Soldiers of Conquest (2 page)

The sort of recklessness that had brought Henry Lee success on the battlefield ruined him in his personal life. He squandered most of his first wife's tobacco fortune in wild schemes. He began land speculating with the money of his second wife, the mother of Robert E, and when unable to pay a $40,000 debt was thrown into debtor's prison. President Monroe “arranged” for “Light-horse” to escape his debts in the States by fleeing to the West Indies. This was the last time six-year-old Robert ever saw his father, who died five years later in exile. Because of the absence of his father, black haired and brown eyed Robert grew up with much responsibility while but a boy.

With a long list of illustrious ancestors, English earls, American governors, Speaker of the House, generals, signers of the Declaration of Independence, diplomats, and judges, Robert had much to live up to, and a father's black actions to live down. Believing the military was the best way to accomplish his goals, he decided upon West Point as a starting point. He had been the most sponsored cadet to have ever entered the Point, with five U.S. Senators, three Representatives, and the Secretary Of War endorsing him.

A full grown man standing six feet tall, Lee was accepted at the Point in 1825 and graduated in 1828 as Adjutant of Cadets, the highest rank possible. When the Mexican War began he urgently requested transfer to the front to take part in the fighting. He was ordered to join General Scott in the invasion of central Mexico.

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Ulysses Hiram Grant was born April 27, 1822 at Point Pleasant, Ohio in a two room, clapboard house 18 feet by 19 feet. His father, Jesse Root Grant, named him Ulysses after the Grecian warrior Ulysses in Fenelon's epic tale Telemachus. Ulysses was of the eighth generation in the United States. His ancestors, Mathew and Priscilla Grant were of Scottish descent and came from Dorset England and landed at Plymouth Massachusetts in the summer of 1630 on the sailing ship John & Mary. By the time of the revolution, their descendants had formed a core of a moderately prominent family in Connecticut.

Ulysses's grandfather Noah Grant fought in the Continental Army throughout the Revolutionary War, starting as a Minute Man on Lexington Green and rising to captain by the time the British were defeated. After being discharged, he turned to drunkenness and wasted a substantial inheritance on whiskey, and abandoned his wife and children.

Grant's father, Jesse, was eleven years old at the time of his father's abandonment. He made his own way as a farm hand, and then for several years as a tannery worked soaking hides in lime and oak bark sludge and scraping off the loosened flesh and hair. When Ulysses was two, Jesse quit work in the tannery and moved the family to Georgetown, Ohio, on the banks of the Ohio River. There he started his own tanning business.

Brown haired and blue-eyed Ulysses could read well at six. His true love was horses, and he had a way with them. He had a remarkable visual memory of landscape and terrain and at the age of eight was driving horse and wagon by himself all over the backwoods of the county hauling oak bark for his father's tannery. Neighbors brought colts for Ulysses to break to ride. To show his horsemanship, he would sometimes gallop his steed down the main street standing on one foot on his horse's back. At fourteen Ulysses provided limousine service with a two horse carriage taking people from Georgetown to Chillicothe sixty miles away and return, and to Cincinnati forty miles distant, and delivering mail about the county.

Ulysses had but a few years of formal schooling, however Jesse had a thirty-five book library and required the boy to study. Jesse decided Ulysses should go to West Point, and persuaded his representative, Congressman Hamer, to sponsor Ulysses. Ulysses didn't want to go, but Jesse insisted, and when Jesse insisted that was the way it went.

So at seventeen, standing five foot one inch and weighing one hundred and seventeen pounds, Ulysses set off for West Point on the Hudson River in New York. Worried about passing the entrance examination at the Point, Ulysses took a book from Jesse's library and taught himself algebra during the ten-day journey. He passed the exam and signed the enlistment papers on September 14, 1839. Ulysses graduated in 1843, and being unwilling to apply himself diligently to his studies, ranked twenty-one out of a class of thirty-nine. He was assigned to the elite Fourth Infantry under the command of General Worth.

