Hill penned in his diary what he saw when he reached the top. “The havoc among the Mexicans was now horrible in the extreme. Pent up between two fires they had but one way to escape and all crowded toward it like a flock of sheep.” What Hill then described was an ugly attempt to exact revenge for the slaughter of American wounded at Molino del Rey. “I saw dozens hanging from the walls and creeping through holes made for the passage of water and whilst in this position were shot down without making the least resistance.” All the while, American soldiers shouted, “give no quarter to the treacherous scoundrels.” Israel Uncapher of the Second Pennsylvania recorded in his diary that he and half a dozen others “ran along the parapet and fired at the yellow devils as they ran.” Several dozen teenage boys, niños heroicos, “heroic children,” all cadets at the military college, had remained at the castle to help defend it. Six of them died late in the battle, jumping to their deaths from the castle walls, one clutching a Mexican flag. Today, these young cadets are honored inside the castle with a ceiling mural depicting one of them plunging to his death. Inside the castle, American soldiers broke down doors to find rooms filled with Mexicans pleading for mercy. Another Pennsylvanian, Richard Coulter, remembered that “some officers were taken prisoners, but few others were taken alive.”26
To the north on the Anzures causeway, the Americans were also making progress. Early in the battle, Scott, unaware that Pillow had requested aid from Worth’s division, had ordered Worth to move his troops east along that road to be in position to block both retreating and reinforcing enemy troops moving along the roads between Chapultepec and the city. Worth had dispatched Clarke’s brigade to assist Pillow; then, in compliance with Scott’s order, he sent his other brigade, Garland’s, to reinforce troops struggling on the causeway. Worth followed Garland’s brigade and ordered an attack on the Mexican position at the northeast corner, which broke through at about the same time that Quitman’s men routed the enemy two hundred yards to the south. It was now about 9:30, and the fighting on the castle plateau began to die down as officers regained control of their men. Most of the Mexicans who had not been killed or captured were snaking their way down the steep rock face and retreating toward the city. General Bravo surrendered to Lieutenant Charles B. Brower of the New York regiment, handing the subaltern his diamond-studded sword.27
Two miles away, at Mixcoac, thirty more casualties occurred the instant the American flag went up over the castle. They were among the condemned deserters of the San Patricio Battalion. The other twenty whose death sentences had been upheld had been hanged in the previous three days, and Scott had assigned the forty-seven-year-old Colonel William Harney the task of carrying out the final thirty sentences. Harney was a martinet who used harsh punishment on his own men and was remembered for frequently hanging Indians in the Seminole War; his men feared him as much as they respected him. He hated foreigners, and any who got into trouble in his unit could expect rough treatment, usually bucking and gagging or hanging by the thumbs. He was just the sort for this grisly task. Scott had tolerated his insubordination at the beginning of the campaign, and as a result, he had benefitted from his bold and daring combat leadership. He was Scott’s kind of soldier, but not his kind of man.
The prisoners had their hands and feet tied, and they stood in wagons beneath the gallows with nooses around their necks. In the distance beyond the village of Tacubaya stood the castle, perched atop its rocky platform high above the valley floor. Harney had decreed that the hangings would occur as soon as the American flag went up over the castle walls. At 6:30 A.M., with the preattack bombardment thundering in the distance, Harney rode over to the gallows where the condemned already had been standing for over an hour. He counted only twenty-nine prisoners and asked, “Where is the thirtieth?” The surgeon who was there to pronounce them dead at the appropriate time informed the colonel that the last man was Francis O’Conner, who had lost both legs in the Churubusco battle and was in the hospital near death. “Bring the damned son of a bitch out!” Harney shouted. “My order is to hang thirty, and, by God, I’ll do it!” Several minutes later, litter bearers arrived with an unconscious O’Conner. They tossed him into the wagon, leaned him up against the driver’s seat, and put a rope around his neck. Then Harney read General Order No. 283, which proclaimed their sentence.
