Most of the generals left the conference depressed, except, of course, Quitman, who had begged Scott on previous occasions for an opportunity to fight. He now had his chance, and he would make the most of it. Pillow was displeased with the plan and concerned about the outcome. Worth believed that the attack would fail. Even Scott expressed apprehension to his most trusted staff officer, Colonel Hitchcock. Feelings among the troops were no better. The bloody but fruitless victory at Molino del Rey just four days earlier had a significant psychological effect on the army. A hard fight at the southern gates would at least gain them entry into the city, but the prospects of assaulting an impregnable hilltop bastion that, if captured, would still leave them two miles outside their objective was not an appealing thought. Scott, however, believed that the castle defenses were weaker than those along the southern causeways, and he certainly understood that the approach to Chapultepec offered more cover for attacking troops than did elevated roads. Besides, he still hoped that a Mexican capitulation would render an attack on the city unnecessary. Nevertheless, all of the troops knew that the assault would require great sacrifice, and so the attack order cast a “deep depression” over the army. Lieutenant Hill, who had volunteered for one of the storming parties, thought that the situation “now looked dark and gloomy in the extreme.” Scott’s decision shook the army’s confidence in his leadership.10
There was consternation on the Mexican side as well. General Bravo’s nine hundred defenders were made up of some veteran units but mostly of ill-trained national guardsmen, along with artillerymen and forty-six cadets who refused to leave when the college was evacuated. Bravo thought it imperative that he defend the woods west of the castle, but he needed more men. He requested that Santa Anna send him reinforcements, and he got a battalion, which he posted in the grove. However, the display of American infantry south of the city on September 12 convinced Santa Anna that Scott’s main thrust would come from that direction. So not only did he refuse to send additional troops to Chapultepec that evening, but he also recalled the battalion that he had previously sent. Santa Anna and Bravo met during the night before the American attack, and the Mexican commander urged that Bravo abandon the grove and concentrate his forces on the hill and castle. However, Bravo was adamant, and after a lengthy discussion, Santa Anna committed to send more men before dawn. Bravo left their meeting thinking that he would be reinforced, but Santa Anna never sent the promised aid. Sagging morale and desertion was a significant problem among the Mexican troops.11
Throughout the night, engineers repaired damaged platforms and cannon in preparation for the morning’s artillery barrage, and Lee, up for a second straight night, refused to sleep. In accord with Scott’s instructions, and to assuage his concern over reinforcements reaching the castle, Quitman sent a detachment of some fifty men to perform the dangerous task of establishing an advance picket on the Belén causeway. While posted there, they became engaged in a “brisk skirmish” with Mexican troops, whom Quitman assumed to be the van of a larger body of infantry that he suspected would try to pass from the city to the castle. To meet this threat, Quitman sent Lieutenant George Andrews and a single piece of artillery to join the detachment, and on arriving at the road, Andrews used his gun to “rake the road with several discharges of canister.” No enemy soldiers passed along the road that night.12
At 5:30 A.M., Scott gave the order, and the batteries opened on the castle again. As the sun came up, Pillow and Quitman prepared their units. Near Molino del Rey, Pillow organized his men into three attacking columns, and he attached himself to the center group, which was composed of four companies of the Voltigeurs, the Ninth and Fifteenth Regiments, along with Lieutenant Jesse L. Reno’s mountain howitzers. Captain Lee would go in with the center column and help direct the way. Their line of attack was straight across the marshy bog, through the grove of trees, and up the west slope of the hill. To their right, Pillow placed four more companies of Voltigeurs under Lieutenant Colonel Joseph E. Johnston and Captain Samuel McKenzie’s storming party. Their mission was to advance along the outside of the southern outer wall, force their way through an opening in the wall, and attack the castle from the southwest. On Pillow’s left, his fellow Tennessean and future governor of the state, Colonel William Trousdale, would follow the aqueduct forward with the Eleventh and Fourteenth Regiments supported by a section of guns under Lieutenant Thomas Jackson. Pillow ordered Trousdale to get into position to cut off a Mexican retreat north.13
