The Training Ground Page 23

  Three weeks later, with no sign that Mexico planned to quit the war, he took matters into his own hands and left the First Mississippi, if only for a time. It was a Monday as he galloped Tartar out of Monterrey, destined for Camargo and the Hatchee Eagle, a 116-ton side-wheel river steamer, for the trip down to the mouth of the Rio Grande, there to catch a sailing ship for New Orleans.

  Other than just his chronic restlessness, Davis had several powerful reasons for leaving. First, the wait for the Mexican Congress to reassemble meant an eight-week armistice, and Davis wasn’t the sort to stand idle. Rather than while away his time in the comparative luxury of Monterrey, where many officers were now living in the city’s finer homes, he was more than happy to travel a thousand miles back to Davis Bend. Second, racing home ensured that Davis would be the first member of his regiment to return from the war — with all the fanfare and political capital that entailed. But Davis was in for a surprise: he had no way of knowing that on October 17, just two days before saddling Tartar for the trip home, his brother Joseph had submitted Davis’s letter of resignation. Davis might be coming home a hero, and definitely a politician, but he was no longer a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

  GRANT, MEANWHILE, REMAINED in Monterrey. The Americans were well into their second month as an occupying force, and the daily urgencies of preparing for battle and waging war had been replaced by boredom, mayhem, and longing — though not always in that order. “I got one of the sweetest letters from you a few days ago that I have had for a long time and the least I can do in return is to write you at least three pages in return; even if I have nothing more to write than that I love you, and how very much,” Grant wrote Julia. He and the Fourth were still camped at Walnut Springs. Monterrey had become a bustling American outpost, and his days had settled into a rather comfortable routine. Once again, war seemed very far away. “How happy I should be if I knew that but a few more letters were to pass between my Dearest Julia and myself — as mere lovers — that is to say, how happy I should be if soon Julia was to become mine forever,” Grant wrote. “You say in your letter that you wish it was our country that was being invaded instead of Mexico, that you would ask for quarters, but that you doubted if Mr. Grant would grant them. Indeed dearest, I am one of the most humane individuals you are acquainted with, and not only would I give quarters to anyone who implores them; but if Julia says she will surrender herself my prisoner I will take the first opportunity of making an excursion to Mo. But you must not expect your parole like other prisoners of war, for I expect to be the sentinel that guards you myself.”

  Despite Grant’s distance from Julia, Monterrey was proving to be an enjoyable interlude. “Grant was then quartermaster of the Fourth Infantry,” remembered the Virginian Dabney Maury, a lieutenant in the Mounted Rifles. “I had been badly wounded hunting near Camargo, so as to disable me from duty while in Monterey. Grant being also, by the duties of his office, free to go when and where he pleased, we were much together and enjoyed the association. Grant was a thoroughly kind and manly young fellow, with no bad habits, and was respected and liked by his fellow officers, especially those of his own regiment.”

  The tents of each company were laid out in two rows, with a “company street” running between them. At the end of each street, displayed perpendicular to the road, was each company’s colors. This “color line” was also where muskets and rifles were stacked and where a company assembled in formation. There was precision and order to this arrangement, for it was the same throughout the army, making Walnut Springs and Camargo and Fort Brown and Corpus Christi and the countless bivouacs in between carbon copies of one another — and in that way, home.

  The only regulars inside Monterrey were Worth’s Second Division, accompanied by the Texas Mounted Rifles. Having a force simultaneously within the city and outside it kept the Americans from being bottled up in one spot. This was Taylor’s way of keeping his army prepared for war, in case of a Mexican counterattack. It was not beyond question: intelligence reports showed that General Santa Anna had a force of eight thousand linking up with Ampudia’s tattered thousands far to the south at San Luis Potosí.

