The Class of 1846 Read online

  By now Hardcastle’s ear was attuned to the subtle variations in the shrieks of the incoming shot. The shrill cry of a cannonball passing close enough to take off his head and the scream of more distant shot were different. Both sounds were unpleasant enough, but the former excruciatingly so.

  At 4:00 the next morning Hardcastle was relieved after twenty-four straight hours at the battery, feeling “pretty well broke down.” But he was still alive. A few hours later, a large shell from Vera Cruz crashed into the battery and exploded, hurling one of the mortars more than thirty feet, wounding six men and blanketing others with a mantle of powder and dust.14

  Tom Jackson’s eyes glinted with pleasure. Here was a battle at last. He was also commanding guns and attracting warm acclaim for his coolness and judgment. William Gardner, who was present and finally in good health, noticed that, although under fire for the first time, Old Jack was “as calm in the midst of a hurricane of bullets as though he were on dress parade at West Point.”15 Like Hardcastle, Jackson had watched a cannonball come within five steps of sweeping him into oblivion.16

  By March 27, after Scott had borrowed a battery of heavier, more powerful guns from the navy, installed them in the sand hills, and turned them on the city, Vera Cruz decided it had had enough. With the surrender of the city that day, Scott had his foothold in Mexico, el vomito had still not come, and Tom Jackson had tasted battle. The Americans had thrown three thousand ten-inch shells, two hundred howitzer shells, a thousand Paixhan shot, and twenty-five hundred round shot into Vera Cruz—a total weight of metal of 250 tons. Two officers, two seamen, three soldiers, and one musician had been killed.17

  Everybody in the army was now anxious to be on the road to Mexico City. Hardcastle was living high at Vera Cruz—garrisoned with Scott’s staff in the palace itself—but the city depressed him. Not only was it badly battered, but it was filthy. It is no wonder, he thought, that yellow fever rages here with such virulence. The streets were so disgusting they were painful to behold. The repellent odors rising from “the green putrid matter with which the gutters are full” was enough to drive them into the Mexican interior.18

  A garrison of buzzards, les zopilotes, patrolled and policed the city streets and tried to tidy up, but to little avail. Protected by the authorities, the ghoulish fowl roamed about town at will picking impurities from the streets. Although sanctioned by the civic power, they couldn’t pick enough to quell the stench—and probably added to it.19

  Two divisions of Scott’s army left finally for Jalapa on April 8 and 9. A third left on the eleventh, and the fourth on the thirteenth. Scott and his staff departed on the twelfth.

  The company of sappers, miners, and pontoners was scheduled to leave with the general in chief. But nobody thought to tell this to the mules. When General Scott and his staff left at 4:00 in the afternoon, transportation for Company A had not yet arrived. When it finally did, about dark, it turned out to be a troop of recalcitrant reject mules lassoed from the water as they swam ashore off a ship from Texas. Not only were the beasts seasick and wild, they were offended. Their teamsters were Mexicans who spoke English no better than they did, and who had never harnessed an animal in their lives. They were the least promising teams, men and beasts, McClellan had ever seen.20

  A violent clash of wills consumed the entire night. The company and the intransigent mules, both on the edge of exhaustion, didn’t get underway for Jalapa until half an hour before daylight on the thirteenth.21 Progress up the road was managed only by continued irreverent haranguing and hard cussing. As General William J. Worth and his staff overtook and passed the company, they were embarrassed to hear the engineers indelicately swearing the teams slowly up yet another hill.22

  When all the units of the army had departed Vera Cruz, William Gardner was unwillingly left behind in the path of el vomito. To his disgust, his battalion had been detailed to garrison the fallen city.23 Considering his wobbly medical history so far in Mexico, Gardner is probably the last man who should have been left behind. He had been catching everything.

