The Training Ground

A
LSO BY
M
ARTIN
D
UGARD

Chasing Lance

The Last Voyage of Columbus

Into Africa

Farther Than Any Man

Knockdown

Surviving the Toughest Race on Earth

F
OR
C
OLONEL
G
EORGE
A
LAN
D
UGARD

AUTHOR’S NOTE

T
his is not a history of the Mexican War. Rather, it is the very personal story of the young men of West Point, marching into battle for the first time, learning well the rules and tactics of engagement.

I have always been fascinated by the theme of potential, and that thematic thread weaves through my body of work. How and why individuals blossom from rather ordinary citizens into world-changing historical figures, fulfilling their innate potential even as others around them wither or let their talents lie fallow, makes for powerful narrative.

The story you are about to read is the most poignant example of potential I have yet encountered. While researching, I was struck time and again by the way a group of regular young men were transformed by their experiences under fire, and how those experiences molded them into the great generals and statesmen they would one day become. Through their letters, memoirs, and personal histories, these figures became very much alive to me. I came to understand how intimately they knew one another from their years at West Point and then on the battlefields of Mexico. It was only when I finished writing about their Mexican War experiences that I allowed myself to read the rest of the story and look a dozen or so years down the road to the Civil War. It was thrilling to see how this brotherhood had shown the extent of their potential during the great campaigns of the Mexican War, but it was also heartbreaking to realize that these characters whom I had come to know so well would later become so devoted to killing one another. They were not dispassionate men. One can only imagine how gut wrenching it must have been to peer across a Civil War battlefield and remember the brotherhood once shared with the opposing general. The fact that many of these men resumed their friendships once that war ended is testimony to the enduring bonds forged at West Point and in Mexico.

—
Martin Dugard

Rancho Santa Margarita, California

January 2008

APPOMATTOX

I
t was Palm Sunday, 1865, when General Robert E. Lee rode forth to surrender. The brilliant Confederate tactician had struggled with the decision for two days, but now the time had come. His vaunted Army of Northern Virginia, which had bewildered and frustrated its Union opponents throughout the Civil War, was camped just outside the village of Appomattox Courthouse, hemmed in on three sides by a sixty-thousand-strong Union force. Rather than try to fight his way out once more, Lee had chosen to avoid further bloodshed. It was time for the war that had divided America to come to an end.

The home of a man named Wilmer McLean was chosen, somewhat randomly, as the site where Lee would meet with the Union commander Ulysses S. Grant to lay down his sword. McLean had once lived near the battlefield of Manassas, but a shell had burst through one of his windows during the war’s opening battle, and he had moved to get away from the hostilities. Now, by mere coincidence, the war had found him once again.

Lee arrived first, resplendent in polished black boots, a pressed gray uniform, an expensive ceremonial sword, and a clean yellow sash. With him were Colonel Orville Babcock and Major Charles Marshall. Lee was a stately man who had been a soldier his entire adult life. To show up for such a momentous ceremony in a uniform that was less than his very best would have been unthinkable, even on this heartbreaking occasion.

The three men sat quietly in McLean’s parlor, listening for the telltale rumble of approaching hoofbeats. An orderly had been directed to stand out on the road and direct Grant toward the house.

A half hour later, at 1:30 in the afternoon, the Union general trudged up the front steps. He had ridden thirty-five miles through April mud to be there and was clad in spattered boots and a private’s uniform, onto which he had pinned shoulder boards displaying the three stars of a lieutenant general. He wore no sword, sash, or sidearm, and one of his coat buttons was in the wrong hole. “Grant,” noted one of his staff, Colonel Amos Webster, “covered with mud in an old faded uniform, looked like a fly on a shoulder of beef.”

It was not the first time the two great generals had come face-to-face. Grant later told friends that as he walked up those steps to accept Lee’s unconditional surrender, he felt a sudden embarrassment. Grant was fearful Lee would think his appearance was retribution for a long-ago rebuke during the Mexican War.

“I met you once before, General Lee,” Grant began as they made their introductions, “while we were serving in Mexico, when you came over from General Scott’s headquarters to visit Garland’s brigade, to which I then belonged. I have always remembered your appearance, and I think I should have recognized you anywhere.”

“Yes,” Lee replied cordially, setting Grant at ease. “I know I met you on that occasion, and I have often thought of it and tried to recollect how you looked, but I have never recalled a single feature.”

The two old soldiers sat down facing each other. Then, for the next few minutes, before getting down to the business of bringing to a close the most horrific war in U.S. history, Grant and Lee spoke of Mexico, where they had both worn blue, and where they first learned how to fight.

