Trying desperately to save some sort of face, the Mexican commander agreed to hand over the city to the Americans, but he insisted that he and his army be permitted to leave with all their arms and government property. When Taylor refused and demanded unconditional surrender, Ampudia resorted to a trick. He had his negotiator falsely inform Taylor that authorities in Washington and Mexico City had formed a peace commission and that at that very moment peace between the counties was at hand. Taylor at first refused but Ampudia nursed this blatant lie throughout the day until Taylor, believing the Mexican officer would be good to his word, finally agreed that the Mexican army could march out of the city with just so many horses, so many artillery pieces, etc., not to be molested by U.S. forces for eight weeks. Thus, instead of a complete victory, Old Rough and Ready fell victim to a cheap con.
When news of these developments reached Washington, President Polk was furious. Grateful as he was for Taylor’s victory and the capture of such an important Mexican capital, he condemned the armistice and release of Ampudia’s army “which permitted them to retire from Monterrey … not as prisoners of war on parole, but at perfect liberty to reorganize and renew the war at their own time and place, and [giving] them eight weeks to effect this object.” The president went on to inform his diary that Taylor had “committed a great error” and had “violated his express orders.” As to Ampudia’s claim of a peace commission, it was clear Taylor had allowed himself to be deceived, the president said. It was the opinion of Polk and his cabinet that after making Ampudia’s army prisoners, Old Rough and Ready should have “pressed on into the country,” and that if he had done so “it would probably have ended the war with Mexico.”
Such was the judgment in the halls of the White House, but a ruder reality lay two thousand miles away where Taylor had lost a thousand men in the fighting, and before further offensive operations could be mounted the general felt the army badly needed rebuilding and resupply, which would take no fewer than six weeks. Polk and his cabinet sent orders for Taylor to call off the armistice, but by the time they arrived the truce period had run out anyway.
Meantime, much to Polk’s annoyance and chagrin, the press and public were creating a great hero out of Zachary Taylor for the Monterrey victory. There was a presidential election coming up in 1848, and even though Polk had vowed to serve only one term, it did not sit well with his Democratic convictions that a Whig might take his place—most especially if he did so because of a war that Polk himself had promoted. To add insult to injury, General Taylor had somehow gotten wind of his newfound political status and began writing letters of inquiry to friends—and to acquaintances who were apparently not such close friends—who saw to it that the letters were published. Polk was infuriated. It was an unflattering measure of the president’s personality that he became petty and vindictive in political matters but it was sometimes said that politics was Polk’s “religion,” and he was a stern master when it came to heresies.
During this time the president and cabinet had been contemplating the direction the war should take. Taylor, who was on the scene, had communicated his opinion that it would be a logistic impossibility for an American army to plunge south a thousand miles into enemy territory to take the Mexican capital, and that after conquering the northern provinces a strategy of “masterly inactivity”—one of Calhoun’s expressions—would be the best and cheapest prospect to ultimately force Mexico to the bargaining table.
For Polk, such a policy had become increasingly unviable; the longer the war went on, the louder the Whigs squealed, and the press found fault, and the people grew restless and lost interest, especially if hardships were involved. It was a fairly axiomatic flaw of the political system that Tocqueville had pointed out a decade earlier in Democracy in America, his remarkable study of the new American institution. Unlike monarchies or dictatorships, the Frenchman wrote, democracy as a political system works well enough, “except in storms”—i.e., wars—where there is danger of the electorate losing its passion prematurely. It was a prescient observation that has generally borne itself out over time.
While Polk fretted over this prickly issue, he was paid a visit by his close colleague Senator Thomas Hart Benton, committed Democrat, father-in-law of John C. Frémont, often known by the military title Colonel.e
Benton was no more satisfied with the notion of “masterly inactivity” than Polk and used his considerable powers of persuasion to push for an amphibious landing at Veracruz on the Gulf Coast, which was more than two hundred miles from the Mexican capital. In fact, this option had been discussed at some length by the war planners but had not been exercised in order to see if the Mexicans might capitulate under the present strategy.
