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152 / Battle of Monterrey anyone at the unexpected cost, in terms of casualties, of his “diversion.” Most of the regular army officers killed or mortally wounded on the twenty-first in the eastern sector of the city had served under him for more than two years, ever since his Corps of Observation had been stationed in Louisiana.69 With respect to Worth’s movements on September 22,Taylor skimmed over them and their effect on the campaign in two sentences: “At dawn of day, the height above the Bishop’s Palace was carried, and soon after meridian, the Palace itself was taken and its guns turned upon the fugitive garrison. The object for which the 2nd Division was detached had thus been completely accomplished , and I felt confident that with a strong force occupying the road and heights in his rear, and a good position below the city in our possession, the enemy could not possibly maintain the town.” But to Worth and the men engaged on the southwestern front, the twenty-second was as full of glorious achievements as had been the previous day.Command of the troops selected to attack Independence Hill was assigned to Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Childs of the Artillery Battalion, a distinguished veteran of the Seminole Wars in Florida as well as the Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma battles. His storming party consisted of three companies of the Eighth Infantry under Captain Richard Screven, one of which was A, led by James Longstreet; two companies of the Fourth Artillery, including Captain John B. Scott’s I company to which John Pemberton and Mansfield Lovell belonged; Childs’s own Company A, Third Artillery; and two hundred Texas riflemen under Colonel John Hays who acted “in cooperation”with the regular army units.They left Worth’s camp at 3 a.m., conducted to the column’s “point of ascent” by George Meade, John Sanders, and Dixon Miles. At dawn, Childs’s men were within one hundred yards of the crest. The enemy troops that met them hastily retreated, firing ineffectually, and the Americans quickly took possession of the hill’s highest fortifications.70 Yet breaching the “massive walls”of the heavily fortified Bishop’s Palace was another matter. Despite being located below the crest of the hill’s eastern face, that ancient stone edifice could not be taken without bringing up artillery “except at enormous sacrifice,” it was decided.The artillery pieces that the Americans had captured the previous day on Federation Ridge were being fired from across the river at the Mexican defenders on Independence Hill; however, the Mexicans on Independence Hill had removed their artillery from the summit to the better-protected Bishop’s Palace. To answer those guns, the Americans scrambled laboriously up the precipitous, rock-strewn hill with a dismantled twelve-pound howitzer under the supervision of a Second Artillery lieutenant, John Roland of Duncan’s battery. Assisted by “fifty men from the line under Capt. Sanders,” Worth reported of Roland, “that enterprising and gallant of- ficer had his gun in position, having ascended an acclivity as rugged as steep, Battle of Monterrey / 153 between seven and eight hundred feet in two hours.” Meade said the howitzer was “taken to pieces and carried up by hand to the summit.” Daniel Harvey Hill wrote that he attracted fire while in charge of a party escorting the ammunition for the howitzer. According to Dana, Childs’s command was repulsed twice before the howitzer could begin firing on the Bishop’s Palace. Moreover, direct hits on the two-story stone target and its redoubts did not immediately discourage its defenders.71 Worth had meanwhile summoned reinforcements from Federation Ridge— “the 5th, Major [Martin] Scott, and Blanchards Volunteers,” who reached Independence Hill “in time to participate in the operations against the Palace.” And Childs, anticipating an effort by the Mexicans to retake the heights, had “advanced, under cover, two companies of light troops under command of Capt. Vinton . . . and judiciously drawn up the main body of his command flanked on the right by [John] Hays, and left by [Samuel] Walker’s Texans.”72 The culminating clash was described by Dana, who no doubt witnessed much of it from his post on Federation Ridge: “When the [Mexican] cavalry had advanced halfway up the hill and [their] Infantry began to rattle their musketry, our twelve hundred fellows rose with a shout and rushed on to meet them. . . . They turned...

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