Quitman prepared his force along the road that led north out of Tacubaya. His collection of units was composed of the Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and New York volunteer regiments, the storming party from Twiggs’s division under command of Captain Silas Casey, another group of 120 volunteers designated as stormers and commanded by Major Levi Twiggs, a contingent of forty marines under Captain John G. Reynolds, and Persifor Smith’s brigade, which had arrived that morning from Mixcoac. Four field guns, one each commanded by Captain Drum and Lieutenant Calvin Benjamin and two under Lieutenant Henry J. Hunt, would follow Quitman’s column into the fight, their position and targets governed by circumstances. Including Riley’s brigade in Piedad, the American fighting force totaled about 7,200 men, and their opponent, huddled behind their defensive works around Chapultepec and the city, numbered perhaps 15,000.14
At 8 o’clock, the guns ceased their pounding, and the silence served as Scott’s prearranged signal for the infantry assault to begin. Pillow’s three columns advanced from the mill simultaneously. In the center, inside the walls of the compound, the four Voltigeur companies led the way, with the Ninth and Fifteenth (Pierce’s brigade) close behind deployed for battle. Outside the southern wall, Johnston led the other Voltigeur companies and McKenzie’s storming party as they rushed the gate in the center of the wall, which the Mexicans had blocked with a sandbag redan. They seized the redan, forced their way into the compound, and plunged through the edge of the woods before charging up the hill and capturing the circular redoubt and entrenchments. In their fighting on the southwest side of the castle, Johnston’s men “virtually annihilated” the Mexican San Blas Battalion. There they took cover, and soon Pillow’s force arrived and linked with Johnston’s left.
But Pillow’s center column had encountered more difficulties than had Johnston’s men. It had pushed through the open ground, then became bogged down in the mud and tall grass, while Reno’s howitzers fired shells over their heads into the Mexican defenses. As Pillow, on horseback, led his men into the cypress grove, they drove the enemy from their lodgment in the woods, which Bravo had correctly believed required more men to defend. As the Americans worked their way through the huge cypress trees, the enemy on the hill above depressed their artillery and began to fire canister and grape into the trees, splintering the limbs and causing confusion among the men. Units had already become intermingled as they emerged on the east side of the woods, and there near the base of the hill, a ricocheting ball of grapeshot hit Pillow at the top of his left foot, breaking his ankle. Lee, who was nearby, instructed some men to carry him out of the line of fire, and they placed him behind a large tree. From there, Pillow instructed a staff officer to go to the rear and call Worth’s supporting division forward with “great haste”; then he turned command over to Cadwalader. Pillow’s men started up the hill amid rumors that their general had been killed, and soon they linked on their right with Johnston’s Voltigeurs.15
Colonel Trueman B. Ransom, trying to urge his regiment on up the hill and into the face of the castle’s western defenses, stood waving his sword and shouted, “Forward, the Ninth!” Instantly, a musket ball struck him in the forehead and he fell dead. Despite seeing their commander shot down, they charged ahead anyway but were met with a hail of musketry. Some made it as far as the fosse and took cover there while the rest of the Ninth and the other units found shelter as best they could farther down the hill. Now pinned down, they discovered that the scaling ladders had not made it to the front. Without the ladders to
get them over the wall that surrounded the castle, there was no point in pushing up the hill. They simply remained in place for at least fifteen minutes, exchanging musket fire with the enemy.16
While stuck in their scattered position on the lower half of the hill, they made another unsettling discovery. Some of the men noticed on the hillside around them small mounds of dirt. Perhaps they were buried soldiers from the previous day’s bombardment? No, they were mines. This realization came as Cadwalader, Captain Joseph Hooker, and the rest of Pillow’s staff were moving among the men trying to keep them steady. Unknown to the Americans at the time, the Mexican engineer, Manuel Aleman, whose job it was to detonate the mines at the appropriate moment, had deserted his post. Quickly the Americans located and cut most of the canvas powder trains that were necessary to ignite the explosives and thus avoided a potential disaster.17
