The Training Ground (5 page)
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.
U
PON 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.
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.
— U
LYSSES
S. G
RANT
,
M
EMOIRS
Corpus Christi
M
ARCH 11, 1846
I
t 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 order 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.
Grant also liked the fact that most of his friends from West Point were in Corpus Christi. In fact, nearly two hundred academy graduates rounded out the officer corps. Even as the army prepared for war (indeed, a surprise Mexican attack on their camp could have come at any time), there was a burgeoning sense of sadness among the officers because they feared the conflict would be diplomatically resolved before they tested themselves on the field of battle. Grant was dismayed to note that this zeal for war had less to do with right and wrong than with personal advancement and glory. “The officers are all collected in little parties discussing affairs of the nation,” he wrote Julia on May 6. “Annexation of Texas, war with Mexico, occupation of Oregon, and difficulties with England are the general topics. Some of them expect and seem to contemplate with a great deal of pleasure some difficulty where they may be able to gain laurels and advance a little in rank.” With war came promotion and perhaps glory and riches. Death and dismemberment, for many American troops, were secondary concerns.
Yet even in the best of times, conditions were treacherous, and it became difficult for Grant to maintain his high spirits. The camp was infested with snakes, and more than one man woke in the night to find a deadly rattler coiled in his bedroll. Thick black clouds of flies covered the tents and food, swarming into men’s mouths as they tried to sleep or eat. And a predatory militia of camp followers had wandered down from Louisiana to take advantage of the soldiers. This band of pimps, whores, gamblers, and desperadoes was described by one soldier as “all the cutthroats, thieves and murderers of the United States and Texas.” Corpus Christi had been a quiet and desolate smugglers’ outpost before Taylor’s Army of Occupation arrived. In less than a year it had become a haven for gambling, prostitution, and loan-sharking — the last a result of the U.S. Army’s inability to pay the soldiers for months at a time.
Grant wasn’t a complainer, but if he were, his letters to Julia during the winter months could have gone on and on about the harsh northerly winds, the punishing rain and thunderstorms, and the unprotected coastal plain where there wasn’t so much as a tree to block gales ripping in off the Gulf. The army’s Quartermaster Corps, unaccustomed to providing for the needs of a wartime force, had disbursed flimsy, floorless tents; as a result, Grant and the rest of the four-thousand-man force slept in the cold mud, protected from the elements by thin woolen blankets. Fevers and diarrhea became so common that one-sixth of the American contingent was on sick call at any given time.
Instead of griping, Grant wrote love letter after love letter to Julia, rambling on and on about wanting to resign his commission just so he could be with her — and during the long, miserable winter he came very close to doing just that. But by March, when the rains had ended and conditions were finally right for the Army of Occupation to mobilize, he knew that such an act would have been perceived as cowardice and an abandonment of his West Point brethren. The cold, hard facts were this: in order to see Julia again, he might need to fight the Mexicans. There was no way of escaping back into her arms until the conflict was ended. “Fight or no fight, everyone rejoices at the idea of leaving Corpus Christi,” he wrote to Julia. Others may have been heading south dreaming of glory; Grant headed south to get back to Saint Louis.
In all, nearly thirty-five hundred U.S. troops were marching to face a Mexican army that would soon number more than twice that size. They had come to Corpus Christi from posts great and small all around America (frontier outposts were often manned by a single company numbering just fifty-five men). Not only was their winter drilling under Taylor a crash course in how to function as a large armed force, but it also marked the first time in three decades that the bulk of the U.S. Army was in the same place at the same time.
To avoid ambush during the march to Mexico, General Taylor divided his army into four columns, each leaving a day apart. The first column had left on March 8. The cavalry, in the form of Colonel David Twiggs’s Second Dragoons, led the way alongside a company of horse-drawn light artillery. Two more brigades of infantry and artillery trailed in their dusty wake. Grant and the Fourth Infantry were the final elements of Taylor’s enormous caravan. On March 11, they struck their tents and gathered in formation on the sands of Corpus Christi, preparing to cross the Nueces River and venture into the no-man’s-land buffering the American and Mexican armies.
The Fourth was commanded by Colonel William Whistler, an aging alcoholic who had alternately served with distinction and gotten so thoroughly inebriated that he’d been threatened with dismissal from the service. His time in uniform had begun during the presidency of John Adams and continued through America’s expansion. Whistler, who had first been commissioned in 1801, was taken prisoner by the British during the War of 1812, for many years withstood hardship and prolonged separation from loved ones as a fort commander on the turbulent American frontier, and performed admirably as leader of the Fourth Infantry in Corpus Christi. The son of a Revolutionary War soldier, he was a besotted living bridge between America’s past and its future.
