Clouds of Glory

by Michael Korda

  The fleet was unable to get away from the Lobos Islands until March 3, and Scott was still short of supplies and had only half the surfboats he required for the landing. This time the weather was favorable, and on March 5 Lee had his first sight of Vera Cruz, and the formidable island fortress of San Juan de Ulúa that guarded the approach to the city from the sea. The next day Lee accompanied Scott on a small steamer, the Petrita,* to examine the beaches to the south of the city. The Petrita came so close to the fortress that the Mexicans opened fire on it—the first time in the twenty-two years of his army career, as Freeman points out, that Lee had ever been under fire. Scott surveyed the beaches and quickly decided to accept Commodore David Conner’s advice that the best choice was Collado Beach, less than three miles south of Vera Cruz, which was somewhat sheltered by two small islands and a coral reef just offshore, and consisted of “a gently curving strip of sand” with “a line of sand hills about 150 yards inland.” Although he could see no evidence of Mexican preparations from the Petrita, Scott anticipated that the landings would be opposed, that the Mexicans would shelter their artillery behind the sand hills (or sand dunes, to describe them more accurately), and that the first wave of soldiers and Marines would have to rush and carry the dunes.

  The landing was scheduled for March 8, but the threat of bad weather, which failed to materialize, obliged Scott to postpone it to March 9, a day of light breezes and bright sunshine. March 9 was also, as it happened, “the thirty-third anniversary of the Commanding General’s promotion to the rank of general,” apparently a propitious coincidence, since the first wave of 2,595 men went ashore without problems or incidents in the early afternoon, supported by “schooner-gunboats,” close inshore in case artillery was needed, thus demonstrating the value of Scott’s flatboats and his attention to detail. Lee witnessed the landing from the quarterdeck of the Massachusetts, standing beside Scott, and saw “the whole fleet of transports—some eighty vessels, in the presence of many foreign ships of war, flanked by two naval steamers and five gunboats to cover the movement.” The men quickly boarded the sixty-seven flatboats, and landed “in the exact order prescribed . . . without the loss of a boat or a man,” and virtually without opposition except for a few shells fired from too great a range to be dangerous. On board the ships—even two warships of the Royal Navy were present, attending as observers—crews lined the decks and rigging cheering, and bands played. By the next day, when General Scott landed with his staff, he had about 12,000 men onshore, more than enough to seal Vera Cruz off from the landward side, while the navy blockaded it from the sea. Though Lee could have had no premonition of it, he was about to be transformed from a resourceful military engineer into a daring soldier and a hero.

  Immediately after landing, General Scott made a “reconnaissance” of the wall and fortifications surrounding Vera Cruz on the landward side, accompanied by what he referred to as “his inner cabinet,” which included Lee. One look was enough to confirm to a professional soldier like Scott that the walled city would not be an easy place to take by attack. The fortifications of Vera Cruz “were considered . . . to be among the strongest, if not the strongest, in North America.” The wall around the city’s landward side was fifteen feet high, built of solid coral or granite blocks, with nine “bastions” (protruding fortresses that could give covering fire to each other and to the “curtain” or wall), built into it at intervals, “each mounting from eight to ten guns.” The Mexicans had lavished a good deal of money and energy on strengthening the city’s defenses and those of the formidable fortress of San Juan de Ulúa that guarded it from the sea, since the capture of Vera Cruz by a French expeditionary force in 1838. Scott immediately called his staff together and presented them with his opinion. “A death-bed discussion,” he wrote, “could hardly have been more solemn.” He saw only two choices: either storming the city and then pushing on as fast as possible into the interior before the yellow fever season set in, or besieging the city. Despite the amount of time a siege would take, Scott himself favored “regular siege approaches,” since he feared that taking the city by means of storming parties might cost him as many as 2,000 or 3,000 men, leaving him with not enough troops to march inland and take Mexico City, and also since he wished to limit the “slaughter . . . of non-combatants” that would inevitably accompany an assault. He solicited the opinion of all his officers, including Lee, and to a man all of them expressed a preference for a siege.

