The Training Ground Read online

  Bayonets were fixed. Brogans were tied. Prayers were murmured. Then the Americans charged, screaming as they ran forward, a bansheelike wail piercing the thick Texas air.

  The Mexican artillery fired point-blank into the wall of onrushing American troops. Their cannons were Napoleonic War surplus nine-pounders that had been purchased secondhand from Britain in the 1830s. Arista’s gun crews included as many as seven men, each wearing the dark blue coats and trousers and black stovepipe shako hats of Mexican foot artillery. Working at top speed, they could fire a round every three minutes — but more often it was one round every five. When the enemy was a quarter mile away, that was more than enough. But the enemy wasn’t a quarter mile away; Taylor’s army was running right at the cannons, without regard to their safety. Mexican canister rounds were still hot out of the barrel as they claimed their first victims. Survivors reported that their clothes caught fire when the fabric was nicked by passing shot. But although some Americans went down, more remained upright and closed in on Arista’s increasingly concentrated troops.

  Not to be outdone, American cavalry charged ahead of the infantry, their horses dodging their comrades on foot as well as chaparral and cannonballs on the path to the Mexican defenses. This, too, was a Napoleonic tactic: first the cavalry and infantry, then the light artillery, always moving forward.

  It worked. Mexico’s frontline artillery crews, stunned by the American onslaught and lacking time to reload, were quickly overrun. For the rest of the Mexican army, it was vital that they stand their ground. If they fell back now, there was little to stop Taylor from sweeping in and charging down the road into Matamoros.

  The Americans overran the cannons and collided with a wall of Mexican infantry and cavalry. The combat now was mostly hand-to-hand. Both sides were armed with bayonets and sabers, but they just as often swung the wooden butt of a musket as a weapon.

  The next two hours saw an explosion of mayhem and carnage, yet Taylor’s plan was unfolding just as he’d scripted it. And with the cavalry and infantry holding the center, American light artillery now moved forward to fire canister and grape rounds into the heart of the Mexican ranks. This prevented Arista from sending reinforcements into the thick of the battle.

  Another obstacle facing the Mexican troops was Arista himself. He was confident that the American charge was a diversion, so he remained in his tent, writing at his desk, and entrusted the battle to Brigadier General Rómulo Díaz de la Vega. Even when reports filtered back to his campsite, making it clear that the attack was not a ruse, Arista failed to believe them.

  Once the center of their line had been obliterated, the Mexican troops panicked. It was now obvious that their right and left flanks were incapable of collapsing onto the Americans, which had been their only chance to overwhelm Taylor’s army. Men began to sprint toward the Rio Grande. The distance to the river was three miles. Many didn’t make it that far, hacked to death by the blade of an American cavalry saber as they ran for their lives. Numerous Mexicans hid in the chaparral to await the end of the battle, when they would give themselves up as prisoners of war. In all, more than four hundred Mexicans were captured, including General Díaz de la Vega, a gracious man who was dumbfounded by the defeat. “If I had had with me,” he marveled, “$100,000 in silver, I would have bet the whole of it that no 10,000 men on earth could drive us from our position.”

  Arista had eluded capture by fleeing his tent just in time. American troops ransacked its belongings, coming away with a silver dining set and another, far more valuable bit of plunder: a topographical map of the Texas frontier, showing roads, villages, and mule trails. The Americans had been feeling their way through the countryside without any such guide. As a means of anticipating Mexican strategy and deploying troops, the map was priceless to Taylor.

  GRANT AND HIS men missed out on the bayonet charge. Rather than join the action, he had held his company back, waiting for conditions to improve. “I at last found a clear space separating two ponds. There seemed to be a few men in front and I charged upon them with my company. There was no resistance, and we captured a Mexican colonel, who had been wounded, and a few men.”

  Just as Grant was congratulating himself, a group of American soldiers marched toward him from the direction of the Mexican position, and it dawned on Grant that he had not “captured” the wounded colonel and those few men. The line of battle had already moved far forward, and Grant was merely taking custody of men who had been overlooked during the charge.

