The Training Ground Read online

  Hazlitt was still very much on his mind. The Pennsylvanian was the young officer who had coaxed Julia to marry Grant. Just two weeks earlier, Grant had written to Julia that “Mr. Hazlitt is very well,” knowing it would prompt memories of good times at White Haven. Now his twenty-five-year-old former classmate was gone.

  Hazlitt’s death soon devastated Grant. He would mourn his fallen West Point brethren for months, often bewildered by the power of grief. “I came back to my tent to drive away, what you call the Blues,” Grant wrote Julia. But driving away the heartbreak was a challenge. He also struggled to cope with the sadness, looking for solace in his work, his love for Julia, and his optimistic belief that he would return home soon. Grant put enormous faith in Taylor’s hope that Monterrey might mark the end of the war. There were rumors in camp that peace negotiations between Mexico and America had already begun. “I hope sincerely that such is the case, for I am very anxious to get out of the country,” he confided to Julia.

  But General Santa Anna had explicitly stated that he would refer the matter of peace to the Mexican Congress, which did not meet until December. Despite Ampudia’s deceptive words to the contrary, no American emissary would be received until then, so the Americans settled in as an occupying force.

  Matamoros had marked just the third time in U.S. history that its army had gained control of a foreign territory (the other two being Quebec during the Revolutionary War and various regions of Canada during the War of 1812). Monterrey, however, would be a much greater test of the American’s ability to rule another populace. One could only hope that Taylor wouldn’t see a repeat of York, in 1813, when Americans had looted and burned the city during a three-day bender. Many Mexican War volunteers had signed up out of impulsive patriotism, but others had been lured by promises of “Roast beef, two dollars a day, plenty of whiskey, golden Jesuses, and pretty Mexican girls.” Thus far their experiences had been something far more miserable. Monterrey offered a chance to make amends.

  On a more historical note, the predominantly Protestant American force’s taking up residence in a strongly Catholic nation had many West Pointers recalling their studies of Napoleon’s struggles to subjugate Spain during the Napoleonic Wars. The French disregard for Spain’s social practices and Catholic faith had led to a bloody nationalist uprising. Before invading the Iberian Peninsula, Napoleon had estimated that his losses would total some twelve thousand; instead, more than three hundred thousand French troops died at the hands of Spanish partisans. At one point, the frustrated French were shooting priests and burning entire villages in an attempt to maintain order. Taylor, with his puny remaining force, faced a very similar dynamic in Mexico. He began planning the occupation, hoping it would be incident free — perhaps more along the lines of the Duke of Wellington’s occupation of Spain, when the British general’s forces supplanted Napoleon’s. Wellington had been adamant that his troops respect the Spanish citizens’ homes and property, and as a result the British occupation was relatively blood free.

  Pro-expansionist forces back in Washington had no fears of an uprising. They firmly believed that Mexico’s indigenous population would embrace the Americans as a liberating force, bringing democracy to replace tyranny. On the ground, things were more complicated. “This plan of an armed occupation, I, individually, am opposed to, upon the ground of its never having any end,” wrote Meade. “For Mexico, though she will hardly undertake to drive us out, will nevertheless be always talking about it and making preparations, which will compel us to be always prepared by having a large army on this frontier.”

  Monterrey marked the beginning of a very long lull in the fighting. Both sides needed time to lick their wounds and form a new strategy. New leaders and new officers were about to enter the fray, men whose exploits would overshadow anything the war had seen thus far. Less than three months after graduating from West Point, many brand-new young lieutenants from the very noteworthy class of 1846 had already landed in Port Isabel and begun traveling upriver. And anxious as he was to go home, Sam Grant was destined to travel ever deeper into Mexico.

  So, finally, was Robert E. Lee.

  III

  POLITICS AND WAR

  The administration had a most embarrassing problem to solve. It was engaged in a war of conquest that must be carried to a successful issue, or the political object would be unattained. Yet all the capable officers of the requisite rank belonged to the opposition, and the man selected for lack of political ambition [Taylor] had himself become a prominent candidate for the Presidency. It was necessary to destroy his chances promptly.