  “All sieges are much alike,” Scott remarked, and he was right. By the mid-nineteenth century formal sieges were becoming rare—although there are exceptions: Grant would besiege Vicksburg in 1863, and the Prussians would besiege Paris in 1870—but the rules of siege warfare were ancient, rigid, and well understood. The attacker must first “invest” the city by digging trench lines around it, effectively isolating it; dig in his artillery; then summon the military commander to surrender the city before opening fire. As “Scott’s protégé, prized particularly for his uncanny eye for terrain,” Lee was largely responsible for directing the digging of five miles of trenches, extending them closer and closer to the walls, and for the all-important task of siting the artillery and digging it in. Scott raged because the War Department had refused to provide him with “a siege train” of “very heavy artillery,” but he had enough heavy mortars in place by March 22 to summon “the Mexican commander to surrender.”

  General Juan Morales promptly appeared in full uniform under a flag of truce and, after a colorful and formal military ceremony of the kind that was so dear to General Scott’s heart, politely declined to surrender the city. The American artillery then opened fire. By nightfall, the effect was spectacular, “a lurid glare, illuminating for one instant the white domes and grim fortresses of Vera Cruz,” as each mortar shell landed with a thunderous explosion, but because of their high trajectory and relatively small size the mortars did not lend themselves to battering down thick stone walls and fortresses. Lee had worked hard to accomplish something of a miracle in twelve days, particularly since many of the mules had died during the voyage and the heavy mortars therefore had to be manhandled across the beach and the dunes by the troops. The Mexicans had made full use of dense hedges of chaparral and spiny local cactus, as well as of trous de loup (the language of siege warfare was still French, in which most of the textbooks on war were written), conical holes with a sharpened stake at the bottom, intended to impale anybody who fell in. In addition, the besieging Americans suffered from thirst, prodigious numbers of sand fleas, high winds, and dense sandstorms. Lee himself carried out reconnaissance by night so close to the walls that he set the dogs behind them to barking, and was shot at one night by a sentry as he returned to the American lines. The bullet passed so close that it singed his uniform—an unexpected baptême du feu, which he passed with flying colors.

  Reluctant as Scott was to cede a role in the taking of Vera Cruz to the navy, he was aware that with the artillery at his disposal he had no chance of making a substantial breach in the walls. He swallowed his pride and requested six heavy guns from the warships. This posed a huge challenge for Lee, who had to pick a site for the naval battery close to the city wall, “but hidden from its view by a thick growth of chaparral.” Lee built the battery “on a sand ridge about seven hundred yards from Fort Santa Barbara, near the middle of the American line,” managing to construct it so that the work was screened from the Mexicans. Each of the eight-inch naval guns weighed over three tons, and had to be lowered from the warship’s deck into a cutter and rowed to the beach, then hauled through the dunes to the battery by the sailors. Lee found the sailors as reluctant to dig and fill sandbags as the soldiers were, but he persisted, and by the morning of March 24 he had all six naval guns dug in and ready to fire, one of them under the command of his brother Sydney Smith Lee. As the sailors began to chop down the chaparral and sponge the sand out of their guns, the Mexicans finally noticed the naval battery and opened fire on it. Lee ignored the shells falling around him and direc
ted the return fire, apparently “unconscious of personal danger.” His only concern was for his brother. “No matter where I turned,” he wrote later, “my eyes reverted to [him]. . . . I am at a loss what I should have done had he been cut down before me. . . . He preserved his usual cheerfulness, and I could see his white teeth through all the smoke and din of fire.” (In the days before smokeless powder was invented massed musket fire was accompanied by billowing clouds of thick, dark smoke illuminated from within by orange flashes as weapons were fired. The smoke often made it impossible to tell friend from foe—this was one of the many reasons why British soldiers continued to wear the red coat to the end of the nineteenth century.) The hellish exchange of fire lasted until sunset and resumed early the next day, by which time “a thirty-six-foot breach had been blasted through the city’s walls, and its fortresses ‘drilled like a colander.’” On March 25 the city’s European consuls appealed for “a partial truce to be enable women, children, and neutrals to be evacuated,” a sign that enemy’s resolve was weakening, but Scott replied “that no truce could be allowed except on the application of the governor (General Morales), and that with a view to surrender,” and the next day General J. J. Landero—General Morales having prudently “feigned sickness” and turned over command to his deputy—asked formally for terms of surrender. On March 27 Vera Cruz was occupied by the U.S. Army. The garrison of over 4,000 men marched out, laid down their arms, and were sent home as prisoners of war on parole (Scott had no means of feeding them). In just eighteen days Mexico’s “principal port of foreign commerce” had been taken, along with more than 400 guns, with the loss of only sixty-four American officers and men.

