Several roads converged at Coyoacán, and once there, Scott had a decision to make. He could turn north and take the road to Tacubaya, which would put him only three miles from the capital. Other than a single brigade of defenders under General Joaquín Rangel, the way was open. However, that would lead the two divisions under his immediate supervision away from his other two divisions down at San Antonio and would put the Mexican army between him and his supply train in San Agustin. Although Santa Anna’s army was retreating, it was also concentrating around Churubusco, which tends to strengthen, not weaken, a fighting force. Rather than put more distance between himself and General Worth, Scott knew that he needed to force a junction—a decision that meant that his immediate objective would be the enemy army, not the enemy capital.
Bullet-scarred wall of the Convent of San Mateo. Courtesy of the author.
Lieutenant Isaac Stevens of the engineers went into the tower of the church in Coyoacán to survey the area. Cornfields dotted the terrain, concealing a complete view of the surroundings, but Stevens could tell that Churubusco was the focal point of Mexican activity. Looking southeast, he also saw a flow of personnel coming up the road from San Antonio. Churubusco was a magnet, drawing all Mexican forces to it, and Stevens could clearly see that all retreating forces were being funneled to the bridge across the Churubusco River. The lieutenant also detected defensive works in the area, especially around the San Mateo Convent and on the southern end of the bridge. He reported his findings to Scott, who accordingly sent Captain Phil Kearny’s First Dragoons to explore the best approach to San Antonio, and he ordered Pillow to follow with one of his brigades (Cadwalader’s). This move was conceived to correspond with Worth’s attack from the south. At the same time, Scott dispatched engineers under Lieutenant Gustavus Smith to reconnoiter the area around the convent, and he ordered Twiggs to follow with Persifor Smith’s brigade and Captain Francis Taylor’s battery to force an opening to the Churubusco bridge.24
Gustavus Smith and his engineers advanced several hundred yards from Coyoacán toward the convent with several companies of infantry in support. They got to within five hundred yards, but their view was largely obstructed by cornfields all around. In the distance, Smith could see the roof of the convent, and through occasional breaks in the corn, he detected Mexican infantry to the right and left. Lieutenant McClellan, who had taken another route and had gotten closer, returned to Smith and reported having seen a battery in front of the church and troops “crowded” on the roof. After capturing a lancer and sending him back to General Twiggs for interrogation, Smith and McClellan ascertained that American units were already making contact with the enemy line in front. All they could hear was musketry, but they knew that the stray units that had pushed forward had to be drastically outnumbered, so they ordered Taylor’s battery forward in support. Lieutenant Stevens thought that a few rounds of canister fired at the church would disperse the enemy troops and relieve the Americans on the right from the gradually intensifying musket fire. However, rather than follow Lieutenant Smith’s recommendation to bring up one gun to operate from the protection of an adobe hut that he had found, Taylor ordered the entire battery forward to within 150 yards and deployed it in an exposed position. The Mexicans unleashed what Taylor described as “a most terrible fire of artillery and musketry.” Thus commenced, at about half past twelve, a destructive artillery duel between Taylor’s guns and those of the San Patricios that lasted for an hour and a half.
The battle had originated prematurely when Twiggs ordered a close reconnaissance of the enemy line to determine its strength and the best mode of attacking it. His overanxious infantry, flushed with their easy victory that morning and expecting more of the same, pressed forward, and thinking that they were only attacking a church, they rushed in, only to find themselves “directly in front of a bastioned work and immediately under the fire of their guns.” The withering fire from Rincón’s men forced the Americans to take cover in cornfields, behind maguey plants, and in irrigation ditches. They had hastily dashed forward without adequate knowledge of what lay ahead, but once there, had no choice but to “make the best of it,” as Lieutenant John D. Wilkins of the Third Infantry put it. Engineer Smith, reckoning that he would lose half of his men if he tried to cross the road, instructed them to take cover as best they could and not to move without orders. The American advance on the convent remained stalled more than a half hour later when Worth’s division approached from the south.25
Worth had not been idle on his part of the battlefield. After starting his men for Padierna that morning, he complied with Scott’s order to turn around and return to San Antonio so as to be ready to attack from the south when Pillow and Twiggs arrived from the north. Worth arrived back at his starting point in front of San Antonio around 11:00 A.M. as General Bravo was preparing to evacuate the town. The Mexican general left part of his command in the fortifications to keep Worth in check while he led the remainder north to Churubusco. This is the movement that Stevens had seen from the church tower around noon. Concurrent with Bravo’s withdrawal, Worth sent Colonel Newman S. Clarke’s brigade to the left to pick its way through the eastern edge of the Pedregal in an effort to cut the road leading north. He deployed his other brigade under Colonel John Garland perpendicular to the road and facing the enemy’s San Antonio fortifications with orders to attack the works as soon as Clarke’s brigade reached the road above the town. It was a classic turning movement—hold the enemy in front and attack in flank.26
