The Training Ground (13 page)
Growing Up
M
AY 24, 1846
S
am Grant was growing a beard. It had taken a while to fill in, but by late May his facial hair was finally beginning to flourish. He was surprised at its flaming red color but nevertheless quite sure that the beard had a manly effect on his appearance. “My Dear Julia,” he wrote, “do you ever see me anymore in your dreams? How much I wish you could see me in reality! I am certain that you would not know me. I am as badly sunburnt as it is possible to be, and I have allowed my beard to grow three inches long.” Grant was no longer the naive young lieutenant who had sailed from Saint Louis two years earlier. He had changed. He was becoming a battle-hardened soldier.
The engagements at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma were career and emotional turning points for Grant and the others who had fought in them. But that would only be clear years later; now they were just battles that had needed to be won so that the young men could return home. It was the same for those who had been part of the triumph at Fort Texas.
Remarkably, only two Americans had died there. The first was the hapless Sergeant Weigart. The second was Major Jacob Brown, who had succumbed to his horrific wound mere hours before the siege came to an end. The major had suffered terribly in his final days. “It was so hot he could scarcely breathe. Of course, his fevers raged,” wrote Dana. “He is a very serious loss to our regiment, one which we will not be able to replace. He was a perfect bulldog for the fight.”
Soon after, the earthworks along the Rio Grande were finally given an official name: Fort Brown.
An exclamation point had been added on May 18: Taylor’s army crossed the Rio Grande by flatboat and occupied Matamoros without a shot being fired. It was Lieutenant George Gordon Meade who canvassed the riverbanks for the perfect crossing site.
Matamoros was flea-bitten and dusty, occupied by whores, farmers, peasants, and those Mexican officers and soldiers who had chosen to quit the war rather than accompany their army inland to the city of Monterrey,
1
where General Arista was planning to make another stand. Soldiers who had been wounded at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma had risen from hospital beds to join the retreat, terrified that the Americans would torture or simply kill them. That march had turned into an ordeal all its own, with many of Arista’s men committing suicide rather than die from the thirst and starvation that eventually defined the desperate journey.
They would have been far better off remaining in Matamoros. Taylor wanted no cruel behavior directed at the Mexicans, be they prisoners of war or private citizens. His aim was to build trust and cooperation. “It was the policy of the commanding general to allow no pillaging, no taking of private property for public or individual use without satisfactory compensation, so that a better market was afforded than the people had ever known.”
The Americans searched the town’s small adobe homes and community buildings for any supply depots the Mexican army might have left behind. They were shocked by the vast quantities of abandoned munitions: grenades, gunpowder, twenty-five hundred pounds of cannon powder, and more than thirty thousand musket cartridges. The Mexicans had spiked most of their cannons (destroying the weapon’s tube by firing the gun while it was packed with sand or rocks or driving a spike or file into the gun’s vent) and pushed them into the river, but a few pieces of heavy artillery were discovered intact, including one cannon hidden in a church belfry.
There was more: barrels of clothing, desks, muskets, bayonets, and vast quantities of playing cards. Tobacco was an illegal commodity in Mexico and was carefully packed in barrels to be sold on the black market. More than two hundred thousand cigars were discovered, and Taylor ordered them distributed to his army.
The locals eagerly sold the Americans fresh vegetables, eggs, sugar, and milk from their personal stores. After months of army rations, it was a welcome change of fare for Taylor’s men. Such niceties gave Matamoros a pleasant air, but Grant knew that the situation was about to take a drastic turn. “Up to this time,” he later explained, “Taylor had none but regular troops in his command.” But now that Mexico had been invaded, volunteer regiments were forming all over America, eager to join in the fight. These citizen soldiers had little, if any, military training. Nobody knew how they would fit in with the officers and soldiers of the regular army. Yet Taylor needed these reinforcements if he was going to pursue Arista deep into Mexico.
The plan approved by Congress on May 13 gave each state a recruiting quota. The new soldiers would be transported by river or sea to New Orleans and then either overland or by sea to the mouth of the Rio Grande. The volunteers had the option of enlisting for the entire war or for twelve months. They would provide their own uniforms and horses and would receive the same pay as regular soldiers. The officers would be chosen by an election among the men and would be equal in authority and pay to their regular army counterparts. Only Polk could appoint generals and staff officers, and those were subject to Senate approval.
