On the Mexican side, the humiliations at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma were repaid by the court-martial and dismissal from the army of the popular general Mariano Arista, which prompted in turn the downfall of President Mariano Paredes. Both of these men were replaced with what for the Mexicans would prove to be unfortunate choices.
The Paredes affair involved possibly the greatest con ever perpetrated on a sitting U.S. president, certainly up until that time. Readers will recall Polk’s meeting with the shadowy, slick-talking Alejandro Atocha, who had arrived at the White House on the evening of Friday the thirteenth of February, 1846, to inform a startled Polk that Atocha’s friend Antonio López de Santa Anna, the recently deposed president of Mexico, had an exciting proposition to offer.
Atocha said that Santa Anna, who was living in exile in Havana, would entertain an offer of $30 million from the U.S. government in exchange for clear title to all of Texas and the New Mexico and California territories, if only the American navy would smuggle him back into his country to stage a coup and regain power. Polk had considered the offer seriously at the time, which was right before war had broken out, and even discussed it with his cabinet, but in the end he let the matter drop.*
When war finally came Polk had not forgotten the incident, and he dispatched the navy commander Alexander Slidell Mackenzie to Havana to parley with the irrepressible Mexican leader.† As we have seen, Polk’s vision included the acquisition of California and New Mexico, by purchase if possible, by war if necessary, and he certainly preferred purchase over war. The meeting took place on July 6, 1846, about the same time John Frémont was raising the American flag over Sonoma and Kearny’s army was eating dust down the Santa Fe Trail. The wily Mexican’s views were all that Atocha had said and more; Santa Anna even suggested that the Americans should be more aggressive, so as to give Mexicans a face-saving excuse to trade their territory for money.‡
A month later, on August 8, Santa Anna, Atocha, and two other conspirators became the only cargo sailing from Havana to Veracruz on the English merchant steamer Arab, deliberately “unmolested” by Commodore David E. Conner of the U.S. blockading squadron.
Citizens of Veracruz were startled to behold this controversial politician once again in their midst, even though he had been “met on the streets by a ragged honor guard” of shills prompted by bribes or other emoluments to support him. There was an anxious moment when somebody reminded the ex-presidente that he had been exiled under the penalty of death if he returned. But such was Santa Anna’s magnetism that when he stomped one-legged over to the city hall and delivered himself of a powerful condemnation of the current state of affairs, the crowd forgot all about the firing squad and embraced his fulminations against the hated Gringo.
John S. D. Eisenhower, in his book So Far from God: The U.S. War with Mexico, 1846–1848,§ sets the scene: “During the course of a week statues and portraits of him were brought out of hiding, [including his severed leg, which two years earlier had been disinterred from its resting place in an urn atop a stone column in Santa Paula and dragged through the streets by an angry crowd] and the name of Santa Anna appeared once more on numerous street signs. Mobs shouted pro–Santa Anna slogans, and a few threw rocks at the house of the former president Herrera.”
Soon Santa Anna had regained control of the army, which would be followed closely by control of the country itself. And just as quickly he repudiated any notion that he might be willing to trade Mexican territory to the United States for cash or anything else. In fact, his intention from the outset had been only to drive the Yankee invader from Mexican soil and to reconquer Texas in the bargain—the ultimate double cross!
Following the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, Zachary Taylor took time to rest and reorganize an army that was quickly filling up with volunteer regiments from the South and the Midwest, which were arriving on steamers out of New Orleans. By midsummer the American force consisted of some 3,200 regulars and 8,500 volunteers—an army of 12,000 spoiling for a fight. It was obvious to Taylor that the Mexicans had no intention of offering themselves up in battle again along the line of the Rio Grande, so he would have to take the battle to them—no easy matter in the harsh countryside of northern Mexico.
Most of the enemy army had now concentrated in or around Monterrey. That was about 250 miles west of Taylor’s camp at Matamoros near the mouth of the Rio Grande, which the soldiers had derisively named “Baghdad.” There in wretched, swampy living conditions the healthy along with the wounded and ill suffered and died with alarming regularity beneath the scorching sun, beset by flies, ants, mosquitoes, snakes, scorpions, tarantulas, and other subtropical unpleasantries.
