The Man Who Saved the Union (5 page)

Grant’s test came soon. Taylor remained at Port Isabel long enough to load a train of wagons, then countermarched toward the Rio Grande. Six miles from the now besieged garrison a stand of timber lined a former channel of the river. Palo Alto, the place was called, for the tall trees. The American column approached the stand and discovered a larger number of Mexicans arrayed for battle. “
Our wagons were immediately parked, and Gen. Taylor marched us up towards them,” Grant wrote Julia. “When we got in range of their artillery they let us have it right and left.” The first cannonballs fired at the Americans did no damage. “They would strike the ground long before they reached our line, and ricocheted through the tall grass so slowly that the men would see them and open ranks and let them pass,” Grant wrote. As the Americans drew nearer to the Mexicans, however, the firing grew more dangerous. Taylor ordered the American artillery to return fire. “Every moment we could see the charges from our pieces cut a way through their ranks making a perfect road,” Grant recorded. “But they would close up the interval without showing signs of retreat.”

The Mexican artillery and small arms fire eventually took a toll. “Although the balls were whizzing thick and fast about me, I did not feel a sensation of fear until nearly the close of firing,” Grant wrote Julia. “A ball struck close by me, killing one man instantly. It knocked Capt. Page’s under jaw entirely off and broke in the roof of his mouth, and knocked Lt. Wallen and one sergeant down besides.”

Dusk brought the battle to an end, with the Mexicans falling back. The Americans counted their modest casualties—nine dead, fewer than fifty wounded—and estimated the greater losses on the Mexican side. Grant and the others congratulated themselves on surviving their first action and prepared to resume the fight the next day.

In the morning, though, they discovered that the Mexicans had abandoned the field. Grant and the others for the first time witnessed the aftermath of battle. “
It was a terrible sight to go over the ground…,” Grant wrote Julia, “and see the amount of life that had been destroyed. The ground was literally strewed with the bodies of dead men and horses.”

Taylor sent scouts to find the Mexican army. Thick chaparral blocked the way, and the scouts advanced with care. They spotted the Mexicans beyond a series of ponds at Resaca de la Palma. The Mexican army from the day before had been augmented by troops from Matamoros, and the
entire force had drawn up a defensive line behind the ponds. The American scouts engaged the Mexicans from a distance and sent word back to the main force.

Taylor ordered his army forward. The captain of Grant’s company had gone with the scouts, leaving Grant in command of the unit—“
an honor and responsibility I thought very great,” he wrote. As the army made contact with the Mexicans, Grant’s company was on the American right, and he led his company through the bushes wherever an opening appeared. “At last I got pretty close up without knowing it,” he explained. “The balls commenced to whistle very thick overhead, cutting the limbs of the chaparral right and left. We could not see the enemy, so I ordered my men to lie down, an order that did not have to be enforced.” Gradually Grant realized that the Mexicans were firing not at his unit but at some troops behind them, and he managed to extricate his men to better ground.

Meanwhile the American left had forced the Mexicans back, and the entire Mexican line began to crumple. “Our men continued to advance and did advance in spite of their shots, to the very mouths of the cannon, and killed and took prisoner the Mexicans with them, and drove off with their own teams, taking cannon ammunition and all to our side,” Grant told Julia. “In this way nine of their big guns were taken and their own ammunition turned against them.”

Grant himself led a charge between two ponds and was thrilled to capture a Mexican colonel and several enlisted men, who offered little resistance. He proudly sent the prisoners, under guard, to the American rear. But as he was doing so an American private, helping a wounded American officer, emerged from a thicket ahead of Grant’s position, and Grant realized that his charge had been over ground already taken by the Americans. “My exploit was equal to that of the soldier who boasted that he had cut off the leg of one of the enemy,” he recalled wryly. “When asked why he did not cut off the head, he replied: ‘Someone had done that before.’ ”

The battle became a rout as the Mexicans ran short of ammunition. “The Mexicans fought very hard for an hour and a half,” Grant said, “but seeing their means of war fall from their hands in spite of all their efforts they finally commenced to retreat helter skelter. A great many retreated to the banks of the Rio Grande and without looking for means of crossing plunged into this water.… No doubt many of them were drowned.”

