The Training Ground Page 4

  Once again, Sam Grant slipped his gold West Point ring from his finger and asked his beloved Julia to wear it, definitely proposing marriage. She said yes — under one condition: “I begged him not to say anything to Papa about our engagement, and he consented to this simply on account of shyness. When he asked me to wear his class ring I took it and wore it.” She, in turn, gave Grant a lock of her hair.

  ON JUNE 8, 1844, the matter of annexing Texas was put to a vote.

  American distrust for Great Britain had diminished little since the Revolutionary War and had only been reinforced by the War of 1812. It was a time when the sun truly never set on the British Empire, and there was widespread fear that Britain would seek to establish a new toehold on the North American continent by bringing Texas into the fold. Slavery in Texas would then be banned, as it had recently been in Britain’s other possessions. Many southerners feared that escaped slaves would then flood into Texas, seeking sanctuary. They also hoped to increase their power by adding Texas to the Union as a slave state.

  Tyler had been extremely vocal in defending slavery, and his secretary of state, John C. Calhoun, had even written to the British government about the virtues of this practice. As a result, many senators who had no love for Britain but even less for slavery now lined up against Tyler’s resolution. When it came time to vote, the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly decided against the measure, thirty-five to sixteen. Texas would remain an independent nation.

  But the battle was far from over. A cornerstone of the decade-old Whig Party was their staunch opposition to a strong executive branch. Yet rather than let the Texas matter die, Tyler decided to force it through Congress as a joint resolution (needing approval in the House and Senate, but by a simple majority rather than two-thirds). This last-ditch effort to push his agenda sealed his fate within his party. The Whigs turned their back on the unrepentant Tyler when it came to selecting their 1844 candidate, making him the first incumbent president in U.S. history not to win his party’s nomination. With just a few short months left in his term, Tyler rededicated himself to American expansion via the joint congressional resolution.

  For years, American political writers had argued that the United States had a God-given right to expansion, because it was more virtuous than other nations. John L. O’Sullivan, a zealous Democrat, had argued that America was “the Great Nation of Futurity” in a November 1839 issue of the United States Democratic Review. “Our annals describe no scenes of horrid carnage, where men were led on by hundreds of thousands to slay one another,” wrote O’Sullivan. He repeated two words over and over in that essay: manifest and destiny, both in reference to America’s inherent moral authority to expand its boundaries. He would later combine the words into a single sweeping pronouncement. The United States, O’Sullivan would write, had a “manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.”

  That vainglorious notion was a subcurrent to American life during the 1840s, as evidenced by the ever-growing number of pioneers flooding to settle lands west of the Mississippi. To Tyler and an increasing number of politicians, the next logical step was to wrestle Oregon away from Britain, snatch California and New Mexico away from Mexico, and add Texas to the Union. That last item on the list, thanks to Texas’s pro-American leanings, was the most logical place to start.

  Annexation became a vital part of each candidate’s campaign platform in the 1844 presidential election. When Martin Van Buren, a northern Democrat who had been leading in the polls and was the favorite to win his party’s nomination, went on record as opposing annexation, the southern voting bloc threw their weight behind Tennessee firebrand James K. Polk, who sought a “reannexation” of Texas, as if the territory had once been American. The dark horse Polk prevailed for the Democratic nomination and would face Whig Henry Clay, who wanted Texas to join the Union, but only if it could be accomplished without war.

  Polk was a lawyer and a slave owner whose gift for oratory had earned him the nickname Napoleon of the Stump. He was dogmatic in his Jacksonian belief in American expansion — so much so that he had earned a second sobriquet: Young Hickory. A small, thin man with pursed lips, steel gray eyes, and graying black hair that he combed straight back from his high forehead, Polk had a peevish and self-important air and the habit of affecting a folksy twang when speaking before constituents. His childhood had been marred by a surgery that left him impotent (a hole was drilled through his prostate — without the use of anesthetic — to alleviate painful urinary stones). As an adult, Polk was known for his zealous pursuit of personal ambition and ideals, as well as for an enormous personal dislike for the Whigs. Polk would be forty-nine on November 2, which would make him the youngest president in history if elected.

  By cleverly twining the possible annexation of Oregon with the Texas issue, Polk succeeded in winning not only the southern states, but also portions of the industrial North. Still, it was clear that Polk, with his eagerness to wage war, did not enjoy the backing of the entire nation. He won by the narrowest of margins: Polk and Clay each received 48.1 percent of the popular vote. The difference was Polk’s 170 electoral votes to Clay’s 105.

  On February 28, 1845, just days before leaving office (until the passage of the Twentieth Amendment in 1933, the inaugural date was fixed by the Constitution as March 4), Tyler finally pushed his joint resolution for Texas annexation through Congress. On March 1, he signed it. In one of his last acts as president, Tyler then instructed the U.S. chargé d’affaires to Texas, Andrew Jackson Donelson — an 1820 graduate of West Point and a nephew of the former president — to relay the terms of statehood to Texas president Anson Jones. If Texas voted to join the Union, it would become a single slave state, which could then divide itself into as many as four additional states if it chose. In addition, Texas would enjoy all the benefits that came with being a state, among them political stability, a sound currency, military protection from Mexican and Indian forces, a postal service, and congressional representation. The deadline for acceptance was set at January 1, 1846. After that, the deal was off the table.