Taylor and his staff began the march with Whistler’s column. When the last man was safely away, the general galloped ahead to catch up with the forward elements. Taylor trusted Whistler to bring up the rear.
The enlisted were on foot, while the officers would travel the two weeks from Corpus Christi to the Rio Grande by horse. It would be a dry, dusty trip across a barren salt plain, sure to blister the heels and crack the tongues of the foot soldiers. Many officers, foreseeing those hardships, had compassionately purchased a cheap six-dollar mustang for their personal servants. But Sam Grant — ironically enough, the Fourth’s undisputed top horseman — was prepared to walk.
There were two reasons for this. The first had to do with fairness: if his men were going to slog twenty miles a day across the Texas wasteland, so would he. The second was more practical: Grant no longer possessed a horse. A week earlier he had owned three mustangs, but a careless groom let them run off. Grant was a proud man. He was bad at managing money but was not in the habit of begging or borrowing when funds ran short. “I determined not to get another, but to make the journey on foot,” the young lieutenant promised himself.
Yet news of Grant’s missing horses had gotten around. It was only natural that a group of officers who already knew one another through their common educational background and various army postings, and who had endured a hard winter in Corpus Christi together, would gossip like a sewing circle. These officers knew that Grant was so gifted on horseback that he had been commanded to give a special equestrian jumping demonstration at his West Point graduation and that he’d broken a supposedly unrideable wild mustang while in Corpus Christi, saddling the horse and galloping across the plains for hours until it stopped trying to buck him off and calmly consented to his commands. If Grant were less likable, his fellow officers might have reveled at seeing him walk all the way down to Mexico, looking as blistered and sunburned as some Irish immigrant private. But Grant was the sort of undersized, hardworking, self-effacing individual that other men felt compelled to take care of. And so they did.
A few days earlier, Grant’s company commander had pulled Grant aside to discuss the march. Captain George Archibald McCall was a forty-four-year-old Philadelphian. Rangy, with a handsome face and neatly trimmed beard, McCall was widely respected as a great soldier and a gentleman — and like Grant, a consummate horseman. (He sold one of his favorite buggy horses to Zachary Taylor, who then rechristened the animal Old Whitey and made it synonymous with his oversize personality.) McCall preferred traveling by horse over any other mode of transportation, including trains or steamboats. Not surprisingly, the idea of Grant’s traveling on foot made McCall anxious. The march would be daunting, to say the least. Grant’s ability to lead men into battle might be impaired if he were exhausted and footsore. Casually, in the manner of an inquiry rather than an order, McCall asked if Grant planned on buying a new steed. “No,” Grant replied, adding that he belonged to a foot regiment and it was natural for him to walk.
“I did not understand the object of his solicitude,” a puzzled Grant later wrote of the encounter. McCall pretended to let the matter drop. It was not as if he had an extra horse. Of the captain’s two expensive steeds, it was clear to Grant that McCall would ride one and his servant the other.
So when Brevet Second Lieutenant Sam Grant lined up alongside his men on the morning of March 11, he was sure that he was about to march two hundred miles to the Rio Grande on foot, without fanfare or sympathy.
Captain McCall had other plans. “There, Grant,” he yelled, pointing to an unbroken mustang, “is a horse for you.”
Grant studied the animal. It was a spirited three-year-old colt, one of the thousands that roamed the Texas prairie in herds so great that Grant thought it would take a land the size of Delaware to contain them. Though wild, they were exceptional horses, with a bloodline running back to the Arabians brought to North America by Spanish soldiers centuries earlier. Traders frequently rode out to capture the animals and sell them to the army — or in this case, to McCall, who had used his own money to purchase the mustang for the unhorsed lieutenant.
Grant was deeply touched. He thanked the captain and quickly threw a saddle on his new mount. “I saw the captain’s earnestness in the matter, and accepted the horse for the trip. The day we started was the first time the horse had been under saddle. I had, however, but little difficulty in breaking him, though for the first day there were frequent disagreements with us over which way we should go, or whether we should go at all,” wrote Grant. “At no time during the day could I choose exactly the part of the column I wanted to ride with; but, after that, I had as tractable a horse as any with the army, and none that stood the trip better.”
And so it came to pass that when Sam Grant rode off to war for the very first time, he sat astride a headstrong, unpredictable, slightly aimless young horse — an animal, in fact, with a spirit much like his own.
