The Man Who Saved the Union

by H. W. Brands

  The Americans raced forward, straight into a murderous fire from Mexican artillery and muskets. To Grant’s left and right his comrades fell by the dozen. Realizing their mistake, or rather their commander’s mistake, the regiment retreated to the east of the Walnut Springs road, where the terrain offered momentary shelter.

  Grant was one of the few Americans on horseback, and a superior commandeered his mount. Grant looked about until he saw a subordinate on horseback and claimed that man’s animal in turn. He and the others sought better cover in a canebrake northeast of the city. There he learned that the officer who had taken his horse had been killed.

  The other prongs of the attack went better. American troops gained the eastern edge of the city and climbed to the roofs of some of the houses there. From this elevation they fired down into the Mexican batteries and drove the gunners out. They turned the Mexican guns against other Mexican positions and began advancing toward the plaza. West of the city the Americans severed the Saltillo road and captured fortifications nearby. By the end of the day Monterrey had been cut off from the outside world.

  The Americans and Mexicans spent the next twenty-four hours consolidating their positions. For the Americans this meant resupplying forward troops and reinforcing the positions they had taken. For the Mexicans it entailed abandoning the least tenable of the buildings and streets they still held.

  What the Americans hoped would be the final thrust began on the morning of the third day. Grant joined the forces fighting in from the east, against stiff resistance. The Mexicans had mounted artillery on rooftops from which they poured punishing fire upon American troops trying to advance along the streets. The Third Regiment lost nearly half its officers; Grant’s Fourth fared only a little better, although Grant himself escaped injury.

  The Fourth had almost reached the central plaza when the ammunition ran short. The commanding officer asked for a volunteer to return to the rear with a message for help. Grant tightened the girth on his saddle and offered to go. “I adjusted myself on the side of my horse furthest from the enemy,” he explained afterward, “and with only one foot holding to the cantle of the saddle, and an arm over the neck of the horse exposed, I started at full run.” He was most vulnerable at the intersections of streets, where dozens of Mexicans had clear shots at him. Yet he dashed across at such a gallop that he was behind the next row of buildings before most of the defenders even saw him. He completed his ride winded but unscathed, only to learn that his effort had been wasted. Before the needed ammunition could be sent forward his comrades had been compelled to fall back.

  The Americans on the western side of the city had better luck. Their commander, General William Worth, ordered them to advance not through the streets but through the houses. The Americans would enter a house, drive out its defenders, and then with picks and axes cut holes through the wall into the adjoining house. They would hurl grenades through the holes, forcing the Mexican troops backward long enough to climb through and secure that dwelling. Slowly but inexorably they chopped and blasted their way to within a short distance of the plaza.

  At the end of the third day the Mexican commander, Pedro de Ampudia, concluded that his position was hopeless. He dispatched an emissary to Taylor to negotiate a truce. Taylor, with the momentum of battle on his side, initially demanded a surrender of the city and of Ampudia’s army. Ampudia rejected the demand, pointing out that Taylor might capture the city and the army by force but only at great additional cost to the Americans. He offered to surrender the city but not his army, which would withdraw across the mountains. Taylor, not wishing to lose any more men, accepted the compromise.

  The Mexicans evacuated the city the next day. Grant and the other Americans for the first time got a good look at their foes. “Many of the prisoners”—they weren’t actually prisoners but seemed so to Grant—“were cavalry, armed with lances, and mounted on miserable little half-starved horses that did not look as if they could carry their riders out of town. The men looked in but little better condition. I thought of how little interest the men before me had in the results of the war, and how little knowledge they had of ‘what it was all about.’ ”