“Find a flaw, some weakness in the defenses of the fort and city that will allow us to capture them,” General Scott, Chief of the American Army, directed his subordinate officers standing with him on the deck of the small naval steamboat Patrita lying on the Bay of Campeche. He made a sweep of his hand in the direction of Mexico's largest seaport Veracruz and mighty Fort San Juan de Ulua a mile distant and standing out in sharp relief under a brilliant tropical sun.

General Scott, a huge man at six feet five and huskily built, had arrived the day before from the States on his flagship, the warship Massachusetts. He had brought with him for the invasion ninety-nine large ships crowded with nine thousand soldiers and the holds full of cannons, muskets, and cavalry mounts.

The Patrita rose and fell showing a portion of her copper sheathed bottom as the swells generated by a storm in the Gulf of Mexico forced their way under her keel. Balancing themselves against the movement of the ship, the blue uniformed army officers held their field glasses focused on Veracruz and the huge stone fortress. With the army men was Admiral Conner, Commodore of the American Navy's warships that had been blockading the Mexican eastern coast for the past ten months.

Robert E. Lee, Captain of Engineers and one of Scott's staff officers, noted the beauty of the city, the scores of ships lying upon the turquoise water of the bay and Fort San Juan de Ulua located on the western edge of a coral reef one thousand yards directly seaward from Veracruz. The grand vista added to Lee's pleasant feeling from being part of a band of men planning the invasion of a large nation and fighting great battles with its army. He regretted the killing and destruction that would be done to win the war. He pulled away from those dark thoughts and concentrated his attention on Veracruz.

The city lay in the shape of a crescent moon and hugging the shoreline. Its landward perimeter was two miles long and enclosed many tall buildings of whitewashed masonry. Sixteen splendid white domed buildings promenaded along the waterfront and several magnificent Catholic churches pierced the sky with tall steeples each bearing a cross. The city contained such an abundance of white buildings that it glowed with a luminous sheen. Eight stone piers extended out from the quay and dozens of fishing boats with sails lowered were berthed along them. The city appeared immensely prosperous.

Veracruz was protected from an attack from the sea by a massive granite seawall strengthened at the northern end with Fort Conception and at the southern end by Fort Santiago. He couldn't see the opposite side of the city, but had studied reports describing the city's defensive walls as being some fifteen feet high, three feet thick, and with nine well-constructed cannon bastions reinforcing it. Slots in the wall through which muskets could fire upon attackers were spaced every four feet. Besides its renowned fortifications, the city was famous in Europe and America for its pretty, free-spirited women, and for the dreaded and deadly el vomito, yellow fever.

He tried to picture how this land of the Aztecs might have looked when in the spring of the year 1519 A.D. the eleven ships of the Spanish General Hernando Cortez appeared off the white sand beach. Perhaps there had been a village of brown skinned men, women, and children who watched in awe as the general and his five hundred and fifty soldiers, their blood hot with thoughts of gold and jewels, came ashore wearing their metal armor and armed with muskets and swords, fourteen bronze cannons, stores of powder and shot, and sixteen horses. Cortez had burned ten of his ships, and in a “do or die campaign”, built a road following the aged footpaths - the Aztecs had not invented the wheel - and climbed into the mountains where they had been told a fabulously rich city lay. After killing thousands of the Aztecs in battles, the Spaniards fought their way down into the valley and into the great capitol city of the nation. The Spaniards stole shipload upon shipload of the Aztec people's gold, silver and jewels and sent all back to Spain. Cortez named the land Mexico. Spain ruled it for three hundred years, until 1821 when the Mexicans wrested back control.

Lee turned his spyglass away from Veracruz and to the several ships hanging on their anchors and crowding the harbor. Most prominent were the three American battleships, the heavily armed Albany, Potomac, and John Adams showing the open bores of their big cannons to the fort and city, and as a warning to any Mexican or foreign ship's captain that might be considering running the blockade.

Also present were foreign men-of-war, two British frigates, a French frigate and a Spanish sloop. The foreign warships were here to protect their country's nationals and business interests during the coming war. The British were most concerned for they owned most of the gold and silver mines in Mexico, and scores of other business ventures.