Needless to say, the officers and soldiers of the regular army were not happy about this turn of events. Many had spent their entire adult lives in the army, seeing little promotion while enduring great hardship and familial separation. It galled them that they would be forced to salute a group of well-connected, undisciplined civilians who didn’t know rank and file from a fighting square and who had never heard a shot fired in anger.
Those first volunteer units began arriving on May 24. A regiment from New Orleans marched inland from Port Isabel, some six hundred men in all. They were a sorry lot, ill disciplined and “used up” in the estimation of one American officer.
Grant took the newcomers’ presence in stride. As always, his thoughts were on ending the war as soon as possible. If that meant bringing in volunteer regiments, no matter how ragged they might be, he was willing to endure their presence. He hadn’t been in the army long enough to be passed over for rank, and he had few plans to remain in the service after the war was over. “My dearest Julia,” he wrote, “I feel as if I shall never be contented until I can see you again, my Dear Julia, and I hope to never leave you again for a long time.”
Bearded, sunburned, and now battle-hardened as he might be, one thing had not changed about Sam Grant: he was hopelessly under Julia’s spell. “P.S. The two flowers you sent me come safe, but when I opened your letter the wind blew them away and I could not find them. Before I seal this I will pick a wildflower off the bank of the Rio Grande and send you.”
F
OUR DAYS LATER
, it was Meade who wrote home. “I really consider spending a day in my tent, uninjured, equivalent to passing through a well-contested action,” he told Margaretta. Meade was not trying to be glib. The volunteer regiments had only been in camp a few days, and already their sense of entitlement and lack of discipline were causing major problems. Many came from slave states. These “soldiers” refused to do chores such as chopping firewood or hauling water, which they considered slave labor. After the euphoria of arriving at the war, most of the volunteers had settled into a routine of daily drunkenness. A standing order against firing guns in camp was totally ignored. Most of the volunteers were still back across the river at Fort Brown, but they gathered regularly on the north bank of the Rio Grande to fire their muskets at Matamoros. Not only were the lives of innocent civilians at risk, but the tents of regular army officers were pitched in the town.
The thought of remaining in his shelter and risking having a volunteer’s bullet strike him annoyed Meade no end. He spent his days riding his horse through the Mexican countryside, inspecting roads and abandoned fortifications. With Blake dead, he was the lone topographical officer in camp. Even with the captured map, the Americans knew little about the Mexican landscape, so it was Meade’s duty to ride out alone to make charts and observations about what Taylor could expect to find when he marched toward Monterrey. The stark landscape appealed to Meade, and he was surprised to find himself taken with the local culture. He thought the women were demure and graceful and began teaching himself a few words of Spanish so that he might talk with them.
Meade was a quietly courageous sort who gave little thought to the bandits that were said to roam the area or to any vestiges of Arista’s army that might be hiding out. The long rides along the Rio Grande were a tonic, just as the excitement of battle was. He was no longer consumed by thoughts of going home.
As soon as he returned to Matamoros, Meade’s mood darkened. Other officers enjoyed the place, but to Meade it was a depressing town where most of the houses were made of logs and the grand cathedral near the central plaza was an unfinished eyesore. He turned up his nose at the women, whom he considered “old hags, worse looking than Indians.”
But Meade saved his most pointed criticisms for the volunteers. General Taylor had absolutely no control over their behavior, and their own officers seemed uninterested in imposing discipline. The citizen soldiers traveled back and forth across the Rio Grande at will to frequent the saloons and gambling halls that were springing up to service the American army. They stole and butchered local cattle and sometimes even shot Mexican citizens just for sport. The majority of volunteers were Protestants with a strong bias against people of other religions and cultures (more than one resident of Matamoros was murdered just for being a brown-skinned papist), which made for a natural clash with the Irish Catholic immigrants that composed a large chunk of the regular army’s enlisted ranks.
