Grant

CHAPTER THREE

—

Rough and Ready

WHEN ULYSSES S. GRANT joined his regiment in May 1844 at a place called “Camp Salubrity,” outside of Natchitoches in western Louisiana, his life suddenly meshed with a watershed moment in American history. A month earlier, President John Tyler, a Virginia slaveholder, had presented the Senate with a treaty to annex the independent Republic of Texas. Because Texas had legalized slavery, the treaty spurred impassioned debates between North and South, flaring into a national referendum over the westward spread of slavery. Speaking in upstate New York, William Seward articulated the Whig contention that Texas annexation would provoke an “unjust war” with Mexico “to extend the slave-trade and the slave-piracy.”^¹

Grant’s regiment camped near the Texas border as part of the Army of Observation. Its ostensible purpose was to deter American filibusters into Texas, but the unspoken agenda was to warn Mexico, which regarded the breakaway republic as renegade Mexican territory, against meddling in the proposed annexation. In his Memoirs, Grant blasted the Texas scheme as an imperialist adventure, pure and simple, designed to add slave states to the Union. “For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”^{² He always said he never forgave himself for going into the Mexican War.³ If Grant thought this way at the time—and some contrary evidence exists—he certainly was not outspoken about it. However wicked the war, he “had not moral courage enough to resign” and felt an overriding duty to serve the flag.⁴}

Grant kept Julia apprised of his journey up the Red River to Natchitoches, describing pesky clouds of mosquitoes, knots of raffish gamblers, and low shores teeming with alligators. Camp Salubrity took its name from a high, sandy ridge favored with pure spring water, pine woods, and elevated air free of bugs. Ever since West Point, Grant had fought a nagging cough, which he feared might be consumption, but the wholesome atmosphere and daily exercise banished any remnants of this, restoring him to full vigor. Grant seemed cheerful enough about the rough army life. “As for lodgings I have a small tent that the rain runs through as it would a sieve . . . and as to a floor we have no such a luxury yet,” he told his Georgetown friend Mrs. Bailey.⁵

Grant posted frequent letters to Julia, converting drumheads into desks and tenderly pressing flowers between leaves. Colonel Dent hovered in his mind, a baleful presence. “Julia can we hope that your pa will be induced to change his opinion of an army life?” Grant wondered. “I think he is mistaken about the army life being such an unpleasant one.”^{⁶ Although Julia eagerly awaited his letters and pored over them repeatedly, she never replied with the speed Grant wished, leaving him dangling on tenterhooks. At one point, he counted only eleven letters from her in a twenty-month period. One wonders whether, to test Grant’s fidelity or undermine their relationship, Colonel Dent forbade Julia from writing more often. Another possibility is that her chronic eye problem converted even simple letter writing into an onerous task. We do know that Colonel Dent kept Julia busily distracted with St. Louis parties where she would be exposed to hordes of handsome young bachelors.}

In November, with potent backing from slaveholding states, James K. Polk, a Tennessee Democrat, who had made Texas and Oregon annexation the centerpiece of his campaign, scored a narrow victory in the presidential race over Whig Henry Clay. Like other Whigs, Jesse Root Grant feared admission of Texas might further entrench slavery and strengthen the Democratic majority in Congress. Colonel Dent was equally hell-bent on absorbing Texas into the Union. Emboldened by the Democratic victory, the lame-duck Tyler administration lobbied hard for a joint congressional resolution to annex Texas, which passed on February 26, 1845. Once outgoing President Tyler signed it, Mexico severed diplomatic relations with the United States and mobilized for war.

Before the outbreak of open hostilities, Grant wangled a twenty-day leave to return to St. Louis, hoping to secure Colonel Dent’s permission to marry his daughter. The surprise visit startled the Dents: Grant materialized on a dappled gray horse and bounded earnestly up the verandah steps, looking tanned and fit after his southern sojourn. Since Colonel Dent was about to leave on a trip, Grant rode with him to St. Louis the next morning, hoping to spring his momentous question. Julia’s father reiterated that his delicate daughter could never withstand the rigors of an itinerant army life. Showing some flexibility, Grant informed the Colonel that he now had an offer of a math professorship at a college in Hillsboro, Ohio. Unappeased, Colonel Dent issued a startling counteroffer: “Mr. Grant, if it were Nelly you wanted now, I’d say ‘yes.’” “But I don’t want Nelly,” rejoined Grant. “I want Julia.”^{⁷ He extracted a promise that he and Julia could correspond and, if they were still intent on marriage a year or two hence, the Colonel would relent. Emma Dent’s postmortem of this pact has the ring of truth: “When Julia wanted a thing of my father she usually got it.”^{⁸ When he returned to Camp Salubrity in early May, still gnashing his teeth over Colonel Dent’s prickly behavior, Grant nonetheless wrote brightly to Julia, “I shall always look back to my short visit to Mo. as the most pleasant part of my life.”^⁹}}

Relations between the United States and Mexico had deteriorated in his absence. The flashpoint of controversy was whether the Nueces River formed the southern border of Texas, as Mexico believed, or the Rio Grande, 130 miles farther south, as the Polk administration insisted. The Polk interpretation would conveniently double the size of the newly adopted state. The president planned to stage a confrontation that would enable him to declare war against Mexico, and Grant claimed to see through this ploy—at least in retrospect. “We were sent to provoke a fight, but it was essential that Mexico should commence it.”^{¹⁰ To this end, Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to march the Army of Observation, including Grant’s regiment, into the disputed zone near the Rio Grande. As a first step, Taylor shifted the army to a staging area near New Orleans. While Grant was there, his commanding officer, William Whistler, was hauled up on charges of drunkenness and disorderly conduct. Grant sat beside him in the courtroom, giving him time to contemplate the damage public inebriation could inflict upon a military career. As it happened, soldiers soon arrived from Grant’s company and whisked Whistler away before he was tried.}

