned a battlefield promotion for his design of Fort Brown, had detailed Monterrey’s stunning new defenses. A frontal assault or an extended siege was out of the question because the American army lacked large cannons and mortars. Instead, the bulk of Taylor’s forces would take up positions on the plain north of the city walls. Jefferson Davis and the Mississippi Rifles would stand among that broad phalanx. The army’s rank and file would remain in formation, just as at Palo Alto. And just as on that prairie battlefield, the Americans would be a long-range target for Mexican cannons as they stood out in the open.
That was the point: they were a decoy. As they drew fire and attention, Brigadier General William Worth would march west and then south in a grand loop that would circumvent the hilltop fortresses at La Federación and La Independencia. The plan was to mount a surprise attack that would block the road to Saltillo, serving the twofold purpose of sealing the Mexican army inside Monterrey and cutting the city off from the rest of Mexico. It would, in effect, become a military island. Worth would then continue his broad sweep and enter the city from the west, bypassing La Independencia and La Federación, if possible, since storming the heights by force might mean huge casualties.
Worth’s flanking movement would also set in motion a pincer action. His Second Division would hammer the city from the high ground to the west; Taylor’s First and Third divisions — Mississippi Rifles included — would simultaneously launch a two-pronged frontal assault on Monterrey, charging in from the north and the east. The only remaining compass point would be blocked by the Río Santa Catarina, its shallow but swift current providing a neat southern boundary to the battle, hemming in the Mexicans inside the city.
The plan was bold. Military thinking held that an attacking force should outnumber an entrenched defender by three to one in order to ensure success. The overmatched Taylor was putting that theory to the test — and then some. He was also flirting with disaster by splitting his small army, just as he had done at Palo Alto, where his had been the army on the defensive.
The key to Taylor’s plan was stealth and speed.
Neither one materialized.
O
N THE AFTERNOON
of the twentieth, Worth and his Second Division augured northwest out of Walnut Springs, setting Taylor’s plan in motion. He led a force of 1,651 regular army soldiers, along with the First Texas Mounted Rifles. The Texans were an unusual force: trained and armed like infantry, but with every single man mounted on horseback. This made them an agile, deadly fighting machine. Another band of Texans, the Second Mounted Rifles, were being held in reserve, prepared to gallop to the rescue should Worth get in a jam. Topping it all off, Worth’s force included two companies of “flying” artillery, so called because their lightweight, horse-drawn bronze six-pounders (and on occasion twelve-pound howitzers) could easily be galloped to any strategic position on the battlefield. The British army had pioneered the concept with their “horse artillery,” but the Americans were taking it to a new level. Ten companies composed each U.S. artillery regiment, and one company per regiment was designated as “flying.” The six-pounder had a range of fifteen hundred yards and weighed less than half a ton. By attaching the wheeled gun carriage to a limber, which was then fastened to a horse, it was possible to quickly repel a surprise cavalry assault or a sudden infantry flanking movement. From the cavalry to the infantry to the lightweight horse-drawn cannons, Worth’s was a division designed for nonstop movement.
The lot of them would march to the Saltillo road, staying hidden from the Mexicans if at all possible. They would seize the road, keeping their distance from the guns atop La Independencia and La Federación, and then invade the city from the west.
Taylor planned to launch the second half of the offensive on his side of the city, so cutting off the Saltillo road before sunrise the next morning was paramount. If there was any general upon whom Taylor could depend to complete that task, no matter what the obstacles, it was Worth. He was fifty-two, a handsome and sometimes petulant man with wavy hair and a barrel chest. A Quaker by birth and a soldier by choice, he began his career as a private during the War of 1812 and rose through the ranks to become an officer. A round of grape had pierced his thigh at the Battle of Lundy’s Lane during that conflict, leaving him lame in one leg. Worth, who had later served as commandant of cadets at West Point, had the distinction of being Taylor’s favorite general — and easily the most capable.
Sadly for Worth, the Mexicans had not spent the summer fortifying their city only to have him sneak around the back and invade through its weakest point. Their lookouts caught sight of Worth’s force and quickly figured that he meant to block the Saltillo road. They would give him that, for the Mexicans had no use for the winding dirt thoroughfare until the battle was won. However, the heights of La Independencia and La Federación were of vital strategic importance. Rather than bother with an attempt to hold the Saltillo road, Ampudia rushed reinforcements to La Independencia, which featured two sturdy stone forts.