Most infuriating of all to soldiers like Meade, the American people viewed the volunteers as being better, more patriotic soldiers than the regular army. The men of West Point, the public thought, were a second-class bunch who served for money — mercenaries. The volunteers, on the other hand, were brave men willing to risk their lives out of love for their country.
“They expect the regulars to play waiters for them,” wrote a disgusted Meade. The very presence of the volunteers was an affront to the sacrifices he’d endured for his country since the very day he entered West Point. “No, soldiering is not play, and those who undertake it must make up their minds to hard times and hard knocks.”
But there was little he could do about them other than complain. Taylor would need much of the summer to mount his assault on Monterrey. The occupying force — regular and volunteer alike — were destined to spend a long, hot season in Matamoros, waiting for the order to move out. And when they did so, much to Meade’s disgust, they would do it together.
TAYLOR’S WAR
The Mexican war was a political war, and the administration conducting it desired to make party capital out of it. General Scott was at the head of the army, and, being a sol-dier of acknowledged professional capacity, his claim to the command of the forces in the field was almost indisputable, and that does not seem to have been denied by President Polk, or Marcy, his Secretary of War. Scott was a Whig and the administration was democratic. General Scott was also known to have political aspirations, and nothing so popularizes a candidate for high civil positions as military victories. It would not do, therefore, to give him command of the “army of conquest.” The plans submitted by Scott for a cam-paign in Mexico were disapproved by the administration, and he replied, in a tone possibly a little disrespectful, to the effect that, if a soldier’s plans were not to be supported by the administration, success could not be expected. This was the 27th of May, 1846. Four days later, General Scott was notified that he need not go to Mexico. General [Edmund P.] Gaines was next in rank, but he was too old and feeble to take the field. Colonel Zachary Taylor — a brigadier-general by brevet — was therefore left in command.
— U
LYSSES
S. G
RANT
,
M
EMOIRS
Camargo
J
UNE 14, 1846
T
he spring rains were replaced by a summer heat so fierce that one officer described the beating sun as having “force enough to bake one’s brains, however thick the skull may be.” Matamoros and Fort Brown were transformed into full-fledged frontier depots. Taylor prepared to move his headquarters up-river to the town of Camargo, which would be used as a base for the assault on Monterrey — or wherever the Mexicans would make their next stand. Arista had moved inland, and so would the Americans.
Camargo was an ideal jumping-off point. It was closer to the action. Men and supplies could quickly be ferried there from Port Isabel and Matamoros by steamboat.
From Camargo, Taylor’s army would travel overland, on foot and horseback, deep into Mexico. His chief quartermaster was in the process of buying two thousand pack animals to supplement the mules, horses, and oxen already ferrying supplies. Steamships had begun arriving in Matamoros on a regular basis, much to the delight of the local residents. The boats were brought from New Orleans and were specially selected for their shallow draft (which made their six-hundred-mile journey through rough ocean to the Rio Grande a nautical marvel). Their presence made transportation of supplies much easier. The normal wagon caravan making the regular journey to Port Isabel for supplies numbered 240 wagons and stretched across the Texas prairie in a single-file line three miles long. A steamboat carried almost as much and did so at much greater speed.
Both were in short supply. The wagons were more problematic. Wagons were not mass-produced in a central factory or production plant; they were built one by one, by craftsmen spe-cializing in wagon construction. Every village and town throughout America had such individuals. The trick was finding them, getting new wagons assembled, and shipping them to Matamoros. Even with steamships hauling many of the supplies, Dana estimated it would require some fifteen hundred wagons to transport Taylor’s munitions and stores from Matamoros to Camargo. However, just seven hundred were on order. Until Taylor had these wagons — or found some other means of hauling his army’s provisions deep into Mexico for the next stage of the war — the Americans were forced to spend day after infernal day waiting.
And waiting. And waiting. With every passing hour the Mexican army disappeared farther into the interior, digging themselves in and fortifying their position for the war’s next great battle.
An adage of war states that time always favors a defensive force. This all but ensured that the next clash would not be so haphazard as Palo Alto or as lopsided as Resaca de la Palma. The Mexicans would reinforce and resupply.