By the Fourth of July, Texas had voted for American annexation, heightening the likelihood of war. At this point, Grant took a young man’s view of the conflict, finding it a boyish lark despite many annoyances. To cater to his personal needs, he had taken as his servant a black boy who spoke English, Spanish, and French. Writing to Julia, Grant dwelt more on his chances for promotion than the tense political standoff, finding soldiering “a very pleasant occupation,” marred only by the inconvenience it posed “in the way of our gaining the unconditional consent of your parents to what we, or at least I, believe is for our happiness.”^{¹¹ He told her she had little inkling of the moral authority she exerted over him and that whenever he felt tempted to do anything amiss, he thought of her and refrained from doing so. “I am more or less governed by what I think is your will.”^{¹² Treasuring her judgment, bowing to her desires, Grant had begun to internalize Julia’s values when exercising self-control.}}

By September 1845, Grant’s infantry regiment was relocated to Corpus Christi, Texas, the spot where the Nueces River empties into the Gulf of Mexico. A tiny Mexican seaside village with assorted adobe houses and fewer than a hundred people, it was now overrun by several thousand soldiers, the bulk of the American army commanded by Taylor. “We are so numerous here now,” Grant reassured Julia, “that we are in no fear of an attack upon our present ground.”^{¹³ Responsive to the scenery, Grant galloped across open plains and was entranced by the pristine Texas setting, with its herds of wild horses, Indian wigwams, and mesquite shrubs. Far from being openly outraged by the war, he reported to Julia, “the most numerous class of Mexicans are much better pleased with our form of government than their own” and “would be willing to see us push our claims beyond the Rio Grande if we would promise not to molest them in their homes and possessions.”^¹⁴}

Grant had plenty of opportunity to study Taylor and ape the uncouth manners of Old Rough and Ready. The owner of a Louisiana plantation, with more than two hundred slaves, Taylor shunned fancy military dress, sometimes donning a linen duster with a wide-brimmed planter’s hat. He preferred to ride a mule or an ordinary nag and frequently roamed alone on the battlefield, taking personal stock of the enemy. When resting on a march, he did so in unorthodox fashion, letting both legs hang over the same side of the horse as he munched an apple. For all that, he was widely respected for his “blunt, honest, and stern character,” in the words of William Tecumseh Sherman.¹⁵ With his leathery face and tousled hair, he was frank, down-to-earth, and a fine storyteller. As a Whig, he privately denounced annexation as “injudicious in policy and wicked in fact.”^{¹⁶ In describing Taylor, Grant provided a perfect description of his own economical writing style: “Taylor was not a conversationalist, but on paper he could put his meaning so plainly that there could be no mistaking it. He knew how to express what he wanted to say in the fewest well-chosen words.”^{¹⁷ During the Civil War, General George Gordon Meade thought he knew where Grant’s style had originated. “He puts me in mind of old Taylor, and sometimes I fancy he models himself on old Zac.”^{¹⁸ Grant confirmed this hunch: “There was no man living who I admired and respected more highly” than Taylor.¹⁹}}}

At Corpus Christi, Grant caught Taylor’s eye when he was deputized to lead a team of men assigned to scrape away oyster beds obstructing the passage of ships. Grant grew so exasperated when his men would not follow orders that he jumped into waist-high water to demonstrate his preferred method. While some nearby officers mocked Grant’s take-charge style of leadership, Taylor promptly endorsed it: “I wish I had more officers like Grant, who would stand ready to set a personal example when needed.”^{²⁰ Through such quick-witted actions, Grant soon earned promotion from brevet second lieutenant to full second lieutenant.}

Already an acknowledged virtuoso on horseback, Grant specialized in breaking untamed horses that Mexicans rounded up from the countryside to sell. James Longstreet described one especially dramatic incident when Grant had a refractory horse “blindfolded, bridled, and saddled,” then rode it for three hours to subdue it.²¹ The man who performed such robust feats had a surprisingly sedate personality. He liked to laugh, joke, play cards, and smoke a pipe, but mostly kept to himself. “He was always a very mild-spoken man, he spoke like a lady almost,” recalled J. D. Elderkin, a drum major. “He was about as nice a man as you ever saw . . . He had a very heavy beard all through Mexico and his whiskers were of a reddish-brown color . . . His general character was of a quiet, inoffensive man. He spoke but few words to anybody but he loved to ride on horseback.”^²²

All that fall, Grant fantasized that war would be averted and a diplomatic solution found. He wanted desperately to marry, bridled at his interminable engagement to Julia, and reiterated his willingness to resign from the army. Oddly enough, Julia pleaded with him not to resign, even though he offered to do so for her sake. Meanwhile, with every letter, the relentless Jesse Grant badgered Ulysses to quit the army and alerted him that the offer of a math professorship in Hillsboro, Ohio, would stand until spring. Once resigned that his son would not leave the service, Jesse took matters into his own inimitable hands and secretly, but futilely, lobbied Thomas Hamer to have Ulysses transferred to a new regiment of mounted riflemen.²³

The extended stay in Corpus Christi, a hotbed of smuggling, generated worries that idle soldiers would be corrupted by the lax atmosphere. The town’s civilian population had burgeoned to one thousand and was not of the most savory sort, the place reviled by one officer as “the most murderous, thieving, gambling, cut-throat, God-forsaken hole” in Texas.²⁴ Commanding officers thought performing plays might stave off debauchery among the soldiers. By January, Corpus Christi boasted two new theaters, including one holding eight hundred people and playing to packed houses nightly, with officers usually handling both male and female roles. After suitable costumes were obtained from New Orleans, the decision was made to stage Othello. The first choice for Desdemona was James Longstreet, who stood six feet tall and would have towered over Othello, so the prudish Grant was drafted instead. This seems an unlikely choice until we recall that Emma Dent thought him “pretty as a doll,” while Longstreet alluded to his “girlish modesty.”^{²⁵ As it turned out, Theodoric Porter, playing Othello, couldn’t work up enough body heat around Grant. “Porter said it was bad enough to play the part with a woman in the cast,” said Longstreet, “and he could not pump up any sentiment with Grant dressed up as Desdemona.”^{²⁶ To put Porter out of his misery, Grant was cashiered and a professional actress imported from New Orleans.}}