For the next three hours, they all watched the castle in the distance, trying to see through the smoke that enshrouded the hill. After a while one of the prisoners, hoping that the Mexicans would successfully defend their hilltop bastion, yelled to Harney, “If we won’t be hung until your dirty old flag flies from the castle, we will live to eat the goose that will fatten on the grass of your own grave, Colonel.” But Harney acted as if he did not hear the man. Later, when another one made a derisive comment aimed at Harney, the colonel dismounted, climbed up into that man’s wagon, and hit him in the mouth with the hilt of his saber, knocking out some of his teeth. Finally, at 9:30, while peering through his brass telescope, Harney saw the Stars and Stripes go up, and he ordered the teamsters to pull the wagons forward, thus leaving the deserters to dangle to their death.28
From Mexico City, Santa Anna and other officers had been watching the battle and the castle. He thought of sending reinforcements but hesitated until it was too late, still fearing an attack from the south. In the span of just a few minutes, he watched the Americans swarm over the walls of the castle, saw the Mexican tricolor lowered down the flagstaff and the Stars and Stripes go up, and saw, too, the remains of the Chapultepec defenders streaming in his direction. “I believe if we were to plant our batteries in Hell the damned Yankees would take them from us,” he reportedly exclaimed. A subordinate officer nearby simply hung his head and muttered, “God is a Yankee.”29
chapter thirteen
A Devil of a Time
Belén and San Cosme Garitas
When these deeds become known, our Country will be astonished, but I regret to say with weeping.
—John W. Geary, Second Pennsylvania Volunteers
The bloody contest for Chapultepec ended after about an hour and a half, but it was only a lull in the battle. Some of the most intense fighting of the day lay ahead at the gates of the city. The castle acted as a magnet that morning, attracting the high-ranking officers of the army who wanted to see the prize up close. Pillow had some soldiers carry him up the hill in a blanket, or as one soldier called it, a “Buffalo robe,” and while there, he listened to Cadwalader harangue the division with a patriotic speech from one of the castle’s balconies. At one point, Pillow asked Sergeant Thomas Barclay, who stood nearby, what unit he was with. He was from the Second Pennsylvania, a part of Quitman’s division that four months earlier had been part of Pillow’s brigade. Remembering the aspersions that Pillow had cast on the unit after Cerro Gordo, Barclay boldly responded, “this is the 2nd Pa. Regt., the men who you said waved at Cerro Gordo.” Pillow’s pleasant disposition immediately turned to anger, and he shot back, “I think you have a damn sight of impudence for a sergeant.”1
At the eastern base of the hill, Quitman gave instructions for his men to resupply their ammunition and form around the aqueduct on the Belén causeway in preparation to push on to the city. Then he ascended to the top to collect the rest of his division. Once at the castle, he stood on a parapet to examine the road leading into the city. Like the Anzures causeway that skirted the north wall of Chapultepec, it had an arched aqueduct running down the middle, but unlike that of Anzures, its arches had not been filled in with masonry. Its support columns were eight feet wide, and through the arches, one could pass from one side of the road to the other. Groups of retreating Mexican troops were still visible moving east along the road, and at the far end behind breastworks and redoubts, Quitman saw a large cluster of enemy soldiers around the Belén garita. That was his objective. He intended to pry the city open at the southwest gate, and he was in a hurry. Probably fearing that he would receive a halt order from the commanding general at any moment, he int
ended to push toward the city and out of Scott’s reach as soon as possible. Scott had shunned an aggressive pursuit after Cerro Gordo and had refused to march on the capital after Churubusco, and now Quitman intended to press the American advantage all the way into what he perceived to be the ultimate objective. In addition, Quitman probably surmised, or at least hoped, that this would be the last battle of the war, and having been kept in the shadows throughout the campaign, he desperately wanted to seize this opportunity to distinguish himself. Before leaving the summit, his aides quickly gathered Shields’s brigade, instructing them to collect on the road below, while he conferred with Pillow, convincing him to release his division to join Quitman’s in an advance.2