Lee turned back to Fort San Juan de Ulua. The massive structure with its strong battlements was made of coral stone faced with tough granite. It had been built by the Spanish two centuries before to protect Veracruz from pirates, and had served its purpose admirably for no pirate fleet had ever captured the city. The fort, stained a dark brown by the ages, rose menacingly from the reef with vertical, sixty-foot tall walls, above which were two additional fortified levels. Towering still higher was a round tapering column of three levels, the topmost level being constantly manned by lookouts watching the sea. At the base of the fort, water batteries lay wherever it seemed possible to make a landing. The Mexican national flag, a tricolor of red, white, and green with an eagle holding a serpent in its beak, fluttered from a tall staff on the domed peak of the highest tower. Lee had spent four years strengthening the American forts along the Atlantic seaboard and knew from that experience that Ulua with its walls bristling with cannon had to be the strongest fortification in the western hemisphere. Capturing it would be a formidable endeavor.

He saw Mexican artillerymen working swiftly at their cannons in Ulua and called out. “General Scott, there are men working at the guns on the second level of the fort.”

Scott intently studying Veracruz, now swung his field glasses to Ulua. “Ah, yes. They're sponging the barrels of their pieces and we shall soon have a shot at us.”

“Shall we move out of range?” asked Commodore Conner.

“Not just yet, commodore, if you please” Scott said and looking down from his lofty height at the admiral, frail and sickly from old wounds, and the months he had spent blockading the Mexican coast with its inhospitable climate. “The Mexican gunners will need a few rounds to get our range so we'll have time to do our reconnaissance. And reconnaissance of a foe's weapons and defenses is the key to victory.”

“The Mexican gunners most often shoot high the first time,” said General Worth who had fought the Mexicans with General Taylor in northern Mexico.

Through his field glasses Lee watched the Mexican gunners prepare their cannons. Scott was gambling his campaign by not withdrawing beyond range. The Mexican gunners might get lucky and hit the Patrita with one of their first shots. A shell exploding on the boat could end the invasion before it began for standing on the deck with him were the senior officers of the American Army; Generals Worth, Twiggs, and Patterson who commanded the three army divisions, Chief Engineer Colonel Totten, Chief Of Artillery Colonel Banks, and Major Turnbull Chief of Topographical Engineers. The death of Commodore Conner would decapitate the navy.

General Scott spoke from behind his field gasses to Commodore Conner. “Commodore, what information have you gathered about the current ordnance in Ulua?”

“I've talked with several of the British naval officers who have been in the fort recently and one of them informed me that besides some fine old Spanish guns, there is a new, heavy battery of sixteen British bronze long 24-pounders. That's the worse for us for the British make excellent weapons. In total I estimate the ordnance in Ulua, counting cannon, mortars, and howitzers at three hundred. From what I've seen, nearly half of them, including heavy ten-inchers, could be aimed at any ships I might send against Ulua. We would suffer heavy losses.”

“How about the number of men stationed there?”

“My best estimate from what I've heard is around twenty five hundred.”

“I see no weakness in the fort's defenses,” Scott said. “It may be impregnable from the sea. If the city was taken first, the fort might hold out for months. We have no time for a siege for the yellow fever season will be upon us within the next few days and the troops must be got off the lowland and into the mountains before it arrives. Yet we must have possession of the harbor and shipping facilities for they're needed in all future operations.”

“General, the British have just run up flags signaling that they want to come aboard for a parley.” Conner said, his field glasses aimed at the frigate commanded by the senior British officer.

“They don't like the war and are itching to know as much of our plans as we would divulge,” Scott replied with a wry smile. “We'll signal them when we get back to the Massachusetts and arrange a time. What's your estimate of the Mexican military in the city?”

“I'd say approximately thirty-five hundred. And about eight thousand civilians remaining from the normal population of fifteen thousand. They won't leave for various reasons, mainly from fear their possessions would be stolen.”

Scott nodded acknowledgement of the information and turned back to Veracruz. “It's a beautiful city, but I'll capture it even if I have to destroy it in the taking,” he said.