  The march to Jalapa gave the rest of the army time to contemplate what lay ahead and to become acquainted with the Mexican countryside along the national road. To Tom Jackson there appeared to be but two seasons in Mexico—“wet and dry.” It was now dry and sterile, the countryside through which they were passing was caught up in a drought, and there was but little vegetation.24

  The soldiers could not only savor their conquest of Vera Cruz, but could also take satisfaction in the news from the north. General Taylor and his much-depleted army had repulsed the Mexicans at Buena Vista on February 22 and 23. It had been the hardest battle of the war so far, and it had nearly been lost. The Mexican president and general in chief, Antonio Lopéz de Santa Anna, had hurled wave after wave of his army against Taylor’s little force and the American line had quavered several times. But it didn’t break, and under a withering counterfire from the roving American artillery, Santa Anna had simply claimed victory, given it up, and withdrawn.

  And now there was trouble ahead on the high road to Jalapa. In a place called Cerro Gordo, dug in on a conical thousand-feet-high hill called “El Telegrafo,” was the ubiquitous Santa Anna himself. The fiery one-legged president was back from Buena Vista and about as happy with the turn of events as the sapper and miner company’s mules.

  General David Emanuel Twiggs was the first to stumble onto this impediment in the road, since his was the lead American division. It could have been disastrous, for Twiggs’s usual strategy in such cases was to attack anything in his path, no questions asked. Twiggs was a bluff bear of a man, 6 feet 2 inches tall with long flowing white hair and a beard, which hung to his chest. He looked like the prophet Aaron, and spoke like the volcano Vesuvius—in an erupting hellfire of curses and oratory. Indeed, the army called him “Old Orizaba.”25

  When Twiggs reached Cerro Gordo and saw what was ahead of him, he uncharacteristically drew up and waited for General Scott to arrive. The Mexican position appeared too strong to attack from the front. Santa Anna was well dug in across the main road. There had to be a better way, and Scott sent his West Point engineers to find it. As they fanned out to the left and right, Scott sat back to wait.

  After three days of the “boldest examinations,” Lee returned to confirm that Santa Anna was indeed unassailable from the front, but that a plan to turn him on his left might work.26

  Lee’s counterpart scouting the other side of the Mexican position was the irrepressible, prank-playing George Derby. He had reconnoitered up the Rio Del Plan about four and a half miles on the Mexican right flank while Lee was assessing the left. Accompanied by one man, Derby went all the way around into the rear of the enemy and made a report accompanied by a sketch detailing positions and numbers. He presented his findings at the same high level conference of general officers and engineers where Lee presented his. Scott decided to attack the Mexican left on the basis of these reconnaissances.27

  Next to El Telegrafo was a smaller hill called La Atalaya, and a path leading to it over which, if improved, light batteries might approach without detection. Indeed, Santa Anna himself had briefly considered this possibility, but had dismissed it. He didn’t believe in his heart that a goat could successfully approach his army from that direction.28 Scott’s intention based on Lee’s assurances was to take advantage of this assumption. He would send Twiggs on a looping sweep around Santa Anna’s, left flank. The rest of the army would make a diversionary movement against his center and right in hopes the Mexican president would mistake that for the real thing and continue to believe in the impossibility of an attack from the left.

  The plan was set in motion on April 17. Dabney Maury had a front row seat in this epic moment in history, but he wasn’t at all certain it was the seat he wanted. He had marched with the Mounted Rifles earlier in the day at the front of Twiggs’s division, and they had gotten around on the flank in good order. Twiggs was not yet ready to begin the major assault, but he made the mi
stake of telling one small American column during some preliminary skirmishing to “Charge ’em to hell!” and they had taken him literally. Over La Atalaya the column swept, down the slope, and part way up El Telegrafo, where it was quickly and unhappily pinned down under heavy Mexican cannon fire.29

  As this was happening, Maury and the other Mounted Rifles were resting by the side of the road behind La Atalaya. The first he knew of the situation on the other side of the mountain was when somebody shouted, “Send up the Rifles!” The Rifles immediately rushed to the relief of the beleaguered little force and was soon sharing its predicament.