Benton insisted that it was both desirable and necessary in order to win the war quickly; otherwise, he warned, the conflict could go on interminably and sink the Democrats in the elections. Veracruz, however, was a risky, even dangerous, approach. It would demand an army of at least 12,000 men initially, which would mean another politically unpopular call for volunteers. It would require the quick capture of the port city, defended by its notorious fortress the Castle, and before the Mexicans could rush an army there to relieve it. It would then involve marching and supplying this large army to Mexico City through broken, often mountainous terrain that was ideal for defense. If the Mexicans somehow marshaled enough forces, the expedition could become a great calamity.
Who should command this force? asked Polk. Taylor’s name came up and Polk dismissed him as “not a man of capacity enough.” Benton agreed.f Winfield Scott’s name arose and Benton nixed that by saying he had “no confidence in him,” causing the president again to ask, “Who then?” At which point, in an act almost breathtaking in its megalomania, Old Bullion Benton drew up and suggested … himself!
There were a number of levels in this bizarre scenario, not the least of which was that Benton was a Democrat, while Generals Scott and Taylor were Whigs,g and in those times the man who commanded the victorious U.S. Army in a war was almost a shoe-in to become the next American president. This alone was enough to soothe whatever apprehensions Polk might have felt over Benton’s startling presumption and total lack of qualifications. The way Benton explained it, Congress needed to create a new military rank of lieutenant general. This highest-ranked officer would be granted the authority to make peace with Mexico, he said, but not necessarily command combat troops in the field—in effect a kind of supernumerary man-on-the-scene who would let the generals do the fighting but step in whenever disputes needed settling or diplomatic decisions were called for. And also he would be dubbed commander in chief. It was a brilliant political ploy, if it worked.
But it did not work. Many in Congress saw straight through the thing and stalled, and after Polk and Benton hemmed and hawed for a few days it was decided to give command of the Veracruz expedition to Winfield Scott, a Whig—but not nearly so offensive as Zachary Taylor had become—and also an officer of proven field merit.
For months, Scott had made various overtures to get himself out of the doghouse with Polk and Marcy, but to no avail. He offered up a tactical sketch for a bombardment and amphibious landing at Veracruz, and on another occasion he suggested that he take command of newly recruited volunteers headed to Texas, but these ideas were coldly turned away by the secretary of war. But then, according to Scott, Polk summoned him to his office every day for nearly a week, tantalizing him with discussions of war plans but never hinting that he would be chosen to lead. When Polk at last called Scott in for the final meeting, he again toyed with him, cautioning him on the importance of victory in the Veracruz expedition—as if the commanding general of the army didn’t understand this already—and ascertaining whether Scott had “the proper confidence in the administration.” When Polk finally informed Scott that the command was his, “he was so much affected that he almost shed tears,” the president told his diary, “and said he would show his gratitude by his conduct when he got to the field.” The gen
eral departed, Polk wrote, “the most delighted man I have seen for a long time.”
However, on the night of December 14, well after Scott had departed, Polk held a conference with several prominent members of Congress in which he pleaded with them to create a rank of lieutenant general for Senator Thomas Hart Benton, who would supersede Scott. Unfortunately for the president, the congressmen said it was “impossible,” not only because Benton himself had made too many enemies but also because both Scott and Taylor had friends who would be against it, and the Calhoun faction would also be against it, in order to prevent Benton from becoming president. All this was still unbeknownst to Winfield Scott until he read it—or some version of it—in a newspaper as he boarded a steamer in New Orleans on his way to the war, after which, considering all the “gratitude” he had shown Polk, “his indignation was intense.” In his memoirs Scott lamented, “a grosser abuse of human confidence is nowhere recorded.”