Not long after this rare thespian interlude, Grant’s regiment was ordered to the north side of the Rio Grande, moving into the heart of disputed territory as President Polk resolved to bring the crisis to a head. “Texas had no claim beyond the Nueces River,” Grant later noted, “and yet we pushed on to the Rio Grande and crossed it. I am always ashamed of my country when I think of that invasion.”^{²⁷ To trek south across dry, uninhabited prairie, broken by salt ponds, Taylor split his army into four columns that marched up to thirty miles a day. Riding a mustang, Grant marveled at the huge herds of wild horses that sometimes blanketed the plain as far as the eye could see. At the Little Colorado River, the Fourth Infantry waded across in water up to their necks with wagons and mules tugged across with ropes. Upon arriving at the Rio Grande, the Americans gazed across the narrow waterway at the heavily armed Mexican city of Matamoros, which had a small fort and artillery mounted on sandbag breastworks. Grant’s letters to Julia lost their youthful ardor and grew somber. The proximity of two armies, he wrote, would spark a confrontation that could only be resolved “by treaty or the sword.”^²⁸}

On April 12, 1846, General Pedro de Ampudia warned Taylor that unless he withdrew American forces to the Nueces River within twenty-four hours, a state of war would ensue. A man of crisp decision, his spine stiffened by Polk’s truculence, Taylor declined to budge. “Gen. Taylor made a courteous but decided reply,” Grant informed Julia, “to the amount that we would not leave but by force.”^{²⁹ Two weeks later, Mexican troops ambushed American soldiers north of the Rio Grande, slaughtering or wounding sixteen of them. At once Taylor apprised Washington that hostilities had commenced. President Polk now seized upon the casus belli he had long craved, and with the country inflamed by patriotic fervor, Congress voted for war with Mexico by overwhelming margins. Imbued with a sense of honor, Grant believed it would be unconscionable to leave the army at such a moment fraught with danger, and he jettisoned forever his cramped dream of becoming a math teacher. The war now under way would be known as “Mr. Polk’s War.”}

On the morning of May 8, Zachary Taylor and his three-thousand-man army came face-to-face with a much larger Mexican force at a wooded prairie named Palo Alto due to its tall trees. Grant was impressed by the serried ranks of Mexican spears and bayonets glinting in the strong sunlight. Deep in enemy territory, he identified with his commanding general and sympathized with his terrible burden: “I thought what a fearful responsibility General Taylor must feel, commanding such a host and so far away from friends.”^{³⁰ The battle of Palo Alto developed into an artillery contest. Once oxen-drawn cannon were in place, Taylor barked: “Canister and grape, Major Ringgold. Canister and grape.”^{³¹ Firing comparatively primitive weapons, the Mexicans could only return solid shot, while Taylor had howitzers that hurled explosive shells across immense distances and tore apart Mexican lines.}}

Even though the Mexicans were outmatched, they gave Grant his first unforgettable taste of the horrors of combat. When the first barrage of Mexican cannonballs bounced toward American lines, soldiers sidestepped them easily. Then a cannonball streaked through the air near Grant, missing him but shattering the skull of an enlisted man, spattering his blood and brains on surrounding soldiers. The sudden blast inflicted a disfiguring wound on a Captain Page in Grant’s regiment. “The under jaw is gone to the wind pipe and the tongue hangs down upon the throat,” Grant wrote. “He will never be able to speak or to eat.”^³²

During his maiden battle, Grant discovered something curious about his own metabolism: he was tranquil in warfare, as if temporarily anesthetized, preternaturally cool under fire. The night of the Palo Alto battle he fell into a deep, dreamless slumber on the battlefield. The next day, as he surveyed the terrain, he was powerfully affected by the carnage around him, including sixty American casualties. He told Julia it was a “terrible sight” to see the ground “strewed with the bodies of dead men and horses.”^{³³ To the youthful Grant, “the engagement assumed a magnitude in my eyes which was positively startling.” Years later, hardened by the unspeakable casualties he had seen in the Civil War, he mused, “Now, such an affair would scarcely be deemed important enough to report to headquarters.”^{³⁴ The Mexicans sustained several hundred casualties at Palo Alto, a victory that subsequently helped to catapult Zachary Taylor into the White House.}}

The next day, the Mexicans, bolstered by fresh troops, formed a long, thin line behind a pond called Resaca de la Palma. Unlike that of Palo Alto, the topography was rough and swampy, covered with tangled chaparral, rendering artillery useless and bringing infantry into play. When Taylor sent two senior captains from Grant’s company on a scouting mission, Grant was temporarily placed in charge of a company for the first time. “He was wonderfully cool and quick in battle,” said J. D. Elderkin. “Nothing ever ‘rattled’ him.”^{³⁵ He proved intrepid leading men through holes in thickets until enemy fire had whittled away the chaparral in a chaotic free-for-all. “We could not see the enemy, so I ordered my men to lie down,” Grant wrote, “an order that did not have to be enforced.”^{³⁶ In a clearing between two ponds, Grant had his men storm the Mexican lines. When they returned with a wounded American officer, Grant realized he had retraced ground already gained. As he observed, “This left no doubt in my mind but that the battle of Resaca de la Palma would have been won . . . if I had not been there.”^{³⁷ The Mexican retreat devolved into a panicky rout as fleeing soldiers plunged pell-mell into the Rio Grande. As the Army of Observation metamorphosed into the Army of Invasion, Zachary Taylor led his triumphant troops into Matamoros on May 18. “I think you will find that history will count the victory just achieved one of the greatest on record,” Grant told Julia.³⁸ He derived cynical amusement from “reading of the deeds of heroism attributed to officers and soldiers, none of which we ever saw.”^³⁹}}}

During two rain-soaked months stuck in Matamoros, Grant had plenty of time to ponder his three-year engagement to Julia. He sent her wildflowers handpicked from the Rio Grande banks and tried to figure out ways to speed up their marriage. Once the war was over, he told her, he might resign and work in his father’s leather goods store in Galena, Illinois. “My father is very anxious to have me do so.”^{⁴⁰ He also grew into a perceptive student of Mexico. He already thought Mexican soldiers courageous, but badly supervised by inept generals. In commenting on the American occupation, he betrayed a populist streak and profound sense of social justice, telling Julia: “Some of the volunteers and about all the Texans seem to think it perfectly right to impose upon the people of a conquered City . . . and even to murder them where the act can be covered by the dark. And how much they seem to enjoy acts of violence too!”^{⁴¹ It was his first lesson on the need to be magnanimous in victory and not lord it over a conquered people. He saw how freely rich Mexicans exploited their downtrodden brethren. “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.”^{⁴² This last comment shows that Grant, early in his career, fully comprehended the barbarity of slavery.}}}