Texas was originally a state belonging to the Republic of Mexico. It extended from the Sabine River on the east to the Rio Grande on the west, and from the Gulf of Mexico on the south and east to the territory of the United States and New Mexico — another Mexican state at that time — on the north and west. An empire in territory, it had but a very sparse population, until settled by the Americans who had received authority from Mexico to colonize. These colonists paid very little attention to the supreme government, and introduced slavery into the state almost from the start, though the constitution of Mexico did not, nor does it now, sanction that institution. Soon they set up an independent government of their own, and war existed, between Texas and Mexico, in name from that time until 1836, when active hostilities very nearly ceased upon the capture of Santa Anna, the Mexican president. Before long, however, the same people — who with the permission of Mexico had colonized Texas, and afterwards set up slavery there, and then seceded as soon as they felt strong enough to do so — offered themselves and the State to the United States, and in 1845 their offer was accepted. The occupation, separation, and annexation were, from the inception of the movement to its final consummation, a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union.

Even if the annexation itself could be justified, the manner in which the subsequent war was forced upon Mexico cannot.

— U
LYSSES
S. G
RANT
,
M
EMOIRS

PROLOGUE

O
n March 16, 1802, President Thomas Jefferson signed into law the Military Peace Establishment Act, creating a U.S. military academy. The school would be located on a bluff at West Point, at an S-shaped bend in the Hudson River that the American general Benedict Arnold had famously offered to hand over to the British during the Revolutionary War. Major Jonathan Williams, a grandnephew of Benjamin Franklin’s who dabbled in philosophy but had an even greater passion for engineering, was named the academy’s first superintendent. The school opened on July 4 of that year, and three months later, Cadet Joseph Swift successfully passed a series of oral exams to become the institution’s first graduate. He was just eighteen years old, and perhaps the most notable aspect of his brief tenure at the academy was that he had once threatened to kill an instructor.

Jefferson, a fifty-nine-year-old stalwart of the Democratic-Republican Party, was an avowed pacifist with a passion for global exploration. This put him in the complicated position of coveting the North American continent’s unknown territories while being opposed to the military force needed to obtain and maintain them. Jefferson had once harangued George Washington about the unconstitutionality of a school that would create a warrior class. But less than three years after the great general’s death, Jefferson had set aside his ideals concerning the military and expansionism, pragmatically recognizing that trained warriors would be needed to mold and protect America’s future. Just twenty-three years after they had lost control of their American colonies, large numbers of British redcoats were stationed a few hundred miles north of West Point, arrayed along the Canadian border like an avenging force. Jefferson knew that the impression of a strong American military was the most effective way of averting future wars.

Just one year later, with another stroke of the pen, Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Territory from cash-poor France for fifteen million dollars. Napoleon Bonaparte needed money to fund a new series of wars and recognized that the American continent was an indefensible strategic liability for a European nation. Jefferson immediately dispatched his personal secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, on an epic journey to investigate this new frontier. Though Lewis led a group of men known as the Corps of Discovery, the trip was military in nature, a scouting incursion that pushed beyond the boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase all the way to the Pacific coast, reaching lands that Captain James Cook had claimed for Britain in 1778.

The logistical demands of American expansion meant that the establishment of West Point, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Corps of Discovery were very much connected. West Point’s curriculum emphasized engineering and mathematics over military tactics, and it was no coincidence that Superintendent Williams was also given command of the newly formed Army Corps of Engineers: the cadets weren’t being trained for battle so much as learning to build frontier garrisons and bridges and roads. The War of 1812, however, was a reminder that the army also had to be a fighting force. America won that conflict, thanks in part to the valor of West Point graduates such as that very first graduate, Joseph Swift — “Number 1” in academy lore. Swift not only distinguished himself in the field at the Battle of Crysler’s Farm, but he also used his engineering skills to design New York City’s defensive fortifications and then went on to help rebuild Washington, D.C., after the British burned it to the ground in August 1814.

Cadets entering West Point knew they would receive (free of cost) one of the finest engineering educations available anywhere and then graduate into a career of low pay, slow advancement in rank, and — following the War of 1812 peace treaty with Great Britain — little prospect of battlefield glory. Still, a military commission offered a level of social status and — with few exceptions — could only be attained by graduating from that academy overlooking the Hudson. As a result, and despite the trade-offs, a steady trickle of applicants eager to join the Long Gray Line petitioned their congressman for an appointment. Prospective cadets were required to be at least four feet nine inches tall, between the ages of fourteen and twenty, free of physical defect, and well educated in reading and arithmetic. Each congressman, in turn, would forward the applications on to the secretary of war, who would send them on to the president for final approval. The competition was fierce, and there were no state or regional quotas. When applying, it paid to have connections in high places.