In the coming days there was further acrimony between General Taylor and the administration, and Polk in particular, who seemed to have taken on a positive hatred of the man. “I am now satisfied he is a narrow-minded, bigoted partisan, without resources and wholly unqualified for the command he holds,” Polk declared. Whether that had anything to do with it or not, Taylor was soon deprived of three-quarters of his army, including all of his regulars, who were to report to Matamoros for inclusion in Winfield Scott’s Veracruz expedition. This of course left Taylor dangerously shorthanded, and so when General Wool’s 3,400-man presence was made known Taylor ordered him to abandon the Chihuahua expedition and join him near Monterrey.
It was a good thing, too, because Santa Anna, who had by this time raised a 20,000-man army, had just intercepted a letter to General Taylor from General Scott revealing Taylor’s glaring manpower weakness, and the Mexican commander now resolved to destroy him.
This in turn created a glaring weakness for Colonel Alexander Doniphan and his mounted regiment of one thousand Missourians who, unaware of all these developments, were at the moment struggling down the Santa Fe Trail to join up with General Wool so as to conquer Chihuahua.
* Polk does not tell us in his diary or elsewhere if alarms went off at the notion of Santa Anna ruling Mexico once more. After all, Santa Anna had been directly responsible for the massacre of hundreds of Texan prisoners at Goliad and the pitiless slaughter at the Alamo.
† Alexander Slidell Mackenzie was the Spanish-speaking brother of John Slidell, whom Polk had appointed U.S. minister to Mexico to try to smooth things over before hostilities broke out.
‡ In fact, Santa Anna had frequently used the excuse of “imminent national danger”—including the invasion of Mexico by the French—to drum up support for his many returns to power. The deeper the Americans drove into Mexico, the easier it would be for Santa Anna to regain power.
§ Eisenhower wonderfully described Santa Anna as “a master of Mexican mob psychology,” and his book is easily the most insightful about that conflict.
‖ An estimated 1,500 American soldiers died at Camp Camargo—more than 10 percent of the army—and when these figures became known in the United States naturally it produced a reaction of anger, anxiety, and revulsion.
a Since his wagons had not come up, Taylor arranged to purchase one thousand mules from the nearest town and then hired one thousand Mexican mule drivers to pack and lead them.
b It is likely that Worth considered the distance (about ten miles) from Walnut Springs to the objective and timed his movement so an attack could be made early next morning, when the men would not be tired from the march and would have all day to fight for the hills.
c Once more proving what military commanders were just beginning to realize: cavalry was no longer a match for modern infantry trained to fire two or three shots a minute from their rifles, and especially not against fast-firing batteries of “flying artillery” employed by the U.S. Army.
d As it turned out, the man who led the flight from the Tannery was its commander, who had also fled at the Battle of Resaca de la Palma.
e Benton, a lawyer and planter, had held that rank in the Tennessee militia under Andrew Jackson during the War of 1812. He did not, however, see combat during Jackson’s famous victory over the British army at the Battle of New Orleans. Instead, he had been detailed to duty as liaison between Jackson’s forces and the military authorities in Washington.
f Everyone seemed to have political spies, and Polk certainly had his. “From all the information I have received,” he told his diary, Taylor was “unfit” for the command, “had not mind enough,” and “was a bitter political partisan and had no sympathies with the administration.” As well, Polk insisted that Taylor was controlled for political purposes by the Whigs, including the editor of the New Orleans Picayune.
g Taylor also seemed to have spies of his own and had spoken of “Polk, Marcy, and Co. as willing to discredit and ruin” him.
CHAPTER TEN
Dancing on Air
After five weeks in Santa Fe, General Kearny felt comfortable enough to resume his march to California, even though rumors persisted that Armijo had raised a large army of reconquest. Fort Marcy was complete, its artillery fan bristling above the city, fully armed against invaders. Kearny’s Code had been laid down and, apparently, was being followed. The former Mexican citizens appeared pacified. Accordingly, at two p.m. on September 5, 1846, Kearny marched out of Santa Fe, south following the Rio Grande for a hundred miles, before dropping down to the west along the Gila and into the unknown.