Beginning in early June Taylor received separate instructions from Secretary of War William Marcy and General of the Army Winfield Scott (who were still not on speaking terms) suggesting an attack and occupation of Monterrey, capital of the state of Nuevo León.
Scott, in fact, suggested to Taylor that Monterrey would be an ideal jumping-off point for a campaign to capture Mexico City, a notion that Taylor found preposterous, given that the Mexican capital was a thousand miles to the south across immense mountains and wide deserts, let alone enemy opposition. Not wishing to offend his chief, Taylor merely responded that such an expedition would be “impracticable,” but he agreed that Monterrey must be captured, as well as all the other northern capitals, which would put both an economic and a political squeeze on the Mexican government.
For a staging area halfway to Monterrey Taylor picked the empty riverbanks of Camargo, a hundred miles northwest of Matamoros by land, but some four hundred miles by riverboat, which was how Taylor planned to transport his men. There were on hand a few small steamers and these were pressed into service on the turbid swirling Rio Grande, which was fraught with quicksand, eddies, whirlpools, and dangerous shoals.
The camp at Camargo proved to be every bit as miserable and unsanitary as “Baghdad,” and it was situated on reeking mudflats along the San Juan River where “the very name Camargo became synonymous with boredom, filth and tragic death. Diseases took a fearful toll and the dead march never ceased throughout the day.”‖
When Taylor arrived at Camargo he was horrified at the state of affairs, but since many of his troops and equipment had yet to arrive he was hamstrung. At last he could stand no more, and in late August the general issued orders for the army to march on Monterrey, about 120 miles to the southwest. It was before he was ready, but considering the alternative Taylor felt he had no choice.a From scouting parties the Americans learned that Monterrey had become a fortified bastion, occupied by the 10,000-man Mexican Army of the North now led by the ferocious Pedro de Ampudia, a forty-two-year-old Cuban-born sadist who two years earlier—and without so much as a court-martial trial—executed a rival general in one of Mexico’s eternal civil wars, chopped off his head, and had it fried in boiling oil to preserve it for exhibition on a pike in the public square in the city of Villahermosa, Tabasco.
Ampudia had taken charge of the Mexican army after Arista’s departure and right before Santa Anna assumed authority. Everyone knew that Monterrey was the key to the interior of Mexico and it had been recently fortified so as to become a formidable obstacle. The city was laid out rectangularly, in city blocks, and most of the houses and buildings were connected, flat-roofed, and built of stone, making each potentially a miniature stronghold. Guarding the Marin road, down which Taylor’s army would have to march from the north, were two large forts, el Tenería (the Tannery, or slaughterhouse) and Fort Diablo (Devil’s Fort). In front of the city, a gargantuan slab-sided edifice called the Citadel commanded all northern approaches. Walled in masonry thirty feet high with rectangular bastions and constructed on the foundations of an old cathedral, the Citadel’s eight guns posed a fearful impediment for anyone trying to get at the city. Taylor’s men called it the Black Fort. As if that were not enough, on Independence and Federation hills, two elevations just to the west and behind Monterrey prop
er, were a pair of artillery strongpoints—one was called the Bishop’s Palace and the other Fort Soldado—that further dominated the approaches to the city. Behind them, on the outskirts of town, the imposing Sierra Madres reared thousands of feet straight up out of the plain like a cresting basalt wave.
Taylor’s army began marching from the dreadful Camargo encampment on September 4 and, after several stops to obtain shoes, blacksmith services, and provisions, the leading elements arrived before Monterrey on September 19, shadowed along the way by a squadron of Mexican lancers. The American army numbered fewer than seven thousand; Taylor had concluded that he could bring no more because of the difficulty of provisions and handling larger bodies of men. They brought with them eight days’ worth of rations. The marching army was now composed of all 3,200 of Taylor’s regulars and 3,000 volunteers—a total of 6,200 troops. Another 4,700 of the volunteers in his army had been left behind. By contrast, Ampudia had a full 10,000 men to defend Monterrey—7,000 regulars and 3,000 rancheros, or guerrillas.