  But having the army camp outside Monterrey served another purpose, too. Its citizens had been so afraid of the Americans that many had fled to Saltillo and other towns farther inland. They were terrified that they would be captured, sent to the United States, and sold into slavery, although rumors to this effect proved to be false. However, the people of Monterrey still had reason to be scared of the occupying forces. Hoping to prove that the American army would treat them well, Taylor had banned the sale of alcohol in the city, given that violence often accompanied drunkenness (this, however, proved almost impossible to enforce as Americans discovered Mexican spirits such as mescal for the first time).

  Gambling and associating with camp followers were also off limits. At a time when he should have been allowed to focus on the war, or at the very least on saving his command, Taylor (who rotated between Saltillo and Monterrey) was forced to spend his time and energy finding ways to keep the bored, vengeful, and sexually frustrated volunteers from causing trouble. Though he had full authority over the regulars, Taylor was forbidden to punish volunteers. His only recourse was to place offenders in chains and send them back to New Orleans for trial, whereupon the guilty volunteer would be released for lack of eyewitnesses. “Reliable information reached Washington, almost daily, that the wild volunteers as soon as beyond the Rio Grande, committed with impunity, all sorts of atrocities on the persons and property of Mexicans,” an exasperated General Winfield Scott wrote of Taylor’s woes. “There was no legal punishment for any of those offences, for by the strange omission of Congress, American troops take with them beyond the limits of their own country, no law but the Constitution of the United States, and the rules and articles of war. These do not provide any court for the trial or punishment of murder, rape, theft, etc, etc. — no matter by whom or on whom committed.”

  Mexicans were shot down in the streets. Livestock were stolen. Women were raped. “Many outrages have been committed on respectable females, some of the most hellish, devilish kind, and heart-rending in the extreme. Some volunteers the other night, for instance, entered the house of a very respectable family, and obliged the husband to leave the room. Some held him outside whilst two remained inside. One held a pistol to the lady’s head whilst the other fiend incarnate violated her person,” Dana wrote Sue.

  At one restaurant in town, a group of Tennessee volunteers got drunk and began destroying plates, then took out their guns and began shooting. They killed one of their own in the process. Taylor was forced to banish one group of volunteers, the Louisville Legion, from Monterrey entirely. They were ordered back to Camargo after it was discovered that a large group of them regularly went out on vigilante raids, searching for Mexicans to kill.

  Worst of all was the Texas cavalry — the Texas Rangers, as they were known. Thought by many to be an elite unit, they viewed the war as a means of extracting revenge on Mexico and the Mexican people, and Monterrey as a city that was theirs to plunder. Texas Rangers wore buckskin shirts and were fond of tucking their dusty pants into the tops of their riding boots. They disdained bathing and were infested with lice and fleas, wore broad-brimmed hats similar to Mexican sombreros, and were never without a gun belt, knife, or rifle — and sometimes wore all three at once. Few of the Rangers shaved, and their thick beards added to their outlaw appearance, particularly in comparison to the regulars, who were generally clean shaven. When Worth temporarily ceased military patrols, thinking that order had been restored, the thatch-roofed shanties of peasants were burned and at least one hundred Mexicans were murdered. The Texans, under Colonel Hays, were found to be responsible but went unpunished.

  The Mexican populace quickly learned to differentiate between the regulars and the volunteers — the good Americans and the bad, to their way of thinking.

  And over time the violence died down. Little by lit
tle, the citizens of Monterrey returned. Their local economy flourished, thanks to the American soldiers who were willing to pay for goods and services. Thus the waning months of 1846 passed, with Taylor’s Monterrey army literally divided into two camps: those in the city and those in the country. Life seemed to be settling back into a normal routine. It was, as Grant wrote, “a quiet camp life.”