Worth probably believed that this was finally his chance to achieve the glory that had eluded him thus far in the campaign. The slow, tedious siege at Veracruz had displeased him, and he had arrived at Cerro Gordo too late to participate. Then came the embarrassing run-in with Scott at Puebla. At last, this would be his opportunity, and he did not disappoint. After hearing of the enemy’s route at Padierna but before deploying his troops at San Antonio, he had told his junior officers “that as General Twiggs’s Division had covered itself with glory, we must do something,” thus indicating that the earlier rivalry between those two division commanders remained alive on the Churubusco battlefield. Both Worth and Clarke were veterans of the War of 1812, and the tactics used by Worth at San Antonio were a replica of those he saw executed by a young General Scott at the Battle of Chippewa in July 1814. There Scott, a brigade commander, had sent one of his regiments into the woods to the left with orders to attack the British flank. That attack had worked beautifully. Now Worth, who was one of Scott’s staff officers in 1814, hoped to bag the Mexican force in his front with a similar move, and he intended to do so using his old friend, Clarke, with whom he had shared those bloody experiences along the Niagara River thirty-three years earlier.27
Clarke’s men slowly picked their way through the Pedregal for two miles. The path they followed was described by Lieutenant Ralph Kirkham of the Sixth Infantry as “all rock, covered here and there with prickly pears, . . . deep chasms, and very uneven at all times.” The Mexicans spotted them working their way through the lava field and opened fire on them with small arms, but it had little effect. The brigade came out onto level ground about a mile from the road and a mile north of San Antonio, and they rushed forward and attacked the long, thin enemy column packed on the road. The portion of Bravo’s command that was above the point of attack hurried on to Churubusco to join the rest of their army, but those below Clarke’s attack began to scatter. To the south, Worth attacked the now lightly manned San Antonio fortifications and easily dispersed the remaining defenders before pressing up the road to form a junction with Clarke. This pincer only intensified the panic among the Mexican soldiers, laborers, and civilians who were trapped between Worth’s two brigades. Mud from the previous night’s rain created a quagmire that caused wagons and caissons to sink so deep that they had to be abandoned on the road, which only added to the confusion within the retreating column.28
Slowed only by abandoned wagons that blocked the road for a mile, Worth pursued
the retreating throng up the road to Churubusco in what became a running battle. “Shall I shake out the colors and let them see who are after them?” a corporal in the Second Artillery asked company commander John Sedgwick. “Yes,” Sedgwick responded. At one point, Lieutenant Raphael Semmes came upon a U.S. soldier standing over the motionless figure of a heavy-set Mexican. Approaching closer, Semmes saw that it was an officer, and he asked the American if the man was dead. “Oh, no sir,” came the reply, “he is only a little out of wind, being a fat man; I have just run him down.” Then the officer sat up and explained that in their rush to get away, his aide had taken his horse, leaving him to escape on foot.29 It was during the pursuit, at about 1:00 P.M., that Pillow, at the head of Cadwalader’s brigade, joined Worth’s division. Having been ordered by Scott to strike at San Antonio from the north, Pillow discovered that Worth had already pushed through the town and that the battle on his front had become fluid. So Pillow turned the brigade north and with some difficulty crossed two deep irrigation ditches to take a position on Worth’s left as they deployed for battle south of the Churubusco River.
Twiggs’s division had been engaged for over half an hour when Worth arrived at Churubusco. Bringing his winded soldiers up as quickly as possible, Worth placed Garland’s brigade to the right of the road and adjacent to some cornfields. Then he positioned Clarke’s brigade nearest the road with two regiments (the Fifth and Eighth) facing northwest and obliquely pointing toward the tête de pont. Clarke’s remaining regiment (Sixth) was deployed directly across the road staring right at the strength of the Mexican bridgehead. Cadwalader’s brigade fell in on the left and deployed itself so that its line extended almost to the convent. The Voltigeurs constituted the reserve. Taking into account Twiggs’s division, which faced northeast and north, the Americans, about 8,000 strong, were roughly aligned in a crescent shape around 20,000 Mexicans whose defensive position was strong and compact, and who enjoyed interior lines and a secure line of retreat.30
Muskets and cannon from the tête de pont opened fire on Worth’s men as they deployed for battle. Flushed with his easy push north from San Antonio and determined to best Twiggs by capturing the Mexican strong point, Worth became rash and careless, and he repeated the mistake that Twiggs had made earlier. Lieutenant Nathaniel Lyon believed that since Worth had “no share in the glory of Contreras, [he] determined to bring his division into action under whatever disadvantages.” Thus, without any pretext of reconnoitering the enemy position, he ordered Clarke’s brigade to attack straight up the road. One of the best regiments in the entire army, the Sixth, commanded by Major Benjamin L. Bonneville, led the brigade forward shortly after 1 o’clock. Other officers in the unit included Simon Bolivar Buckner, Lewis A. Armistead, and Winfield Scott Hancock, all future Civil War generals. Buckner would be wounded within minutes of the regiment’s advance, and at some point during the battle, Hancock, the namesake of his army commander, received a slight wound. Armistead and Hancock survived the carnage of this day only to go on to face each other as enemies sixteen years later, when men of Hancock’s Union Corps would mortally wound Armistead during Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. At Churubusco, the Sixth rushed forward, exposed on the causeway and in easy range of Mexican infantry and artillery hidden in a cornfield on the American right. A wall of musket balls and grapeshot coming from two directions stopped the advance and forced it back. Garland’s brigade also tried but failed to make headway to the right, and Duncan’s battery could not come up and support because of the mushy ground. Clarke ordered his men forward again, but again, they were repulsed. On the left, Cadwalader sent his units forward, but cornfields and irrigation ditches resulted in disorganization as the attack lost momentum.31
