The Training Ground Page 2

  Matilda, who was also Lee’s second cousin, died in 1790, and three years later Henry remarried, a woman almost half his age. Ann Hill Carter Lee gave birth to six children. The fourth, a boy who came into the world on January 19, 1807, was given the name Robert Edward, for two of her brothers.

  By then, Light-Horse Harry Lee’s financial misadventures had long derailed his promise. He had served in Congress for a term, had been briefly considered for a presidential nomination, and had written the words that Chief Justice John Marshall used to eulogize George Washington — “first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.” But soon after young Robert Edward was born, confiscation of family assets became a regular part of the family equation. For a year, beginning in the spring of 1809, Light-Horse Harry was cast into a debtor’s prison, where he wrote his memoirs of the Revolutionary War. The family was destitute by the time he was released, with every property and dwelling sold to pay bills.

  As devastating as that surely was, Harry Lee’s worst problems were before him. In July 1812, while defending a friend who shared his opposition to America’s new conflict with Britain, he was beaten for nearly three hours by a pro-war mob. They poured hot candle wax into his eyes, slashed at him with knives, and even tried to cut off his nose. Harry suffered serious internal injuries, his face was permanently disfigured, and his speech was slurred for the few remaining years that he lived. In 1813 he abandoned his family and traveled to Barbados at the behest of President James Monroe, hoping to regain his health. That summer day, five-year-old Robert Edward said good-bye to his father for the last time. On March 25, 1818, while finally making his way home to Virginia, Light-Horse Harry Lee died on Cumberland Island, off the coast of Georgia.

  Robert Edward Lee was eleven at the time. His mother was raising the family in Alexandria, in a small house on Washington Street. Ann Carter Lee was only in her midforties, but she was already dying from the stress of too many years spent struggling to keep the family together in the face of Harry Lee’s many setbacks. She had loved her husband dearly and was proud of his many accomplishments, but she was just as adamant that her five children not be like him. Ann was a gentle woman who instilled in her children a disdain for all things impulsive and reckless, and daily preached a gospel of personal discipline and self-restraint. Those lessons would define Robert E. Lee for the rest of his life. He would never drink, swear, or gamble, just as his mother had hoped.

  The seeds of Ann’s teachings first bore fruit in the years following Henry’s death. After Robert’s older siblings, Carter, Ann, and Smith, moved away, he became the head of the household, left to care for his now-invalid mother and younger sister Mildred. He was growing — eventually reaching five feet ten and a half inches — and becoming a handsome young man, with a strong chin, wavy brown hair, and dark brown eyes. He was intellectual yet rugged, fond of study and just as fond of swimming in the nearby Potomac River or trekking through the forests and hills outside town.

  In 1823, Robert finished his studies at a small academy in Alexandria and applied to West Point. The family attorney, William H. Fitzhugh, wrote a letter of introduction, and Robert boldly bypassed the congressional selection process by presenting the letter directly to Secretary of War John C. Calhoun. On March 11, 1824, Lee was formally notified of his appointment. His enrollment was pushed back an entire year, however, because of an unexpected surplus of qualified applicants. Lee passed the year in productive fashion, preparing himself mentally for West Point by studying at a new boys’ school that had, coincidentally, just opened next door to the Lee home, and meeting the Marquis de Lafayette, the famed Frenchman and Revolutionary War hero who had once been a peer of Harry Lee’s and had called upon the late general’s widow during a triumphal return to America.

  On July 1, 1825, Robert Edward Lee reported to West Point. “His personal appearance surpassed in manly beauty that of any cadet in the corps,” said a fellow cadet effusively. “Though firm in his position and perfectly erect, he had none of the stiffness so often assumed by men who affect to be very strict in their ideas of what is military.” Here, along the Hudson, he had found himself.

  Lee blossomed at West Point. Not only did he excel in his academic subjects and display exemplary conduct, but he also grew fond of reading on concepts beyond the academy’s purview, devouring topics such as travel and philosophy in his spare time. His grasp of mathematics was so advanced that he was asked to serve as an assistant professor in that subject.

