The Training Ground Read online

  Taylor was at the center of all that adulation. His seeming battlefield invincibility was rapidly making him a folk hero and thus a political threat. The Whig Party had been revitalized and was in the process of regaining control of the House and the Senate in the elections of 1846. Looking ahead two short years, Polk was fearful that Taylor might run for the presidency — and, with his homespun ways and wartime heroics, might win.

  Polk acted quickly. On October 13, he directed Secretary of War William L. Marcy to annul the armistice. Then Polk removed Taylor from command of the Tampico expedition. Leading the American army in his place would be Robert Patterson, an Irish-born Democrat. Patterson was a volunteer who owed his rank to an influential civilian job in banking and his limited service — in the Quartermaster Department — during the War of 1812. Patterson was pompous and soft. At his headquarters in Camargo there was a standing order that “no wagons or horsemen should pass the street facing his palace door” owing to the fine clouds of caliche dust that they soon sent wafting inside. Thanks to Patterson’s unlikable personality, it was an edict that some regulars took great pride in ignoring. “Colonel May and Lieutenant Britton, affecting not to understand the order or to forget it, gallop past the palace door a dozen times a day with lightning speed, and raising a devil of a dust, lost in the clouds of their own creation before the sentinel has time to call a halt,” wrote one eyewitness.

  Patterson’s lack of command experience (and his unswerving Democratic allegiance) had prompted Taylor to leave him behind in Camargo with the volunteers rather than allow him to make the march to Monterrey. Patterson and his fellow Democratic volunteers had made their anger known to Washington, and now Polk was letting them know he had heard, loud and clear.

  “Well may we be grateful that we are at war with Mexico,” wrote a cynical Meade when the news reached Monterrey. “Were it any other power, our gross follies would have been punished severely before now.”

  An outraged Taylor chose to ignore the follies altogether. After informing the Mexican army by courier that the armistice was no more, he and Worth led a force of a thousand men some fifty-five miles southwest into Saltillo, which he occupied on November 16. The town had once been a major Mexican city, a place where people thronged annually for a great open-air fiesta featuring bullfights and cockfights and gambling on cards. The narrow streets were paved with small stones made smooth by mules’ traveling over them, and fountains still lined the plazas, but the city had fallen on hard times. “Saltillo seems to be rather on the decline,” wrote one Indiana volunteer. “Many of the buildings look very old and are going to ruin.”

  General Wool, whose army had camped in nearby Monclova to wait out the armistice, had abandoned their march to Chihuahua after having received word that the Mexican army was no longer there. Wool’s men now stood ready to join the rest of the American forces. They would position themselves in Parras, just west of Saltillo, and guard Taylor’s right flank. Together they would hold a line that kept the Mexican army bottled up in the southern half of the country. A three-hundred-mile expanse of uncrossable desert lay between the American forces and the combined armies of Santa Anna and Ampudia, in San Luis Potosí. Now the American occupation force was split, with most of the army in Monterrey and the smaller advance contingent in Saltillo. “I presume that General Taylor’s idea is to hold this country,” wrote Meade, “and keep his troops ready to carry out the orders of the Government.”

  The orders of the government, however, were for Taylor to remain in Monterrey. Those orders had arrived by courier on November 12. Not only had Taylor ignored them, but he now set in motion a plan to broaden the sweep of his command.

  Even before occupying Saltillo on November 16, he had pronounced himself “decidedly opposed to carrying the war beyond Saltillo in this direction,” effectively indicating that the quaint old village was the southernmost point his army would occupy. Taylor’s ambition was to form a defensive line that stretched eastward from Saltillo to the town of Victoria and then on to Tampico, on the Gulf of Mexico. On December 13, Taylor rode toward Victoria to set that plan in action. With him was a division of regulars commanded by General David E. Twiggs and a brigade under General John A. Quitman. Patterson and the Second Division of Volunteers were to march from Camargo to join up with him in Victoria and then proceed to Tampico, which the U.S. Navy had already taken without a fight.