As storm clouds gathered, Worth’s army marched through the afternoon across recently harvested fields of sugarcane and corn. The rich soil caked to their feet, and the uneven stalks jutting from the ground slowed their march to an anguished plod. The horse-drawn six-pounders bogged down in the mud. By sunset, Worth’s division had managed to travel only six miles in four hours. He was reluctant to push on in the darkness, fearful of his army’s getting split or of a sudden Mexican attack. Just as much as he needed to sever the Saltillo road by daylight, Worth needed to keep his men out of danger. As the rain began, he pressed on — but carefully.
“We were soon all wet through to the skin,” Dana wrote. “It soon turned so dark you could not see your hand before you, and the cold was keenly felt through wet clothes. We marched forward two miles farther, and there on the wet ground of a hillside with no cover, wet clothes, on a cold and cheerless night, and as dark as pitch, we lay on our arms with nothing but our coats and not even able to take exercise to keep warm.”
The troops were exhausted, but the order to sleep in the field was hardly welcomed. The Second Division had left their tents at Walnut Springs in order to travel light. They would doze fitfully in the cool mountain air, their bodies trapped in the harsh cocoon of a strafing wind, muddy soil, and freezing rain. A warming flame would have been nirvana and would have made the night pass more quickly, but the downpour and the wartime need for concealment made campfires impossible. The result, Dana wrote to Sue, “was the most cheerless, comfortless, unhappy night I ever spent.”
Monterrey, Day One
S
EPTEMBER 21, 1846
K
nowing that his troops were paying close attention to his behavior, General Zachary Taylor oozed a calculated confidence as the time for battle drew near. His optimism wasn’t altogether feigned.
The Fourth Infantry, minus Grant, had spent a long and laborious night out on the open plain in front of Monterrey. The quartermaster was watching the battle plan unfold from the safe distance of Walnut Springs. The view was unique, and one he might not have enjoyed on the front lines. He was, in effect, seeing the feints and parries of battle from the same perspective as General Taylor. Five hundred unobstructed yards of flat earth separated their forward position from the city walls. Taylor had sent two companies of artillery along with Worth, which left few cannons at his disposal. The remaining guns consisted almost entirely of Lieutenant Braxton Bragg’s and Brevet Captain Randolph Ridgely’s horse cannons. Traditional military doctrine held that artillery was static, anchored to one position on the battlefield at all times because of its ponderous weight. The two primary battlefield weapons were the traditional field gun, which utilized a low, flat trajectory when fired, making it ideal for antipersonnel rounds, and the howitzer, which featured a shorter barrel but elevated the muzzle upward, for a blast that rained down razor-sharp shrapnel from above (the third form of cannon, the mortar, launched projectiles at a severe upward angle and was better utilized as a siege gun than as a field piece).
Bragg and Ridgely were just two of the young American officers at the forefront of the revolutionary new “flying artillery” concept. Captain Samuel Ringgold, the fifty-year-old son of a congressman, was considered by many the “father of modern artillery” and the man who had done more than any other American to promote the new concept. Ironically, he had been mortally wounded on the plains of Palo Alto while applying those tactics in actual combat for the first time. Now it was left to Bragg and Ridgely to carry on his legacy.
For now, Taylor resorted to the traditional. Though he had ordered the heavy artillery left behind in Camargo, he had hedged his bets by dragging three very large guns up from the Rio Grande. There was nothing “flying” about the pair of twenty-four-pound howitzers and the cumbersome ten-pound mortar now being moved into siege range. Once in position, these guns — courtesy of Company C, First U.S. Heavy Artillery — would be capable of dropping monstrous shells on Monterrey. Taylor’s scouts had discovered a natural hedgerow out on the plain, big enough to conceal those cannons and hundreds of men. During the night the artillery and soldiers had dug into the depression behind that berm. “The point for establishing the siege battery was reached, and the work performed without attracting the attention of the enemy,” Grant noted.
Grant’s Fourth Infantry, which had also supported Ridgely’s artillery at Palo Alto, spent the night of September 20 as part of a forward egress from Walnut Springs. The men huddled together in the brisk air. Their bodies had been warmed at first from the labor of placing the guns, but now they were chilled and their clothes were still damp with sweat. Back at Walnut Springs, watch fires kept soldiers warm when breaks in the weather made it possible, but fire was out of the question for the forward troops. Side by side, some standing watch, some curled up on the ground, they waited out the darkness, praying for morning to come, even though they knew all too well that daylight would not deliver them from their misery. Come dawn they would be warmed by the sun and would then race, on command, toward the unknown of Monterrey’s defenses. As cold as the night might have been, nothing made them tremble inside the way thoughts of the impending attack did.