  Lee shared his time at West Point with other future generals and national leaders like Joseph E. Johnston, Jefferson Davis, and W. N. Pendleton, but none of them possessed Lee’s self-discipline and desire to compete for the top spot in his class. His own curiosity cost him that prize: though he dedicated his final year to studying and abandoned all pleasure reading, he fell short of his goal and finished second. Still, by all measures, his time at West Point had been magnificent.

  On July 10, 1829, less than two months after her son’s graduation, Ann Carter Lee passed away. A devastated Lee was at her side. Soon, though, another woman became prominent in his life, as Lee rekindled his relationship with an old friend from a distinguished family. Mary Anne Randolph Custis was a descendant of George Washington. Her family estate, Arlington, overlooked Alexandria. Lee had visited it often since childhood, for the Lees and the Custises were distant relations. Mary was twenty-one and frail, with a sharp nose, a quick smile, a habit of being late, and mousy blond hair that she parted in the middle and wore in ringlets down to the base of her neck. Their relationship steadily became more formal during the summer of 1829 — Lee, the dashing and earnest young lieutenant, and Mary, the socialite known for her kindness and good graces. They were married the following summer. Over the next fourteen years, they would have seven children.

  In the meantime, Lee’s career beckoned. He was often away from home, sent to build forts, embankments, wharves, locks, and other vital infrastructure in faraway outposts on the Georgia coast and the upper Mississippi and in closer locales such as New York Harbor. He wore the uniform of a soldier, but his daily duties were those of a highly trained engineer. This pattern would solidly define the next fifteen years of his life — a series of summer construction projects followed by winter journeys home to be with Mary and the children, who usually did not travel with their father.

  Lee was thorough in his work, careful in his dealings with his fellow officers, and in every way the opposite of his father, never associated in the least with scandal. But the peacetime army was no place for advancement, even for a man of his caliber. By the spring of 1844, almost a decade and a half after graduating, he was still just a captain.

  As luck would have it, Lee received orders to return to West Point at that time, assigned, along with several of his fellow officers, to spend two weeks helping to administer the cadets’ final exams. Among these officers was Major General Winfield Scott, commanding general of the army. The two got to know each other on a somewhat formal basis, and Scott came away with a favorable impression of Lee. This likely would have meant nothing at all, had hostilities between the United States and Mexico not increased over the next two years. When they did, however, Scott would remember Lee and call upon him to prove himself on the field of battle.

  SOMEWHERE IN THE middle of the West Point alumni hierarchy, between the capricious nature of the class goats and the perfection of Lee, was a small young man from Ohio. His given name was Hiram Ulysses, but his fellow cadets called him simply Sam — or if a last name was required, Sam Grant. The Ohioan wanted little to do with the army and had only come to West Point to please his father. Grant was clean shaven and square jawed, stood five eight, and weighed just 120 pounds; he had steel blue eyes, auburn hair that he would part on the left until the day he died, and, concurrent with his arrival along the Hudson, a nagging cough — compliments of West Point’s drafty dormitories — that made him wonder if he had tuberculosis. Friends considered him noble and powerfully loyal and
thought it obvious that the introverted young man had little if any experience when it came to the opposite sex. Yet they marveled at the way he sat a horse and at his almost spiritual connection with those animals. Still basically a boy, he was already complicated.