The Mexican losses were even larger than the day before. “After the
battle the woods was strewed with the dead,” Grant wrote Julia. “Wagons have been engaged drawing the bodies to bury. How many wagon loads have already come in, and how many are still left, would be hard to guess. I saw three large wagon loads at one time myself.” Grant mentally added in the prisoners taken and the weapons captured and concluded, “The victory for us has been a very great one.”

And it was a satisfying victory for Grant personally. “There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction,” he told Julia. “But I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.”

4

I
N THE HALF-DAY LULL BETWEEN THE BATTLES OF
P
ALO
A
LTO AND
Resaca de la Palma, while Grant was counting the carnage of his first action at arms,
James Polk convened his cabinet in Washington. The president didn’t know that one pitched battle had occurred and another was imminent, for dispatches from the Texas frontier required a week or more to reach the East. Polk didn’t even know of the earlier incident in which Taylor’s scouting party had been overwhelmed by the much larger
Mexican force, with the loss of several American lives.

Yet Polk wanted to declare war anyway. The Mexican government continued to refuse to relinquish
California, and the more often the Mexicans refused, the more determined Polk became to have it. In his mind and to his cabinet he escalated some minor commercial disputes into a justification for war. The cabinet agreed. A strong majority endorsed the president’s decision to ask Congress for a war declaration.

The president sent the cabinet members home and pondered the wording of his request. He would explain how Mexico’s sins against the business interests of American citizens had insulted American honor and how the American government was left with no choice but to defend that honor. He knew his case was weak, but it was the best he had and he was prepared to press it forward.

Then, on the evening of May 9, about the time the Mexicans were fleeing the field at Resaca de la Palma, Polk received word of the first skirmish. The welcome news made his task much easier. The opponents of expansion toward the southwest—
John Quincy Adams and the antislavery forces—might have blocked a war for territory but wouldn’t be able to stymie a war for redress of mortal injury to American soldiers.
“
After reiterated menaces,” Polk wrote in his recomposed message to Congress, “Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood on the American soil.”

Adams and his allies challenged the accuracy of Polk’s assertion. They noted that the soil described was disputed between the two countries. They demanded more information about the circumstances of the skirmish and accused the president of provoking the conflict for his own aggressive purposes.

Yet they lacked the votes to stem the rush to war. The House of Representatives approved the president’s war request within hours by a vote of 174 to 14. The Senate, wishing to preserve its image of deliberation, made Polk wait overnight before delivering an even stronger war vote of 40 to 2.

W
hen Grant was nine years old a French aristocrat named
Alexis de Tocqueville toured America to discover the meaning of democracy and perhaps, if democracy caught on, the direction of the world. When Grant was thirteen Tocqueville published the first volume of
Democracy in America
, which focused on the domestic institutions of the Americans; when Grant was eighteen Tocqueville released the second volume, which treated, among other subjects, the way American democracy waged war. The author contended that the Americans were a peaceful people, in part from the luck of their location. “
Fortune, which has showered so many peculiar favors on the inhabitants of the United States, has placed them in the midst of a wilderness where one can almost say that they have no neighbors,” Tocqueville wrote. “For them a few thousand soldiers are enough.”

No less important was the pacific influence of the social equality and opportunity that characterized American life, Tocqueville said. Under aristocratic regimes the army afforded a means of advancement denied to commoners in civilian life; in democratic systems ordinary men could get ahead in other fields, and for this reason and others, the culture of the warrior weakened. “The ever-increasing number of men of property devoted to peace, the growth of personal property which war so rapidly devours, mildness of mores, gentleness of heart, that inclination to pity which equality inspires, that cold and calculating spirit which leaves little room for sensitivity to the poetic and violent emotions of wartime—all these causes act together to damp down warlike fervor.” Tocqueville proposed
a general rule: “Among civilized nations, warlike passions become rarer and less active as social conditions get nearer to equality.” And a corollary: “Men living in times of democracy seldom choose a soldier’s life.”