  Scott praised Lee in his dispatch home for his work not just as an engineer, but as an aide. Even more important, Lee had distinguished himself among his fellow officers by the two qualities that count most in war: courage and professional expertise (militarily speaking, neither is of much use without the other). However, he himself was saddened rather than pleased by his first experience of warfare. After he rode around the battered walls of Vera Cruz and surveyed the effect of the 1,800 shells fired from the naval battery as well as 2,500 more from the mortars he had sited so carefully, he wrote home: “It was awful! My heart bled for the inhabitants. The soldiers I did not care so much for, but it was terrible to think of the women and children.” Then, as would so often be the case in the future, he expressed no words of triumph, or satisfaction in victory.

  As Lee looked at Vera Cruz, with its smashed tenements, its streets “littered with the bloated corpses of dead animals,” and its sad rows of civilians waiting to be buried, he might have agreed with the Duke of Wellington’s terse comment as he rode over the battlefield of Waterloo in 1815: “Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.”

  Whatever Lee’s failings, a love of glory for its own sake was never among them.

  It is 280 miles from Vera Cruz to Mexico City. Scott had two routes before him: one to the south, skirting the barrier of the Sierra Madre range about 90 miles from Vera Cruz, which ran at a right angle across the direction of his advance; the other to the north, slightly longer and steeper, which ran through a mountain pass at Cruz Blanca. The two roads met at the town of Puebla, 100 miles from Mexico City. Of these, the better road was the so-called National Highway, which followed the route used by Cortés in 1519, leading out of the tierra caliente, the marshy fever country around Vera Cruz, through Jalapa, Perote, and Puebla; then skirting the famous Mount Popocatépetl and descending into the great Valley of Mexico. This road crossed a number of rivers running west to east, and wound through numerous steep ravines and “narrow passes,” any one of which would have provided a perfect place for an ambush, particularly since Scott’s army would be strung out along many miles of the National Highway, with the three divisions much too far apart to support one another in case of trouble. Despite the risk, Scott decided to take it. The truth is that Scott was in a race against time. He had been delayed in Vera Cruz longer than he wished by the difficulty of acquiring sufficient mules and horses for his artillery and supply wagons. Two of his men had already died of yellow fever, so he had no choice but to advance deep into enemy territory before he was ready, leaving behind him a lengthening supply line that even a small number of enemy troops or guerrillas could cut at any moment, at the same time cutting off his line of retreat. In Washington, President Polk deplored this “great military error,” and far away in London, the Duke of Wellington, who was avidly following Scott’s progress on the map from newspaper accounts, decided, “Scott is lost . . . he can’t fall back upon his base.”