  That is where Maury was at the moment, pinned down on the gun-swept side of Atalaya Hill. From his vantage point he could see clearly all that was happening. The Mexicans were keeping up a dropping fire on any Americans who inadvisedly showed themselves. He could see Santa Anna himself on the field in citizen’s dress, mounted on a superb gray horse and personally in command. Several of Maury’s men fired at him, but he was too far away.

  Maury’s little command hunched uneasily behind a clump of undergrowth that crowned a hill, and from there he could see another small group of Rifles under the command of his classmate, Alfred Gibbs. They appeared to be better situated, in a sheltered spot nearer to the enemy, yet in little danger of being cut off. Maury wanted to be there too. So rising, he shouted, “Follow me!” and charged down the slope toward them. As he ran, the Mexicans opened up on him and before he had gone a hundred yards a ball shattered his left arm. He turned to see that he was entirely alone on that bare hillside; not one of his men had followed him. Understandably so.

  He managed to drag himself and his shattered arm to the cover of a bush, where he slumped faint with pain. As he reached the cover, a rifleman sprang from behind the only available tree and ran to the rear for help. When the help arrived directly in the form of Sergeant Robert Coleman, it proved to Maury once again what a small world it was, even in the heat of battle on a barren Mexican hillside. Coleman was an old friend, one of the immortals of Maury’s class at West Point who had been found deficient and sent away. But here he was again, and never a more welcome presence.

  Coleman began carrying his wounded former classmate from the field, and was well on his way when they encountered Major Edwin Vose Sumner, who was temporarily in command of the Mounted Rifles in the absence of their permanent commander, Persifor F. Smith. Maury briefed Sumner as best he could through his pain, and the major, a man with the voice of a bugle and nicknamed “Bull of the Woods,” hurried forward impetuously. Almost immediately he was bowled over himself by a glancing shot to the head. There were those in the army who would argue strongly that this was the safest possible place for Sumner to take a bullet and have it do the least harm. He too was carried to the rear, and as soon as he could walk he staggered over to Maury. The hit must have had a pacifying effect on the rough old dragoon’s mind, for he spoke very kindly now to the wounded lieutenant whom he had often spoken so sharply to in times past, and called him “my brave boy.”

  In the rear, a surgeon inspected Maury’s wound and shook his head sympathetically.

  “You’ve a very bad arm,” he said cheerfully. “I shall have to cut it off.”

  Maury blanched and began to stall for time. “There’s a man over there whose leg is worse than my arm,” he told the surgeon. “When you are ready for me you will find me behind that big rock down the hill.”

  When the surgeon went off, Maury made for the rock and there found yet further sign that this was a war being waged by old friends, classmates, and associates. Waiting there was Tom, Jimmy Stuart’s slave, unhappily holding his master’s horse, listening to the pounding gunfire and wishing himself elsewhere. Maury immediately mounted Stuart’s horse and set out for Plan del Rio, the army’s staging ground, where he knew there were proper accommodations for the wounded and perhaps surgeons less inclined to lop off limbs.

  By now Maury was a sorry sight, pale and faint and covered with blood. A soldier led his horse while Tom, glad enough to be leaving the battle area, walked close by with a flask of Stuart’s brandy ready in his hand. When he saw Maury about to faint he set him up with another pull.

  In the medical tent at Plan del Rio, a doctor named Cuyler fixed Maury as comfortably as he could and inspected his wound.

  “We can save that arm, Maury,” he said.

  That was what Maury longed to hear. “Do it at all risks,” he said. “I will die before I will lose it, and I assume all responsibility.”