A short time after Quitman left, Scott arrived with his staff. He and Hitchcock had been watching the battle from a housetop in Tacubaya, and when the general had seen the American flag go up, he mounted his horse and rode to the castle as quickly as possible. As he rode onto the summit, his men cheered and gathered around him, and he, in turn, lavished praise on all present. Then an officer brought General Bravo to Scott, and the two generals had a brief and cordial conversation. Next, Scott turned to Lieutenant George Davis, one of Quitman’s aides, and asked the whereabouts of the division commander. When Davis told him that Quitman was massing his division for an advance on the Belén garita, a testy Scott asked, “Is it General Quitman’s intention to advance without orders?” The question put Davis in a predicament. He did not answer—could not answer. What would he say, yes in defiance or no in dishonesty? His silence, however, sufficiently served as an answer. So Scott instructed Major Edmund Kirby to go to Quitman and order him to fall back to Chapultepec, which is precisely what the division commander had feared.3
Not only was Quitman acting without orders, but he was also thwarting Scott’s plans. The Chapultepec victory represented yet another successful application of the sword, and Scott may have intended to halt and hold the castle until he could ascertain Mexican intentions. To have done so would have been consistent with his previous statements and actions. Once again, he had placed the city in “imminent danger of capture,” which he had stated as a requirement for conquering a peace, and once again he had taken “a strong position from the enemy” and had done so “in view of the city.” Now it was time to await the Mexican response. Conventional wisdom assumes that the city was Scott’s primary objective on September 13 and that he intended to press on to the western gates, but with his old friend Worth in the vanguard. Perhaps. However, Scott’s strategy of moderation would have dictated that he pause first to see if the city would capitulate without a fight. How long he might have halted operations, if at all, is impossible to know—a day, maybe only a few hours. If an assault on the city became necessary, he indeed meant to bestow that honor on Worth, and he already knew how he intended to approach the city. He would feint at the Belén garita with Quitman’s division and send Worth’s division to assault the San Cosme garita, the weakest gate of the city’s west side. Quitman’s rashness, however, threatened to put the day’s events out of the commanding general’s control, but again, this was just such a possibility that Scott had predicted in his Puebla letter. He wrote that after defeating the enemy or seizing a strong position, he would give the city officials a chance to surrender, “if he could restrain the enthusiasm of his troops.” Seeing that he could not, he issued orders designed to have his tactical plans catch up with the facts of the situation. So he instructed Worth to collect his division, follow the Anzures causeway’s dogleg to the north, and proceed two miles to the San Cosme causeway, then east to the San Cosme garita. The commanding general intended to throw every available unit in that direction while he continued to try to turn Quitman’s advance into a mere diversion.4
Perhaps the best evidence suggesting that Scott did not intend to move immediately on the city lies in the fact that he attacked Chapultepec in the first place. It was a fortified position much like El Peñon to the east, and like El Peñon, it could have been bypassed or turned by a circuitous route and thus rendered useless. According to Ulysses S. Grant, whose Memoirs benefitted from four decades of reflection and the keen eye of the most famous commanding general of the Civil War, the castle could have been easily avoided. Scott could have reached his objective without ever coming under fire from the Chapultepec guns. By swinging around west of Molino del Rey, then north, the army could have gained the San Cosme causeway a mile and a half farther west and approached the garita in the same manner as Worth, with the entire route out of the castle’s range. Furthermore, Grant contended, the Belén garita could have been approached from Piedad and remained outside the range of the castle’s artillery. This kind of turning movement to avoid the strength of the castle fortification would have been entirely consistent with Scott’s previous tactics and with his desire to preserve the lives of his men. Therefore, in hindsight, Grant proclaimed the attack on the castle to be “wholly unnecessary.”5 But that assumes that the city was Scott’s objective when it most likely was not. History can never know precisely what was in Scott’s mind, and in his reports of the battle, he certainly made it seem as if the attack on the garitas was a seamless continuation of the morning’s action, but it is not farfetched to assume that Quitman’s impetuosity altered what could have been a different ending to the campaign.