Only twenty-four, Grant guessed correctly that Taylor would transfer his army west to Monterrey, giving him a commanding position in northeastern Mexico, coupled with access to the main road to Mexico City. When they reached Camargo, Colonel John Garland tapped Grant as acting assistant quartermaster of his regiment and he balked at what struck him as a banal administrative post. “I respectfully protest against being assigned to a duty which removes me from sharing in the dangers and honors of service with my company at the front.”^{⁴³ Since Grant had gained a reputation for competence, Garland turned him down flat. The appointment was actually a godsend for Grant, turning him into a compleat soldier, adept at every facet of army life, especially logistics. With the exception of ammunition and weaponry, the quartermaster supplied everything needed to clothe and transport an army, including uniforms, shoes, canteens, blankets, tents, cooking utensils, horses, forage, and mules. Here Grant would learn not battlefield theatrics but the essential nuts and bolts of an army—the mundane stuff that makes for a well-oiled military machine. This provided invaluable training for the Civil War when Grant would need to sustain gigantic armies in the field, distant from northern supply depots. As quartermaster, Grant could have ducked battles altogether, but he fought in them all and never chose to shirk combat. Showing an understated proficiency, he seemed in his element. “When you spoke to him about anything under the sun,” said J. D. Elderkin, “he would have an answer in a moment and never hesitate at all.”^⁴⁴}

Just how well Grant grasped large-scale strategy became manifest when he received an unexpected visit from Thomas Hamer, the Ohio congressman who had sponsored him at West Point and was now a brigadier general of volunteers. One day the two men rode into the countryside, pausing on the brow of a hill, and pretended to be generals with two armies contending on the plain below. Hamer lost their imaginary encounter and was astounded by the cunning moves Grant executed to defeat him. Afterward he scratched off a prophetic letter: “I have found in Lieutenant Grant a most remarkable and valuable young soldier.” He added that Grant was “too young for command, but his capacity for future military usefulness is undoubted.”^{⁴⁵ Such was Grant’s respect for Hamer that when the latter died of illness in early December, Grant not only mourned the loss of a friend but believed the country had lost a future president.}

As Taylor marched his army west to Monterrey, a dreary tramp in heavy rain over washed-out roads, Grant’s talents as quartermaster shone. By the time troops arrived at their encampment each night, Grant had wood prepared for campfires and herds of cattle ready to be butchered for fresh meat. War had already surrendered its charm for him, and he was frustrated by the slow pace of events, complaining to Julia that “wherever there are battles a great many must suffer, and for the sake of the little glory gained I do not care to see it.”^⁴⁶

When Taylor’s army arrived outside Monterrey, Grant perceived that the Mexicans held a strong position with superior numbers. The town had thick stone walls and was sheltered by mountains on three sides. Outside the city, in a defensive structure dubbed the Black Fort, the Mexicans had erected a citadel that could strafe approaching soldiers from almost any direction. General Ampudia and his men could also fire cannon mounted on surrounding parapets at troops entering the central plaza. Grant was supposed to remain with camp equipment at a place called Walnut Spring, when he heard at daylight a furious volley of intensifying fire. “My curiosity got the better of my judgment, and I mounted a horse and rode to the front to see what was going on.”^{⁴⁷ When the order came to charge, Grant duly accompanied the Fourth Infantry into battle. The artillery and musket blasts belching from the Black Fort raked the advancing regiment, killing or wounding one-third of them in minutes. Grant could have dodged combat with a clear conscience, but he deliberately exposed himself to fire. He blamed the steep loss of life on Colonel Garland, who could easily have withdrawn his men beyond the lethal range of the Black Fort guns.}

During the retreat, in a gallant gesture, Grant loaned his horse to the regiment’s exhausted adjutant, Lieutenant Charles Hoskins, who was subsequently killed. In a measure of Grant’s humanity he crept out alone onto the battlefield that night to identify the body. Another lieutenant recalled spotting a shadowy figure bending over a wounded man, “giving him water from a canteen and wiping his face with a moistened handkerchief.”^{⁴⁸ The merciful man was Grant, who temporarily became the new regimental adjutant. Before the Monterrey fighting ended, Grant suffered the loss of West Point classmate Robert Hazlitt. “We have been intimate friends and rather confidential ones,” Grant told his brother, “and no one but his relations can feel more harshly his loss than myself.”^⁴⁹}

Grant’s supreme moment of valor arose during fierce fighting on September 23. That afternoon, his regiment bored deep into the city under a hail of deadly fire. The enterprise grew hazardous whenever they reached intersections where they were exposed to musket balls and grapeshot fired by Mexican infantry posted on low rooftops. “It was as if bushels of hickory nuts were hurled at us,” said one soldier.⁵⁰ At one point, his ammunition dangerously depleted, Colonel Garland needed to send someone for fresh supplies. The risk was so huge that he requested volunteers rather than simply dispatching someone. Grant stepped forward to tender his services and here his agility with a horse named Nellie appeared to stunning effect. With daredevil dexterity, he wound one foot around the saddle, draped an arm over the neck of the horse, and rode off at full gallop, using the horse to shield his entire body. The Mexicans got only brief, intermittent glimpses of his hidden, low-slung figure as he streaked by at high velocity. “It was only at street crossings that my horse was under fire, but these I crossed at such a flying rate that generally I was past and under cover of the next block of houses before the enemy fired. I got out safely without a scratch.”^{⁵¹ At one point, Grant coaxed his horse into scaling an earthen wall four feet high. He would regale listeners with his derring-do for years.}

