Already wounded twice while on the causeway, Beauregard met more misfortune as the Americans inched closer to the garita—although perhaps “good fortune” is a more appropriate characterization. At one point while he, Quitman, Shields, and Smith tried to talk over the noise of battle, a shell struck the top of the arch they were standing under, sending debris down on them. Only moments later, grapeshot from the garita struck him; one slammed into his saber and did no harm, but the other hit him in the side, knocking him down. Stunned and with the breath knocked out of him, a friend gave him a drink of whiskey to resuscitate him. He unbuttoned his coat and found that the ball had hit right where he kept his gloves and eyeglasses. They had stopped the bullet’s momentum, resulting in only a bruise.9
Quitman’s casualties mounted, but his men kept working their way through the arches while Drum’s artillery, firing from both sides of the aqueduct, provided support. Some time during their slow advance, Quitman and Beauregard left the causeway and attempted to survey the adjoining marshes when they both fell into a water-filled canal and the general lost one of his boots. At a little after 1:00 P.M., the rate of Mexican fire began to slacken as a result of two developments. First, they ran low on ammunition, and second, rumors that more Americans were advancing along the southern causeways induced some of their infantry to fall back to the city. With the gate now but a short dash away, Quitman took a weapon from a wounded rifleman, fired his last round, and tied a red silk handkerchief to the barrel. Waving it over his head, he yelled for the men to follow him into the works. The Rifles and Palmettos rushed to the gate and began to pour over the parapets, ending all Mexican resistance in that citadel. Israel Uncapher thought it was “the most bloody & hardest contested battle which has been fought in Mexico.”10
It was 1:20 when the Belén garita fell, four hours since the capture of Chapultepec. But this proved to be only a lull. If the Americans thought that capturing the outer gate would gain them entry into the capital, they were soon disappointed. The gate stood three hundred yards from the city proper and from the Ciudadela at the city’s edge. The Ciudadela, a converted tobacco factory, housed the garrison that was permanently stationed at Mexico City, and it presented another imposing obstacle blocking Quitman’s ultimate triumph. The unfortified east side of the garita offered minimal protection for the American troops once inside, thus exposing them to fire from the city. The Belén defenders had withdrawn to the Ciudadela, and they soon resumed firing from there. Santa Anna had left earlier to go up to the San Cosme garita to prepare it for Worth’s arrival, but now he hastened back to the Ciudadela with more men and artillery as the fight between the two strongholds intensified.11
When Drum ran out of ammunition, he and his battery mates abandoned their guns and turned a captured 8-pounder around to continue firing. According to one volunteer, “Drum displayed the most coolness & daring of any man I saw. He worked at the gun & leveled it every time himself while his men were falling fast around him.” Quitman later referred to the artilleryman’s “iron nerve” when recounting his division’s action on the causeway. Within an hour, Drum was mortally wounded and his battery decimated: both of his lieutenants wounded, one of them, Lieutenant Calvin Benjamin, mortally, one sergeant killed, and all the other noncommissioned officers save one wounded. The lone uninjured sergeant became the battery commander. A Mexican cannonball took off both of Drum’s legs, but he lived until after nightfall. “There has been no greater slaughter in any one company during the whole war,” wrote D. H. Hill, also of Drum’s Fourth Artillery. Hill also thought that Drum’s company was “cut all to pieces” because “the raw levies which supported it behaved most cowardly.”12 It is unclear to which units Hill referred. He was always critical of the volunteers, and all three volunteer regiments were with Quitman on the Belén causeway that afternoon. However, the general indicated in his battle report that the volunteer regiments, especially the Palmettos, were in the thick of the fight with the Rifle Regiment. Perhaps he meant the Ninth Regiment of Pierce’s brigade, which had been authorized and raised earlier that year and had joined the army at Puebla only five weeks earlier. They were truly “raw levies.” In fact, all of Pierce’s regiments fell into that category, but apparently only the Ninth accompanied Quitman up the road, and it is conspicuously absent from the general’s battle report except for one passing reference.