Riding with him were three hundred handpicked cavalrymen of the First U.S. Dragoons Regiment, a small detachment of field artillery, half a dozen mountain men as scouts, and Captain Emory’s party of topographical engineers, consisting of fourteen people, including two “servants”* for Emory and his assistant Lieutenant Warner.
Following closely behind Kearny, but by a different route, would be the five hundred men of the Mormon Battalion, which was to be commanded by Captain Philip St. George Cooke after the death of Colonel James Allen. The battalion was expected in Santa Fe any day.
Left behind was Colonel Doniphan’s thousand-man mounted regiment of Missouri Volunteers, who were waiting to be relieved by a newly raised Second Regiment of Mounted Missouri Volunteer Cavalry, which was also expected any day, coming down the Santa Fe Trail. Colonel Sterling Price, a thirty-seven-year-old St. Louis lawyer, congressman, and friend of the president, who had resigned his seat in Congress to fight in the war, commanded it. Once Price’s regiment arrived, Doniphan could begin his march down the Rio Grande into Chihuahua, where ostensibly he would join up with General Wool and conquer the province.
Meantime, Kearny had left Colonel Doniphan in overall charge of all the military forces at Santa Fe and appointed Charles Bent, of Bent’s Fort renown, as governor of the New Mexico Territory, which would be administered from the pueblo town of Taos, where Bent had a home.
When Kearny’s little army reached the rude pueblo of Albuquerque, four days and seventy-five miles from Santa Fe, they crossed to the western side of the shallow Rio Grande and camped “on a sandy plain, destitute of woods, and with little grass.” More than one diarist remarked on the “myriads of sand crane, geese, and brant.” The weather had turned mild, a sort of Indian summer, when it could be quite cold at that altitude (7,000 feet) at that time of year. They used the occasion to trade their tired, thin mules to the townspeople for better stock. Emory reported, “The more liberal were our offers for the animals, the more exorbitant were the demands of the Mexicans.”
When it was ascertained that General Armijo’s wife had fled to the city, Kearny directed Captain Emory “to call and see Madam Armijo, and ask her for the map of New Mexico, belonging to her husband, which she had in her possession.”†
Emory said, “I found her ladyship sitting on an ottoman, smoking, after the fashion of her country-women. She said she had searched for the map without success; if not in Santa Fe, her husband must have taken it
with him to Chihuahua.”
With that, Kearny’s caravan moved on, soon arriving in Indian territory, a sobering experience. While the citizens of Santa Fe had appeared pacified with their abrupt change of government, the Indians had used the occasion to run amok. Not only were different tribes attacking Mexicans, they also began fighting with one another. The warlike Navajos in particular launched a fresh rampage of thieving, murder, and kidnapping throughout the province, presumably on the notion that the Mexicans would be unsettled by Kearny’s arrival and thus more vulnerable to raids. On October 2, for example, a large band had fallen upon a Mexican village near the town of Socorro, “killing seven or eight men, taking as many women and children, and driving off 10,000 head of sheep, cattle and mules,” according to a report by General Kearny, who arrived at the scene shortly after the crime. Two U.S soldiers detailed to track stolen livestock were eventually found shot through with nearly a dozen arrows, their skulls crushed by large rocks and their bodies otherwise mutilated.
Nevertheless, Captain Emory was in an exploratory mood and rode away from the line of march out of topographical curiosity, reporting, among other things, of finding a strange, empty land filled with “Obi-one canescens” (ragweed).
“I saw here the hiding places of the Navajoes,” he wrote, “who, when few in numbers, wait for the night to descend upon the valley and carry off the fruit, sheep, women, and children of the Mexicans. When in numbers they come in daytime and levy their dues.”
Kearny was outraged by the barbarous turn of affairs. He was certainly no stranger to Indian violence, having seen a life’s worth on the plains, yet for the most part it had been Indian against Indian. Now it was Indian against “civilization,” so to speak, which to Kearny’s and practically every other white American’s mind meant that civilization must eradicate savagery.
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