  Grant remained infuriated at his cowardice in holding back his company during the infantry charge. “The ground had been charged over before,” he wrote. “This left no doubt in my mind that the battle of Resaca de la Palma would have been won, just as it was, if I had not been there.”

  Nonetheless, he had fought. His letter to Julia that day was written from the captured Mexican camp on the south side of the Resaca de la Palma. Lacking a writing desk, he set his paper atop the head of a captured Mexican drum.

  Longstreet, too, was thinking of home and his beloved Louise — and had been during the battle itself. “A pause was made to dip our cups for water,” Longstreet later recalled, “which gave a moment for other thoughts; mine went back to her whom I had left behind. I drew her daguerreotype from my breast-pocket, had a glint of her charming smile, and with quickened spirit mounted the bank.”

  Meade had done little but observe, yet he was euphoric about the action-packed spectacle he had witnessed. “They gave away in all directions, and there was a total rout of the Grand Mexican Army that was going to eat us up. We captured seven pieces of artillery, all their pack mules, several hundred in number, all their ammunition, several hundred stands of arms, and all their baggage. Took one general, two colonels, several captains and subalterns, and some hundred and fifty men, prisoners.” Then he added, as if aware that his gloating was inappropriate: “It is supposed to take all day today and tomorrow to bring in their dead and wounded off the field, as the ground is said to be literally strewn.”

  Indeed, the Mexicans had suffered 256 killed and 182 missing — losses that dwarfed the Americans’ 127 casualties. Corpses — horses, mules, and men — carpeted the road. Flies coated the bodies in thick black swarms, and the hot afternoon air reeked of death. The bulk of the Mexican fatalities was not due to American bullets but to the tricky currents of the Rio Grande. Unable to swim, yet so overcome with fear that they leaped into the river anyway, scores of soldiers drowned; their bodies would litter the muddy banks for miles and miles in the days to come, many of them naked, their uniforms having been swept away by the river as submerged rocks and branches held them underwater. Rotting in the sun, bloated beyond recognition, these men became carrion for coyotes, crows, and the turtles that made their home in the red river clay.

  WITH THE BATTLE won, the American soldiers turned their thoughts back to Fort Texas. The first order of business was to make sure it was still in American hands. Without it, they were without a home, naked against a surprise Mexican attack.

  Closer and closer they marched, until finally, looking into the distance, they could see the U.S. flag flying over the embattled structure — shot full of holes by Mexican snipers, barely fluttering in the languid heat after six days of bombardment, but atop the flagpole nonetheless. The fort had held.

  The men inside that fort were more than just soldiers of the Seventh Infantry; they were friends and comrades who had shared the beach at Corpus Christi, the Rio Colorado crossing, and all those long hours plunging shovels into the ground and reshaping the earth into an ingeniously designed defensive fortress. The tattered flag that marked their survival was a deeply welcome sight.

  Weary from battle, Taylor’s army marched into Fort Texas.

  TEN

  Volunteers

  MAY 11, 1846

  Jefferson Davis was chronically restless. As the freshman congressman from Mississippi, he had such great legislatorial potential that former U.S. president John Quincy Adams had predicted �
��he will make his mark, mind me,” after Davis gave an eloquent floor speech on the annexation of Oregon early in his term. Adams’s praise was the sort of career-making benediction that would inspire most young politicians to pursue their calling with greater diligence. But by May 1846, after Davis had spent just six months in office, Congress was beginning to bore the thirty-seven-year-old. For inspiration, he was setting his sights on a new ambition: war.

  Not only was Davis prepared to vote in favor of a resolution that would send American troops into Mexico (and perhaps into Oregon to fight the British after the Mexicans had been dealt with), but Davis personally lusted to lead them into battle. Given his status and West Point education, the job was almost his for the taking. There was, however, a formidable obstacle between Davis and his first taste of combat: a rather determined woman by the name of Varina Davis — his young and sharp-tongued wife.