Worth’s division became pinned down in the cornfields and among the irrigation ditches along both sides of the Acapulco Road. It was a “‘butt head’ attack,” concluded Lyon, ordered by a “stupid Officer.” Their swift pursuit had led them into the teeth of perhaps the toughest fight the Mexicans put up during the entire campaign. Chaplain John McCarty, an Episcopal priest and New York native, earned the praise and respect of the men of the division that day. As was his custom, he went in with the men, and during that long fight in front of the tête de pont, he roamed the ground, looking for the best places to get across the numerous ditches that traversed the ground. Along the way, he frequently stopped to console the wounded, all the while urging the men forward and pointing the way. As George Kendall aptly put it, “Such a Chaplain is worth having in a small army like ours.”32
All along the concave American lines from the convent around to the bank of the Churubusco River on the far right, units were cut to pieces and stymied in the early afternoon. The stern Mexican resolve and determined resistance surprised American soldiers, whose greatest concern a few hours earlier had been whether they would succeed in catching the retreating enemy host. They had uncharacteristically but hastily rushed into a fight without adequate reconnaissance. The advantages that the Americans enjoyed previously and the relative ease that characterized earlier battles had resulted from careful and extensive study of enemy positions and the surrounding terrain. Scott had sent engineers to survey the areas in front of both Twiggs’s and Worth’s divisions, but an overzealous pursuit and a lack of patience to wait for the engineers’ reports meant that men rushed forward without knowing the hazards in their front and flanks.
Scott remained in Coyoacán about a half mile behind Twiggs’s division, issuing orders from horseback. He sat on his mount in the shade of a tree as staff officers came and went, updating him on the latest developments at the front. At one point, an observer heard him exclaim, “My God, I have so many irons in the fire some of them will burn.” Moments later, Noah Smith, the self-appointed army guide who, having lived in the area for several years and having an intimate knowledge of the surrounding fields, approached Scott with information about how to flank Santa Anna. The bridge north of Coyoacán could be used to get troops across the river, and Smith knew how to navigate the cornfields to bring a force into the enemy flank and rear north of Churubusco. Scott accordingly ordered Pierce’s brigade forward under Captain Lee’s supervision and Smith’s guidance in an attempt to get part of the army north of the river and on the Mexican right flank. It was another iron into the fire, and when he directed Shields’s brigade to follow Pierce in support, he had put virtually all of his men into the fight.33
Scott watched as Pierce’s men filed through Coyoacán and turned onto the road leading north. From his location under the shade tree, Scott spotted Pierce, who had been badly injured the night before in the Pedregal, when his horse fell and rolled his foot on the rocks. His foot was so tender that he held it away from the animal so that it would not rub or bounce against its side. The commanding general approached and said, “Pierce . . . you are not fit to be in your saddle.” “Yes I am . . . in a case like this,” responded the division commander. “I ought to order you back to St. Augustine. You cannot touch your foot to the stirrup,” Scott countered. “For God sake don’t give the order,” Pierce pleaded before assuring Scott that one foot in the stirrup was enough. Besides, he believed that this “will be the last great fight, and I must lead my brigade.”34
The entire American army, except those units guarding the supply train at San Agustin, was now in the fight. Scott, having committed his reserves and sent all troops forward, found that he and his staff were practically alone in the rear of the army, a virtual detachment hundreds of yards away from any significant body of troops, and therefore vulnerable to capture or attack by remnant enemy bands. It was a potentially dangerous situation for an army commander, so he moved up to a position just behind Twiggs’s men. There was greater danger of a stray musket ball that close to the fighting, but all things considered, his personal safety depended on relocating.35
When Pierce’s and Shields’s men crossed the river and turned right (east), they were about a mile from the Acapulco Road. Working their way through s
eemingly endless cornfields, Pierce put out skirmishers in front with orders to fall back on the main body when they made contact with the enemy. At one point, they reached a ditch ten feet wide and six feet deep—impossible to cross on horseback. Some of Pierce’s men helped him from the saddle, and he hobbled along on foot until pain and fatigue forced him to stop. As they approached the road about three quarters of a mile north of the river, they began to exchange fire with Santa Anna’s reserve units. Pierce’s and Shields’s brigades deployed for battle, with the latter’s extreme left resting among the buildings of the hacienda Portales. Shields attempted to extend his line farther north so as to flank the Mexican troops and occupy the road, but the enemy responded by extending their line farther north with infantry and three thousand lancers. The fighting quickly became intense, and many of the Americans took refuge in the hacienda, refusing to go forward. Lee sent word back to Scott to forward reinforcements, but with no available infantry units, Scott redirected the Second Dragoons and Mounted Rifles to assist. Until they arrived, activity on that part of the battlefield remained stalled.36
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