  Polk made Texas the centerpiece of his inaugural address. As he spoke, thunderstorms raged. Gazing out from the Capitol’s east portico onto a sea of umbrellas, Polk could see spectators standing ankle deep in freezing mud. “Foreign powers should therefore look on the annexation of Texas to the United States not as the conquest of a nation, but as the peaceful acquisition of a territory once her own,” he gravely intoned.

  Mexican officials read between the lines of Polk’s speech and immediately broke off diplomatic relations with the United States. Using the only bit of political leverage they possessed, they belatedly offered to formally recognize Texas as an independent nation. They were acting at the behest of Britain and France, which favored a buffer nation between Mexico and the United States. The two European nations feared that if American expansion was left unchecked, the United States might someday take on dimensions even larger than New Spain, covering the entire North American continent — including Canada. As long as Texas held fast, remaining a nation unto itself, Britain and France were confident that they could control the size and shape of the budding American empire.

  Of the two countries, Britain fretted most about America’s growth. Years before, the two nations had signed the Anglo-American Convention of 1818, establishing peaceful cohabitation of Oregon. But rampant American settlement of that territory was putting a strain on the joint ownership agreement. And with Polk’s election, there was a growing national clamor in the United States to annex Oregon and remove the British altogether — by force, if necessary.

  Britain and France formally requested that Texas take at least ninety days to study all sides of the annexation issue. Texas president Jones, who reveled in being at the center of all the international wheeling and dealing, agreed. He saw the two European powers as allies — Brit
ain in particular — to the point that he became blinded to the reality that their interests were entirely self-motivated. “Texas was then a rich jewel lying derelict by the way. She was without a friend who thought her of sufficient consequence to take her by her hand and assist her in her accumulated misfortunes,” Jones later wrote. “Guided by her interests and a far-reaching policy, England had become such a friend.”

  For his part, Mexican president General José Joaquín de Herrera feared war with America. Land speculators had flooded into Texas during 1844, bringing the non-Mexican population up to one hundred thousand — a formidable number of people allied against his nation. But for the sake of appearance, Herrera could not bend to American pressure. Polk didn’t help matters any by opening diplomatic talks with a proclamation that the only issue not open to discussion was Texas.

  As tensions mounted between the United States and Mexico, international opinion came down solidly on Mexico’s side. The Times of London wrote of “the enormous wrong done to Mexico by this aggression of the United States, and the probable consequences of that wrong to British interests.” On May 17, in Mexico City, the Mexican government initialed a British-brokered treaty recognizing Texas as an independent republic. President Jones began playing both sides against the middle, using the diplomats of Britain and France as power brokers, seeking to gain the best deal for his nation as he decided whether independence or annexation was the wiser move. But on June 4, Herrera reneged. He once again stated that Texas rightfully belonged to Mexico. He ordered his army to assemble for war.

  Polk did the same. He commanded Brevet Brigadier General Zachary Taylor to march the American army on Texas.

  TAYLOR, A SHORT and fiery second cousin to former president James Madison, went by the nickname Old Rough and Ready. “In his manners and in his appearance, he is one of the commonest people in the country,” marveled one of Taylor’s fellow generals. “Perfectly temperate in his habits, perfectly plain in his dress, entirely unassuming in his manners, he appears to be an old gentleman in fine health, whose thoughts are not turned upon his personal appearance, and who has no point about him to attract particular attention. In his intercourse with men, he is free, frank, and manly; he plays off none of the airs of great men I have met, and the more closely his character is examined the greater beauties it discloses.”

  Taylor had been raised on the Kentucky frontier and had little formal education, and he possessed such disdain for military decorum that he almost never dressed in uniform. Yet he was an officer through and through. The sixty-year-old Taylor had been thoroughly schooled in the art of warfare during a military career spanning almost four decades and a vast assortment of armed conflicts that ran the gamut from the somewhat conventional battles of the War of 1812 to the guerrilla engagements of the Seminole Wars. War with Mexico, with its European-trained generals and vast spaces, would likely mean a little of both. Old Rough and Ready was the ideal man for the job.

  DESPITE ITS TICKS and mosquitoes, Camp Salubrity (as the bivouac near Fort Jesup was known) turned out to be a relatively pleasant posting. Grant even gave the Louisiana woods credit for improving his health. “I kept a horse and rode, and stayed out of doors most of the time by day, and entirely recovered from the cough which I had carried from West Point, and from all indications of consumption,” he wrote.

  The commander was Colonel Josiah H. Vose, an older man unconcerned with military rituals such as daily drill, which meant that the junior officers had a great deal of free time on their hands — perhaps too much. Pete Longstreet and Sam Grant made regular trips into Natchitoches, where they played a rugged new game called football, drank, and wagered on horse races. After the discipline of West Point, and with the ongoing uncertainty of impending war, the officers of Camp Salubrity were more than happy to live it up.

  “There were five days of races at Natchitoches. I was there every day and bet low, generally lost,” Grant wrote his friend Robert Hazlitt on December 1.