  But soon after the march began, Taylor received a message from General Worth in Saltillo, relaying rumors of a possible Mexican attack on the town. On December 17, he turned and charged back with Twiggs’s force, ordering Quitman to continue his march to Victoria. On December 23 he abruptly reversed his course upon hearing that Wool’s army had ridden to Worth’s aid, to repel what was likely a false alarm. Once again, Taylor rode with Twiggs’s division to Victoria.

  Back on the Rio Grande, in the disease-ridden outpost of Camargo, a visitor had arrived, searching for the elusive Taylor.

  This visitor was none other than General Winfield Scott. He had come not only to rein in Taylor but to steal his beloved army.

  IV

  SCOTT’S WAR

  After the fall of Monterey, [Taylor’s] third battle and third complete victory, the Whig papers at home began to speak of him as the candidate of their party for the Presidency. Something had to be done to neutralize his growing popularity. He could not be relieved from duty in the field where all his battles had been victories. The design would have been too transparent. It was finally decided to send General Scott to Mexico in chief command, and to authorize him to carry out his own original plan: that is, capture Veracruz and march on the capital of the country.

  — ULYSSES S. GRANT, MEMOIRS

  TWENTY-SIX

  Transfers

  JANUARY 16, 1847

  Of all days, it was Christmas when General Winfield Scott wrote to General Zachary Taylor, informing him that he needed additional men for his Veracruz invasion. But December 25 was just another day in wartime, and America’s top general was not in a giving mood.

  Scott had hoped to soften the blow by making the demand in person. He had cruised all the way upriver to Camargo by steamboat before learning that Taylor was no longer in Monterrey, or even Saltillo, but now stubbornly riding toward Victoria.

  Someone had to establish order, and Scott was in a hurry to take charge of that task. “My dear general,” he wrote Taylor. “I shall be obliged to take from you most of the gallant officers and men (regulars and volunteers) whom you have so long and so nobly commanded. I am afraid that I shall, by imperious necessity — the approach of the yellow fever on the gulf coast — reduce you for a time, to stand on the defensive. This will be infinitely painful to you, and for that reason, distressing to me. But I rely on your patriotism to submit to the temporary sacrifice with cheerfulness.”

  Taylor, in other words, had fought his last battle.

  Divisions of regulars commanded by Worth and Twiggs, and the volunteers under Quitman and Patterson, were immediately transferred to Scott. Taylor was left with just 500 regulars and 4,500 volunteers. Santa Anna had built up a formidable army — estimates now placed Mexican troop strength somewhere between 15,000 and 25,000 men — south across the desert in San Luis Potosí. And though the terrain separating them from the Americans was considered too arid for such a large army to march across, Santa Anna’s feints toward Taylor had become so common that U.S. troops had given a name to their frantic deployment into fighting positions: stampedes.

  The truth was far less romantic: if Santa Anna actually managed to force-march his conscripts north from San Luis Potosí, Taylor’s army would be slaughtered. Scott tried to soften whatever fears his old comrade might have by dangling the prospect of reinforcements sometime very soon.

  “You will be aware of the recent call for nine regiments of new volunteers, including one of Texas horse. The president may soon ask for more; and we are not without hope that Congress may add ten or twelve to the regular establishment. These,
by the spring, say April, may, by the aid of large bounties, be in the field — should Mexico not earlier propose terms of accommodation; and, long before the spring (March), it is probable you will be again in force to resume offensive operations,” Scott concluded.

  This was unlikely. Both men knew it. Scott was also ordering him to abandon his defensive line across northern Mexico by leaving Saltillo and falling back into Monterrey. There he would be reduced to fending off desperadoes that had begun to prey on American supply wagons. “No man can better afford to do so. Recent victories place you on that high eminence; and I even flatter myself that any benefit that may result to me, personally, from the unequal division of troops alluded to, will lessen the pain of your consequent inactivity,” Scott wrote, concluding his demand as diplomatically as possible.

  Word of the coming Veracruz invasion was already making its way into U.S. newspapers. Scott believed that Santa Anna would soon be too consumed with the rumors to bother Taylor much longer. Once Scott’s army began thrusting inland toward Mexico City, Santa Anna would be forced on the defensive, without a man or a musket to spare for any other theater of operations.