Meanwhile, Trousdale’s column advanced east on the Anzures causeway that ran along the outside of the north wall. After going only a short distance, a Mexican battery at the northeast corner of the rectangular compound opened fire, as did infantry shooting from the north face of the castle above. James Elderkin, who was engaged on the Anzures causeway and who later fought in the Civil War, remembered years later that Chapultepec was “the hottest engagement I ever experienced.” At one point the musket balls were flying so thick that he felt the urge to put his hands up to protect his face. Lieutenant Thomas Jackson led two 6-pound field pieces up the road in support of the infantry, and as soon as the enemy opened fire, all twelve of the horses pulling his guns were killed or disabled, and one of the guns was damaged so badly that it was no longer serviceable. Unable to go any farther, Jackson tried to unlimber the other gun on the spot, but incessant enemy fire caused his artillerymen to scramble for cover behind boulders and shrubs on the side of the road. Jackson remained alone in the road, trying to position the gun amid animal carcasses that blocked the road, when former West Point classmate, Lieutenant George H. Gordon of the cavalry, rode by. “Well, Old Jack, it seems to me you are in a bad way!” Gordon chided. “Pears I am,” Jackson responded.18
Jackson cooly walked along the road with musket balls kicking up dirt all around him as he exhorted his men to help him with the gun. “There is no danger,” he shouted, later recalling that it was the only lie he ever told. “See? I am not hit!” No sooner had that sentence left his lips than a cannonball hit between his feet and bounced through his legs. His cajoling finally brought one sergeant up out of the ditch, and the two men struggled with the gun until they had it ready to return fire. The two of them repeatedly loaded and fired their small-caliber piece until Jackson’s superior, Captain John B. Magruder, arrived. Reaching the point in the road where Jackson was working his gun, Magruder’s horse was shot from under him, but he dusted himself off and, with the help of a few other men, dragged the damaged gun up alongside the other. Until reinforcements arrived, Jackson remained in the road, aiming and firing his guns. Once he was ordered to fall back, but he refused. Later, when someone asked him why he had not retreated in the face of such overpowering enemy fire, he responded that “it would have been no disgrace to have died there, but to have failed to gain my point it would.”19
As these events were unfolding in Pillow’s command west of the castle, all the while, Quitman was advancing from the south. At the signal to attack, he sent Smith’s brigade off to the right to cover his flank as the remainder of his column pushed straight up the causeway. Deep ditches paralleled the road on both sides, making it difficult to cross over to the flat and relatively dry meadows that extended on both the right and left. Other ditches running perpendicular made it difficult to navigate the fields, so the men kept to the road even after they came under fire from Mexican infantry standing on risers behind the outer wall. The deadly musketry took its toll on Quitman’s men, but they pressed on toward the southeast corner of the compound. Upon turning a slight curve in the road, a battery of five enemy guns, posted where the Tacubaya and Belén causeways intersected, opened fire from two hundred yards. The excellent Morelia Battalion of national guardsmen, commanded by Brigadier General Andrés Terrés, lined the intersection just east of the Chapultepec compound in support of the battery. To Private George W. Hartman, it seemed as if “thousands of muskets” were firing on them. Captain Casey fell seriously wounded and Major Twiggs was killed, shot through the chest. Now under intense fire from two directions—front and left oblique—the Americans scrambled for cover in the ditches and a few adobe huts on the side of the road.20
Despite efforts to push forward, Quitman’s attack quickly stalled. A few members of the storming party tried to move off the road and lead a flank attack on the guns, but when they looked back, no one had followed, so they retraced their steps. Among them were Lieutenants Hill and Barnard Bee, both members of the storming party. Before the assault, they had discussed how their actions on this day would bring them notice back home, but this was not what they had in mind. Some of the officers tried in vain to get the marines to assist in another effort to charge the guns, and according to one source, their commander, Captain Reynolds, was sitting in the ditch, refusing to budge. Quitman pulled his men back about fifty yards to some shelter that was offered by the bend in the road, but he knew he could not stay there motionless. He instructed Shields to take the three volunteer regiments to the left, cross the corner of the meadow between the road and the compound, and try to penetrate the fifteen-foot-high outer wall. As they climbed out of the ditch and struck off across the low ground, some of the New Yorkers had a laugh at the marines’ expense, yelling, “why don’t you come along?”21