Taylor’s advance drew up on the plain of the Extremadura valley about three miles in front of Monterrey, with some of the men anxious to charge the city then and there, but Taylor held them back until the rest of the army was up. The Black Fort, a large Mexican flag flying from its ramparts, suddenly belched a cloud of dark smoke, which was followed immediately by a booming report that echoed down the valley, then by another, and another. The last shot caromed off the ground in front of Taylor and his staff and bounced over their heads. At this development they turned and retired out of range to a campground they called Walnut Springs, where Old Rough and Ready began sending out scouting parties to reconnoiter. Tomorrow would be a trying day. This was obviously quite different from what they had faced at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma—and more sinister too. By the end of the evening Taylor had his plan.
The key to Monterrey, Taylor concluded, was the Bishop’s Palace and the other fortifications on Independence and Federation hills to the west and rear of the city. Once in American hands, they could be used to bombard Ampudia into submission. Accordingly, at two in the afternoon on September 20, a Sunday, General William Jenkins Worth led his division in a great hooking loop from Walnut Springs so as to come up on Federation Hill from the rear. In the lead was the Mounted Rifles regiment, volunteers from west Texas under command of Colonel John C. Hays. These would afterward become the fabled Texas Rangers.
It was a measure of Taylor’s contempt for the Mexicans that he divided his army in the very face of battle, but his experience was that the Mexicans were far more inclined to defend than attack. In this he was correct; however, he had misjudged the extent to which the Mexicans were capable of defending.
Taylor’s reconnoitering party had discovered a route that was defiladed behind some high ground from the fire of the Black Fort but soon the movement was reported to Ampudia, who rushed reinforcements to Independence Hill. By six p.m. General Worth halted the column for the night, and the men slept in the open, without shelter, fires, and not much food.b At daybreak they were again on the march. As the leading elements neared the Monterrey–Saltillo road, about two thousand Mexican cavalry attacked them. The Mounted Rifles dismounted and, with the help of two infantry companies and a pair of artillery batteries, decimated the Mexicans, who fled in a matter of minutes, leaving more than a hundred dead and wounded—along with scores of horses—on the killing field.c
Continuing their envelopment of the high ground, Worth’s force by midafternoon had reached the steep base of 400-foot Federation Hill, the rearward of the two, and storming parties of some six hundred men began a grueling struggle through rough chaparral toward the crest. Fortunately, the steepness of the hill protected them from cannon fire since the artillery could not depress to that angle, as they staggered upward, stopping to fire volleys and shouting and yelling. An old military maxim holds that it is difficult to instill confidence in a beaten army, let alone one that has been beaten twice, as Ampudia’s men had been, and they proved it by fleeing “in terror” at the sight of the Americans charging wildly uphill. Atop the rise, Worth’s soldiers used an abandoned Mexican piece to knock out a gun at el Soldado, and the day was theirs.
It was a brilliant, almost textbook victory, but during the same time that Worth was “covering himself with victory,” Zachary Taylor was having a terrible day of it on the other side of town. Old Rough and Ready had kept command of the other part of the army, and to create a diversion to occupy Ampudia’s attention while Worth turned his left flank Taylor had sent two divisions to attack or at least “demonstrate” against the Tannery and el Diablo strongpoints at the eastern fringes of Monterrey. This, Taylor properly concluded, ought to prevent Ampudia from rushing reinforcements from those positions to overcome Worth’s men on the western hills.
Colonel John Garland had been instructed by Taylor to “keep well out of reach” of the enemy artillery. But, Taylor added, if he thought he could capture either or both of the strongpoints, “you’d better do it.” Garland hadn’t gotten far when the Black Fort opened up on his columns with a big 18-inch gun, but soon he was informed that a forward artillery position at the Tannery had been abandoned. What was he to do? He’d been ordered to keep out of range but also to take the strongpoints if possible. Here was a classic case of poor communication. Garland was a fifty-four-year-old veteran of the Seminole Wars, an earnest soldier who took orders seriously—and now this. It appeared that the Tannery could be captured, but not without putting his men in the range of enemy artillery fire. He did the soldierly thing and attacked the Tannery. But his line of assault was faulty.