  Taylor would now pass the rest of the war as he had spent so many months of his career: far from his family, occupying a frontier garrison, commanding men, and fending off a foreign enemy as best he could until it was time to go home. His officers in the Monterrey region had been the army’s best and brightest. Some had already made their mark, others were just beginning to show their potential, and still more were true longshots to command a fighting force. Yet these officers rubbed shoulders on a daily basis, subconsciously studying Taylor’s style of command and getting to know one another’s strengths and weaknesses, quirks and talents, emotions and fears — just as they had at West Point: Ulysses S. Grant, Thomas Jackson, George Meade, George McClellan, Napoleon Dana, Braxton Bragg, John Pope, Abner Doubleday, Daniel Harvey Hill, Pete Longstreet, Joseph Mansfield, William Hardee, and many more. Now all of them were gone, transferred to the command of either Patterson or Scott. Meade, whose respect for Old Rough and Ready had blossomed into adulation, was the only topographical engineer to be ripped from Taylor’s command. One of the few Monterrey veterans who remained with Taylor was Jeff Davis, freshly back from Davis Bend and Varina, ready and eager to once again take charge of the Mississippi Rifles.

  “It is with deep sensibility that the commanding general finds himself separated from his troops,” Taylor told them all, using the third person as he addressed the departing ranks. “To those corps, regular and volunteer, who have shared with him the active services of the field, he feels the attachment due to such associations, while to those who are making their first campaign, he must express his regret that he cannot participate with them in its eventful scenes. To all, both officers and men, he extends his heartfelt wishes for their continued success and happiness, confident that their achievements on another theater will redound to the credit of their country and its arms.”

  General Zachary Taylor had no idea how profoundly those hopes would soon be realized.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Artillery Officer

  JANUARY 7, 1847

  Among those singled out by Taylor as “making their first campaign” was the Virginian Thomas Jackson, an artillery officer. Jackson had a lean physique that made his body appear all sharp angles, from the prow of his long nose and sharply sloping forehead to the cant of his elbows. The only feature that appeared soft was his light blue eyes, which seemed perpetually rimmed with fatigue. Lacking a middle name at birth, Jackson had taken it upon himself to adopt the initial J. — some thought it stood for Jonathan, after his father — and took to signing his name T. J.

  He had been born in a brick house on the main street of Clarksburg, Virginia, on the night of January 20, 1824. The doctor swore he was born before midnight, but no one was paying close attention to the time, so his actual birth date was never established. Jonathan, a lawyer and Freemason with a history of money problems, died of typhoid fever when young Tom was two. Julia Jackson raised her three children with the help of a dozen slaves and her rather large extended family, before remarrying four years later. When Julia died during childbirth in 1831, Tom was sent to live with his uncle Cummins, at a place called Jackson’s Mill, near Weston.

  Julia Jackson had been a devout Presbyterian, but Cummins was cut from a different cloth. Tom grew up in a household without religion, enjoying a backwoods lifestyle centered around outdoor adventure, with minimal restriction. He could drive a wagon and chop wood, among other manual hallmarks of rural living. There were “none to give mandates; none for me to obey but as I chose; surrounded by my playmates and relatives, all eager to promote my happiness.” Indeed, when a twelve-year-old Tom asked permission to float a raft eighty miles down the Ohio River, Cummins agreed to let him go.

  At seventeen, however, Tom heard a Presbyterian minister deliver a sermon one Sunday morning. Cummins had sent his nephew off to the town of Parkersburg to pick up a part for the mill. While there, Tom happened to hear the minister preaching. His sermon was so powerful that Tom returned for the evening service so that he might hear the passionate words of worship once more. The date was August 1, 1841. A seed of religious fervor had been planted in Jackson that would flourish just a few years later — in Mexico.