  But not for much longer.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Policy and Power

  NOVEMBER 7, 1846

  Life in Monterrey was good for George Meade — very good. Thanks to the death and illness of several predecessors, he was now the ranking topographical engineer in Taylor’s army (four had fallen, and it had become a grim running joke that getting the job of senior topog was akin to being issued a death warrant). He and his housemates, fellow topographical engineers Jeremiah Scarritt and John Pope, had hired a cook, a waiter, and a groom to meet their every need. Their opulently appointed mansion was decorated in mahogany and featured a Monterrey rarity: glass windows. Most important, Meade also enjoyed the confidence of Taylor and Worth, two increasingly powerful generals. Worth thought Meade a man of “intelligent zeal and gallantry” and brought him ever closer into his command circle. The two men had ridden down the Saltillo road together, Worth studying the narrow pass for its strategic importance while Meade made carefully detailed terrain sketches for Taylor — sketches that were later forwarded to Washington and reviewed by Polk and Secretary of War Marcy.

  The sketches, however, were not the only missives from Mexico being reviewed by the president and the secretary of war.

  Word of Taylor’s Monterrey victory and subsequent armistice had reached Washington, D.C., on October 11. This could not have been worse news for Polk. Since late August he had been rethinking the war. With the Texas boundary now all but settled at the Rio Grande, it was becoming unclear why U.S. troops were still in Mexico. Popular support for the war was waning among the American public. Yet for Polk to pull out before achieving a complete Mexican surrender would be an enormous loss of face.

  Instead, Polk chose to greatly increase the size of the U.S. force and the scope of the war. He proposed (in a plan borrowed from General Winfield Scott) to abandon military operations in northern Mexico and go straight for that country’s jugular. American forces would first take the small eastern port of Tampico for use as a staging area and then travel hundreds of miles south by ship to invade from the sea at the tropical port of Veracruz. It was Mexico’s largest and most vital harbor and its conduit to the outside world. From there, they would march inland to Mexico City and seize the Mexican capital.

  It was the obvious scheme, for it was becoming clear that the Mexicans had little emotional investment in northern Mexico. Taylor’s advances had minimal effect on life in Mexico’s lush central valley, where the vast majority of its citizens lived, particularly the white criollos, who controlled the church, the military, and the political hierarchy. To them, the North was a place for establishing military presidios — forts — for national defense, but also a place where hostile Indians held far more sway in the vast open spaces between towns. It had been that way since the time of the Aztecs, who referred to the region contemptuously as the Chichimeca, in reference to the area’s nomadic tribes, whose lifestyle they considered barbarian in contrast to their own cultured ways. Mexico’s current leaders, while unwilling to cede northern Mexico to the United States without a fight, would never put themselves under America’s thumb by surrendering their entire nation over those desert lands. Not until Americans took up residence in the halls of Montezuma — Mexico City, once the epicenter of Aztec rule and still the base of all Mexican power — could the war truly be complete.

  On Sunday, September 20, just as hostilities were beginning in Monterrey, Polk convened an emergency cabinet session to discuss this radical change in strategy. He proposed that Taylor be redirected from Monterrey to Tampico and outfitted with seven companies of regulars, a new company of dragoons, and a large body of volunteers. The soldiers would attack the town from the rear, while an American naval fleet commanded by Commodore David Conner would bombard it by sea.

  This was a bold tactical shift, a point underscored by Polk’s making the unusual move of holding a cabinet meeting on the Sabbath. The president was saying, in essence, that Monterrey no longer mattered. Even after the long summer of moving troops up the Rio Grande, the buildup of men and material, and now the ferocious street fighting that would claim hundreds of Mexican and American lives, Polk had decided it was all for naught.

  Thanks to the vast distance between Washington, D.C., and Taylor’s army, the courier delivering Polk’s new orders had crossed paths with the messenger bringing word of the Monterrey armistice. So even as Taylor — and then Meade — digested the proposed Tampico assault, Polk and his cabinet were just receiving news of Taylor’s unilateral act of diplomacy.