It was three hundred yards from the road to the south wall, and all of it across the Mexican front. The volunteers took heavy fire from behind the wall, and as a consequence their casualties mounted as they scrambled through the tall grass, a cornfield, and half a dozen irrigation ditches. Shields, having recovered from his near-fatal Cerro Gordo wound, was hit in the arm but refused to leave the field. Captain Abram Van O’Linda was killed at the head of his company of New Yorkers, and Lieutenant Colonel Charles Baxter, that regiment’s commander, fell mortally wounded. A bullet struck A. J. Bates in the thigh, but it was not serious, so he pressed on. Within minutes, he was hit in the other thigh and he dropped to the ground unable to go further. Others went down after being hit multiple times by musket balls. Lieutenant Colonel John W. Geary of the Pennsylvania regiment was also wounded during the attack. However, two Pennsylvania volunteers accused Geary of cowardice for twice abandoning his men during the day’s fighting. The unsubstantiated charge appeared to be politically motivated, for Geary was promoted to colonel after the battle and went on to serve with distinction as a general in the Union army.22
Upon reaching the shelter of the wall, the volunteers caught their breath for several minutes and tried to form their companies. Then the Pennsylvanians and New Yorkers moved to the left and began to pour through the redan that Johnston’s Voltigeurs had opened just minutes earlier. Meanwhile, the South Carolinians found a break in the wall caused by the bombardment and used their bayonets to chisel it wide enough for a man to squeeze through, and in two places the volunteers began swarming into the Chapultepec compound. They ran to the foot of the hill, and in some cases officers, in the confusion, gave conflicting orders to move up the hill in this direction or that. But many of the men just ran straight up without hearing or caring about orders, and as they advanced from the southwest, they found the Voltigeurs and deployed to the right, thus giving the Americans a continual line of attackers from the west face of the castle curving around to the south face.23
Storming the walls of Chapultepec. Courtesy of Special Collections Division, University of Texas at Arlington Libraries.
The progress of both Quitman’s and Pillow’s columns had been slow and uncertain, but at this point, the situation began to change decidedly in favor of the Americans. Exact timing is difficult to approximate in a battle, but after what must have been about
fifteen or twenty minutes stalled on the western slope, the scaling ladders arrived. Colonel Newman Clarke’s crack brigade of regulars from Worth’s division arrived too, giving the other units the momentum to push up the steepest part of the hill. Now in a concerted and concentric manner the mingled units of Pillow’s and Quitman’s commands began to close in on the castle at the summit. At the ten-foot-deep fosse, some of the men tossed ladders in, jumped after them, and leaned them on the opposite side to climb out, while others laid the ladders across from lip to lip and using them as bridges, walked on the rungs to the other side, oblivious to their friends in the ditch below, who carried their muskets with bayonets pointed upward. As they pushed on to the final parapet, the Mexicans continued their heavy fire into the advancing lines. Leading the way for Clarke’s Eighth Infantry was Lieutenant James Longstreet carrying an American flag. He was hit in the leg, and as he staggered to the ground, Lieutenant George Pickett grabbed the standard and continued to the top. Upon reaching the final wall, dozens of ladders went up and the bravest, or perhaps the most reckless, began to climb. Moses Barnard of the Voltigeurs was the first to plant a flag atop the Mexican works. A severe struggle for control of the parapet ensued, and in such situations, the bayonet, or perhaps the butt of a musket, was the weapon of choice. For several minutes the close combat raged until gradually the U.S. troops won the contest and began to pour over the wall. The defenders scattered across the terrace that surrounded the castle as Americans surged in greater numbers over the wall, across the grounds, and into the castle itself. Soon there was no delineation between the intermingled Americans and Mexicans.24
On the east side of the castle, Americans depressed some captured guns and began to fire down at the enemy stronghold at the north end of the Tacubaya causeway. This was just the assistance that Quitman needed. He organized the men left under his command and mounted another attack on the battery that had caused his column so much trouble an hour earlier. This time his men swept into the works, motivated by what Quitman called “desperate valor,” and engaged the enemy in a hand-to-hand struggle that forced the Mexicans to give up their guns and retreat. Among Quitman’s storming party was D. H. Hill, who, along with his comrades, turned left, entered the compound from the east, and started up the road that led to the summit. When Hill looked up, he saw the Stars and Stripes already flying from the top of the castle. But the fighting was not over; the Mexicans continued to resist in isolated pockets as they tried to escape.25
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