  5

  ONE OF GRANT’S COMRADES AT MONTERREY WAS THOMAS HAMER, the Ohio congressman who had nominated him for West Point. Hamer had volunteered for service upon the outbreak of the war, and he joined Taylor’s army at Camargo. He was a generation older than Grant and a major to Grant’s second lieutenant, but the two Ohioans spent spare time together, as Hamer observed in a letter home. “I have found in Lieutenant Grant a most remarkable and valuable young soldier,” Hamer wrote. “I anticipate for him a brilliant future, if he should have an opportunity to display his powers when they mature. Young as he is, he has been of great value and service to me. Today, after being freed from the duty of wrestling with the problem of reducing a train of refractory mules and their drivers to submissive order, we rode into the country several miles, and taking our position upon an elevated mound, he explained to me many army evolutions; and, supposing ourselves to be generals commanding opposing armies, and a battle to be in progress, he explained suppositious maneuvers of the opposing forces in a most instructive way; and when I thought his imaginary force had my army routed, he suddenly suggested a strategic move for my forces which crowned them with triumphant victory, and himself with defeat, and he ended by gracefully offering to surrender his sword! Of course, Lieutenant Grant is too young for command, but his capacity for future military usefulness is undoubted.”

  Hamer survived the battle of Monterrey only to fall ill afterward. He died within days, leaving Grant to console the widow. “He died as a soldier dies,” Grant wrote, “without fear and without a murmur. His regret was that, if death must come, it should not come to him on the field of battle. He was mindful the last of all of those at home who would most suffer.… Personally, his death is a loss to me which no words can express.”

  Years later Grant mused on how things might have happened had Hamer lived. “Hamer was one of the ablest men Ohio ever produced,” Grant wrote in his memoirs. “I have always believed that had his life been spared, he would have been President of the United States during the term filled by President Pierce. Had Hamer filled that office his partiality for me was such, there is but little doubt that I should have been appointed to one of the staff corps of the army—the Pay Department probably—and would therefore now be preparing to retire. Neither of these speculations is unreasonable, and they are mentioned to show how little men control their own destiny.”

  The capture of Monterrey made Taylor a national hero, causing Polk to recalculate the politics of the war. Perhaps Taylor, not Scott, was the larger threat to a Democratic succession. Polk talked himself into discounting Taylor’s accomplishment—he complained that Taylor shouldn’t have let Ampudia’s army march away—and maligning Taylor’s motives. “He is evidently a weak man and has been made giddy with the idea of the Presidency,” Polk wrote in his diary. “He is a narrow minded, bigoted partisan, without resources and wholly unqualified for the command he holds.” To undermine Taylor, Polk commenced to favor Scott. He endorsed Scott’s plan for an invasion of central Mexico and let Scott strip Taylor of some of his victorious troops.

  Grant’s regiment was one of those reassigned to Scott. Grant admired Taylor and was proud of what the army had achieved under the general, but he was happy to be heading to what promised to be the decisive theater of the war. The excitement of the victory at Monterrey had been followed by the tedium of camp life. “Here we are, playing war a thousand miles from home, making show and parades but not doing enough fighting to much amuse either the enemy or ourselves, consuming rations enough to have carried us to the capital of Mexico,” Grant wrote from Monterrey in December 1846. “If our mission is to occupy the enemy’s territory, it is a success, for we are inertly here; but if to conquer, it seems to some of us who have no control that we might as well be performing the job with greater energy. While the authoritie
s at Washington are at sea as to who shall lead the army, the enterprise ought and could be accomplished.” In his memoirs Grant would say he had doubted the justice of America’s policy toward Mexico from the moment of the annexation of Texas. “I was bitterly opposed to the measure,” he wrote, “and to this day regard the war which resulted as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.” But at the end of 1846 he wasn’t writing so broadly. He simply told Julia he wished the war had never started. “I begin to think like one of our captains who said that if he was the Government he would whip Mexico until they would be content to take the Sabine for their boundary and he would make them take the Texans with it.”

