The Training Ground Page 12

  In the midst of his loss, Davis thought he might find solace in the rigors of military life. The purpose of that 1838 visit to Washington was to apply for a new commission. There was talk that Congress might fund three new regiments, and he hoped to reenter the military as a member of one of them. However, just one new regiment was added to the army, and Davis did not receive an appointment. He returned home to Brierfield, his plantation, to continue life as a farmer. Soon after, Davis focused his attention on politics. His political inspiration was Thomas Jefferson, as his father’s had been. He strongly believed in states’ rights and in reducing the size of the federal government, just as Jefferson had. As a slave owner and as a man who had openly disdained his Yankee counterparts during his time at West Point (“you cannot know how pitiful they generally are,” he had written to Joseph), Davis was troubled by the growing antislavery movement in the northern states. He became active in Mississippi politics, learning firsthand the exhaustion of campaigning and the elation of a powerfully delivered stump speech. He ran for Congress in 1843 and lost handily. Two years later, having become deeply entrenched within the state Democratic Party’s hierarchy, he was elected easily. In between the initial loss and the subsequent victory, he met and married Varina Howell, younger than Davis by two decades. His tone in their letters was occasionally paternal, but on the whole, theirs was a loving and equitable marriage. Varina was jealous of the great demands that politics put on her “Jeffy” but was nevertheless thrilled with the rewards. Having a husband in the U.S. Congress was something she had never anticipated but grew to enjoy a great deal.

  War with Mexico had the potential to change all that.

  Davis had learned the importance of paying attention to his constituents. So when the Mississippi newspapers ran headlines screaming “To Arms To Arms” and some seventeen thousand men raced to Vicksburg to volunteer for military duty in Taylor’s army, Davis paid attention. Even before that, his desire to see battle had been getting the best of him. In a letter written on May 12, a day before Congress took a formal vote on the war, Davis confided to a friend that if the people of Mississippi asked him to go to war, he would do so. “If they wish it, I will join them as soon as possible, wherever they may be.”

  If there were any doubts in Davis’s mind about the positive effects it might have on his career, a May 21 rally in New York City confirmed the war’s phenomenal popularity: fifty thousand people gathered in front of city hall to show their support for the conflict in Mexico. In Philadelphia, the North American wrote, “Upon the duties which the present crisis invoked, our country has but one heart.”

  Davis and Varina fought bitterly when she learned of his intentions. She pleaded with him not to go, and Davis ultimately bent to her will. Concerned for his wife’s “weaknesses which spring from a sensitive and generous temper,” Davis promised Varina that he would not accept a commission. But back home in Mississippi, volunteer regiments were being formed. Two of those came from Warren County, in which Vicksburg and Davis Bend were both nestled. There was a growing public outcry that Davis command a Mississippi regiment. Davis kept it a secret from Varina, but in his heart he had already broken his promise: he had every intention of accepting a command, if offered, to lead the men of Mississippi into battle. He would go to Mexico.

  ELEVEN

  Growing Up

  MAY 24, 1846

  Sam Grant was growing a beard. It had taken a while to fill in, but by late May his facial hair was finally beginning to flourish. He was surprised at its flaming red color but nevertheless quite sure that the beard had a manly effect on his appearance. “My Dear Julia,” he wrote, “do you ever see me anymore in your dreams? How much I wish you could see me in reality! I am certain that you would not know me. I am as badly sunburnt as it is possible to be, and I have allowed my beard to grow three inches long.” Grant was no longer the naive young lieutenant who had sailed from Saint Louis two years earlier. He had changed. He was becoming a battle-hardened soldier.

  The engagements at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma were career and emotional turning points for Grant and the others who had fought in them. But that would only be clear years later; now they were just battles that had needed to be won so that the young men could return home. It was the same for those who had been part of the triumph at Fort Texas.

  Remarkably, only two Americans had died there. The first was the hapless Sergeant Weigart. The second was Major Jacob Brown, who had succumbed to his horrific wound mere hours before the siege came to an end. The major had suffered terribly in his final days. “It was so hot he could scarcely breathe. Of course, his fevers raged,” wrote Dana. “He is a very serious loss to our regiment, one which we will not be able to replace. He was a perfect bulldog for the fight.”

  Soon after, the earthworks along the Rio Grande were finally given an official name: Fort Brown.

  An exclamation point had been added on May 18: Taylor’s army crossed the Rio Grande by flatboat and occupied Matamoros without a shot being fired. It was Lieutenant George Gordon Meade who canvassed the riverbanks for the perfect crossing site.

  Matamoros was flea-bitten and dusty, occupied by whores, farmers, peasants, and those Mexican officers and soldiers who had chosen to quit the war rather than accompany their army inland to the city of Monterrey,1 where General Arista was planning to make another stand. Soldiers who had been wounded at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma had risen from hospital beds to join the retreat, terrified that the Americans would torture or simply kill them. That march had turned into an ordeal all its own, with many of Arista’s men committing suicide rather than die from the thirst and starvation that eventually defined the desperate journey.