Right before dawn the next day, Ampudia sent a messenger under a white flag to Taylor, requesting an armistice. Taylor gave remarkably lenient terms that seem to foreshadow the generous terms bestowed by Grant at Appomattox. Paroled soldiers would be allowed to retain their muskets and horses as the army retreated to a spot sixty miles south during an eight-week cease-fire. Characteristically Grant experienced no schadenfreude as he observed Mexican troops surrender, only infinite pathos for their miserable plight. “My pity was aroused by the sight of the Mexican garrison of Monterrey marching out of town as prisoners . . . Many of the prisoners were cavalry, armed with lances, and mounted on miserable little half-starved horses that did not look as if they could carry their riders out of town.”^{⁵² Grant praised Taylor’s “humane policy,” but President Polk was furious with the generous surrender terms that failed to divest the Mexicans of their weapons.⁵³ Among other things, he scented a political rival in Taylor, who was lionized by the press and presented as a potential presidential candidate for the 1848 election.}

As the American army tarried near Monterrey, Grant savored his time there and was beguiled by Mexico—an attraction that lasted a lifetime, feeding a love of foreign travel. “The climate is excellent, the soil rich, and the scenery beautiful,” he informed Julia.⁵⁴ The only thing disturbing his peace of mind was a typically inconsiderate act by his gauche father, who had, without permission, taken one of his letters and published it in a newspaper. Grant was doubtless irked by this behavior both as an invasion of privacy and as a boorish attempt at self-promotion by Jesse. Grant vowed to Julia that “I intend to be careful not to give them any news worth publishing.”^{⁵⁵ In the meantime, he purchased food from local farmers, established a bakery for his regiment, and stood out for his energy and unobtrusive manner. While he did not entirely abstain from drinking, no accusations of alcohol abuse surfaced during this period. “He was at that time a temperate, sober man, free from the drink habit,” said Chilton White, who knew Grant at Monterrey. “I have seen him at times when I thought he felt the exhilarating effects of intoxicants, but he was at all times a level headed man.”^⁵⁶}

—

THE MEXICAN WAR did more than just educate Grant in strategy and tactics, it also tutored him in the manifold ways wars are shot through with political calculations. “The Mexican war was a political war,” he would observe, “and the administration conducting it desired to make party capital out of it.”^{⁵⁷ Monterrey’s fall made Zachary Taylor the darling of the Whig press. When this was followed by Whig victories in the November elections, giving the opposition party control of both houses of Congress, President Polk grew leery of Taylor as a Whig rival for president. In a Machiavellian maneuver, he decided to divest Taylor of most of his troops and replace him with Winfield Scott, a Whig lacking Taylor’s brand of popular charisma.}

In high-handed fashion, Polk dispatched Scott to Texas without notifying Taylor of what was afoot. When Scott arrived in Point Isabel after Christmas, he informed Taylor by letter that he had taken over the Army of Invasion and was radically revamping the war strategy. Instead of pushing south from Monterrey, he planned to take Taylor’s regular troops, land them at Veracruz farther down the Mexican coast, then guide them inland to take Mexico City—the historic trail charted by Hernán Cortés. “Providence may defeat me,” bellowed the grandiloquent Scott, “but I do not believe the Mexicans can.”^{⁵⁸ Taylor was relegated to a sideshow of the main event. “It was no doubt supposed that Scott’s ambition would lead him to slaughter Taylor or destroy his chances for the Presidency,” recalled Grant, “and yet it was hoped that he would not make sufficient capital himself to secure the prize.”^⁵⁹}

Grant was with Taylor when he received the shocking news of his demotion and never forgot his hero’s befuddled reaction. “Taylor was apt to be a little absent-minded when absorbed in any perplexing problem, and the morning he received the discouraging news he sat down to breakfast in a brown study, poured out a cup of coffee, and instead of putting in the sugar, he reached out and got hold of the mustard-pot, and stirred half a dozen spoonfuls of its contents into the coffee. He didn’t realize what he had done till he took a mouthful, and then he broke out in a towering rage.”^{⁶⁰ This early experience made Grant tend to view war as a hard-luck saga of talented, professional soldiers betrayed by political opportunists plotting back in Washington.}

Between the founding era of the Republic and the Civil War, no figure embodied the American military more splendidly than Winfield Scott, who was promoted to brevet major general by the War of 1812. Straddling two eras, he would serve under presidents as far apart as James Madison and Abraham Lincoln. Mocked as “Old Fuss and Feathers” behind his back, he had never seen a parade ground he didn’t long to tread or a uniform he didn’t wish to wear. With his enormous height, wavy hair, and ample flesh, he loved to flash medals, flaunt plumed hats, and preen before mirrors, a vanity that made him susceptible to flattery. Grant noted how Scott sent word ahead to commanders of the precise hour he planned to arrive. “This was done so that all the army might be under arms to salute their chief as he passed. On these occasions he wore his dress uniform, cocked hat, aiguilletes, sabre and spurs.”^{⁶¹ Such vainglory was so alien to Grant that it is sometimes hard to say whether he modeled himself after Zachary Taylor or in opposition to Winfield Scott.}

For all that, Grant credited Scott with a brilliantly resourceful mind and strategic daring. To travel from Veracruz to the capital, an army of twelve thousand would quit a secure supply base, traverse 250 miles of mountainous terrain, then face a much larger and well-fortified enemy in a populous capital. To do this, Scott assembled a first-rate team of bright junior officers, including Pierre G. T. Beauregard and George B. McClellan and a rising star on the engineering staff, Robert E. Lee. Throw in a host of other officers who later reappeared in the Civil War—Joseph Johnston, John Pemberton, James Longstreet, Winfield Scott Hancock, Albert Sidney Johnston, Joseph Hooker, George Thomas, Braxton Bragg, and George Gordon Meade—and the Mexican War seemed a dress rehearsal for the later conflict. With a retentive memory for faces and events, Grant accumulated a detailed inventory of knowledge about these varied men that he drew on later.