It took time for Worth to organize his column, replenish his ammunition, and fill in a trench across the road. The Mexicans had dug the trench across the front of their battery at the northeast corner of the castle compound to impede an infantry assault on their guns, but now it served the additional function of retarding the American pursuit. A similar trench across the Tacubaya Road protected the five-gun battery at the southwest corner, but while Quitman had gone to the top of the Chapultepec hill to gather his men, General Persifor Smith had supervised the task of filling it in with broken pieces of the outer wall. While Worth’s men waited for the road to be repaired, they watched as two American civilians on horseback—“army followers,” as one observer called them—rode over to some bushes about two hundred yards from the road. Hidden there were two Mexican soldiers, likely wounded and unable to keep up with their retreating unit, who got on their knees to plead for mercy. But the Americans drew their pistols and shot each man repeatedly. The U.S. soldiers watching from the road let out a “loud murmur of disapprobation at this atrociously savage act,” and one even fired his musket at the two men. When they returned to the road where the soldiers were gathered, “they received a shower of curses and epithets, showing how much their infamous conduct was detested.”6 The disapproval of this kind of behavior presents a stark contrast to the actions of American soldiers who gave no quarter a short time earlier on the castle grounds. Those men, however, were largely volunteers from James Shields’s brigade and relatively new recruits of Franklin Pierce’s brigade—the types of soldiers notorious for undisciplined behavior. The ones down below on the Anzures causeway were the disciplined veterans of Worth’s division of regulars.
The morning was slipping away by the time Worth’s column turned left and started away from the castle. Worth had superseded Trousdale, who originally commanded that portion of the Chapultepec assault force. Now augmented by Sumner’s dragoons, another light battalion, and batteries commanded by Duncan and Magruder, Worth pushed north in full view of the city on his right. But Quitman had a head start and a shorter distance to cover, and his column had already encountered resistance from a two-gun battery halfway up the Belén causeway. The Rifle Regiment led Quitman’s column, but it had to take cover inside the archways when Mexicans began to rake the road with canister. Supporting their cannon was a redan to the right filled with infantrymen who began to pour musket fire into Quitman’s troops. At the front of the column, Beauregard was hit in the thigh and had his shoulder grazed. Captain Drum brought his guns forward and returned fire as the Rifles advanced from arch to arch. An hour later, the Rifles had closed the distance enough to charge the battery and drive the Mexi
cans back to the Belén garita.7
When Major Kirby arrived with Scott’s directive to stop, the first of several such messages that Scott sent to his division commander that day, Quitman ignored it. He was determined to be the first one inside the city, and, unwilling to allow orders to dampen his zeal, Quitman pressed on into the teeth of the heavily fortified gate. Santa Anna arrived at the gate to personally direct the defense and had brought with him more artillery and infantry. As Quitman advanced, he faced not only artillery and musket fire from the gate’s blockhouse, but also the oblique fire from a battery on the Piedad causeway. Thus, as the forenoon turned to afternoon, Quitman found himself in a situation similar to the one he had been in that morning on the Tacubaya Road. In addition Santa Anna had posted guns along a promenade that ran north from the Belén garita and extended along the entire western edge of the city. They, too, opened fire on his advancing troops, forcing them to again seek shelter within the archways. The marshy ground prohibited any approach other than straight up the road. Fortunately, the width of the columns provided enough space to conceal about a half dozen men, and in this fashion, the Rifles, now intermingled with men of the South Carolina Regiment, moved from arch to arch, gradually nearing the gate. When the fire from the Piedad causeway became “very annoying,” to use Quitman’s descriptive understatement, Drum fired a few rounds of canister in that direction, which dispersed the Mexican gunners.8
A Gallant Little Army Page 33