  — ULYSSES S. GRANT, MEMOIRS

  TWENTY-THREE

  Change of Command

  OCTOBER 12, 1846

  The second front of Taylor’s invasion opened on a Monday morning, as engineers supervised the construction of a temporary pontoon bridge across the Rio Grande. Crossing the bridge would be Brigadier General John E. Wool, a former lawyer with a comb-over hairstyle and perpetually downturned mouth, leading a column consisting of nearly two thousand regulars, Illinois volunteer infantry, Arkansas volunteer cavalry, and 118 supply wagons. They were marching from San Antonio toward the Mexican fortress at Chihuahua.

  Chihuahua was nestled at the base of the Sierra Madre, 350 miles northwest of Monterrey. Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny, Grant’s former commander at the Jefferson Barracks, had marched a large American force from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, into Santa Fe during the summer and had become its military governor on August 18. Kearny had captured the New Mexico region without incident, but he had left just a small garrison force in Santa Fe as he marched on to California to continue the American conquest of the West. The American troops in Santa Fe were very much at risk from a counterattack by Mexican troops marching due north out of Chihuahua — thus the need to neutralize any forces that might be stationed there.

  Wool had been orphaned at a young age, but his stellar organizational skills and battlefield bravery during the War of 1812 had long ago helped him rise above that harsh twist of fate. By the time he led his army toward Mexico, he had risen to prominence as the U.S. Army’s third-ranking general, behind Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor. Even better, at least in President Polk’s mind, Wool was a Democrat. From a political and pragmatic point of view, Polk thought Wool the ideal man for the pivotal thrust toward Chihuahua. With any luck, he might win a decisive battlefield victory and deflect some of the American public’s growing fascination with Taylor.

  The newly arrived general went to work immediately. His greatest task would be turning volunteers into soldiers. At first he faced great opposition, but simple pleasures such as hot coffee, prompt payment of their salaries, and the accoutrement of war proved to be a means of winning them over. “General Wool displayed great activity in organizing his army, and putting the commissariat in the finest possible condition. Sugar and coffee of the best quality have always been a part of his soldier’s daily diet,” wrote one soldier approvingly. “No army was better provided than this with all the munitions and appliances of war.”

  Once his men had begun to look and act like an army, there still remained the problem of getting those soldiers to Chihuahua. A quick look at the chart showed Wool that the town definitely existed somewhere out in the foothills of the Sierra Madre, but few maps detailed this region of northern Mexico. The Spanish and then the Mexicans had neglected the area because it was barren and inhabited by hostile Indians — a wasteland dividing the lush farmlands of the south with the rugged lands north of the Rio Grande. “Nobody wanted to go into the vast zone of the north,” wrote one Mexican historian, “which, lacking people, was a danger, an invitation to pillage, an open arc.”

  The few maps that existed were inferior and not to scale, offering vague sketches of the few existent dirt roads. There were no topographical maps at all, nothing to provide specifics about cliffs, mountains, waterfalls, deserts, ravines, or other geographical hazards. As a result, Wool arranged for two teams of engineers to accompany h
im. The first, a four-man group from the Topographical Corps, would blaze the trail and begin drawing the first serious charts of northern Mexico. The other group was composed of two civil engineers who would supervise the building of roads and assembly of temporary bridges.

  Robert E. Lee was a member of the second group, working closely with a fellow West Point graduate named William D. Fraser. As if to emphasize the slothful course of Lee’s career thus far, both men were captains, but Fraser was seven years younger — and Lee’s superior officer.

  Not that Fraser was an ambitious overachiever. He was thirty-three years old, stuck squarely in that no-man’s-land between West Point and premature retirement. This was a land that Lee knew all too well. He was just four months shy of his fortieth birthday. A dark brown mustache gave him a rakish air that belied his stolid demeanor, and his muscular shoulders and chest gave him an imposing physical appearance. Lee was a bold man when he had to be, brimming with a quiet confidence about his abilities and intellect. But he could also be deeply conservative, even timid. By his own admission, Lee had stayed in the military out of procrastination, not out of some deep belief that he was thus destined for greatness. “I am waiting, looking, and hoping for some good opportunity to bid an affectionate farewell to my dear Uncle Sam,” he had written to a friend more than ten years earlier. Apparently, he was still waiting.