  The reassignment to Scott’s army injected new life into the regiment. “As soon as Gen. Scott took command, everything was changed,” Grant told Julia in early 1847. The officers cracked the men into trim, and central Mexico beckoned even as it threatened. “At Vera Cruz we will probably have a desperate fight but our little Army goes so much better prepared than it has ever done before that there is no doubt as to the result. I fear, though, that there is so much pride in the Mexican character that they will not give up even if we should take every town in the Republic.”

  The regiment marched from Monterrey to the mouth of the Rio Grande, where they awaited naval transport to Vera Cruz. The ships arrived after several weeks, and Grant boarded the North Carolina with four hundred of his fellows. The voyage was rough. “A great part of the time we have had a very heavy sea and often you would think the ship would capsize,” he told Julia. Grant discovered to his relief that he wasn’t prone to seasickness. Meanwhile, though, several soldiers displayed the unmistakable symptoms of smallpox, putting the rest of the army on edge and reminding everyone of the other diseases endemic to the coast. “We will have to get out of this part of Mexico soon or we will be caught by the yellow fever, which I am ten to one more afraid of than the Mexicans,” Grant wrote Julia.

  The American fleet consisted of sailing ships primarily, but one vessel was a steam-powered dispatch boat driven by a propeller. Most of the men had seen river steamers pushed by paddle wheels, and a smaller number had seen ocean steamers, similarly driven by paddle wheels, which made a great commotion with their noise and splashing. The propeller boat overtook the sailing ships with little noise, no splashing and barely a wake. “Why, the thing looks as if it was propelled by the force of circumstances,” one of Grant’s fellow officers remarked.

  The landing at Vera Cruz, via surfboats ordered built by Scott for the purpose, went smoothly. The Mexicans might easily have disrupted the operation, but they contented themselves with desultory artillery fire from a fort above the beach. One shot decapitated an American major, but the others fell short.

  Vera Cruz frowned formidably upon the invaders. “The city is a solid, compact place, the houses generally built of stone and two or three stories high,” Grant recorded. “The whole place is enclosed by a stone wall of about fifteen feet in height and four or five feet thick.”

  Scott decided not to waste American lives assaulting the town. Instead he besieged it, constructing a cordon from the shore north of the town through sand hills on the west and back to the shore at the south. Scott had his engineers build artillery emplacements and then issued an ultimatum to the Mexican commander, Juan Morales, to surrender the city. When Morales refused, Scott ordered the American gunners to open fire.

  For three days the Americans rained solid shot and explosive shells upon the city. On the afternoon of the third day foreign consuls in the city asked Scott to suspend the bombardment long enough for foreigners, women and children to be evacuated. Scott refused, saying they could have left upon his ultimatum to Morales. The consuls thereupon appealed to Morales to surrender the town. He agreed, on the condition that his men be paroled and the rights of civilians in the city be respected by the conquerors. Scott granted the condition and took the city.

  The victory came none too soon, from the American perspective. Some of Scott’s lieutenants, fearing a long siege, had urged him to order an assault. Against the larger losses an assault would entail they balanced the likelihood of an epidemic among the troops should they remain on the coast when the fever season arrived. The Americans all knew of the vomito—yellow fever—and they not unreasonably dreaded it. Scott guessed that the siege wouldn’t last long, and he was gratified when events proved him correct.

  The road inland from the coast was one of the oldest and most storied routes in the history of the Americas. It was the path Cortez had followed in the early sixteenth century on his way to defeating the Aztecs and seizing Mexico for Spain, and it had been an artery for commerce ever since. Grant was impressed. “From Vera Cruz to this place the road is one of the best, and one that probably cost more labor than any other in the world,” he wrote Julia from a point a hundred miles inland. The road climbed steadily, carrying the Americans from the torrid coast to a perennially temperate region where elevation offset the strength of the tropic sun. “The climate is said to be the best in the world,” Grant noted, and in April he was willing to credit the claim. “It is never so warm as to be uncomfortable nor so cold as to make a fire necessary.”

