| [15] | See Parker’s Recollections of a Naval Officer, with reply of P. S. P. Conner, Army and Navy Journal, February 2, and April 19, 1884, and Magazine of American History, July, 1885. |
| [16] | Chaplain Fitch W. Taylor, The Broad Pennant. |
| [17] | See, for perhaps the best brief statement of the causes leading to the Mexican war and the part played by Polk, the article “Wars;” by Prof. Alexander Johnston, Lalor’s Encyclopaedia. Vol. III, p. 1091. |
CHAPTER XXII.
“COMMODORE PERRY COMMANDS THE SQUADRON.”
The precise methods and almost immutable laws of military science required that the American invasion of Mexico in 1847 should be at the exact spot on which Cortez landed two centuries before, and where the French disembarked in 1830, and in 1865. This was at the only port on the Gulf coast of Mexico, in which large vessels could anchor. Ships entered by the North channel or fastened to rings in the castle walls. Our war vessels lay a little south of the Vera Cruz founded by the Spanish buccaneer.
With but a few skirmishes and little loss, the line of circumvallation was completed by the 18th, and named Camp Washington. Ground was broken for intrenchments, and platforms were built for the mortars which were placed in sunken trenches out of sight from the city. Waiting for a pause in the raving norther, and then seizing opportunity by the foremost hair of the forelock, the sailors landed ten mortars and four twenty-four pounder guns. By the 22d, seven of the mortars were in position on their platforms. Most of these latter were of the small bronze pattern called coehorns, after their inventor the Dutch engineer, Baron Mennon de Coehorn. These pieces could be handled by two men. A few mortars were of the ten-inch pattern.
This was a pitiful array of ordnance to batter down a walled city, and a nearly impregnable castle. With these in activity, both city and castle, if well provisioned, could hold out for months. Shells falling perpendicularly would destroy women and children, but do little harm to soldiers. The forty other mortars and the heavy guns were somewhere at sea on the transports and as yet unheard of, while every day the shadow of the dreaded vomito stalked nearer. Vera Cruz must be taken before “King Death in his Yellow Robe” arrived. The Mexicans for the nonce, prayed for his coming.
The vomito, or yellow fever, is a gastro-nervous disorder which prostrates the nervous system, often killing its victims in five or six hours, though its usual course is from two to six days. Men are more susceptible to it than women. It was the Mexican’s hope, for Vera Cruz was its nursery, and the month of March its time of beginning. Northerners taken in the hot season might recover. In the cold season, an attack meant sure death. The disease is carried and propagated by mosquitoes and flies, and no system of inoculation was then known. An outbreak among our unacclimated men would mean an epidemic.
Scott, despite his well known excessive vanity, was a humane man and a scientific soldier. His ambition was to win success and glory at a minimum of loss of life, not only in his own army but among the enemy. His aim was to make a sensation by methods the reverse of Gen. Taylor’s, whose popularity had won him the soldier’s title of “Rough and Ready,” while Buena Vista had built the political platform on which he was to mount to the presidency. “Taylor the Louisianian’s” battles were sanguinary, but indecisive. He had driven in the Mexican left wing. Scott hoped to pierce the centre, to shed little blood and to make every shot tell. The people at home knew nothing of war as a science. They expected blood and “a big butcher’s bill,” and the newspapers at least would be disappointed unless gore was abundant. His soldiers and especially those who had been under Taylor and whose chief idea of fighting was a rush and a scuffle, failed at first to appreciate him, and dubbed this splendid soldier “Fuss and Feathers.”
Scott determined at once to show, as the key to his campaign, a city captured with trivial loss. Yet all his plans seemed about to be dashed, because his siege train had failed to come. The pitiful array of coehorns and ten-inch mortars, with four light twenty-four pounder guns and two Columbiads, would but splash Vera Cruz with the gore of non-combatants, while still the enemy’s flag was flaunted in defiance, and precious time was being lost. The general’s vanity—an immense part of him—was sorely wounded. “The accumulated science of the ages applied to the military art,” which he hoped to illustrate “on the plains of Vera Cruz,” was as yet of no avail. Further, as a military man, he was unwilling to open his batteries with a feeble fire which might even encourage the enemy to a prolonged resistance. Conner is said to have offered to lend him navy guns, but he declined.