  Yet the army was where he belonged, just as it had been for his father. He loved its discipline and emphasis on duty and would have been quite lost without them in his life. When the call to war finally came on August 19, Lee’s first priority was the army, not his wife and children: indeed, he had been in such a rush to get to Texas that he didn’t bother stopping at home to say good-bye. This despite the fact that Mary had just given birth to a new baby girl, that their Arlington home was just a short jaunt across the Potomac, and that he might be gone in Mexico for several months, at the very least.

  Lee had traveled by steamboat to New Orleans and then to the Texas coast. There he eagerly galloped a horse across the brush and chaparral of the coastal plain toward San Antonio, desperate to arrive before Wool marched his army into Mexico. Amazingly, it took him just three weeks to travel some twenty-five hundred miles. Lee had been so speedy that he reached Wool’s command with a week to spare. His first assignment upon arriving was typical of an engineer, not a warrior. He was off to make the rounds of the local merchants, purchasing pickaxes, shovels, hammers, and other tools essential to building Wool’s vital new infrastructure.

  On September 28, at the same time Ampudia was ushering his army from the smoldering remains of Monterrey, Lee rode out of San Antonio with Wool’s brigade, off to engage a foreign enemy in battle for the first time in his career.

  As in all great military movements, the heady grandeur of setting out was soon replaced by the rigid routine. Each day began with a 3:00 a.m. reveille and inspection of arms. Breakfast followed immediately afterward, with the men gobbling down goat’s milk, rice pudding, and gruel. There was no mess tent, nor were there cooks to prepare a hot meal. The men were simply issued their rations, preparing them themselves or pooling them and rotating the cooking chores. They ate in darkness, off tin plates, each man allotted a single tin spoon and tin cup as utensils. Lee and the other officers enjoyed the relative luxury of sleeping in tents. Soldiers from the Quartermaster Corps struck the tents as breakfast was consumed, expertly bundling the canvas, tent poles, and officers’ personal belongings for the journey to the next night’s campsite.

  Those lacking rank slept on the ground, with just a wool blanket between them and the earth, and another wool blanket for warmth. Beginning their daily march was as easy as rolling the two blankets into a bedroll, slinging it over their shoulder, and waiting for the order to move out. This came promptly at 4:00 a.m. — just one hour after rising. Wool’s army averaged fifteen miles a day over the rolling hills and chaparral desert between San Antonio and the Rio Grande.

  During his time scouring the markets of San Antonio, Lee had local artisans construct four large wooden pontoons. The Quartermaster Corps was responsible for carting these unwieldy behemoths across the Texas wilderness, lashing each to the top of a wagon, praying all the while that the pontoons didn’t somehow topple and break. They were precious cargo, designed to build a vast temporary bridge over the Rio Grande in case the river was too deep and fast for Wool’s force to march across.

  Eleven days and 164 miles after setting out from San Antonio, Lee prodded his horse into the sluggish current, testing the river’s depth. His trained eye told him that the distance from the American shore to the Mexican was easily three hundred yards, and the river’s depth soon proved too deep for men and material to ford in safety.

  The time to build his bridge had arrived. Lee supervised the careful placement of the pontoons out in the current. Strung together with a rope that crossed from one side of the river to the other and then overlaid with wooden planks, they formed what the men called a flying bridge.

  It took three days of manual labor and engineering calculation to properly position the pontoons and complete the bridge.

  When Lee was satisfied that his new construction was sturdy and ready, men and material were allowed to cross — but not all at once. He watched as two hundred men at a time, marching slowly, balancing themselves carefully on the ever-heaving bridge, invaded Mexico, looking more like circus acrobats than soldiers. Wool was so delighted at the success that he halted his army on October 13 and threw a party for his officers. Port, champagne, and whiskey were proffered. Lee, according to his habit, attended but did not partake. Among the officers was the newly commissioned volunteer colonel John J. Hardin of the First Illinois, the former congressman Lincoln had defeated for the Whig Party nomination.