  Grants had lived in America for eight generations, dating back to the arrival of the Englishman Matthew Grant, who sailed to Massachusetts on the Mary and John in 1630. Sam’s great-grandfather had been a commissioned officer in the British army who died in 1756 during the French and Indian War. His grandfather Noah fought for the colonists at the Battle of Bunker Hill and then served clear on through the Revolutionary War, mustering out after the grand finale at the Battle of Yorktown. Afterward, Noah joined the large number of settlers marching westward in search of opportunity. He ended up in Ohio, where he fathered nine children. Unable to support them all, Noah sent the more capable off to make their way in the world. Noah’s fourth child, Jesse, was kicked out at the age of eleven. Never having forgotten the years of poverty that ensued, he grew into a tightfisted and controlling man with an ironic fondness for personal luxury. A tanner by trade, he married the warm and devout Hanna Simpson in 1821. Their first child, a son, was born on April 27, 1822, in Point Pleasant, Ohio. Selecting the boy’s name was no easy matter. Relatives gathered from far and wide to offer their opinions before the family finally settled on Hiram Ulysses — his father being partial to the former and his grandmother having a fondness for the Greek hero. His father’s preference would go to waste when Grant applied to West Point seventeen years later. The congressman making the appointment knew that the child went by Lyss, so he assumed Ulysses to be a first name. He also made the mistake of believing that the Grants had followed the common practice of using the mother’s maiden name in the middle. Thus Hiram Ulysses Grant became Ulysses S. Grant. Lyss didn’t learn that his name had been changed until he signed in at West Point, and officials there, showing the stubborn military logic that Grant would come to despise, refused to reverse the blunder. His fellow cadets soon took the mistake a step further. “I remember seeing his name on the bulletin board, where the names of all the newcomers were posted,” noted William Tecumseh Sherman, a cadet three years ahead of Grant. “I ran my eye down the columns, and there saw ‘U.S. Grant.’ A lot of us began making up names to fit the initials. One said, ‘United States Grant.’ Another ‘Uncle Sam Grant.’ A third said, ‘Sam Grant.’ That name stuck to him.”

  Jesse Grant had submitted Sam’s application without telling his son; Grant got his revenge by being an indifferent cadet. “A military life had no charms for me. And I had not the faintest idea of staying in the army even if I should be graduated, which I did not expect,” he once explained. “I did not take hold of my studies with avidity. In fact, I rarely ever read over a lesson a second time during my cadetship.”

  Engineering, that backbone of the West Point curriculum, was a dry topic for the detached and somewhat romantic Grant. Making matters worse, he had a limited background in math, a topic vital to engineering success. Rather than tackle the problem through study and self-discipline, Grant preferred to read novels and other books unrelated to military life whenever possible. His disdain for West Point was so great that when Congress introduced a resolution in December 1839 that would abolish the military academy, Grant pored over newspaper accounts of the ensuing debate, praying the measure would succeed so he could return to Ohio without being considered a failure. “I saw in it an honorable way to obtain a discharge,” he stated plainly. The bill, much to Grant’s chagrin, failed.

  Year by year, his apathy grew. Grant was promoted from cadet private to the rank of corporal as a sophomore, and then to sergeant during his junior year. But he received so many demerits that he was stripped of rank and was made a private once more; he was in the bottom half of his class academically — ranking 25th in his class of 39 in artillery tactics, 28th in infantry tactics, and, when it came to conduct, 156th out of 253 in the entire school. Surprisingly, the only class at West Point in which he performed well was mathematics, for which he had such a natural aptitude that his earlier lack of education was soon forgotten.

  Yet there was more to this quiet cadet than even he realized. “He was proficient in mathematics but did not try to excel at anything except horsemanship,” remembered a fellow cadet. “He was very daring. When his turn came to leap the bar, he would make the dragoons lift it from the trestles and raise it as high as their heads, when he would drive his horse over it, clearing at least six feet.” Grant had a steadfast quality that drew others to him, and a powerful gift for observation and analysis. He was elected president of the Dialectic, the cadet literary society, and was chosen to join a secret society called the T.I.O. — twelve in one — whose members wore rings engraved with those initials, promising to wear them until their wedding day, at which time they would give the rings to their wives. “We all liked him. He had no bad habits,” remembered his classmate D. M. Frost, who would go on to become a general. “He had no facility in conversation with the ladies, a total absence of elegance, and naturally showed off badly in contrast with the young Southern men, who prided themselves on being finished in the ways of the world.”

  One of those much more refined southerners was James Longstreet, a strapping young man born in South Carolina and raised in the Georgia hills, who went by the nickname Pete. Longstreet was a year ahead of Grant and had the careless grace of a man thoroughly comfortable in his own skin. He was loud and larger than life, fond of whiskey, practical jokes, cards, and breaking academy rules. The tall, broad-shouldered Longstreet and the diminutive Grant were physical opposites, but they were also kindred spirits who formed a lasting bond. “We became fast friends the first time we met,” Longstreet said of Grant, whom he described as possessing “a noble heart, a loveable character, and a sense of honor which was so perfect.” The unlikely friends would later see battle in two wars. The first time they would fight on the same side; the second time they would not.