The student body at West Point often numbered no more than 250. A typical graduating class averaged 60 cadets, all held to rigorous standards. The curriculum favored mathematics and engineering skills but also included French, drawing, chemistry, ethics, history, geography, infantry drill, and, for two hours every second afternoon, artillery practice. Alcohol, tobacco, playing cards, leaving academy grounds, and drunkenness were forbidden. Cadets were not allowed to have cooking utensils or novels in their room, and the library was open for just two hours per week, on Saturday afternoons, as reading excessively for pleasure was considered detrimental to a budding soldier’s focus on his studies. These rules were broken on a regular basis, the resulting punishment sometimes as grand as expulsion or, more commonly, demerits, often resulting in diminished cadet rank and status. As intended, however, the tight strictures and modest enrollment brought about a deep and positive sense of community. The cadets learned well the strengths and weaknesses of their peers and were such a close-knit bunch that one graduate referred to the corps of cadets as “the very Siamese twins of society.” Long before Shakespeare wrote his famous St. Crispin’s Day speech in 1599, in which Henry V proclaims his soldiers to be a “band of brothers,” military men everywhere understood what that phrase meant; so, in time, did the men of West Point.

Some of those brothers would make indelible marks on American history. In its first five decades alone, West Point graduated men whose names would become synonymous with the nation: Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, William Tecumseh Sherman, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, George Gordon Meade, and many more.

The least of those brothers, academically speaking, were those who graduated last in their class each year — the goats. Among these was George Pickett, a Virginian who became something of a cult figure for graduating fifty-ninth in a class of fifty-nine and then later led one of the most famous cavalry charges in the history of modern warfare.

Lee was, perhaps, the best of them. A methodical perfectionist and son of a Revolutionary War hero who later fell on hard times, the Virginian finished second in the class of 1829. He did not receive a single demerit during his four years at West Point, a record that could never be broken. In 1852 he would return to act as superintendent.

Two of Lee’s forebears had signed the Declaration of Independence, but a third — Lee’s father — had a far more profound place in American history. Henry Lee was better known as Light-Horse Harry for the dashing manner in which he charged Lee’s Legions, his combined infantry-cavalry unit of partisan soldiers, into battle during the Revolutionary War. Lee, who graduated from the College of New Jersey in 1773 (the institution changed its name to Princeton University in 1896) at the age of eighteen, was not only one of George Washington’s favorite officers but also one of the youngest. At the age of twenty, he was a captain in the First Continental Light Dragoons; two years later he was a major; and at the Battle of Paulus Hook in 1779, for which Congress voted that a special medal be cast to commemorate his midnight attack on a British fort in New Jersey (which netted 158 prisoners and saw fifty British soldiers killed), Lee was all of twenty-three.

Washington soon promoted Lee to lieutenant colonel and transferred his unit to the Carolinas, where they joined forces with southern units led by Francis “the Swamp Fox” Marion and Thomas “the Gamecock” Sumter to harass the British. Lee’s Legions fought with distinction at the battles of Camden and Guilford Courthouse before returning north again, where they served at the Battle of Yorktown, which all but ended the Revolutionary War.

Once the conflict ended, the five-foot-nine bundle of energy and ambition found himself at loose ends. Lee was instrumental in helping to ratify the U.S. Constitution and went on to serve as governor of Virginia. But he spent his money poorly, speculating on properties and soon finding himself so deeply in debt that his wife, Matilda, put all of her own assets in a trust to protect them from his creditors.

Matilda, who was also Lee’s second cousin, died in 1790, and three years later Henry remarried, a woman almost half his age. Ann Hill Carter Lee gave birth to six children. The fourth, a boy who came into the world on January 19, 1807, was given the name Robert Edward, for two of her brothers.

By then, Light-Horse Harry Lee’s financial misadventures had long derailed his promise. He had served in Congress for a term, had been briefly considered for a presidential nomination, and had written the words that Chief Justice John Marshall used to eulogize George Washington — “first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.” But soon after young Robert Edward was born, confiscation of family assets became a regular part of the family equation. For a year, beginning in the spring of 1809, Light-Horse Harry was cast into a debtor’s prison, where he wrote his memoirs of the Revolutionary War. The family was destitute by the time he was released, with every property and dwelling sold to pay bills.