Winfield Scott’s advent turned everything topsy-turvy. By early February 1847, Grant’s regiment was reassigned to a division commanded by Brigadier General William J. Worth and braced to board a ship at the Rio Grande for passage to the island of Lobos north of Veracruz. By the end of the month, Grant was writing to Julia from the North Carolina, a ship laden with four hundred soldiers that pitched so crazily in heavy seas that Grant feared it would capsize. The weather was blazing hot, and the discomfort for passengers exacerbated by a boat designed to haul cargo instead of humans. Jesse Grant prodded his son to leave Mexico, and Ulysses himself was eager to be done with the war, especially after a nearly two-year absence from Julia. “If we have to fight,” he told Julia, “I would like to see it all done at once.”^{⁶² Around this time, Zachary Taylor foiled Polk’s plan to emasculate him, scoring a resounding victory at Buena Vista—success that ensured him the Whig nomination in 1848, propelling him into the White House.}

On March 9, Scott disembarked his army on the Veracruz beaches in what he boasted was “the largest amphibious invasion yet attempted in history.”^{⁶³ The men took flatboats then waded ashore, breasting high breakers and brandishing their rifles above the surf. “The Mexicans were very kind to us, however,” Grant wrote drily, “and threw no obstacles in the way of our landing except an occasional shot from their nearest fort.”^{⁶⁴ Instead of storming the walled city, Scott opted for a siege and, once big guns were installed, pounded the place mercilessly, with Robert E. Lee and George McClellan engaged in placing batteries. Grant and Pierre Beauregard reconnoitered enemy fortifications, and Grant also studied American siege lines. On March 29, nearly reduced to starvation in a shattered city, the Mexicans officially capitulated, yielding five thousand prisoners. Like Taylor at Monterrey, Scott allowed Mexican soldiers to depart with their dignity intact. Instead of taking them as prisoners, he permitted them to be paroled and keep their sidearms and horses, providing another humane precedent for Grant later on. In narrating events for Julia, he dispensed with false bravado. “I am doing the duties of Commissary and Quarter Master,” he wrote, and only needed to have “the Pork and Beans rolled about.”^⁶⁵}}

The campaign’s most perilous phase commenced as Scott cut loose from his coastal base and ventured into the hinterlands. In London, the Duke of Wellington stared aghast at this high-stakes strategy, which flouted all military prudence. “Scott is lost . . . he cannot fall back upon his base,” he declared.⁶⁶ Grant watched intently as this strategy unfolded and would imitate it during his Vicksburg Campaign. Passing through scenic but treacherous countryside, the army forded rivers, filed through narrow mountain passes, and crossed deep ravines in the Sierra Madre. The strategy of living off the land placed inordinate pressure on quartermasters. Some soldiers shed superfluous baggage in the wilting heat, and Grant, now a permanent quartermaster, had to make up their deficiencies. The long march meant he could no longer communicate with his parents, who grew alarmed by his silence. “During this time his mother’s hair turned white from her anxiety about him,” Jesse Grant recollected.⁶⁷ Grant’s sister Mary similarly remembered Hannah Grant “with a look of concern supplanting the pleasant expression her face usually wore,” while Jesse avidly tracked his son’s doings in the pages of the Army Register.⁶⁸

When his army reached a spot called Cerro Gordo, Scott seemed to hit an insuperable obstacle. The main road zigzagged around a mountainside, often running between sheer walls of rock, with Mexican artillery posted on their crests. Seeing the futility of a frontal assault, Scott dispatched Robert E. Lee on a secret mission to discover ways to circumvent Antonio López de Santa Anna’s fortified position. Lee detected a mountain trail that bypassed the Mexicans and widened it to make way for troops. This enabled the Americans to circle around their foes in a surreptitious flanking maneuver, attacking them from the rear. In writing home, Grant likened this intricate maneuver to Napoleon crossing the Alps. The Mexicans soon surrendered, suffering more than a thousand casualties with thousands more taken prisoner. The battle taught Grant indelible lessons about military leadership: the need for supreme audacity and the vital importance of speed, momentum, and the element of surprise. Scott praised Lee unstintingly, promoting him to brevet major.

Grant was now operating on two levels of reality. One side of him monitored the war minutely with a sharp eye for arresting details. “As soon as Santa Anna saw that the day was lost he made his escape with a portion of his army,” he wrote to Julia, “but he was pursued so closely that his carriage, a splendid affair, was taken and in it was his cork leg and some Thirty thousand dollars in gold.”^{⁶⁹ At the same time, he fell under Mexico’s enchantment—they had arrived at the high plateau, eight thousand feet above sea level—and was mesmerized by the sublime peaks. “Around us are mountains covered with eternal snow,” Grant wrote, calling the town of Jalapa, with its orange groves and gardens, “the most beautiful place I ever saw in my life” and saying he would gladly make it his home if Julia agreed to join him there.⁷⁰ At more melancholy moments, he regretted that he had not taken his father’s advice, resigned from the army, and headed into business.}

After the decisive Cerro Gordo victory, Scott’s army resumed its triumphant progress along the National Highway toward Mexico City, and Grant’s division secured the roadway. Scott was forced to halt for months because of expiring one-month enlistments. As he awaited reinforcements, Santa Anna had a chance to strengthen Mexico City’s defenses. The approach to the city presented fiendish difficulties because thin causeways on level ground made approaching troops easy targets for Mexican artillery. Encamped at Puebla, staying near the central plaza, Grant showed deepening insight into the fighting. He had a growing appetite for leadership and reaped a rich harvest of ideas for later use. After poring over maps and quizzing Mexican scouts, Grant grew convinced that Scott should swing his army around to the north of Mexico City. On the southern side, the army would flounder “through morass and ditches” whereas it would proceed to the north on solid, elevated ground.⁷¹ At first Grant hesitated to criticize his superiors, thinking such conduct “contrary to military ethics,” then he tried without success to relay his message up through the ranks.⁷² When Robert E. Lee stumbled upon a southern route, Scott heeded his advice instead.