  The armistice had the potential to be an enormous loss of face for Polk. His own peace efforts, launched in July, had been rebuffed by the Mexicans, who made it clear they would not talk peace until all American forces left their country. Additionally, the British and French were growing more and more hostile toward Polk’s war. In an article that the Times of London reprinted for British readers, the Parisian Journal des Débats succinctly described their view of the war thus far: “A grievance was imagined relative to a strip of land between the Rio Nueces and the Rio Grande, which had belonged to the insurgent Texians, which was manifestly false, and which it was said the Mexicans retained contrary to justice. But once Matamoros was conquered, the Americans were in possession of the disputed territory. Why, then, advance an army, first to Camargo and subsequently to Monterey? . . . Mr. Polk and his counselors cannot but have perceived this, and they regret having advanced on that side; but to recall General Taylor, at present, would be to cover themselves with confusion in the eyes of their political adversaries and in the eyes of the multitude, whom they have inspired with a fatal passion for military glory.”

  What some saw as Polk’s act of naked aggression was punctuated by the recent congressional proposal for a railway that would travel across the Rocky Mountains and on to the Pacific. With the railway, the sea-to-shining-sea goal of Manifest Destiny would almost be complete.

  From the European point of view, Mexico was an impoverished young nation being bullied by a greedy neighbor. It was equally obvious that there was no turning back. “A retreat,” concluded the Journal, “would be translated into a defeat. The Mexicans would be persuaded that they had beaten the Americans.”

  Polk’s greatest dilemma over Taylor’s armistice, however, lay not with the opinions of the British or the French, and certainly not with that of the Mexicans. It was the American people whom he feared most. The problem had its roots in democracy and a politician’s need to be elected by the people before being allowed to serve. Americans had historically been an easily malleable, highly illiterate, and ill-informed mass of voters. But that was changing, and quickly. Technological advances in papermaking and the invention of the steam printing press (which printed well over 1,000 pages per hour, as opposed to the 240 of the Gutenberg-style manual press) had made newspapers affordable and more easily mass-produced beginning in the 1830s. Once only for the well-off, papers sprang up all around the country; New York alone had eleven dailies, a quick source of news and opinion available for as little as a penny a day.

  This in turn helped catalyze an unexpected rise in literacy among the working class. Most communities had a school of sorts, the most popular being the one-room schoolhouse, where reading was among the educational fundamentals, so the ability to read was already widespread. But the growth of the daily newspaper offered Americans the chance to apply that skill as part of their daily routine and as a means to form their opinion on a broad variety of issues, including politics. That opinion would translate into a yea or nay vote come election time.

  In between elections, they voted with their wallets. Competition for re
adership between newspapers became cutthroat. The paper that published a breaking story first could outsell the others, a fact that became readily visible during the war. The New York Herald, in conjunction with the New Orleans Crescent City, the Baltimore Sun, and the Philadelphia Public Ledger, established a network to “express” stories from the battlefield. Traveling via pony express, ship, and steamboat, couriers raced information to the papers. Telegraph service formed the final leg of the network. The system was quicker (by days) than the U.S. Postal Service — so much so that the outraged and embarrassed U.S. postmaster general eventually arrested the Crescent City’s owner on charges of moving mail by private means.

  So even as military couriers sped Taylor’s dispatches to the White House, news of the Monterrey victory was creeping into newspapers across the country well before letters from the front arrived home. “Glorious News from the Army!” read an October 13 headline in the Richmond (VA) Enquirer. “Capitulation of Monterey after Three Days of Fighting.” The New York Herald, that city’s most influential and widely read newspaper, seized on the populist idea that the real heroes were the volunteers. “When it is considered that the men who behaved themselves so gallantly on these occasions, were drawn promiscuously from all parts of our extended country — were strangers to each other till the time when they met at the rendezvous to take up arms in defence of their country’s honour, and never had heard the roar of cannon or the rattling of firearms except on the 4th of July, we have great reason to be proud of their prowess in time of danger, and the reliance we can place in our countrymen’s courage and ability to defend to the death the free institutions that their patriotic sires bequeathed to them, whenever endangered by foreign or domestic enemies.”