  Long before entering Congress, and even before becoming a successful plantation owner, Davis had been an officer in the U.S. Army. The work had been challenging and the hardships many, but he had done well during his six years in uniform. He had resigned his commission in haste, in order to marry and settle down with the love of his life. In the eleven years of struggle and mourning since, he had come to regret that decision. Now, as a formal request from President James K. Polk for fifty thousand troops, ten million dollars in military appropriations, and a formal declaration of war with Mexico reached Congress, Davis saw his chance. He had long backed Polk’s pro-southern, pro-expansion, pro-slavery policies. When the issue was put to a vote, Davis was one of the 174 congressmen voting in favor. Only 14 voted against it (most notably the Monroe Doctrine author John Quincy Adams), while 20 members of Congress abstained.

  Those numbers were misleading. The nation and the Congress were bitterly divided on the war. Leading members of Polk’s Democratic Party, such as John C. Calhoun, Thomas Hart Benton, and even Secretary of War William L. Marcy, counseled the president against the conflict. They argued that America was overextended militarily. Should Britain choose to commence hostilities in Oregon, the United States would be forced to wage war on two fronts — a disastrous policy, given the puny size of its army and the logistical impossibility of supplying forces separated by thousands of miles and a rugged, roadless continent.

  But Polk — whom Varina Davis dismissed as “an insignificant looking little man” — saw the war as a means of unifying the country behind his policies. Polk cleverly bundled his war declaration with an appropriation request to provide funds for Taylor’s troops, already engaging the Mexican forces in Texas. At a time when Americans were cheering the victories of Taylor’s army, even as many of those same citizens were opposed to further hostilities, Polk’s careful wording transformed the measure into a referendum on patriotism. Thus, even antiwar northern Whigs ended up voting in favor of a conflict they did not want.

  No matter where they stood, the Washington politicians risked little but their careers with a yes or no vote. Davis was the rare legislator willing to back up his stance by marching off to the front lines. His years at West Point had been the making of him, not just as a man but also as an American. “Those who have received their education at West Point, taken as a body, are more free from purely sectional prejudices, and more national in their feelings than the same number of persons to be found elsewhere in the country,” he later wrote. The irony in this statement would become apparent only years later.

  Davis’s straight-backed posture was that of a man who had once been an officer of some distinction, but the truth was that his military service was bereft of glory. He was a lively man whose ego sometimes got the best of him, a character trait that resulted in his (unsuccessful) court-martial for insubordination in 1835 and hastened the end of his army career. For a man accustomed to success in all aspects of life, his lack of military commendation rankled. He ached to march into battle and make a name for himself. If nothing else, he would also advance his political fortunes, for the people of Mississippi were even more gung ho about the war than he was.

  Varina adamantly opposed the idea of her husband’s running off to play soldier. After all, he was finally getting established in Congress after the middling success of his army days and the equally mediocre years he had spent as a plantation owner, which were lived largely in the shadow of his older and more successful brother Joseph. Politics, not war, seemed to be Davis’s calling. Indeed, with his strong jaw, piercing eyes, and powerful oratorical style, he seemed to have been born for the profession. Making the matter even more complicated was the fact that Varina, a sensuous beauty who had just celebrated her twentieth birthday, adored Washington, D.C. Though the nation’s capital was still a city in name only, with few monuments or majestic buildings to mark it as much more than a series of connected villages (the Capitol still lacked its rotunda, the Mall was partially swampland, and fund-raising efforts for a towering obelisk monument that would honor George Washington had churned sluggishly along for decades, with no end in sight), she was much taken with its social scene. To see her husband at the center of it all, meeting occasionally with the president and helping to plan a grand new museum with money bequeathed by the Englishman James Smithson, was to watch history being made. To leave it all and return to their bottomland plantation as Davis galloped off to war, perhaps never to return, made little sense to Varina.

  Yet if ever there was a war that Jefferson Davis had been born to fight, the conflict in Mexico was it. After all, Davis was the namesake of America’s third president, the man who had pushed to expand the country. As an adolescent, Davis had spent a week at the home of Andrew Jackson, another strong advocate of American expansion. And after graduating from West Point in 1828, Davis had served nearly his entire six-year military career on the frontier, extending America’s borders westward. He had built forts in the Wisconsin wilderness, had fought briefly in the Black Hawk War of 1832, and had been selected to become one of America’s first cavalry officers when the First Dragoons were formed the following year, with the intention that they would protect settlers from Indian attack.

