America Defeats Mexico, Wins the West

Winfield Scott during a visit to West Point in 1862.

(NATIONAL ARCHIVES)

If not for five words in a patriotic hymn, the climax of the most one-sided victory in American—and arguably world—history would be all but forgotten. When Gen. Winfield Scott marched into Mexico City and stationed a guard of Marines at the National Palace there—the “Halls of Montezuma” of the Marine Hymn—160 years ago today, he ended the fighting in the Mexican War without his side having lost a single battle. It was “the great event—the epoch—of the nineteenth century,” one lieutenant wrote home, an opinion that necessarily lost some validity after the Civil War began 14 years later. But although it might not be much remembered today, it was a day that increased the size of the United States by almost two-thirds.

War with Mexico had been brewing since the 1820s, when Mexico repeatedly spurned overtures by the American government—already bent on expansion to the Pacific-to buy Texas. The situation heated up in 1836 when American settlers declared Texas an independent nation, leading to Mexican general and president Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna’s siege of the Alamo and his later defeat at San Jacinto. The United States annexed Texas in December 1845, defining the border as the Rio Grande and sending 3,600 soldiers to patrol it. Mexico, however, still claimed all the land up to the Nueces River, a difference of thousands of square miles, and resented American troops on its soil. Escalating skirmishes in the disputed zone finally induced Congress to declare war in May 1846.

By early 1847, impatient with Gen. Zachary Taylor’s sluggish prosecution of the war in northern Mexico, President James Polk authorized the first major amphibious military assault in U.S. history. Ten thousand American soldiers rowed ashore just south of the Gulf port of Vera Cruz on March 9 without a single casualty, and over the next two weeks they demolished the formidably fortified city with nearly 7,000 shells. They then set out for their ultimate goal, the capital, 260 miles away.

The odds seemed heavy against the Americans: They were outnumbered nearly three to one in enemy territory, and with no men to spare they were forced to abandon their supply and communications line from Vera Cruz 125 miles before it reached Mexico City. But some factors did work in their favor, such as the continued tactical blundering of Santa Anna (whose tendency to place self-interest above the national interest had earned him the distrust of his congress and had sent him into exile and back). In contrast, the American commanding general was as strategically gifted as Santa Anna was careless. Scott had joined the army in 1808, and his aggressive fighting in the War of 1812 had won him fame and a medal from Congress. He would serve under all fourteen presidents from Jefferson to Lincoln, the last twenty years as a commanding general. Now 61 years old and standing six-foot-five, he was humorless and stuffy (his nickname was “Old Fuss and Feathers”) but an astute mediator and negotiator and a hard-working, capable leader.

On August 12 the American army reached the Valley of Mexico, a basin covered with marshes and lakes and ringed by mountains. Thanks in part to reconnaissance by the supervising engineer, Capt. Robert E. Lee, Scott was able to direct his army away from Santa Anna’s stronghold and later ambush it, at one point sneaking several miles over the crags and crevasses of a hardened lava bed. After suffering defeats at two outlying towns, Santa Anna stalled the Americans’ advance on the capital for two weeks with feints at peace talks. He had months earlier conned a $10,000 bribe out of Scott in exchange for negotiations that never came to pass, but Scott understood that his own objective in Mexico was as political as it was military: He was there not to destroy Santa Anna and his army but to force them to discuss a treaty, or, as Scott put it, to ”conquer a peace.” If he stormed the capital too quickly and Santa Anna fled, there would be no government to deal with.

Still, when talks broke down and Santa Anna was repeatedly seen strengthening his positions in violation of the truce, Scott resumed battle, orchestrating two brutal and bloody victories at fortifications just outside Mexico City on September 8 and in the early hours of September 13. As Mexican troops then fled across the few elevated causeways that were the only entrance to the city through the marshes, the American army, reduced by casualties and illness from more than 10,000 in August to 7,000, pursued them. Battling from behind the arches of aqueducts and digging protected paths through the walls of adobe homes, the Americans overtook the fortified gates to the city by 6 p.m., September 13, and, perilously low on ammunition, steeled themselves to face off against the Mexican army and unknown numbers of the city’s 200,000 residents. Santa Anna, however, decided the situation was hopeless and evacuated north. At 4 a.m. on September 14, a delegation of Mexican officials surrendered Mexico City to Scott.

Amidst the scattered applause of Mexican citizens, Scott led a procession to the National Palace at 8 a.m., escorted by mounted dragoons and a band playing “Yankee Doodle,” only to find the American flag already waving there: One of his generals had gone in ahead of command and beaten him to the palace by an hour. Scott, not missing a beat, assigned that general the job of military governor of the city. Santa Anna himself resigned two days after the city fell and exiled himself to Venezuela. (A few months later, Mexican leaders would ask Scott to be dictator of Mexico; he declined.)

The American army occupied Mexico City for the nearly seven months it took to draft and ratify the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, officially ending the war. The treaty ceded present-day Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California and parts of Colorado, Nevada, and Utah to the United States and gave America the span of the continent for the first time, thus allowing all the virtues and vices of our manifest destiny. So why is this victory so forgotten today? Perhaps because it was so one-sided as to seem undramatic to us today, or possibly because it cast the United States in the unflattering role of empire-builder rather than defender of Union or democracy.

In any case, it did provide a training ground for the major players of the looming war that would come to overshadow it. In addition to Robert E. Lee, Scott’s army included Lt. George Pickett, who rescued an American flag from its fallen bearer on the morning of September 13 and carried it to much more success that day than he would leading his charge at Gettysburg, and the young quartermaster Sam Grant, who found a church belfry from which to shoot protective gunfire as his countrymen fought along the causeways, and who would later rise to fame under his first name, Ulysses. The Civil War may have given him fame, but the Mexico City campaign gave him and his cohort their first thrill of victory.

—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.