  They would have been far better off remaining in Matamoros. Taylor wanted no cruel behavior directed at the Mexicans, be they prisoners of war or private citizens. His aim was to build trust and cooperation. “It was the policy of the commanding general to allow no pillaging, no taking of private property for public or individual use without satisfactory compensation, so that a better market was afforded than the people had ever known.”

  The Americans searched the town’s small adobe homes and community buildings for any supply depots the Mexican army might have left behind. They were shocked by the vast quantities of abandoned munitions: grenades, gunpowder, twenty-five hundred pounds of cannon powder, and more than thirty thousand musket cartridges. The Mexicans had spiked most of their cannons (destroying the weapon’s tube by firing the gun while it was packed with sand or rocks or driving a spike or file into the gun’s vent) and pushed them into the river, but a few pieces of heavy artillery were discovered intact, including one cannon hidden in a church belfry.

  There was more: barrels of clothing, desks, muskets, bayonets, and vast quantities of playing cards. Tobacco was an illegal commodity in Mexico and was carefully packed in barrels to be sold on the black market. More than two hundred thousand cigars were discovered, and Taylor ordered them distributed to his army.

  The locals eagerly sold the Americans fresh vegetables, eggs, sugar, and milk from their personal stores. After months of army rations, it was a welcome change of fare for Taylor’s men. Such niceties gave Matamoros a pleasant air, but Grant knew that the situation was about to take a drastic turn. “Up to this time,” he later explained, “Taylor had none but regular troops in his command.” But now that Mexico had been invaded, volunteer regiments were forming all over America, eager to join in the fight. These citizen soldiers had little, if any, military training. Nobody knew how they would fit in with the officers and soldiers of the regular army. Yet Taylor needed these reinforcements if he was going to pursue Arista deep into Mexico.

  The plan approved by Congress on May 13 gave each state a recruiting quota. The new soldiers would be transported by river or sea to New Orleans and then either overland or by sea to the mouth of the Rio Grande. The volunteers had the option of enlisting for the entire war or for twelve months. They would provide their own uniforms and
horses and would receive the same pay as regular soldiers. The officers would be chosen by an election among the men and would be equal in authority and pay to their regular army counterparts. Only Polk could appoint generals and staff officers, and those were subject to Senate approval.

  Needless to say, the officers and soldiers of the regular army were not happy about this turn of events. Many had spent their entire adult lives in the army, seeing little promotion while enduring great hardship and familial separation. It galled them that they would be forced to salute a group of well-connected, undisciplined civilians who didn’t know rank and file from a fighting square and who had never heard a shot fired in anger.

  Those first volunteer units began arriving on May 24. A regiment from New Orleans marched inland from Port Isabel, some six hundred men in all. They were a sorry lot, ill disciplined and “used up” in the estimation of one American officer.

  Grant took the newcomers’ presence in stride. As always, his thoughts were on ending the war as soon as possible. If that meant bringing in volunteer regiments, no matter how ragged they might be, he was willing to endure their presence. He hadn’t been in the army long enough to be passed over for rank, and he had few plans to remain in the service after the war was over. “My dearest Julia,” he wrote, “I feel as if I shall never be contented until I can see you again, my Dear Julia, and I hope to never leave you again for a long time.”

  Bearded, sunburned, and now battle-hardened as he might be, one thing had not changed about Sam Grant: he was hopelessly under Julia’s spell. “P.S. The two flowers you sent me come safe, but when I opened your letter the wind blew them away and I could not find them. Before I seal this I will pick a wildflower off the bank of the Rio Grande and send you.”

  FOUR DAYS LATER, it was Meade who wrote home. “I really consider spending a day in my tent, uninjured, equivalent to passing through a well-contested action,” he told Margaretta. Meade was not trying to be glib. The volunteer regiments had only been in camp a few days, and already their sense of entitlement and lack of discipline were causing major problems. Many came from slave states. These “soldiers” refused to do chores such as chopping firewood or hauling water, which they considered slave labor. After the euphoria of arriving at the war, most of the volunteers had settled into a routine of daily drunkenness. A standing order against firing guns in camp was totally ignored. Most of the volunteers were still back across the river at Fort Brown, but they gathered regularly on the north bank of the Rio Grande to fire their muskets at Matamoros. Not only were the lives of innocent civilians at risk, but the tents of regular army officers were pitched in the town.

  The thought of remaining in his shelter and risking having a volunteer’s bullet strike him annoyed Meade no end. He spent his days riding his horse through the Mexican countryside, inspecting roads and abandoned fortifications. With Blake dead, he was the lone topographical officer in camp. Even with the captured map, the Americans knew little about the Mexican landscape, so it was Meade’s duty to ride out alone to make charts and observations about what Taylor could expect to find when he marched toward Monterrey. The stark landscape appealed to Meade, and he was surprised to find himself taken with the local culture. He thought the women were demure and graceful and began teaching himself a few words of Spanish so that he might talk with them.

  Meade was a quietly courageous sort who gave little thought to the bandits that were said to roam the area or to any vestiges of Arista’s army that might be hiding out. The long rides along the Rio Grande were a tonic, just as the excitement of battle was. He was no longer consumed by thoughts of going home.