Their safety blanket was those three big guns. Combined with Bragg and Ridgely’s flying artillery, the howitzers and mortar formed an unusual aspect of Taylor’s strategy. Normally, heavy artillery might be used to besiege the city, as the Mexicans had attempted at Fort Brown. Or the guns could be used against columns of infantry, as at Palo Alto. But during his reconnaissance on the nineteenth, Major Mansfield realized quite astutely that the Mexican army would never leave the city. Their battle plan was to draw the Americans in to create an optimal field of fire. Taylor’s men, if all went according to plan, would march straight into the fortified kill zones. But relying so heavily on these strongpoints meant the Mexicans were effectively stuck: they couldn’t travel from strongpoint to strongpoint without risking annihilation, and they couldn’t march out onto the prairie without throwing their entire battle plan into disarray.
Taylor’s artillery had just enough firepower to prove Mans-field’s analysis was correct. The big guns were trained on the Black Fort and La Tenería. These would keep the Mexicans pinned down inside their fortifications. Should Ampudia’s army venture out, most likely with a cavalry force, the artillery would cut them down. And when the time came for an American assault, those cannons would lay down suppressing fire to protect the American charge.
That protection had its limits. Any frontal assault on Monterrey was going to be bloody.
At dawn, Worth’s forces rose from the ground several miles to Taylor’s right. Once again they slogged toward the Saltillo road. As they did, the big guns of Company C, First U.S. Heavy Artillery, opened fire. The diversionary tactic was designed to keep the Mexicans focused on the First and Third divisions, distracting them from sending further reinforcements to block Worth’s advance.
The Mexican batteries answered loud and clear. “At daylight,” Grant wrote with understatement, “fire was opened on both sides and continued with, what seemed to me at that day, great fury.”
The advantage was clearly with the defenders. Hidden within La Tenería and the Black Fort were thirty cannons — all of them trained on the spot five hundred yards across the open plain where American bodies were pressed as flat as humanly possible against the wet soil. Only a lip of earth stood between them and those Mexican cannons.
Grant could take it no longer. “My curiosity got the better of my judgment, and I mounted a horse and rode to the front to see what was going on.”
A
GREAT DEAL
was going on, all over the battlefield. Worth’s division, for instance, was finally reaching its objective. “We started to place ourselves in the position of the Saltillo road,” Second Lieutenant George Gordon Meade wrote to his wife, “by which we should cut off the retreat of the enemy and have an eye to the advance of his reinforcements, said to be daily expected.” Among his troops were three infantry divisions: the Fifth, the Eighth, and the Seventh. Pete Longstreet was in the Eighth, his men marching in a narrow picket line. Dana was in the Seventh. Meade rode close to Worth as part of the Topographical Corps, the general’s indispensable guide to the landscape and defenses that lay just ahead. Meade was famished. He had been caught out with the rest of the two-thousand-plus force during the rainy night. He had slept as best he could, wrapped in his trusty cloak, which was made waterproof by its india-rubber lining. The lack of campfires had prevented the troops from cooking even a simple evening meal. Now his stomach rumbled and a deep chill lingered in his bones.
Up at the very front of the taut column, the Texas cavalry served as the advance guard. They were followed closely by the three units of infantry and two more of flying artillery.
The twin summits loomed above Meade’s left shoulder — Independencia closest and Federación on the far side of the river. The fortress on that peak belonged to the local archbishop. Like the Black Fort on the opposite side of Monterrey, it had been given a nickname by the American forces — in this case, quite logically, the Bishop’s Palace. At 6:30 hellfire rained down from the fortified sanctuary; a horse was killed, a wagon was struck, and a soldier in the Fifth Infantry lost his leg. Yet the American flanking movement had taken Worth’s men farther and farther west of the city, pointedly ensuring that the Americans were just beyond truly effective artillery range. The Mexicans helped out by using solid rounds that lacked explosive charges. The balls of iron were more a nuisance to the Americans than anything else — a reminder to look lively and pay attention. When Meade had ridden out with Major Mansfield as part of the initial Monterrey reconnaissance, the Mexicans had been so accurate that a passing cannonball whooshed within two feet of Meade’s pant leg — and almost crushed the nearby Zachary Taylor. The Mexican gunners may have had inferior munitions, but they were no amateurs.
The Texans, hungry after the miserable night, had ridden ahead and then dismounted to eat from a cornfield. Just north of the Saltillo road, they chose a poor time and place to stop. “As we were turning the corner of the road entering the valley, the enemy showed himself with a large cavalry force, some two thousand, with some five hundred infantry, evidently intending to dispute our passage,” wrote Meade.