By August, with dysentery rife at Puebla, Scott again elected to break loose from his supply lines and march on Mexico City, pioneering a new style of warfare. “We had to throw away the scabbard,” he explained, “and to advance naked blade in hand.”^{⁷³ In striking at Contreras, San Jerónimo, and Churubusco, he shattered Mexico City’s outer defenses in bloody fighting. He sacrificed more than a thousand men, but Mexican casualties rose four times higher, robbing Santa Anna of a full one-third of his army. Lee was again singled out for bravery and bumped up to brevet lieutenant colonel. Even in retrospect, Grant could find no fault with the meticulous steps Scott had executed. He was also struck by the cheers lavished upon the general, and, writing home, tried on for size the feelings of the victorious commander. “I wondered what must be the emotions of General Scott, thus surrounded by the plaudits of his army. The ovation was genuine, and from the hearts of his men.”^⁷⁴}

With Scott’s army poised to strike at Mexico City’s gates, President Polk had his emissary, Nicholas P. Trist, attempt on September 2 to negotiate a peace treaty by which Mexico would relinquish Texas to the Rio Grande and transfer New Mexico and California to the United States for a negotiated sum. The Mexicans rebuffed this insulting offer and a brief armistice ended two days later. On September 8, Scott launched an attack against Molino del Rey—the King’s Mill, in English—which was incorrectly thought to be deserted. An entire Mexican division opened up withering fire from the mill. After American artillery reciprocated, bombarding its stone walls with bullets and cannonballs, four American companies charged forward. Grant raced to the mill only to discover his ex-roommate, Fred Dent, lying wounded and spouting blood from his thigh. Grant “refreshed him from his canteen and dragged him to a place of safety close under the wall,” Julia wrote.⁷⁵

For a young man, Grant was remarkably clearheaded and self-possessed in combat. “At the Battle of Molino del Rey,” said Longstreet, “I had occasion to notice [Grant’s] superb courage and coolness under fire.”^{⁷⁶ Grant discerned that several armed Mexicans still stood atop the building. After backing up a cart to the wall, he sprang onto the roof only to find that an American had single-handedly captured the Mexicans. “They still had their arms, while the soldier before mentioned was walking as sentry, guarding the prisoners he had surrounded, all by himself.”^{⁷⁷ Quite typically, Grant incorporated this mock-heroic tale into his Memoirs even though it cast him in a slightly comic-opera light.}}

At Molino del Rey, Grant exhibited bravery and compassion, tending so many wounded Americans on the battlefield that one fellow soldier portrayed him as “a ministering angel” with “a kind heart.”^{⁷⁸ The night after the battle, he came upon young Virginia lieutenant George Pickett shivering in the cold. When Grant asked why he trembled, Pickett replied, “I shall fr-fr-freeze to d-death.” “Oh no you won’t,” said Grant, who found a piece of roasted red chili pepper, blew away the ashes, then handed it to the West Point graduate. “Here, Pickett, you eat that and it will be as good as a stove inside of you.”^{⁷⁹ When Winfield Scott was asked in future years whether he remembered Grant from Mexico, he noted that he “attained special distinction at Molino del Rey”—a distinction that earned Grant the honorary grade of brevet first lieutenant.⁸⁰ Grant learned the importance of following up promptly on victory and chided Scott for not pursuing the fleeing enemy once the mill was taken. Though an American victory, Molino del Rey carried a fearful price tag of almost eight hundred American casualties.}}

On the morning of September 12, American heavy artillery battered the fortress at Chapultepec, once a royal residence, now a military school. When it fell the next morning, Grant and his men sprang forward under an aqueduct toward the gate of San Cosme, sprinting from arch to arch to evade Mexican bullets. With about a dozen volunteers, joined with soldiers from another company, Grant cleared Mexican snipers from parapets and rooftops, enabling the American column to pass. Then he spotted a church steeple a hundred feet high that might allow an unobstructed shot at the back of San Cosme gate. In narrating this maneuver in his Memoirs, Grant gave an amusing description of the scene at the church: “When I knocked for admission a priest came to the door, who, while extremely polite, declined to admit us. With the little Spanish then at my command, I explained to him that he might save property by opening the door . . . and besides, I intended to go in whether he consented or not. He began to see his duty in the same light that I did, and opened the door, though he did not look as if it gave him special pleasure to do so.” Grant and his men hoisted a dismantled howitzer into the belfry, assembled it, then trained it on Mexicans behind the gate, creating “great confusion.”^⁸¹

Elated, General Worth sent Lieutenant John Pemberton (who would someday surrender Vicksburg) to summon Grant. The appreciative general told Grant he wished to deliver a second howitzer to the belfry. Grant’s reaction showed his canny nature. “I could not tell the General that there was not room enough in the steeple for another gun, because he probably would have looked upon such a statement as a contradiction from a second lieutenant. I took the captain with me, but did not use his gun.”^{⁸² Thanks to Grant’s shrewdly commandeering the church, Worth’s men overran the San Cosme gate, leaving Mexico City defenseless before them. Toward the end of this eventful day, Grant learned that a close friend, Lieutenant Calvin Benjamin, had received a mortal wound. He found him lying on a cot in the street and wiped away dirt that begrimed the dying man’s face—a poignant moment that revealed strong emotion beneath Grant’s impassive facade. For his assault on the San Cosme gate, Grant attained the honorary rank of brevet captain for “gallant and meritorious conduct in the battle of Chapultepec.”^{⁸³ This temporary promotion would allow him to wear the bars and perform the duties of a captain. Irvin McDowell, later a Union general, termed Grant in Mexico “the best horseman and the bravest fellow in the army.”^{⁸⁴ Promoted to brevet colonel, Robert E. Lee received a rare accolade from Winfield Scott, who extolled him as “the very best soldier that I ever saw in the field.”^⁸⁵}}}

Bedecked in military finery, Winfield Scott strode into the National Palace of Mexico City on September 14—the storied Halls of Montezuma. Veteran military observers agreed with the Duke of Wellington that Scott now stood forth as “the greatest living soldier.”^{⁸⁶ Local residents deserted the streets, lending them an eerie silence. As a parting shot, Santa Anna emptied the prisons of inmates, and one of them, posted atop a roof, shot Grant’s friend Lieutenant Sidney Smith of the Fourth Infantry. Grant never forgot the ghoulish sequel. Smith “retained his natural color, his respiration, pulse and temperature were almost normal, he was cheerful and he had no idea of dying. He even laughed and joked about it and said that after he got well he should never be careless again. Suddenly his complexion changed to that of a corpse and in a few hours he was dead.”^{⁸⁷ Based on seniority, Grant was promoted to first lieutenant by this sudden death. Had it not been for this fatality, Grant realized, he would have remained a second lieutenant “after having been in all the engagements possible for any one man and in a regiment that lost more officers during the war than it ever had present at any one engagement,” he wrote with a distinct trace of bitterness.⁸⁸}}