Garland intended to get at the Tannery by going around it, to its rear. But that put his columns, 500-men strong, in a deadly double crossfire of artillery and rifles from the rooftops of the city itself, the Black Fort, the guns of the Tannery, and now the guns of el Diablo, which was behind the Tannery. It was sheer murder and confusion. Taylor arrived on the scene and threw reinforcements into the fray but by dusk he’d ordered a withdrawal.
Ironically one infantry company, commanded by Captain Electus Backus, tenaciously stayed the course and when the soldiers noticed a body of Mexicans fleeing the Tannery they rushed in and captured the fort, taking dozens of prisoners and five guns.d Still, the attack had been a trial for the army, which had sustained some four hundred casualties—nearly 10 percent of those committed to action. Among them were many of Taylor’s best officers, and the carnage was deeply dispiriting for the men—heads torn off, limbs shredded, ghastly disfiguring wounds, and the unnerving cries for mercy and screams of pain. At day’s end the general was forced to renew his respect for the Mexican army, which he had tended to trivialize after the two earlier encounters.
Next day Taylor’s severely mauled wing of the army reorganized and regrouped, but Worth’s division continued its attack with a dawn storming party on 800-foot Independence Hill. To their surprise, Worth’s soldiers discovered that most of the defenders had retreated to the sanctity of the Bishop’s Palace, which looked impregnable to infantry attack, and was. However, fifty of Worth’s artillerymen using ropes and tackle blocks somehow grappled the disassembled parts of a twelve-pound gun up the hillside and began blasting the ramparts of the so-called palace several hundred yards distant on the eastern end of the hill. At the same time, U.S. artillery on Federation Hill also opened up on the stronghold, which compelled its defenders to flee with considerable loss of life. By late afternoon the American flag waved over the Bishop’s Palace, and the morning of September 23 revealed that Ampudia had abandoned all of his outlying forts and strongpoints and was fortifying houses for a do-or-die defense in the main part of town.
Colonel Jefferson Davis’s regiment of Mississippians was ordered into town to “carefully reconnoiter” beginning at the Tannery by using “the cover of walls and houses” (which was another way of saying, “Don’t march down the middle of the street”). It was soon discovered that Monterrey city was a death trap to anyone
showing himself in the open. Mexican riflemen manned the rooftops and windows of the adobe row houses. American artillerymen figured a way to blast them with cannons by loading a gun behind a wall or house, then running it out quickly and firing a round at a house down the street, then quickly hauling the gun back to cover by a rope from behind the wall. Davis’s men quickly figured out that the best way to get at the Mexican defenders was to take a house and then, using pickaxes, crowbars, and mauls, batter their way through the next wall and toss in a lit artillery shell to clear out whatever Mexicans might be there, and then repeat the process from one house to the next. The U.S. troops penetrated block after block in this manner, breaking through scores of houses, until they were nearly to the town plaza, where most of the frightened women and children who had not evacuated had fled.
At some point in the midst of this frantic activity, Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant made a name for himself with a notable act of bravery. Grant, who had been assigned as quartermaster for the Fourth Infantry, learned the leading parties were nearly out of ammo. One of the finest equestrians ever to graduate West Point, he jumped on his horse Indian-style with one leg slung over the saddle and the other under the horse’s belly and, clinging sideways and protected from enemy fire, he clattered at a gallop down the deadly streets to order up the munitions.
From the eastern end of town, Worth’s soldiers had begun similar block-clearing tactics and the two wings of the army were about to meet in the center plaza as the brutal street fighting continued all day and into the night. A gray misty morning found the streets littered with corpses, and the Americans poised to continue their grim excavations, when messengers arrived with orders to hold up the assault. Ampudia, it seemed, had decided to negotiate the surrender of Monterrey.