Those two regiments of Mexican cavalry — the Jalisco Lancers and Guanajuato Lancers — launched a sudden attack.
As the Texans hurried back to their mounts, Longstreet took the initiative and led his men forward to counterattack. His quick action gave the Texans time to take cover near a wooden fence and begin firing straight into the Mexican horsemen. “The Mexican cavalry charged on our people most gallantly, but were received with so warm a fire as to throw them into confusion,” Meade exulted.
The Mexican lancers pulled back to regroup. Meanwhile, Worth’s two batteries of flying artillery charged toward the front of the American column and unlimbered their cannons. Within minutes the six-pounders were hurling canister rounds into the massed Mexican horsemen. The carnage was instant, maiming and killing men and horses. Blood, lances, and plumed stovepipe shako hats littered the ground; the morning air was rent by the screams of dying men and animals. Among the fallen was Lieutenant Colonel Juan Nájera, the commander of the Jalisco Regiment.
The attack had been nothing less than a suicide charge. “The infantry and a portion of the cavalry retired towards the town, but twelve hundred of the cavalry went in the direction of Saltillo, and have not been heard from since,” wrote Meade. As Mansfield had predicted, the Mexican army was in full defensive mode, ill prepared to venture outside Monterrey’s city walls. That a single horse regiment had lost one hundred men, with another three hundred wounded, before fleeing to fight another day was an indication that the battle for Monterrey was no place for their cavalry.
Soon, Meade and the other Americans were not just taking and holding but crossing beyond the Saltillo road. This sealed the Mexican army inside the city. Worth ordered a messenger to gallop back toward Taylor with the news that “the town is ours.”
The time was early, shortly after 8:00 a.m., and the message as premature as the day was young. Controlling the Saltillo road was a fine accomplishment, but it was no guarantee that the Americans would enter Monterrey, let alone take the city.
Meade rode alongside General Worth as the commander devised a strategy. Worth had a reputation for behaving impulsively, but now he remained collected. “We were on the Saltillo road beyond the gorge through which it passes into town, and . . . this gorge was heavily defended by artillery on the tops of those hills, and by a strong work around the Bishop’s Palace, on one hill, and a redoubt opposite, on the other.” The dilemma was whether it was smarter to send an assault force up the slopes of La Independencia and La Federación, or simply to continue sweeping around to the southernmost side of the city, probing for a more vulnerable place to enter.
Worth appraised the battlefield with his veteran eye, focusing on the enemy’s control of the high ground. “The examination,” the general later wrote, revealed “the impracticability of any effective operations against the city, until possessed of the exterior forts and batteries.”
Worth had to alter his plans if they were to stand any chance. “It now became necessary to take those heights before we could advance upon the town,” Meade later remembered, breaking the situation down to its simplest terms in a letter home. The hills would be assaulted, one at a time, regardless of the human cost.
Shortly after noon, Captain Charles Ferguson Smith and his red-legged infantry — the same men who had so bravely waded the Rio Colorado five months earlier — forded the Santa Catarina and then began clawing their way up Federación’s rocky slope. This time they were joined by two hundred Texas Rangers.
The gritty force took fire from the moment they stepped into the river and then became pinned down as they climbed. Worth ordered the Seventh Infantry to move forward and reinforce them. “Up the hill we went with a rush, and the Texans ahead like devils,” Dana wrote Sue, trying to sound fearless. “On we came like an irresistible wave. Nothing could stop us.”
A
T THE SAME
time, on the opposite side of Monterrey, the Fourth Infantry was still being held in reserve, back by the three siege guns. An affable Georgian and the son of a Revolutionary War major general, General David E. Twiggs (“a grand looking old man, six feet two in stature, with long flowing white hair and a beard which hung over his broad breast like Aaron’s” was how one officer described him) would normally have been in command of the First Division, but he had inadvertently taken an overdose of laxative before the battle, believing that a bullet would pass through his body without harm if his bowels were properly loosened.
Lieutenant Colonel John Garland had assumed command of Twiggs’s division. Garland was a capable man and had served in the military for more than three decades. But he had never led a charge, and now his brave leadership was undermined by bad tactical decisions. As he cautiously led eight hundred soldiers of the First Division forward under withering fire from the Black Fort and La Tenería, the open plain left his men unprotected, with nowhere to take cover. The units fragmented into smaller groups as they ran forward. The Maryland and District of Columbia volunteers veered too far to the left, toward La Tenería, and were soon subjected to an even greater profusion of artillery and musket fire. Almost all of them lost their nerve. They turned and fled back to Walnut Springs, leaving just one commander and a band of seventy men to press onward into the city.