  The approach of the Americans compelled Mexico’s ablest commander to try to cut them off. Antonio López de Santa Anna had been in and out of office more times than most of his compatriots could remember. He was living in exile in Cuba at the outbreak of fighting on the Rio Grande in 1846, but with a promise to negotiate an end to the hostilities, he persuaded the Polk administration to allow him through the American blockade of the Mexican coast. He forgot his promise on reaching Mexican soil and rallied the army and people against the invaders. He hurried north from the capital to challenge Zachary Taylor, who, refusing to be Polk’s pawn and Scott’s coat holder, had advanced from Monterrey toward central Mexico.

  The two armies met at Buena Vista, just south of Saltillo. Santa Anna’s force outnumbered Taylor’s, but Taylor had the better position, with mountains guarding his flanks. In two days of bloody fighting Taylor’s men inflicted heavy casualties on the Mexicans, sufficient to make Santa Anna withdraw but not so grievous as to allow Taylor to continue south. Taylor treated the outcome as a triumph and headed back to the United States to accept the Whig nomination for president.

  Santa Anna returned south to fend off Scott, who, as luck would have it, was approaching Santa Anna’s birthplace and hometown, Jalapa, on the road from Vera Cruz to Mexico City. Grant looked forward to the collision, albeit not as much as he might have. After tasting battle on the Rio Grande and at Monterrey, he felt confined by his quartermaster’s duties. He wrote to his commanding officer requesting permission to relinquish his assignment. “I must and will accompany my regiment in battle,” Grant insisted. He threatened to do so even if he was not replaced as quartermaster. He realized he would be leaving the stores in his care unguarded, but he had an answer, of sorts. “I am amenable to court-martial should any loss occur to the public property in my charge by reason of my absence while in action.”

  Grant’s superior appreciated the sentiment but was unimpressed by the logic. “Lieutenant Grant is informed that the duty of Quartermaster and Commissary is an assigned duty, and not an office that can be resigned,” he responded. “However valuable his services might be, and certainly would be, in line, his services in his present assigned duties cannot be dispensed with.”

  Consequently Grant had to watch while others got the thrilling tasks. Santa Anna selected to make his stand in a narrow pass by the village of Cerro Gordo, near a mountain of the same name just west of Jalapa. The Mexicans blocked the road upon which the Americans were approaching and placed artillery on the surrounding elevations. To attack Santa Anna head-on would have been suicidal.

  So Scott sent scouts behind the ridges the Mexicans controlled. Robert
E. Lee, a handsome captain of engineers from Virginia who had graduated from West Point fourteen years before Grant and many places higher in his class, and who was widely deemed the most promising officer in the army, led a reconnaissance north of Santa Anna’s position. Lee ventured far into the territory held by the Mexicans and at one point found himself alone and surrounded by the enemy near a spring to which they regularly resorted. Lee ducked under a fallen log to escape detection, only to have some of the Mexicans approach and sit on the very log under which he was hiding. He held his breath, and held his spot till darkness allowed him to escape.

  He returned to the American camp with word that it might be possible for an American column to slip behind the ridges, improve the route he had discovered and attack the Mexican positions from the rear. This intelligence became the basis for Scott’s battle plan and for the battle itself. “Perhaps there was not a battle of the Mexican war, or of any other, where orders issued before an engagement were nearer being a correct report of what afterwards took place,” Grant wrote admiringly many years and battles later. “Under the supervision of the engineers, roadways had been opened over chasms to the right where the walls were so steep that men could barely climb them. Animals could not. These had been opened under cover of night, without attracting the notice of the enemy. The engineers, who had directed the opening, led the way and the troops followed. Artillery was let down the steep slopes by hand, the men engaged attaching a strong rope to the rear axle and letting the guns down, a piece at a time, while the men at the ropes kept their ground on top, paying out gradually, while a few at the front directed the course of the piece. In like manner the guns were drawn by hand up the opposite slopes.” The guns were placed behind the Mexican entrenchments, which were undefended on that side.