Time would test Tocqueville’s predictions, but his characterization of America as a nation almost without an army was accurate enough during the first half of the nineteenth century. Whether because of the absence of threatening neighbors, because of the presence of preferable career alternatives, or because of a distrust of standing armies like those that supported despots elsewhere, Americans refused to fund more than the skeleton of an army between wars. Grant and his fellow West Point graduates were the backbone of that skeleton; for the muscle and flesh the nation looked to volunteers summoned once war was declared. The result was a predictable lag between the events that triggered a war and the onset of sustained fighting.

In the case of the war with Mexico, the enlistment, training and transport of volunteers filled most of the summer of 1846. Grant spent the time encamped at Matamoros, which Taylor’s force occupied shortly after the American victory at Resaca de la Palma. Grant found the Mexican town most curious. “
Matamoros contains probably about 7,000 inhabitants, a great majority of them of the lower order,” he wrote an Ohio friend. “It is not a place of as much business importance as our little towns of 1,000.” Mexican society was no less strange. “The people of Mexico are a very different race of people from ours. The better class are very proud and tyrannize over the lower and much more numerous class as much as a hard master does over his negroes, and they submit to it quite as humbly. The great majority are either pure or more than half blooded Indians, and show but little more signs of neatness or comfort in their miserable dwellings than the uncivilized Indian.” To Julia he described the typical Mexican home: “
Low with a flat or thatched roof, with a dirt or brick floor, with but little furniture and in many cases the fire in the middle of the house as if it was a wigwam.”

When the summer rains arrived the Mexican houses began to look better—at least better than the American tents. “
The whole country is low and flat,” Grant wrote Julia. “It has rained almost incessantly so that now the whole country is under water. Our tents are so bad that every time it rains we get a complete shower-bath.”

M
ore than comfort was at stake. “I am afraid, Julia, that Matamoros will be very sickly this summer,” Grant wrote. The threat of sickness disposed Taylor to move his troops to higher ground. But
James Polk weighed matters other than the health of the army. During the 1844 campaign Polk had quieted concerns about a potential dynasty of Tennessee Democrats—his supporters called him “Young Hickory”—by promising to serve but a single term if elected. As a result the 1848 race was wide open, and everyone knew that a victorious general would have an advantage over mere civilians.
Winfield Scott, the ranking army general, was the obvious person to lead an invasion of Mexico in the event an invasion proved necessary. But Scott was a Whig with badly disguised political ambitions, and Polk had no desire to make him a war hero and hand the Whigs the presidency.

Zachary Taylor was the obvious alternative to Scott. Taylor was also a Whig, but he appeared content to remain a soldier. The trouble with Taylor was that he was junior to Scott; in fact he was only a colonel by permanent rank, having been brevetted a brigadier general to lead the border operation. To put Taylor over Scott would cause problems in the army and among the army’s supporters in Congress.

Polk proceeded nonetheless to favor Taylor and undermine Scott. When Scott proposed a war plan based on a landing at Vera Cruz, on the central Mexican coast, followed by a thrust to Mexico City, the president countered with an assertion that the fighting should be confined to Taylor’s theater in northern Mexico, the part of the country the United States desired. Scott wanted a large army of volunteers; Polk, knowing that volunteers tended to vote for their generals, maneuvered to limit the enlistments. After the American victories at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, Polk arranged to have Taylor promoted to major general, equal in rank to Scott.

G
rant observed the Washington machinations from afar and dimly. As a cadet at West Point he had considered Scott the sum of what a soldier should be, but as a second lieutenant in Mexico he found himself drawn to Taylor. “
General Taylor never made any great show or parade, either of uniform or retinue,” Grant remembered later. “In dress he was possibly too plain, rarely wearing anything in the field to indicate his rank, or even that he was an officer; but he was known to every soldier in his army and was respected by all.” Taylor was considerate, to the point
of inadvertent humor. The senior naval officer on the Rio Grande said he was coming to Taylor’s camp to pay his respects; Taylor knew that the navy instructed its officers to wear all the uniform to which they were entitled, and, not wishing to make his visitor uncomfortable, he dusted off his own good uniform and put it on. The navy man, meanwhile, having heard of Taylor’s distaste for show, dressed down for the meeting. The result was that both men were embarrassed and uncomfortable and spent most of the session apologizing to each other.