Grant was thrilled by Scott’s panache and military acumen, especially since he believed President Polk, by holding back troops, had tried to undercut a feared political adversary. “Since my last letter to you,” he told Julia, “four of the hardest fought battles that the world ever witnessed have taken place, and the most astonishing victories have crowned the American arms. But dearly have they paid for it! The loss of officers and men killed and wounded is frightful.”^{⁸⁹ Baked by the tropical sun, worn out by years of war, Grant had a red beard that hung four inches long and he thought he had aged ten years in appearance. Yet despite the heavy toll from combat and disease—13,283 Americans had died, nearly a fifth of all soldiers who fought—Grant was still in some ways a callow young man, seeing an exotic new country for the first time and gushing to Julia that “Mexico [City] is one of the most beautiful cities in the world . . . No country was ever so blessed by nature.”^⁹⁰}

The Mexican government having fled, American troops lingered as an occupation army while politicians hammered out a peace agreement. Winfield Scott, after fiercely prosecuting the war, proved generous in victory. At first Grant witnessed brutal reprisals by Mexicans against their peers who had cooperated with the Americans, including women who had their heads shaved for fraternizing with United States officers. But in time Grant saw how a wise, charitable policy toward a conquered civilian population restored peaceful conditions with impressive speed. “Lawlessness was soon suppressed,” Grant wrote, “and the City of Mexico settled down into a quiet, law-abiding place.”^{⁹¹ Other accounts of the American occupation depicted atrocities raging on both sides.}

The Fourth Infantry camped in the small village of Tacubaya, four miles outside of Mexico City. Although Grant still had quartermaster duties and dealt with a clothing shortage in his regiment, he had free time to ride to the city daily and play cards with future president Franklin Pierce. Besieged by beggars, Grant deplored the gross inequality of Mexican society and instinctively sided with the oppressed. “With a soil and climate scarcely equaled in the world,” he protested, Mexico “has more poor and starving subjects who are willing and able to work than any country in the world. The rich keep down the poor with a hardness of heart that is incredible.”^{⁹² Whatever his criticisms of their society, Grant never regarded the Mexicans as racial inferiors.}

Because bullfighting was the national sport, Grant attended one fight purely for the experience and was sickened by it. “I could not see how human beings could enjoy the sufferings of beasts, and often of men, as they seemed to do on these occasions.”^{⁹³ In his Memoirs, he included a vivid description of a bullfight that gains its power from Grant’s patent identification with the dying bull after it is pierced with spears. “The flag drops and covers the eyes of the animal so that he is at a loss what to do; it is jerked from him and the torment is renewed. When the animal is worked into an uncontrollable frenzy, the horsemen withdraw, and the matadores—literally murderers—enter, armed with knives having blades twelve or eighteen inches long, and sharp.”^⁹⁴}

For Grant, the most fascinating moment in Mexico came when he joined with Simon Bolivar Buckner and other officers in a hair-raising ascent of the enormous volcanic mountain of Popocatépetl. Their mules negotiated trails that skirted yawning chasms, flanked by sheer vertical walls of rock. The next day, buffeted by heavy snow and wind, they were forced to turn back a thousand feet below the crater. Nine officers suffered severe snow blindness and had to be led back down the mountain on horseback. After returning, the group visited the Valley of Cuernavaca and explored a mammoth cave festooned with singular rock formations that hypnotized Grant. “We had with us torches and rockets and the effect of them in that place of total darkness was beautiful.”^⁹⁵

It is consistent with Grant’s later drinking patterns that he abstained from alcohol during combat periods, when he was actively engaged and shouldered responsibility. “I never saw Grant under the influence of liquor at all,” said one soldier. “I know he did drink a little, but that was pretty good whisky he had.”^{⁹⁶ Another person noted he “never drank to excess nor indulged in the other profligacy so common in that country of loose morals.”^{⁹⁷ But idleness, boredom, and the loneliness of occupation mixed a toxic brew of emotions that slowly led him into temptation and people noticed an abrupt change. One Ohio soldier wrote home in May 1848 that Grant was “altered very much: he is a short thick man with a beard reaching half way down his waist and I fear he drinks too much but don’t you say a word on that subject.”^{⁹⁸ A more damning recollection came from his friend Richard Dawson, who said Grant “got to drinking heavily during or after the war.” Right after his return from Mexico, he encountered Grant and said he “was in bad shape from the effects of drinking, and suffering from mania a potu [delirium tremens] and some other troubles of the campaign.”^⁹⁹}}}

Despite such lapses, Grant had compiled an extremely commendable record during the Mexican War, which had turned him into a seasoned officer, steeped in battlefield wisdom and logistical finesse. And then there were useful contacts with dozens of soldiers later elevated to general in the Civil War. Even though Robert E. Lee had rendered meritorious service, Grant had studied him close-up and knew he was not endowed with supernatural abilities: “I had known him personally, and knew that he was mortal; and it was just as well that I felt this.”^¹⁰⁰

The war culminated with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a huge bonanza for the United States. It expanded American territory by nearly a quarter, forcing Mexico to shed half its territory. The United States gained Texas with the crucial Rio Grande boundary as well as New Mexico and California—territories encompassing the current states of California, Nevada, and Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and part of Colorado. In exchange, the United States relinquished claims to Baja California, assumed $3.5 million in Mexican debts owed to American citizens, and handed over $15 million.

As the war’s rabid opponents—Senator Charles Sumner, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson among them—had predicted, the victory carved out a vast territory up for grabs between slave owners and abolitionists, possibly tipping the tenuous balance between North and South. In August 1846, Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania had introduced a measure to outlaw slavery in territory acquired from Mexico, putting slavery front and center in American politics. As one congressman stated, “It would really seem there is no other subject claiming the deliberations of this House but negro slavery.”^{¹⁰¹ While southern legislators quashed the Wilmot Proviso, it stimulated debate that showed just how extraordinarily divisive slavery had grown. Grant insisted the Civil War was “largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions.”^{¹⁰² As a Whig opponent of slavery, Abraham Lincoln supported the Wilmot Proviso and denounced President Polk’s war in thunderous terms: “He is deeply conscious of being in the wrong . . . he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him.”^¹⁰³}}