  As soon as he returned to Matamoros, Meade’s mood darkened. Other officers enjoyed the place, but to Meade it was a depressing town where most of the houses were made of logs and the grand cathedral near the central plaza was an unfinished eyesore. He turned up his nose at the women, whom he considered “old hags, worse looking than Indians.”

  But Meade saved his most pointed criticisms for the volunteers. General Taylor had absolutely no control over their behavior, and their own officers seemed uninterested in imposing discipline. The citizen soldiers traveled back and forth across the Rio Grande at will to frequent the saloons and gambling halls that were springing up to service the American army. They stole and butchered local cattle and sometimes even shot Mexican citizens just for sport. The majority of volunteers were Protestants with a strong bias against people of other religions and cultures (more than one resident of Matamoros was murdered just for being a brown-skinned papist), which made for a natural clash with the Irish Catholic immigrants that composed a large chunk of the regular army’s enlisted ranks.

  Most infuriating of all to soldiers like Meade, the American people viewed the volunteers as being better, more patriotic soldiers than the regular army. The men of West Point, the public thought, were a second-class bunch who served for money — mercenaries. The volunteers, on the other hand, were brave men willing to risk their lives out of love for their country.

  “They expect the regulars to play waiters for them,” wrote a disgusted Meade. The very presence of the volunteers was an affront to the sacrifices he’d endured for his country since the very day he entered West Point. “No, soldiering is not play, and those who undertake it must make up their minds to hard times and hard knocks.”

  But there was little he could do about them other than complain. Taylor would need much of the summer to mount his assault on Monterrey. The occupying force — regular and volunteer alike — were destined to spend a long, hot season in Matamoros, waiting for the order to move out. And when they did so, much to Meade’s disgust, they would do it together.

  II

  TAYLOR’S WAR

  The Mexican war was a political war, and the administration conducting it desired to make party capital out of it. General Scott was at the head of the army, and, being a sol-dier of acknowledged professional capacity, his claim to the command of the forces in the field was almost indisputable, and that does not seem to have been denied by President Polk, or Marcy, his Secretary of War. Scott was a Whig and the administration was democratic. General Scott was also known to have political aspirations, and nothing so popularizes a candidate for high civil positions as military victories. It would not do, therefore, to give him command of the “army of conquest.” The plans submitted by Scott for a cam-paign in Mexico were disapproved by the administration, and he replied, in a tone possibly a little disrespectful, to the effect that, if a soldier’s plans were not to be supported by the administration, success could not be expected. This was the 27th of May, 1846. Four days later, General Scott was notified that he need not go to Mexico. General [Edmund P.] Gaines was next in rank, but he was too old and feeble to take the field. Colonel Zachary Taylor — a brigadier-general by brevet — was therefore left in command.

  — ULYSSES S. GRANT, MEMOIRS

  TWELVE

  Camargo

  JUNE 14, 1846

  The spring rains were replaced by a summer heat so fierce that one officer described the beating sun as having “force enough to bake one’s brains, however thick the skull may be.” Matamoros and Fort Brown were transformed into full-fledged frontier depots. Taylor prepared to move his headquarters up-river to the town of Camargo, which would be used as a base for the assault on Monterrey — or wherever the Mexicans would make their next stand. Arista had moved inland, and so would the Americans.

  Camargo was an ideal jumping-off point. It was closer to the action. Men and supplies could quickly be ferried there from Port Isabel and Matamoros by steamboat.

  From Camargo, Taylor’s army would travel overland, on foot and horseback, deep into Mexico. His chief quartermaster was in the process of buying two thousand pack animals to supplement the mules, horses, and oxen already ferrying supplies. Steamships had begun arriving in Matamoros on a regular basis, much to the delight of the local residents. The boats were brought from New Orleans and were specially selected for their sh
allow draft (which made their six-hundred-mile journey through rough ocean to the Rio Grande a nautical marvel). Their presence made transportation of supplies much easier. The normal wagon caravan making the regular journey to Port Isabel for supplies numbered 240 wagons and stretched across the Texas prairie in a single-file line three miles long. A steamboat carried almost as much and did so at much greater speed.

  Both were in short supply. The wagons were more problematic. Wagons were not mass-produced in a central factory or production plant; they were built one by one, by craftsmen spe-cializing in wagon construction. Every village and town throughout America had such individuals. The trick was finding them, getting new wagons assembled, and shipping them to Matamoros. Even with steamships hauling many of the supplies, Dana estimated it would require some fifteen hundred wagons to transport Taylor’s munitions and stores from Matamoros to Camargo. However, just seven hundred were on order. Until Taylor had these wagons — or found some other means of hauling his army’s provisions deep into Mexico for the next stage of the war — the Americans were forced to spend day after infernal day waiting.

  And waiting. And waiting. With every passing hour the Mexican army disappeared farther into the interior, digging themselves in and fortifying their position for the war’s next great battle.

  An adage of war states that time always favors a defensive force. This all but ensured that the next clash would not be so haphazard as Palo Alto or as lopsided as Resaca de la Palma. The Mexicans would reinforce and resupply.