Corpus Christi History
By Murphy Givens

Wednesday, Dec. 9, 1998

Army, in disarray, marches south

   In February, 1846, Zachary Taylor's Army of Occupation received orders to move south. Capt. W.S. Henry wrote in his diary, "We're off for the Rio Grande!"
   But not yet. "Old Rough and Ready" wasn't ready. Taylor's marching orders had long been expected (it was why his army was here), but when the order came it caught him by surprise, or so Col. Ethan Allen Hitchcock thought. He wrote in his journal that no preparations had been made and that possible routes to the Rio Grande had not been properly reconnoitored.
   The general frantically dispatched two scouting parties -- one to survey the route down Padre Island and the other to check out the old trail taken by the Mexican army as it straggled home after its defeat at San Jacinto.
   Taylor bought mules and horses and hired every wagon and muleskinner within hundreds of miles. (German immigrants arriving at the port of Indianola were stranded because all the wagons had been hired to move Taylor's army.)
   Hitchcock was sick, but not too sick to criticize Taylor. He said the general had failed to organize his command for maneuver, and that neither Taylor nor any of his officers knew how to handle it. He wrote that the army was in bad shape, it had not been trained to fight and the equipment was shoddy. Soldiers had a variety of weapons, including smoothbore muskets, flicklock and percussion-cap rifles, breech-loaders, Tyron's Mississippi Rifles, and some experimental guns made at Harper's Ferry by Eli Whitney Jr.
   Taylor decided not to try to march the army in the sand of Padre Island; he would take the mainland route. The vanguard, a supply train, left Corpus Christi on March 4, 1846. Its job was to set up a supply depot at Santa Gertrudis (later King Ranch headquarters) in advance of the main army's arrival. Unit by unit, the army pulled out, trailed by some 500 or more wagons pulled by mules and oxen. Siege guns and sick men were shipped by sea to Brazos Santiago near the mouth of the Rio Grande. Taylor left behind a small detachment and a general hospital on San Jose Island.
   Camp followers in Corpus Christi were warned not to tag along. H.L. Kinney, who became rich while the army was here, traveled with the army and continued to serve as Taylor's quartermaster.
   The entire army was under way by March 11. As the army marched south, a feud escalated between Col. David E. Twiggs and Brevet Brigadier Gen. William Jenkins Worth. (Fort Worth is named after Worth and our Twigg Street, minus the s, is named for Twiggs). Worth commanded the First Brigade and Twiggs commanded the 2nd Dragoons.
   The quarrel was whether a brevet (or honorary) promotion enabled an officer to outrank one who was his senior in the line. Worth had an honorary rank higher than Twiggs' line rank. Taylor's whole army argued the issue.
   Worth was as critical of Taylor as Hitchcock was. He wrote that, "Whether an idea, strategic or of any other description, has had the rudeness to invade the mind or imagination of our chief is a matter of doubt. We are literally a huge body without a head."
   This sickly, poorly trained, poorly supplied, poorly led army marched toward Mexico for the coming war. Its commanding general did not have the confidence of his ailing chief of staff, Hitchcock, while the senior officers fought over who was next in the chain of command and junior officers took sides. The entire army was in bad shape after its seven inactive months in Corpus Christi.
   After the army left Corpus Christi, one of the last officers to leave, Capt. W. S. Henry, wrote -- "The fields of white canvas were no longer visible and the campground looked like desolation itself, but the bright waters of the bay looked as sweetly as ever."
   TYING UP LOOSE ENDS: The quarrelsome Col. Twiggs won the argument and Gen. Worth went home in disgust. Hitchcock was sent to St. Louis to recuperate and he returned with Winfield Scott's army. In later years, he would become Abraham Lincoln's military attache. "Old Rough and Ready" could do nothing right, but he did manage, through luck and the enterprise of some brilliant junior officers, to win minor battles at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, and major battles at Monterrey and Buena Vista. They made him a hero and helped him to become president two years later.
   (This is the last of three columns on Zachary Taylor's army in Corpus Christi.)
   SOURCES: "Fifty Years in Camp and Field," by Ethan Allen Hitchcock; Nueces County History; Ulysses S. Grant by Geoffrey Perret; Capt. W. S. Henry, "Campaign Sketches of the War with Mexico"; U.S. Grant's "Memoirs"; Otis A. Singletary's "The Mexican War"; Robert H. Thonhoff's "Taylor's Trail in Texas" in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly; Corpus Christi Gazette, March 8, 1846; Caller-Times articles by Bill Walraven, Dave Allred, and Jim Davis.