  The Army of Observation had little to do but await further orders. As the blazing summer turned to a most bearable fall and winter, those orders were slow in coming, so the great pines were felled and cabins were built, giving the camp a more permanent air.

  UPON RECEIVING POLK’S directive, Taylor promptly ordered an elite mounted outfit known as the Second Dragoons to ride overland from Fort Jesup to Corpus Christi, a flyblown smuggler’s haven on the Gulf of Mexico. It took them thirty-two days to travel the 501 miles, but they arrived in the coastal fishing outpost in good shape, ready to take on the Mexican army, which was arrayed 200 miles south, along the Rio Grande. In a best-case scenario, the Mexicans would march north and attack first, instigating war and invading America in one fell swoop, making the United States a victim rather than a belligerent. If that were the case, antiwar protesters would be silenced and international opinion would likely favor America. Taylor would have no choice but to fight back, and Polk’s ambitious national expansion would begin.

  As the dragoons made camp, Grant and the rest of Taylor’s force traveled to the war by steamship. Departing Natchitoches, Louisiana, on July 2, 1845, they journeyed down the Red River, and then the Mississippi, to New Orleans, which was in the throes of a yellow fever epidemic. While they were there, Texas accepted the United States’ statehood offer. On December 29, 1845, as Grant shivered through a wet Texas winter on the beach in Corpus Christi, Texas became the twenty-ninth state, now within — and protected by — a much more powerful republic. Anson Jones, by necessity, was turned out of office. Thirteen years later, the man who would go down in history as the last president of Texas would die a lonely suicide in a Houston hotel room.

  Mexico responded to Texas’s statehood by ousting President Herrera. On January 4, 1846, General Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga took office in his place and immediately announced that Mexico considered its borders essentially the same as had existed before Texas won its independence. From a diplomatic standpoint, war now seemed inevitable.

  Meanwhile, Taylor’s army drilled in the rain on the beach in Corpus Christi. Their presence had not thus far incited a Mexican attack. “We were sent to provoke a fight,” Grant noted with an ironic shrug, as if he were an impartial observer instead of a would-be combatant, “but it was essential that Mexico commence it.”

  Mexico wasn’t taking the bait. Their army had more horses, more men, and more guns and was entrenched in well-fortified defensive positions on the southern side of the Rio Grande. There was no need to invade America and invite international judgment by waging war on Polk’s terms.

  Early in 1846, Polk ordered Taylor to give the Mexicans something to shoot at.

  In the second week of March, the young officers of West Point gathered to lead a march on Mexico. Some had fought in battles against the Seminoles, violent and bloody affairs involving great loss of life on both sides; yet in their minds, this conflict marked the first time they were actually marching off to wage war on another nation. Never did it enter the officers’ minds that the battlefields of Mexico might teach them the tactics and lessons they would later use to wage war on one another.

  I

  LINE IN THE SAND

  The men engaged in the Mexican War were brave, and the officers of the regular army, from highest to lowest, were educated in their profession. A more efficient army for its number and armament I do not believe ever fought a battle.

  — ULYSSES S. GRANT, MEMOIRS

  ONE

  Corpus Christi

  MARCH 11, 1846

  It was just after dawn when the soldiers of the U.S. Army’s Fourth Infantry assembled, rank and file, for the long march to war. Amid a great shuffling of black leather brogans and last-minute adjustments of pistols, muskets, sabers, cartridge belts, bedrolls, india-rubber canteens, and the M1839 forage caps that would keep the South Texas sun off their heads, the nearly five hundred men organized themselves by their separate companies.

  A soft wind blew in off the Gulf of Mexico as the men awaited the o
rder to move out. It was a subtle reminder that spring had arrived after a winter they would long remember for torrential rain, flimsy white tents, and rampant dysentery. Given a choice between spending one more day in Corpus Christi and charging straight into a Mexican artillery battery, most of the Fourth would have chosen the cannon every time.

  With the exception of the regimental band, which wore bright red, every man’s uniform was blue, America’s official national color. The enlisted were mostly immigrants, German, Scottish, and Irish boys who joined the army for the seven dollars a month and the promise of regular employment. The officers were almost all West Point trained and the sons or grandsons of men who fought in the wars of 1776 and 1812. Some were old enough to have fought the British themselves. Among the West Point graduates was Sam Grant, who just wanted out of Corpus Christi. He had camped on the beach for seven long months, and what had begun as a military idyll had become a bivouac hell.

  “I do not believe there is a healthier spot in the world,” he had blithely written to Julia shortly after he’d first arrived. Grant loved the outdoor lifestyle. He had filled his off-duty hours hunting, riding horseback, and losing at cards and had even been cast as the female lead in a production of The Moor of Venice, which was being staged at the new eight-hundred-seat theater the officers had built. (His theatrical career ended before it began: Lieutenant Theodoric Porter, the male lead, objected to performing opposite a man in drag, and an actress was imported from New Orleans for the actual performance.) Those diversions, combined with General Zachary Taylor’s penchant for casual leadership, meant that Corpus Christi was good duty when the weather was nice.