  AS ADMISSION TO West Point required a recommendation from the applicant’s congressman, the student body revealed a geographical diversity uncommon at most American educational institutions. Here a boy from Vermont could meet another from Georgia; a Maryland native would room with someone from Massachusetts.

  There was, however, not a single Texan to be found during Grant’s time along the Hudson. The reason was simple: West Point students had to be Americans. Texas was an independent nation, a democratic republic with its own president and congress, almost constantly at war with the Comanche and Mexican nations, and so vast that the combined square mileage of America’s original thirteen colonies could almost fit within its borders.

  Some saw Texas as a buffer between the United States and Mexico. Others saw Texas as an impediment to America’s growth. Therein lay the roots of war.

  The seeds themselves had been planted centuries before, when the first intrepid English (and later, American) men and women struck inland from the Atlantic, seeking better places to live. This individual penetration was the hallmark of America’s expansion — not growth by governmental decree, but colonist after colonist, striking out to find a better life in the wilderness. For generations they pushed inexorably west, until they were no longer called colonists but settlers and pioneers, in a nod to their courage, sense of exploration, and proprietary interest in land that was frequently not theirs to take.

  Not many of those adventurers favored Texas — not at first. The landscape didn’t extend an easy welcome, the climate was contrary, and the dearth of natural resources meant there were few obvious opportunities to accrue wealth. Texas was a land of low mountains, few lakes, sediment-filled rivers, thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, withering heat, bracing cold, and an abundance of freshwater streams — the lone natural feature that could possibly be considered an asset, were it not for their tendency to become utterly dry in the summer and unrepentantly torrential during the long, rainy winter. Texas was the nesting ground of alligators, catfi
sh, snapping turtles, bloodsucking insects, fifteen varieties of poisonous snakes, and a small, undeniably odd mammal whose body was cloaked not in fur but in a bony shell that looked like battle armor — the armadillo.

  It took a sturdy individual to make a life among those biblical hardships, and Texas’s settlers possessed a desperate, hardscrabble quality, partly because many of them had failed elsewhere. Texas was their last stand, and those who came and stayed bonded fiercely with the land, realizing, quite rightly, that its challenges molded their characters and toughened their hides each and every time they stepped outside.

  These American pioneers were not the first people to experience Texas’s challenges. Its first inhabitants had crossed a land bridge from Asia ten thousand years earlier. Some of those migrants settled on the flat coastal plain fronting what would become known as the Gulf of Mexico. Others preferred the arid land far to the west, and others still the forested hills and rolling plains in the center of the region. A tribe known as the Caddo, who lived in the pine forests of east and northeast Texas, first used the word taysha to describe a friend or an ally. The Spanish, who arrived in the sixteenth century with their horses and dreams of building roads and Catholic missions, gave the word a Castilian spelling and applied it to the region at large. Thus the land became known as Tejas and then Texas, the benevolence of the original term diminishing with each spelling change and the flow of blood and history. In 1716, Texas became part of a larger colony known as New Spain, overseen by a Spanish viceroy in Mexico City. New Spain’s southern border was the Central American isthmus; its northern border was unspecified but was thought to be somewhere around North America’s forty-second parallel, where the lands later known as California and Oregon met. A stubborn brown river neatly bisected New Spain, marking the distinct border at which Texas began. Born as a snow-fed mountain stream at the Continental Divide, some twelve thousand feet up in the San Juan Mountains of the New Mexico region, the river was known as the Posoge (big river) by the Pueblo Indians. Others would name it Río de Nuestra Señora, River of May, and Río Turbio (Turbulent River). It was the explorer Juan de Oñate, in 1598, who reverted back to the Pueblo name, only now in Spanish: Río Grande (or Rio Grande in English).