  Back on Atalaya Hill the small beleaguered American force that had charged ’em to hell and the Mounted Rifles who had rushed to their relief were eventually extracted under the protective fire of a howitzer manned by another of Maury’s classmates, Jesse Lee Reno. But it was a little late for Maury. The battle of Cerro Gordo was over for him.30

  When night fell on Saturday the seventeenth, the Americans were in possession of Atalaya Hill. Still Santa Anna couldn’t believe, or would not admit, that Scott’s main attack would come from that direction.31

  But that was the fact, and the plan for Saturday night made Brevet Second Lieutenant Truman Seymour and every other soldier present swallow hard. The strategy called for them to drag three guns—a twenty-four-pounder siege piece and two twenty-four-pounder howitzers—up Atalaya Hill, plant them, and be ready to open fire on El Telegrafo first thing Sunday morning.32

  To Seymour, of the class of 1846 and now in the First Artillery, the magnitude of the task seemed daunting. All that iron and brass had to be dragged up that steep, rocky mountainside without a road, path, or even a landmark to indicate the direction. It was as dark as Erebus and it was raining. At about 9:00 that night, a team of five hundred soldiers, hungry and already on the ragged edge of exhaustion, picked up the draglines attached to the twenty-four-pounders and began hauling. Relief teams of another five hundred followed, to take up the lines when their strength played out.

  “Such a time of hard, grinding toil and persevering labor as then followed for six successive hours I hope never again to look upon, much less take part in,” moaned one artillery officer. “Many of our strongest men gave out from utter exhaustion.…” While fresh parties were coming up, the wheels of the heavy gun carriages were chocked, braced, and chained—every precaution taken to prevent the guns from running backward down the mountain, crushing everything in their path. Water was carried from small muddy pools half a mile away to relieve the fainting and thirsty men. Many, unable to stand, simply fell out. When the last of the three guns was dragged to the crest at about three in the morning, the track over which they had toiled was strewn with spent, sleeping men from the top to the base of the mountain.33

  Legs Smith had never been so tired in his life. His little company of sappers, miners, and pontoners had already been on the march for twenty-four hours. At about 3:00 A.M., he was so spent that he fell asleep on his feet and tumbled into a quarry hole. There he found himself staring into the glazed, glassy, open eyes of a dead Mexican soldier but inches away. He was suddenly wide awake.34

  Smith’s night, unlike the Mexican soldier’s, was not yet over. The last gun had been dragged up the hill. But now it was his company’s job to plant them. By dawn they had shoveled together enough earth from the barren soil to make a breastwork for the twenty-four-pounder. The two howitzers were left with no protection, wholly exposed to the Mexican artillery on El Telegrafo.35

  Sunday morning broke clear and beautiful, with a gentle breeze from the Gulf fluttering the Mexican ensigns across the way. Into the exhausted senses of the sleeping soldiers strewn up and down the slopes of Atalaya Hill floated the sweet, plaintive, melancholy strain of music. From El Telegrafo the Mexican reveille drifted in, gliding gently over the intervening distance from one summit to the other. Those soldiers able to rouse themselves and look saw across the way the enemy just turning out in the rosy morning light.

  The cream of the Mexican army was there: the lancers—the chivalry of Mexico—with their spikes
and streaming pennons; the Zapadores (sappers); the artillerists drawn up beside their guns; and down the mountain slope, the Mexican infantry. Far below to the left stretched the road to Jalapa and the batteries that guarded it. There too, the Mexican reveille was floating on the soft morning air and the soldiers were turning out of their grass-thatched huts. Beyond them farther still were unmasked and exposed to view all of the remaining lines of the Mexican defenses. It was a breathtaking sight.36

  None of those thousands of awakening Mexicans suspected that at that moment Truman Seymour waited on the neighboring hill with his hand gripping the lanyard of a newly planted artillery piece. None dreamed that a gun could ever be placed there. Even the weary Americans would never have believed it if they hadn’t put it there themselves. When the three guns began to roar at about 7:00 in the morning in an unwelcome counterpoint to the sweet sound of their reveille, it came as a complete and hideous surprise to the Mexicans.37

  As the cannons roared, Colonel William S. Harney rose and motioned to his attacking force, which embraced virtually everybody then on the Mexican left, including the small contingent of sappers, miners, and pontoners—and George Derby.

  Derby had been ordered to report to Twiggs on the morning of the seventeenth, and Old Orizaba had assigned him to Harney. Early in the morning on the eighteenth he had reconnoitered the enemy position, and when Harney ordered the charge, he rose with the rest. This is how he described what happened next: