The Training Ground Page 13

  Taylor had no choice but to wait.

  Most days were filled with trivia and tedium. For Napoleon Dana, the hours were spent fretting over the money he owed a fellow soldier, the large sum he owed Weigart’s family (before his demise, the dead sergeant had requested that Dana hold his wages for safekeeping and act as his executor if he died, but Dana had foolishly spent the money), trying to buy a gold cross from a local senorita in the hopes of sending it home to Sue as a gift (the young woman demurred, saying that she had to ask her mother first), watching the occasional fistfights between the regular army soldiers and the volunteers, and witnessing some of the seedier by-products of occupation. There were “fandangos” going on over in Matamoros each week, American officers and the local women meeting for a night of dancing and strong punch. “I heard there was to be a ‘high-flung’ fandango last Tuesday night,” Dana wrote to his beloved, “something extra above the ordinary things of the kind at which all the beauty and fine dresses and so forth and so forth were to appear. Well, I thought to go over with the rest to take a look. So I went with Captain Ross, Porter and Clitz. I went in, and one look around was enough for me. I remained about two minutes and declared my determination to come home, to which all the party assented, and off we came. There were about forty of our officers in there and about twenty Spanish girls. I inquired particularly if there was not a mistake in the place, but I was told no, that was the high-flung fandango. If this was it, I would like to see a common one for curiosity sake. I believe I have felt fleas on me ever since.”

  DAY BY DAY, the U.S. Army grew. Volunteers poured off steam-ships at the mouth of the Rio Grande. They came from all over the country (except antiwar New England), their daily additions to the ranks dashing the regulars’ hopes of fighting the war on their own. Torrential rains fell an average of four hours each day, thanks to the onset of hurricane season. Not only was Taylor’s expanding army constantly either wet or smelling of mildew, but the rain overwhelmed the camps’ meager sanitary systems, allowing human waste to flood into the river.

  The volunteers, in particular, lacked a fundamental knowledge of hygiene. They saw nothing wrong with drinking water straight from the Rio Grande. Most were soon enduring the early stages of cholera: watery diarrhea, profuse vomiting, and leg cramps. The scorching Texas sun helped to create a vicious circle of dehydration — thirsty men craved water to sate their thirst, unaware that the very same water was making them sick. In extreme cases, soldiers went into shock. Many died.

  For Sam Grant, clinging like a delusional optimist to the ever more irrational hope that the war would end any day, being away from Julia was much more of a problem than the threat of cholera. Regular soldiers didn’t know much more about disease prevention than the volunteers — indeed, the practice of boiling drinking water was as unknown as the concept that disease was spread through minute germs and bacteria. Yet certain lifesaving traditions were a part of army life, passed down from soldier to soldier over the generations. Simple and born of intuition, they were a part of every professional warrior’s way of doing business. Brackish or muddy water was to be avoided at all costs. Regular soldiers made it a habit to drink a great deal of coffee, which provided their bodies with boiled fluid, even if such protection was usually accompanied by a gritty taste reminiscent of a freshly dug well.

  So as the ignorant newcomers clutched their abdomens and squatted over slit trenches in the shrubs along the Rio Grande, a robust Sam Grant fantasized about making love to Julia — a fantasy he was not afraid to share. “I recollect you did volunteer some time ago, or what showed your willingness to do so, you said that you wished we had been united when I was last in Mo and how willing you were to share a tent with me,” he said in a roundabout fashion. “Indeed Julia, that letter made me feel very happy.”

  Grant mailed the letter and eagerly awaited a response. The mail service that soldiers relied on was painfully slow (telegraphs were still in their infancy and were limited mostly to connecting the eastern seaboard’s major cities). It took seven days for the letter to reach Port Isabel, and another week after that to travel up the Mississippi to Saint Louis. Grant kept one nervous eye on the calendar as he waited for Julia’s reply, and the other on Taylor’s army as the great movement inland finally began.

  July progressed, with Grant waiting for mail and the inevitable word to move out, praying his long-awaited missive would arrive first. It didn’t. On July 25, Grant wrote to Julia once again. Taylor’s army was already on the move and he would soon join them. “You must not neglect to write often Dearest, so that whenever a mail does reach this far-out-of-the-way country I can hear from the one single person who occupies my thoughts. This is my last letter from Matamoros, Julia,” he wrote. “At present we are bound for Camargo and thence to Monterey, where it is reported that there is several thousand Mexican troops engaged in throwing up fortifications.”

  THE UNITED STATES had been sharply divided about the potential for this war in the years leading up to the formal declaration. The split had taken place mainly along the North-South — pro-slavery versus abolitionist — line. Even as a wave of jingoistic patriotism swept through the nation and volunteer regiments were quickly being filled with soldiers eager to join the fight, it was no surprise that pockets of antiwar fervor began developing in the North. An editorial in the June 12 edition of the New York Tribune was typical of such sentiment: “They may shout and hurrah, and dance around the bonfires that will be lighted, the cannon that will roar in honor of some field of human butchery; but to what end? Is not life miserable enough, comes not death soon enough, without resort to the hideous energy of war? People of the United States! Your rulers are precipitating you into a fathomless abyss of crime and calamity! Why sleep you thoughtless on its verge, as though this was not your business, or murder could be hid from the sight of God by a few flimsy rags called banners? Awake and arrest the work of butchery ere it shall be too late to preserve your souls from the guilt of wholesale slaughter! Hold meetings! Speak out! Act!”

  But the antiwar crowd was in the minority. Walt Whitman, the twenty-seven-year-old editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, mirrored the national mood as he equated support of the war with being a true American. “There is hardly a more admirable impulse in the human soul than patriotism,” wrote Whitman. Displays of national pride had been minimal during the Thirty Years’ Peace. Taylor’s victories had changed all that. The conflict marked the first time in American history that all its soldiers fought under the Stars and Stripes rather than merely under their own regimental colors. (Army regulations in 1834 had stipulated it as the official flag of the U.S. forces. An 1818 act of Congress had decreed that the flag would have thirteen stripes and one star for each state, with new stars to be added on the Fourth of July following a new state’s admission. As the Mexican War got under way, the flag had twenty-seven stars, with a twenty-eighth soon to be added to symbolize Texas’s admission.)

  So patriotism was not just a mood or an impulse to citizens and soldiers; it could be physically embodied in a symbolic banner around which pro-war factions could rally just as easily as soldiers on the front lines. And it was: cities fluttered with red, white, and blue.

  Another unique aspect of the American patriotic response involved God. Mexico was a deeply Catholic nation, with cathedrals and ritual church attendance a staple of life for the majority of the population. The same could be said of predominantly Protestant America, which was, theologically speaking, still very much influenced by the founding Puritans.

  However, the link between the war and Manifest Destiny, with its emphatic belief that God favored the United States over Mexico, made for a strikingly evangelical form of patriotism. As American citizens cheered the volunteers rushing into their town squares to enlist, the assemblages often felt like a combination between a Sunday morning service and a Fourth of July celebration, complete with bands playing “Yankee Doodle” and fevered speeches comparing the Mexican War with the Crusades.

&nb
sp; And even when those soldiers marched off to war, that cocktail of patriotism and faith traveled right alongside. On June 1, 1846, Captain R. A. Stewart, a Methodist minister and sugar farmer from Louisiana, celebrated the first American church service on Mexican soil since the war’s beginning. Standing on a dusty patch of farmland outside Matamoros, Stewart reminded his all-combatant flock that God intended Anglo-Saxons to rule North America as an “order of Providence.” All devout Americans would stand by the troops as a display of their faith and patriotism.

  Such talk was heady — and premature. As spring turned to summer, the American army had not been seriously tested. Casualties had been light. The war was having little impact on most of the nation. Patriotism, thus far, had come cheap.

  But as Taylor prepared to escalate hostilities by leaving Texas and pressing the fight onto Mexican soil — lands that had nothing to do with Manifest Destiny and that only a meager handful of U.S. citizens coveted — it remained to be seen if the American people would continue to support a cause that was about to lose its moral certainty.

  “We,” Grant wrote of the change in the war’s focus, as evidenced by the new name given Taylor’s force, “became the Army of Invasion.”

  THIRTEEN

  Star-Spangled Banner

  JULY 4, 1846

  If the American army is yet to undertake a campaign south of the Rio Grande, its greatest perils are yet to come,” the Times of London predicted somewhat ominously on June 15.

  That same day the United States and Great Britain signed the Treaty of Oregon, ending all threat of hostility between the two countries. The specter of a two-front war no longer hung over the United States. President Polk was free to concentrate all his military might on Mexico.

  Working off plans drafted by Major General Winfield Scott, the vainglorious yet brilliant commanding general of the U.S. Army, Polk quickly focused America’s ambitions and plans. The war’s goal was to make the Rio Grande the nation’s southern border and to bring California into the Union.

  A four-pronged attack would make this possible.

  Part one was Taylor’s ongoing advance into Mexico; part two would be a second column of American troops marching south from San Antonio under the command of Brigadier General John E. Wool, in order to protect Taylor’s right flank; part three was an improbable two-thousand-mile overland march by U.S. dragoons from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to San Diego, California; and part four was a naval blockade of all Mexican ports on the Atlantic and Pacific to prevent the importation of arms from Europe.

  The Treaty of Oregon made it all possible. Britain had agreed to cede Oregon to the United States, in exchange for keeping sole possession of all lands north of the forty-ninth parallel, an act formally defining the northern border of the United States for the first time since the Louisiana Purchase. The British press, which had been watching the conflict with Mexico closely, seemed to take a certain glee in predicting American calamity. “The hot weather has set in; the yellow fever is raging on the coast; and to advance into the interior of Mexico at this time will be an operation of extreme difficulty,” chuckled the Times.

  None of that dissuaded Jefferson Davis. Though still officially a congressman, his new title was Colonel Davis, commander of the First Mississippi Regiment (the unit’s title was deceptive: they were the only Mississippi regiment). His pay rate was seventy-five dollars a month. On July 3, the War Department had ordered him to leave at once for Mexico, where he would report directly to General Taylor. Now, as America celebrated its seventieth birthday, he and Varina boarded the caravan of stagecoaches that took them over the Appalachians via the National Road. For safety from robbers and other predators, stagecoaches seldom traveled alone, with as many as six journeying together at one time. A typical stage was pulled by four horses, with nine passengers inside the cab and up to four more sitting outside in the open air.

  The Davises would be taken to the Ohio River, where they would then board a steamboat that would ferry them down to the Mississippi.

  Mississippi meant “Big River” to the Native Americans who first settled on her banks. The grand title failed to convey the majesty of a waterway stretching from Canada down into the Gulf of Mexico and had no equal north of the equator — not even the similarly named Rio Grande. The river flowed through America like a promise that would always be kept, expanding the nation’s boundaries by doubling as the nation’s travel hub: settlers headed toward the Santa Fe and Oregon trails gathered on its banks to stock up on provisions to load aboard their covered wagons; traders bound for a summer in the Nebraska and Dakota territories bundled their wares and crowded the stone riverfront wharves of cities like Saint Louis, awaiting passage on steamboats headed north to the Missouri River; travelers from the East journeyed down the Ohio River until it merged with the Mississippi, then changed boats at Cairo, from there continuing downriver to New Orleans or upriver toward Saint Louis and points beyond.

  The riverboat segment of Jeff and Varina Davis’s journey would last nine days. Appropriately, given the patriotic fervor attending their trip and the date Davis chose for his departure, they cruised the Mississippi River aboard the paddle wheeler Star-Spangled Banner.

  Davis had not resigned his House seat when he accepted his new commission, and he was nakedly honest when discussing his motivations in a letter to his sister Lucinda. “It may be that I will return with a reputation over which you will rejoice,” he stated plainly.