Taylor had no choice but to wait.
Most days were filled with trivia and tedium. For Napoleon Dana, the hours were spent fretting over the money he owed a fellow soldier, the large sum he owed Weigart’s family (before his demise, the dead sergeant had requested that Dana hold his wages for safekeeping and act as his executor if he died, but Dana had foolishly spent the money), trying to buy a gold cross from a local senorita in the hopes of sending it home to Sue as a gift (the young woman demurred, saying that she had to ask her mother first), watching the occasional fistfights between the regular army soldiers and the volunteers, and witnessing some of the seedier by-products of occupation. There were “fandangos” going on over in Matamoros each week, American officers and the local women meeting for a night of dancing and strong punch. “I heard there was to be a ‘high-flung’ fandango last Tuesday night,” Dana wrote to his beloved, “something extra above the ordinary things of the kind at which all the beauty and fine dresses and so forth and so forth were to appear. Well, I thought to go over with the rest to take a look. So I went with Captain Ross, Porter and Clitz. I went in, and one look around was enough for me. I remained about two minutes and declared my determination to come home, to which all the party assented, and off we came. There were about forty of our officers in there and about twenty Spanish girls. I inquired particularly if there was not a mistake in the place, but I was told no, that was the high-flung fandango. If this was it, I would like to see a common one for curiosity sake. I believe I have felt fleas on me ever since.”
D
AY BY DAY
, the U.S. Army grew. Volunteers poured off steam-ships at the mouth of the Rio Grande. They came from all over the country (except antiwar New England), their daily additions to the ranks dashing the regulars’ hopes of fighting the war on their own. Torrential rains fell an average of four hours each day, thanks to the onset of hurricane season. Not only was Taylor’s expanding army constantly either wet or smelling of mildew, but the rain overwhelmed the camps’ meager sanitary systems, allowing human waste to flood into the river.
The volunteers, in particular, lacked a fundamental knowledge of hygiene. They saw nothing wrong with drinking water straight from the Rio Grande. Most were soon enduring the early stages of cholera: watery diarrhea, profuse vomiting, and leg cramps. The scorching Texas sun helped to create a vicious circle of dehydration — thirsty men craved water to sate their thirst, unaware that the very same water was making them sick. In extreme cases, soldiers went into shock. Many died.
For Sam Grant, clinging like a delusional optimist to the ever more irrational hope that the war would end any day, being away from Julia was much more of a problem than the threat of cholera. Regular soldiers didn’t know much more about disease prevention than the volunteers — indeed, the practice of boiling drinking water was as unknown as the concept that disease was spread through minute germs and bacteria. Yet certain lifesaving traditions were a part of army life, passed down from soldier to soldier over the generations. Simple and born of intuition, they were a part of every professional warrior’s way of doing business. Brackish or muddy water was to be avoided at all costs. Regular soldiers made it a habit to drink a great deal of coffee, which provided their bodies with boiled fluid, even if such protection was usually accompanied by a gritty taste reminiscent of a freshly dug well.
So as the ignorant newcomers clutched their abdomens and squatted over slit trenches in the shrubs along the Rio Grande, a robust Sam Grant fantasized about making love to Julia — a fantasy he was not afraid to share. “I recollect you did volunteer some time ago, or what showed your willingness to do so, you said that you wished we had been united when I was last in Mo and how willing you were to share a tent with me,” he said in a roundabout fashion. “Indeed Julia, that letter made me feel very happy.”
Grant mailed the letter and eagerly awaited a response. The mail service that soldiers relied on was painfully slow (telegraphs were still in their infancy and were limited mostly to connecting the eastern seaboard’s major cities). It took seven days for the letter to reach Port Isabel, and another week after that to travel up the Mississippi to Saint Louis. Grant kept one nervous eye on the calendar as he waited for Julia’s reply, and the other on Taylor’s army as the great movement inland finally began.
