General Winfield Scott's attack upon Mexico City was an inept disaster?

Answer 1

Not at all. It was the culmination of the most brilliant campaign in American history.

Having fought inland from Vera Cruz, traveling along the only road so that American movements were entirely predictable, Scott entered the Valley of Mexico with 9,000 troops, and proceeded to capture the Mexican capital, which was the largest city in the Americas, with over a quarter of a million inhabitants. As a preliminary it was necessary for the Americans to storm the greatest citadel in the Americas, the fortress of Chapultepec, with walls thirty feet thick. The Mexican Army, nearly three times the size of the US force, had also fortified a stone-walled sugar refinery atop a high hill which commanded the approach to the City of Mexico, and this, too, had to be taken by storm. The City itself was on an island and approachable only over long, straight raised causeways, down which emplaced Mexican artillery could ravage any assaulting force. The surrounding terrain was a lava field, with a sharply jagged broken surface, believed to be impassable, but this, too, the Americans managed, following a route scouted out by Robert E. Lee to arrive at a jumping off place to assault the City from an unexpected direction. The Americans stormed over the causeway, put the Mexican Army to flight, and dictated peace terms to their beaten foe in the enemy's own capital. The resulting Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo not only forced the Mexicans to give up any claim to that portion of Texas between the Rio Grande and the Nueces Rivers, which had been the causus belli. The Treaty obliged the Mexicans to cede to the US the entire present southwestern US - all or part of seventeen states. No 9,000 troops in the history of the Republic ever accomplished anything so astonishing.