With his situation becoming increasingly desperate in midafternoon, Quitman sent his aide, Lieutenant Davis, to find Scott and request artillery, ammunition, and artillerymen. The commanding general was on the San Cosme causeway, following closely behind Worth’s column. When Davis located him and delivered Quitman’s request, an irritated Scott responded that Quitman might as well “call on me for field-marshals.” By rushing toward the Belén garita, Quitman had advanced into the strongest part of the city’s western defenses, which is precisely why Scott wanted the main effort to be directed against the San Cosme gate. “Those views I repeatedly, in the course of the day communicated to Major General Quitman,” wrote Scott five days later. But Quitman was out of his reach—in fact had temporarily removed himself from his superior’s control, and standing in front of Scott was one of that general’s aides. So to take out his frustrations, Scott proceeded to lecture the subaltern about Quitman being out of position and about his having advanced too far up the causeway. Furthermore, he had no available troops to send him, so Quitman would have to make do with what he had.13
Before the afternoon ended, the Mexicans attempted several sorties from the Ciudadela in an effort to push the Americans out of the garita, but each time, the muskets of Quitman’s intermingled units beat them back. To minimize some of the enemy fire from the promenade, now directly on his flank, Quitman sent two companies from the Second Pennsylvania to a sandbag redoubt a hundred yards to the left of the garita with instructions to return a brisk fire in that direction. Quitman held his position in and around the garita until dark, when he hoped to bring up more artillery. After dark, the Mexicans ceased firing, thus providing the respite that the Americans needed to resupply, stack sandbags, and prepare gun emplacements for another push against the Ciudadela citadel the next morning.14
Meanwhile, to the northwest, Worth had spent much of the day trying to catch up in the race to the city gates. That morning after the Mexican units began to break and peel away from their positions in and around Chapultepec and while chaos and disorganization continued to reign around the castle, Hill and Barnard Bee gathered the remnants of their storming party and entered the Anzures causeway well ahead of Worth’s division. They were soon joined by Thomas Jackson, who had mounted his broken guns on wagon limbers. With fewer than fifty men, this brave assortment left the bulk of the army behind and started up the road, pressing large numbers of enemy troops ahead of them. Like the Belén causeway, this road was divided down the middle by a large aqueduct with open arches, so when the Mexicans turned to resist the pursuit, the Americans found cover behind the columns. Much of the way up the road, the two sides fought a running battle, with Jackson periodically stopping to unlimber his guns and fire a few rounds. At one point, Magruder arrived and expressed concern about this small contingent being so far ahead of the rest of the army and the prospects of losing the cannon as a result. However, they persuaded him to allow them to go a little farther, and having done so, General Anastasio Torrejón formed 1,500 lancers on the road and charged the intrepid little band. Jackson cooly positioned his guns on each side of the aqueduct, and as he remembered later, “I opened on them,” and with each shot “we cut lanes through them.” Perhaps Bee’s “stonewall” description, which he applied to Jackson fourteen years later, was merely the expression of an opinion formed in Mexico. After beating back the lancers, Hill, Jackson, and company decided to wait until the rest of Worth’s division arrived before continuing.15
Hill’s and Bee’s presence on the Anzures causeway provides an example of how disorganized some of the American units had become. They, along with other
s in their group, were assigned to Twiggs’s division but had been attached to Quitman’s for the early morning assault. Now here they were a mile ahead of Worth’s division, heading in a different direction from Quitman’s force. No matter which approach to the capital the soldiers took or which unit they found themselves with, they were generally swept forward by the momentum of a running battle, and they all hoped that the road they were on would culminate in the city—and with peace.