  The time for fighting his decision was long past. Varina had been devastated, but her husband had refused to change his mind. “I have cried until I am stupid,” she wrote to her mother. “If Jeff was a cross bad husband, old, ugly, or stupid, I could better bear for him to go on a year’s campaign, but he is so tender, and good that I feel like he ought never to leave me.”

  Davis was risking Varina’s life as well as his own — though that was her own doing. As if she’d learned nothing from Knox’s death, she would be returning to the Deep South at the exact same time of year that mosquitoes and malaria had killed his first wife.

  Davis had implored Varina to agree to remain in Virginia, for her own safety and his peace of mind. But since her social standing would wither notably without her husband in Washington, she was adamant about returning to the South. Varina planned to travel to her parents’ home in Louisiana once Davis went off to war. She thought it a better place to spend the time than alone at Brierfield or even at nearby Hurricane. Her exposure to Davis Bend would be minimal — but even that made Davis nervous.

  He was bursting with pride that his constituents had chosen him to lead the First Mississippi into Mexico, and he longed to do more than just perform gracefully under fire. Indeed, Davis yearned to bring glory upon himself and his men by making sure they were the best-trained, best-equipped, and bravest volunteer fighting force that it was possible to assemble on such short notice. He immersed himself in a pocket field manual while aboard the Star-Spangled Banner, lifting his head from the pages just long enough to explain the meanings of “enfilading, breaking columns, hollow squares, and what not” to his wife from time to time.

  Davis and Varina arrived home on July 13. He soon entrusted his brother with a letter of resignation from Congress but gave him explicit instructions not to submit it unless the war became a political liability.

  Davis hastily made arrangements for Varina’s safety and well-being and placed his longtime favorite slave James Pemberton in charge of the plantation in his absence.

  Jefferson kissed Varina good-bye the very next morning and boarded yet another steamboat, this one bound for New Orleans. He was accompanied by a slave named Jim Green and an Arabian horse called Tartar, named for the Turkish warriors who once rampaged across Europe with Genghis Khan.

  The Tartars were infamous for pillaging and looting, and otherwise changing the course of Western civilization.

  FOURTEEN

  Eager for Action

  JULY 14, 1846

  With Manhattan’s skyline
to his right, the residential borough of Brooklyn to his left, and the green black waters of the Atlantic Ocean straight ahead, First Lieutenant William Tecumseh Sherman could finally rest easily: he was on his way to the war. For six crazed weeks, starting in early June, Sherman had finagled and schemed his way from an unchallenging post with the recruiting department into an assignment with an artillery company bound for combat.

  Wiry and intense, a red-haired dervish whose unkempt and often casual appearance belied deep wells of inner passion and, sometimes, depression, Sherman now stood on the decks of the store ship Lexington along with the 113 enlisted men, five officers, and assistant surgeon of Company F of the U.S. Army’s Third Artillery.

  They were all bound for California, in anticipation of the war’s second front opening there soon. The passage would be arduous and long — perhaps six months. The route would take them down along the coast of South America and around Tierra del Fuego before turning north to the California coastal port at Monterey.

  If F Company had been an infantry outfit instead of artillery, they could have marched to California more quickly. But they were not, and dragging cannons from one side of the North American continent to the other was deeply impractical.

  Sherman was extremely ill suited to such a passive mode of transportation. The young officer from Ohio, sixth in the West Point class of 1840, could only pace the decks in frustration, praying all the while for smooth seas and a following wind.

  This depressed him no end, but the alternative was not traveling to the front lines at all. A Seminole War veteran who had never seen action, Sherman had been on duty as a recruiter when he heard about shots being fired on the Rio Grande. He was overwhelmed by an eagerness to finally take part in some battle — any battle — if only to hold his head high among fellow West Point alumni. “In the latter part of May when at Wheeling, Virginia, on my way back from Zanesville to Pittsburg, I heard the news of the first battle of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma,” he wrote of his zeal, “and, in common with everybody else, felt intensely excited. That I should be on the recruiting service when my comrades were actually fighting was intolerable.”