As devastating as that surely was, Harry Lee’s worst problems were before him. In July 1812, while defending a friend who shared his opposition to America’s new conflict with Britain, he was beaten for nearly three hours by a pro-war mob. They poured hot candle wax into his eyes, slashed at him with knives, and even tried to cut off his nose. Harry suffered serious internal injuries, his face was permanently disfigured, and his speech was slurred for the few remaining years that he lived. In 1813 he abandoned his family and traveled to Barbados at the behest of President James Monroe, hoping to regain his health. That summer day, five-year-old Robert Edward said good-bye to his father for the last time. On March 25, 1818, while finally making his way home to Virginia, Light-Horse Harry Lee died on Cumberland Island, off the coast of Georgia.

Robert Edward Lee was eleven at the time. His mother was raising the family in Alexandria, in a small house on Washington Street. Ann Carter Lee was only in her midforties, but she was already dying from the stress of too many years spent struggling to keep the family together in the face of Harry Lee’s many setbacks. She had loved her husband dearly and was proud of his many accomplishments, but she was just as adamant that her five children not be like him. Ann was a gentle woman who instilled in her children a disdain for all things impulsive and reckless, and daily preached a gospel of personal discipline and self-restraint. Those lessons would define Robert E. Lee for the rest of his life. He would never drink, swear, or gamble, just as his mother had hoped.

The seeds of Ann’s teachings first bore fruit in the years following Henry’s death. After Robert’s older siblings, Carter, Ann, and Smith, moved away, he became the head of the household, left to care for his now-invalid mother and younger sister Mildred. He was growing — eventually reaching five feet ten and a half inches — and becoming a handsome young man, with a strong chin, wavy brown hair, and dark brown eyes. He was intellectual yet rugged, fond of study and just as fond of swimming in the nearby Potomac River or trekking through the forests and hills outside town.

In 1823, Robert finished his studies at a small academy in Alexandria and applied to West Point. The family attorney, William H. Fitzhugh, wrote a letter of introduction, and Robert boldly bypassed the congressional selection process by presenting the letter directly to Secretary of War John C. Calhoun. On March 11, 1824, Lee was formally notified of his appointment. His enrollment was pushed back an entire year, however, because of an unexpected surplus of qualified applicants. Lee passed the year in productive fashion, preparing himself mentally for West Point by studying at a new boys’ school that had, coincidentally, just opened next door to the Lee home, and meeting the Marquis de Lafayette, the famed Frenchman and Revolutionary War hero who had once been a peer of Harry Lee’s and had called upon the late general’s widow during a triumphal return to America.

On July 1, 1825, Robert Edward Lee reported to West Point. “His personal appearance surpassed in manly beauty that of any cadet in the corps,” said a fellow cadet effusively. “Though firm in his position and perfectly erect, he had none of the stiffness so often assumed by men who affect to be very strict in their ideas of what is military.” Here, along the Hudson, he had found himself.

Lee blossomed at West Point. Not only did he excel in his academic subjects and display exemplary conduct, but he also grew fond of reading on concepts beyond the academy’s purview, devouring topics such as travel and philosophy in his spare time. His grasp of mathematics was so advanced that he was asked to serve as an assistant professor in that subject.

Lee shared his time at West Point with other future generals and national leaders like Joseph E. Johnston, Jefferson Davis, and W. N. Pendleton, but none of them possessed Lee’s self-discipline and desire to compete for the top spot in his class. His own curiosity cost him that prize: though he dedicated his final year to studying and abandoned all pleasure reading, he fell short of his goal and finished second. Still, by all measures, his time at West Point had been magnificent.

On July 10, 1829, less than two months after her son’s graduation, Ann Carter Lee passed away. A devastated Lee was at her side. Soon, though, another woman became prominent in his life, as Lee rekindled his relationship with an old friend from a distinguished family. Mary Anne Randolph Custis was a descendant of George Washington. Her family estate, Arlington, overlooked Alexandria. Lee had visited it often since childhood, for the Lees and the Custises were distant relations. Mary was twenty-one and frail, with a sharp nose, a quick smile, a habit of being late, and mousy blond hair that she parted in the middle and wore in ringlets down to the base of her neck. Their relationship steadily became more formal during the summer of 1829 — Lee, the dashing and earnest young lieutenant, and Mary, the socialite known for her kindness and good graces. They were married the following summer. Over the next fourteen years, they would have seven children.