  Before Wool’s army could march any farther into Mexico, a steamboat chugged upriver from Camargo and off-loaded Brigadier General James Shields, another political rival of Lincoln’s, who was just joining the Illinois regiment. Together, the two men had spent less than six months in uniform, yet both outranked Lee.

  THE AMERICANS HOPED that the local populace would see them as liberators and welcome them with open arms. But that hope was based on a naïveté about their neighbors to the south. Mexico was an extremely complicated nation, riven by class division and racial gaps just as wide as those between black and white in the United States. During Spanish rule, the nation had been governed by Spaniards and by those Europeans who had been born in New Spain. The Europeans and criollos, combined, made up just 20 percent of the population, and that minority governed a vast Native American population, who were held in check through terror, random imprisonment, torture, and forced labor.

  Nothing changed after Mexico’s War of Independence. The Spaniards were gone, but the criollos desperately clung to the vast land holdings they had stolen from the Indians. “The aristocracy of color is quite as great in Mexico as it is in this country,” U.S. ambassador to Mexico Waddy Thompson had concluded shortly after Mexico was founded in 1821.

  The Indians fought back, staging violent revolts when the Mexican government seized more of their lands. Each time — at Oaxaca in 1827, Veracruz in 1836, Guerrero in 1842, and Alvarez in 1844 — the Mexican army ruthlessly crushed the peasants. Once violence had been established as a means of settling disputes, no faction within Mexico was safe. The Mexican army soon got in the habit of staging coups to displace unwanted governmental regimes. With the army’s officer corps dominated by criollos and other men of European white heritage, and the enlisted soldiers almost entirely of Native American extraction, the power distribution was no different than in the days before independence. Spain may have left, but the heirs to its colonial legacy still ruled Mexico. Recognizing the hatred for the regime, Polk and his pro-expansion allies in Washington fooled themselves into believing that the Americans would be welcomed into Mexico with open arms — Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, and Monterrey notwithstanding.

  Despite Taylor’s victories, the Me
xican army still ruled most of northern Mexico, vastly dampening the chances that the local peasantry would align themselves with Wool’s force. Shortly after Wool’s crossing, a Mexican officer presented himself and proclaimed that, under the terms of the Monterrey armistice, this new American incursion was illegal. Wool ignored him, preferring to travel farther southward to establish his own armistice boundary rather than let the conquered Mexicans set it for him. While the Mexican army might have been outraged at Wool’s perceived arrogance, they were also in the process of escalating the stakes. On October 8, two weeks after the signing of the armistice, General Santa Anna had arrived in the city of San Luis Potosí with a small army. Pledging his personal fortune as collateral for salaries and munitions, he soon began increasing the size of his force. His goal was twenty-five thousand men. As Ampudia had done at Monterrey, Santa Anna also ordered the construction of new fortifications around San Luis Potosí.

  Wool was ignorant of Santa Anna’s presence and intentions when he resumed his march on October 16. All his army saw before them was a vast, empty land. The Topographical Corps had verified that the best path was a detour slightly southwest toward the village of Santa Rosa. Other than roving bands of Comanche and Apache Indians and perhaps the stray communal farmer, there didn’t appear to be any opposition — or support.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The Perils of Occupation

  OCTOBER 19, 1846

  Jeff Davis was going home. Varina missed him dearly, and Davis had requested a sixty-day furlough to be by her side. A two-month leave was hardly standard procedure among Taylor’s officers, but Davis’s congressional standing and familial connections allowed him a certain leeway. Davis was confident that he would never see Monterrey again. There was still talk of a U.S. commission that would soon meet with the Mexican leaders in Mexico City to discuss a lasting peace. “They were whipped, and we could afford to be generous,” Davis had written his brother Joseph, referring to Monterrey and its aftermath. “The war is probably over.”