By early afternoon, Worth’s main column had caught up with Hill’s improvised vanguard, and the whole pressed on toward the San Cosme causeway with a contingent of troops from John Garland’s brigade now leading the way. At the point where the Anzures and San Cosme roads met, the Mexican resistance stiffened with the aid of a one-gun battery in the intersection pointing south. Because the intersection was in the outer suburbs of the city, the Americans were already encountering houses sprinkled along the road. Not only did the Mexicans plant a cannon in the road, but also infantry lined the roofs of nearby houses. In the new lead unit was Ulysses S. Grant of the Fourth Infantry, and he ascertained that the gun could be flanked by using as protection a rock wall that bounded a house at the intersection’s southwest corner. Leading a dozen men and staying behind the wall, he crept around the house and formed his troops in the San Cosme Road west of the intersection and only a few yards away from the Mexican artillerists. The sight of the Americans on their flank caused them to immediately run toward the city, and so did their comrades on the rooftops.16
It was near the intersection where Scott overtook Worth’s column. The commanding general had left Chapultepec late in the morning with his staff and also with Captain Lee. Since the fall of the castle, Lee already had reconnoitered Worth’s entire line of advance to the suburbs, although there is little information about what he did and where he was. He was slightly wounded in the process but did not seek medical attention. He had reported back to Scott at Chapultepec and was engaged in escorting him up to Worth’s position when he “could no longer keep my saddle.” In other words, he passed out. He had been up for fifty-six hours without sleep and his body simply shut down. Friends took him to a safe place to recover and rest, but he was back in the saddle delivering orders before dawn the next morning.17 Scott pressed on and observed Worth’s operations for some time in the suburbs before returning to the castle late in the afternoon. It was sometime while he was on the road that Lieutenant Davis arrived bearing Quitman’s request for artillery and reinforcements.
Turning right at the intersection, Worth’s men began to make their final approach to the San Cosme garita. Houses now lined both sides of the road, and increasingly Mexican troops fired at them from windows and roofs, making a slow and cautious advance. By the late afternoon, they were within three hundred yards of the garita and completely stalled. This lightly defended and vulnerable gate had been remarkably transformed since the castle had fallen that morning. The Mexicans had hastily constructed a redoubt, filled in the near arches of the aqueduct with sandbags, and added three cannon to the gate’s defenses. Santa Anna gathered additional troops as reinforcements and personally directed some of the day’s preparations. The cannon from the gate raked the road with canister, and hundreds of Mexican infantry packed the rooftops, spraying the road with musketry. The scattered resistance that had annoyed Worth’s advance throughout the late morning and early afternoon now turned into a storm of lead that completely halted his progress. By this time Quitman’s men had been in the Belén garita dueling with the Ciudadela for close to two hours, but it would take the remainder of the afternoon and house-to-house street fighting for Worth to reach the San Cosme garita.18
While reconnoitering south of the road, Grant found a church ideally situated and with a bell tower that appeared tall enough to permit some shells to be lobbed into the garita. Upon returning to the main road, he secured a mountain howitzer and enough men to work it, and after they disassembled it, they struck out. Along the way, they had to cross several ten-foot-wide ditches that were chest deep with water. When they finally reached the church, Grant knocked on the door until a priest answered. The clergyman was polite but he refused them entrance, whereupon Grant, in broken Spanish, “explained to him that he might save property by opening the door, and he certainly would save himself from becoming a prisoner.” At length Grant convinced him that “I intended to go in whether he consented or not. He began to see his duty in the same light that I did, and opened the door.” They reassembled the howitzer in the belfry and proceeded to fire round after round into the garita from a little over two hundred yards. Their shots “created great confusion” among the enemy, Grant remembered years later, and he wondered why at such a close range and with no supporting infantry the Mexicans did not send a body of troops to the church to attack them.19
Meanwhile on the main road, Worth had ordered soldiers into the houses with pickaxes and crowbars to work their way up the street, going through rather than around the houses. In this manner Worth hoped to gain the north flank of the garita. When he saw the effects of Grant’s howitzer shots and discovered their place of origin, he instructed Lieutenant John C. Pemberton, the future Confederate commander at Vicksburg, to go to the church, find the officer in charge, and bring him back. When Grant reported to Worth, the general was so pleased with Grant’s enterprise that he ordered a captain of the Voltigeurs to go back with Grant and take another howitzer to place alongside the first. Grant did not take time to explain to the general that there was no room in the belfry for a second gun. He returned to the church with the other gun, but did not use it. A similarly ingenious placement of a howitzer on the north side of the road by Lieutenant Raphael Semmes also proved effective.20