  As the march toward Mexico City began, Scott himself seemed to become momentarily slipshod in his planning. One difficulty was that he had no reliable intelligence about where Santa Anna might be; the other was that two of his divisional commanders—the impetuous David E. Twiggs and the sulky and sensitive William J. Worth—were quarrelling, and Scott’s old friend Worth blamed Scott bitterly for ordering Twiggs’s division to lead the march, instead of Worth’s regulars. Worth’s behavior, according to a relatively sympathetic fellow officer, was “as arrogant and domineering as pride can make a man.” Although Scott did his best to calm his friend down, he was not about to alter his orders. A great deal of time was wasted on what Worth regarded as an insult to his honor. Worth broke off his friendship with General Scott and sulked like Achilles in his tent, with the result that in the end Twiggs left Vera Cruz on April 9, followed shortly by Major General Robert Patterson’s division of volunteers, then by Scott and his staff on April 12, and finally by Worth on April 16. The result was that the first division marched out of Vera Cruz a week before the last, not a good plan. Signs of lack of discipline were unmistakable—the volunteers drained their canteens too soon, fell out of the line of march because of the extreme heat, and threw away their excess baggage, leaving the road to take shelter from the sun wherever they could find it.

  Scott had ordered Twiggs to advance as far as the town of Jalapa, about forty miles to the northwest, leading the men to conclude that he thought Santa Anna was on the other side of the Sierra Madre. In fact Santa Anna, having returned to Mexico City after his defeat at Buena Vista to reassert his political control and recruit a new army, was already digging into a strong position ahead of Twiggs with something like 12,000 men.* Had Santa Anna truly been the Napoleon of the West, he would have sent out his cavalry and discovered that the American army was strung out along the National Highway in disarray. Instead, he took up a defensive position ahead of them, thus providing Scott with the opportunity to concentrate when he ran into Santa Anna’s position. Of course Santa Anna’s troops were raw and poorly trained, and he may have been more confident of them in a defensive position on high ground than in a more ambitious fast-moving flank attack, but there is no denying he threw away a chance—perhaps the last chance—of a decisive Mexican victory.

  Two days out of Vera Cruz Lee, accompanying General Scott, reached the National Bridge over the Río de la Antigua, “a magnificent structure more than fifty feet high and nearly a quarter of a mile in length, commanding romantic views of the rapid stream winding through towering vistas of luxuriant vegetation.” Scott had feared that Santa Anna might make a stand there, since it constituted an obvious “bottleneck,” but to his relief he found that it had been neither fortified nor destroyed. Riding a few miles beyond the bridge to the next river—the shallow but wide and swift-moving Río del Plan—they found the first two divisions of the American army roughly encamped on a wide plain under “bowers,” rough shelters made of tree branches planted in the ground as uprights, with a covering of grass and leaves. The troops applauded as Scott rode by. “No commander,” he later wrote, with a characteristic touch of complacency, “was ever received with heartier cheers.”

  When he dismounted Scott learned that Santa Anna and his army were entrenched only a few miles away to the west on higher ground that was hard to interpret sensibly from th
e plain below. The few detailed maps of Mexico were sketchy and unreliable, so neither General Twiggs nor General Patterson, nor even Scott himself, had a clear idea of what lay ahead. Even the exact route of the National Highway was unknown. Scott had given clear orders that if Twiggs made contact with the enemy he was to wait until Patterson arrived with his volunteers. Scott hoped to restrain Twiggs, who had a well-earned reputation as a hothead. In fact, the day before, when Twiggs realized that the Mexicans were almost directly in front of him, he had given orders to attack, and was prevented from doing so only by the timely arrival of Patterson, who had risen from a sickbed to take command. This was fortunate, since with Worth’s division still in Vera Cruz, Scott had 6,000 men to Santa Anna’s 12,000.

  1. Sketch map of the Battle of Cerro Gordo.

  {Robert E. Lee, Volumes 1, 2, and 3, by Douglas Southall Freeman, copyright © 1934, 1935, by Charles Scribner’s Sons, copyright renewed 1962, 1963, by Inez Godden Freeman. All rights reserved.}