July progressed, with Grant waiting for mail and the inevitable word to move out, praying his long-awaited missive would arrive first. It didn’t. On July 25, Grant wrote to Julia once again. Taylor’s army was already on the move and he would soon join them. “You must not neglect to write often Dearest, so that whenever a mail does reach this far-out-of-the-way country I can hear from the one single person who occupies my thoughts. This is my last letter from Matamoros, Julia,” he wrote. “At present we are bound for Camargo and thence to Monterey, where it is reported that there is several thousand Mexican troops engaged in throwing up fortifications.”
T
HE UNITED STATES
had been sharply divided about the potential for this war in the years leading up to the formal declaration. The split had taken place mainly along the North-South — pro-slavery versus abolitionist — line. Even as a wave of jingoistic patriotism swept through the nation and volunteer regiments were quickly being filled with soldiers eager to join the fight, it was no surprise that pockets of antiwar fervor began developing in the North. An editorial in the June 12 edition of the
New York Tribune
was typical of such sentiment: “They may shout and hurrah, and dance around the bonfires that will be lighted, the cannon that will roar in honor of some field of human butchery; but to what end? Is not life miserable enough, comes not death soon enough, without resort to the hideous energy of war? People of the United States! Your rulers are precipitating you into a fathomless abyss of crime and calamity! Why sleep you thoughtless on its verge, as though this was not your business, or murder could be hid from the sight of God by a few flimsy rags called banners? Awake and arrest the work of butchery ere it shall be too late to preserve your souls from the guilt of wholesale slaughter! Hold meetings! Speak out! Act!”
But the antiwar crowd was in the minority. Walt Whitman, the twenty-seven-year-old editor of the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle,
mirrored the national mood as he equated support of the war with being a true American. “There is hardly a more admirable impulse in the human soul than patriotism,” wrote Whitman. Displays of national pride had been minimal during the Thirty Years’ Peace. Taylor’s victories had changed all that. The conflict marked the first time in American history that all its soldiers fought under the Stars and Stripes rather than merely under their own regimental colors. (Army regulations in 1834 had stipulated it as the official flag of the U.S. forces. An 1818 act of Congress had decreed that the flag would have thirteen stripes and one star for each state, with new stars to be added on the Fourth of July following a new state’s admission. As the Mexican War got under way, the flag had twenty-seven stars, with a twenty-eighth soon to be added to symbolize Texas’s admission.)
So patriotism was not just a mood or an impulse to citizens and soldiers; it could be physically embodied in a symbolic banner around which pro-war factions could rally just as easily as soldiers on the front lines. And it was: cities fluttered with red, white, and blue.
Another unique aspect of the American patriotic response involved God. Mexico was a deeply Catholic nation, with cathedrals and ritual church attendance a staple of life for the majority of the population. The same could be said of predominantly Protestant America, which was, theologically speaking, still very much influenced by the founding Puritans.
However, the link between the war and Manifest Destiny, with its emphatic belief that God favored the United States over Mexico, made for a strikingly evangelical form of patriotism. As American citizens cheered the volunteers rushing into their town squares to enlist, the assemblages often felt like a combination between a Sunday morning service and a Fourth of July celebration, complete with bands playing “Yankee Doodle” and fevered speeches comparing the Mexican War with the Crusades.
And even when those soldiers marched off to war, that cocktail of patriotism and faith traveled right alongside. On June 1, 1846, Captain R. A. Stewart, a Methodist minister and sugar farmer from Louisiana, celebrated the first American church service on Mexican soil since the war’s beginning. Standing on a dusty patch of farmland outside Matamoros, Stewart reminded his all-combatant flock that God intended Anglo-Saxons to rule North America as an “order of Providence.” All devout Americans would stand by the troops as a display of their faith and patriotism.
Such talk was heady — and premature. As spring turned to summer, the American army had not been seriously tested. Casualties had been light. The war was having little impact on most of the nation. Patriotism, thus far, had come cheap.
But as Taylor prepared to escalate hostilities by leaving Texas and pressing the fight onto Mexican soil — lands that had nothing to do with Manifest Destiny and that only a meager handful of U.S. citizens coveted — it remained to be seen if the American people would continue to support a cause that was about to lose its moral certainty.
“We,” Grant wrote of the change in the war’s focus, as evidenced by the new name given Taylor’s force, “became the Army of Invasion.”