  Davis was not insensitive to his wife’s concerns — at least to those more profound than the mere loss of a social life. Varina, after all, was not the first woman who had disrupted Davis’s military ambition.

  Davis met Sarah Knox Taylor, the daughter of none other than General Zachary Taylor, shortly after completing his checkered career at West Point, where he was almost expelled three times for alcohol-related incidents and ultimately graduated with a poor class standing. After learning basic infantry skills at the Jefferson Barracks, he was posted to the wilds of what would later be known as Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, and Iowa. Taylor was Davis’s commanding officer at Fort Crawford, in the heart of the Wisconsin Territory, for a year, beginning in the spring of 1832. It was there that Davis met the then colonel’s eighteen-year-old daughter. Slender and witty, Knox, as she was known, was a pretty, petite woman with hazel eyes and long brown hair. She was known to be a splendid dancer. Davis fell for her gradually, but soon they were in love. When he asked Taylor for his daughter’s hand, however, the gruff senior officer refused. Taylor had often lamented the vagaries of military life, with its hard travel, dangerous duty, and months and years of enforced separation. Appalled by the fact that he barely knew his children, Taylor was firmly opposed to Knox’s marrying an officer. A schism developed between the two men. Taylor and Davis maintained their professional relationship, but the smitten young lieutenant was forbidden to court the colonel’s daughter.

  The young lovers saw each other on the sly for the next three years. The charade might have gone on much longer had Davis not been brought before the court-martial for “conduct subversive of a good order and military discipline” on February 12, 1835. The trial was held at Fort Gibson, an outpost on the Arkansas River. Davis’s crime was that he had refused to rise for reveille on a cold and rainy Christmas Eve, 1834, even though he was wide awake and already dressed in full u
niform. His commanding officer then placed him under arrest because he found Davis to be contemptuous and disrespectful when confronted about his actions.

  Davis acted as his own defense attorney and won. Shortly afterward he requested leave, not intending to return. On June 17, 1835, Davis married Knox at her aunt’s home in Louisville. He wore a waistcoat and a stovepipe hat; she wore a dark dress and bonnet. Neither of her parents attended. That evening, the newlyweds boarded a paddle wheeler bound for Vicksburg.

  On June 30, 1835, Davis formally resigned his commission. He and his new bride returned to the Mississippi Delta, the region in which he had grown up. His older brother Joseph, a prominent local landowner, lent Davis the money and the land to plant crops on property right next to his own plantation, Hurricane. The acreage was fertile bottomland, located on a curve in the Mississippi known, appropriately, as Davis Bend. The land still needed to be cleared of briars and trees, and Jefferson and Knox would have to build a home, but it was a fine start to a marriage delayed too long by the exigencies of the service. Their future seemed limitless.

  Three months later, Knox was dead.

  The summer heat and humidity of the Mississippi Delta was a haven for mosquitoes and tropical diseases. Davis and Knox were both struck down by malaria shortly after their arrival and took straight to bed. One day, in a state of delirium, Davis awoke to hear Knox in her room, singing a popular song known as “Fairy Bells.” He rose from bed and staggered to her. She died that day, with her heartbroken young husband at her bedside. Sarah Knox Taylor Davis was just twenty-one.

  Davis was soon drowning in grief. He threw himself into clearing land for planting and read great works of philosophy. As a young man he had been anything but sober, a fun-loving partygoer with a rounded face and warm, bright eyes, a passion for life, and a habit of scoffing at authority. But after Knox’s death he slowly took on a severe look. He never totally gave up drinking or smoking — indeed, Davis almost died on a trip to Washington, D.C., in 1838, after falling face-first into a creek and striking his head on a rock during a drunken late night stroll — but in time his face assumed a gaunt, haunted appearance that would make him look malarial even when he was quite well.