  Eight months afterward, Jackson received an appointment to West Point. He had a minimal education, thanks to sporadic school attendance and a lack of good schools near Jackson’s Mill, but he possessed a solid work ethic and a deep desire to succeed. It helped that the congressman making the appointment, Samuel L. Hays, was the father of Jackson’s friend and occasional schoolmate Peregrine. “Jackson,” remembered his classmate Dabney Maury of their first day at the military academy, “was awkward and uncultured in manner and appearance, but there was an earnest purpose in his aspect which impressed all who saw him. Birket Fry, A.P. Hill and I were standing together when he entered the South Barracks under charge of a cadet sergeant. He was clad in gray homespun, and wore a coarse felt hat, such as wagoners or constables — as he had been — usually wore, and bore a pair of weather-stained saddlebags across his shoulders. There was about him so sturdy an expression of purpose that I remarked, ‘that fellow looks as if he has come here to stay.’ ”

  Jackson, however, nearly flunked out his plebe year. His lack of education was clearly an impediment to a military career, forcing him to apply himself to his studies with a dedication that bordered on the fanatic. “His barracks room was small and bare and cold. Every night just before taps he would pile his grate high with anthracite coal, so that by the time the lamps were out, a ruddy glow came from his fire, by which, prone on the bare floor, he would ‘bone’ his lesson for the next day, until it was literally burned into his brain,” wrote Maury. “His steady purpose to succeed and to do his duty soon won the respect of all, and his teachers and comrades alike honored his efforts.” Jackson began compiling a list of aphorisms to keep himself in line: “You may be whatever you want to be”; “Disregard public opinion when it comes to your duty”; “Sacrifice your life rather than your word”; and “Perform without fail what you resolve,” among others. Jackson went on to graduate seventeenth of fifty-nine cadets in the class of 1846. His classmates agreed he would have finished first if there had been one more year.

  It was not all a life of the mind along the Hudson. There were rumors, never proved, that Jackson fathered a child out of wedlock while at West Point. Most curiously, after years of hardening his body through work and self-denial, Jackson had become something of a hypochondriac, complaining of phantom illnesses and raising his left arm high in the air to let blood drain back into his body — this because he thought his left arm was larger than his right, throwing his circulation out of balance. Raising it, he argued, was a means of restoring equilibrium. In time, Jackson would also begin to eat standing up whenever possible, with the aim of “straightening the intestinal tract” and enhancing digestion.


  Jackson had graduated from West Point on July 1 and gone straight to Brown’s Hotel in New York with some classmates to celebrate (getting drunk for one of the few, if not the only, times in his life); by mid-August he was making the journey down the Ohio and the Mississippi and then on to the war via the James L. Day. “I belong to a company of light artillery, which is frequently called flying artillery,” he wrote to his uncle James while at sea. “In an action, if all the officers of the company should be well, I will have to carry dispatches, unfortunately being too low to have a command.”

  Jackson, along with twenty-seven men and eighty-four horses, disembarked at Port Isabel on September 25. He was hungry to see action. “I am in hopes of starting up the Rio Grande tomorrow and on reaching General Taylor as soon as possible,” Jackson wrote his sister Laura. But Monterrey had fallen by then, and Jackson’s unit — Company K, First Artillery — lingered in Port Isabel for two weeks. By Halloween, he had arrived in Camargo by steamer. Jackson openly envied the veterans who had already seen the elephant, but during the long march to Monterrey he developed a growing fascination with the Mexican countryside. “The portion of Northern Mexico which has fallen under my observation is mostly a vast barren waste, cities excepted,” he wrote to his sister. “There are but two seasons in Mexico: wet and dry. In consequence there is but little vegetation.”

  Monterrey, however, was pleasant. Jackson was quartered inside the city with Worth’s division, in a home with an orange orchard and a swimming pool in its large backyard. “It is the most beautiful city I have seen in this country,” he told Laura. He was awed, in particular, by the ornate churches, the devout religiosity of the local people, and even the fine robes worn during Mass by the Catholic priests.

  Jackson had been in Mexico a little over two months when Company K was transferred to Scott’s command. Now he and the rest of his unit hitched their horses and mules to the caissons of ammunition and the limbers of the six-pounders to retrace their steps back to Camargo and then the Texas coast. There, he would board yet another ship, on his way, finally, to make his first campaign.