Winfield Scott

Winfield Scott took an army from a beach at Veracruz to the central square of Mexico City in six months and then had to govern what he had taken. He landed in March 1847, reduced the city after a siege, and turned inland. Cerro Gordo on April 18 forced Santa Anna off the National Road. Contreras and Churubusco in August broke the approaches. Molino del Rey on September 8 was a costly morning against a foundry that mattered less than the men spent on it. Chapultepec fell on the thirteenth. The army entered the capital on September 14.

He was born near Petersburg, Virginia, on June 13, 1786. The War of 1812 had already made him a public officer — Queenston, Fort George, the Niagara wounds. This page is the 1847 campaign, not the younger brigadier and not the old general who later offered the Anaconda plan. The Mexico City march is the work that European staffs studied: a landing, a road, and a refusal to let a capital sit behind a chain of hills as if hills were an argument.

Scott was vain and exacting. The record does not require a softer man. He quarreled with Polk, with Taylor's friends, and with his own volunteers. He also kept a regular army on a foreign road without losing it to disease or to a relief that never came. Nicholas Trist's treaty ended the fighting. Scott's share was the city.

He died at West Point on May 29, 1866, after a last long public life that included an unsuccessful presidential run and a Civil War he was too old to fight. This register will not hang a later war on a 1847 march. It will say the commanding general took the capital the other army had not been asked to take, and that the Halls of Montezuma in the hymn are a street he actually walked.

The carte de visite on this page is a later likeness, not a field daguerreotype from the National Road. The campaign orders are the documentary face.