The sun was rapidly descending in the western sky when the San Cosme garita finally fell. The Mexican defenders had fought bravely all afternoon, sending a constant hail of bullets down the road. They had inflicted casualties but had also taken their share, among them Brigadier General Joaquín Rangel, who had been badly wounded while directing the defense. The end came when American soldiers appeared on the roof of a three-story house thirty yards away from the redoubt that commanded the causeway. They were marines and members of the sapper group that for several hours had been methodically cutting their way through the houses on the north side of the road. Their proximity and elevation allowed them to fire a volley right into the works, scattering many of the defenders. To seize their advantage, the marines went back down the stairs, rushed out the door of the building, and stormed right into the redoubt. As they jumped over the works, they ran headlong into a flood of Worth’s soldiers, who had also rushed the position and were pouring in from the street. The remaining Mexicans fled, giving Worth possession of the garita and its surrounding defenses. As darkness approached, the front of Worth’s unorganized column marched into the western edge of the city near the large Alameda park, but he went no further. His men spent that night in houses close to the San Cosme gate, and the day’s activities ended with Captain Benjamin Huger aiming a 10-inch mortar toward the National Palace in the center of town and firing five rounds.21
Around the San Cosme and Belén garitas, exhausted American soldiers rested and prepared their minds and bodies for more heavy fighting the next morning. Having captured both fortified gates, they were now knocking on the door of Mexico City, but at sunrise, they knew that they would have to break through that door and engage the enemy in a house-to-house street fight in order to claim control of the city. Back at the base of Chapultepec where the two western approaches to the city diverged, Scott oversaw the collection of supplies, hastened forward stragglers and various detachments to their respective units, and “sent to Quitman, additional siege guns, ammunition, [and] intrenching tools.” At the Belén gate, as soon as it was dark and the fighting died down, Quitman’s staff officers, Mansfield Lovell and George Davis, went to work directing soldiers in the construction of fortifications, and Beauregard oversaw the placement of a battery. Quitman’s primary o
bstacle at first light would be the Ciudadela, and his preparations were designed to provide defensive protection from its guns as well as offensive firepower to reduce that stronghold.22
Late in the evening, Quitman instructed Davis to go to the rear and bring ammunition forward. Davis went all the way back to Mixcoac, four miles to the south. There he procured two wagons of ammunition, but the drivers were reluctant—frightened about the danger of going that far forward. Davis insisted that they go, and their sense of duty compelled them to comply. One of the drivers, however, had a change of heart along the way and drove his wagon off the road in an attempt to overturn and disable it, but the shoulder was shallow and the wagon remained upright. Davis galloped forward just as the driver was attempting to dismount and flee, and, pointing his pistol at the man’s head, Davis threatened to blow his brains out if he did not get back in the driver’s seat. The lieutenant delivered the ammunition to the Belén gate in the middle of the night and in time for it to be distributed before sunrise.23
As it turned out, Quitman did not need the ammunition. In compliance with the wishes of political leaders to save the city from destruction, Santa Anna collected his disheartened troops, about 12,000 of them, and at 1:00 A.M. marched north to Guadalupe Hidalgo. At about 4:00 A.M., a messenger from the city council arrived at Scott’s headquarters, informing him of the army’s evacuation and offering terms to surrender Mexico City into his hands. Scott would accept no terms, but he gave one of his own. He demanded an immediate “contribution” of $150,000 to help pay the expenses of the American occupation. Although he demanded the unconditional surrender of the capital, he assured the emissary that they would receive fair treatment from his troops. Unaware of these developments, Quitman was surprised at dawn to see a white flag emerge from the Ciudadela and approach his line. The bearer informed him that the Mexican troops were gone and that the citadel was open to his men. Suspicious of a trap, Quitman agreed to Lovell’s and Beauregard’s request that they be allowed to go to the Ciudadela to investigate. There they encountered a Mexican officer who asked them to sign a receipt for the fortress, to which Beauregard responded that American troops give “receipts with the points of our swords!” Immediately Quitman ordered his men to arms, and there was great scurrying about as they formed on the road. Still anxious to be the first general in the city, he wasted no time in marching his dirty troops in their battle-stained uniforms straight for the National Palace located in the Grand Plaza. Civilians lined the sidewalks and rooftops and peered through windows, staring in angry amazement as Quitman, still wearing only one boot, led his soldiers, some limping, some wounded, and all ragged and tired, through the streets. At 7:00 A.M., a marine lieutenant raised the American flag over the palace as the men gave a loud hurrah. They were in Mexico City at last. One member of the division, Hachaliah Brown, later wrote to his family about lost friends and about his amazement at having “come off without a scratch” in the fight to capture the city. “Had a devil of a time to get here,” he wrote.24
A Gallant Little Army Page 34
