…I have known a few men who were always aching for a fight when there was no enemy near, who were as good as their word when the battle did come.
—Ulysses S. Grant
The Mexican War was our romance.
—Simon Bolivar Buckner
GRANT’S ACCOUNT of the Mexican War is a classic in the literature of war. In his Memoirs, he told the story of an invasion he regarded as unwarranted with critical detachment, and in according the Mexican War much space, he underscored its importance for him. He awakened in Mexico. In assessing the war, Grant was amused and half won over by the logic of the Mexicans who celebrated as victories two gallantly fought but lost battles, Chapultepec and Molino del Rey. It would, he agreed, save trouble, and blood, simply to declare success in war rather than bother to fight. But Grant had little faith in fanciful stories. His purpose was simple: “I would like to see truthful history written.” That is what he wrote.1
The narrative is masterly, but Grant is jealously protective of his feelings about war. Where the account becomes personal, it is restrained. Instead, his emphasis is on presenting objective military history of the first order. The work is so intellectually unpretentious that one can easily miss the sophistication of his study of Generals Winfield Scott, Zachary Taylor, and William J. Worth. In its analysis of strategy, Grant’s work is still fresh; it is in full conversation with the best modern work on the subject, The American Way of War, by Russell F. Weigley. This 1973 study, controversial because of its thesis that Americans have come to think of war as annihilation, a concept derived from Grant’s way of fighting the Civil War, agrees basically with Grant’s analysis of the Mexican War. In 1885 the old politician was careful to be tactful in his discussion of the volunteers (i.e., voters) so maligned by those who saw the Mexican War as a classic argument for a professional army. But such controversies did not interest him greatly; his eye was always on the progress of the war itself. Grant’s Memoirs demonstrate, as do his letters of this period, that the young lieutenant, silently, unnoticed, studied the moves of his commanders with a critical, but never insubordinate, eye. And in recording what he saw he wrote history, not a treatise on the science of war. He told the story of the Mexican War.2
In September 1845 the Fourth Infantry Regiment went, in sailing ships, from New Orleans to Corpus Christi, on the Texas coast. The town, “eally just a cluster of buildings around a ranch, was at the mouth of the Nueces River, in territory disputed by Mexico and the United States, which had annexed the Republic of Texas earlier that year. The chief industry of Corpus Christi was smuggling American tobacco into Mexico, where it was sold below the price set by the government monopoly. General Zachary Taylor’s force of three thousand men, once called the army of observation as it watched from Louisiana the process of the American annexation of Texas, was now styled the army of occupation. The infantry brigades and cavalrymen set up a totally exposed camp of orderly rows of tents along the shore. To brighten dull evenings, James Longstreet directed plays in which fresh-faced Ulysses Grant “looked very like a girl dressed up,” but the Othello of the company found that Grant’s Desdemona “did not have much sentiment.”3
Inland, the country was magnificently untamed; a huge herd of wild horses roamed the area, and was preyed upon by men seeking new mounts and a break in the boredom of camp. Traveling through sparsely inhabited country to San Antonio and on to Austin, Grant saw an abundance of deer and antelope. Hunting was the most common pastime, but not for him: “I had never been a sportsman in my life; had scarcely ever gone in search of game, and rarely seen any when looking for it.” On this trip, a companion persuaded him to go after the turkeys that fed in flocks on nut trees along the streams: “We had scarcely reached the edge of the timber when I heard the flutter of wings overhead, and in an instant I saw two or three turkeys flying away. These were soon followed by more, then more, and more, until a flock of twenty or thirty had left from just over my head. All this time I stood watching the turkeys to see where they flew—with my gun on my shoulder, and never once thought of levelling it at the birds.” There was in Grant a quiet and unsentimental gentleness that was expressed best in his relationships with animals and, later, with his children, but it was a quality that had to be suppressed if he was to make himself heard in a world of men and war. Grant was embarrassed by his unwillingness to kill the birds and spoke of himself as a “failure” as a hunter. But he chose not to forget the incident. The fascinating—and funny—sight of the turkeys was indelibly in his mind, as was the fact that he had had no urge to shoot them.4
Grant also had his eye on the politics of warmaking. All of the considerable literature devoted to explaining how the Mexican War came about might be boiled down to his one sentence: “We were sent to provoke a fight, but it was essential that Mexico should commence it.” This said, Grant proceeded in the Memoirs to a brief essay on how wars are begun in America. His point loses no force in the twentieth century for having been written in the nineteenth:
It was very doubtful whether Congress would declare war; but if Mexico should attack our troops, the Executive could announce, “Whereas, war exists by the acts of, etc,” and prosecute the contest with vigor. Once initiated there were but few public men who would have the courage to oppose it. Experience proves that the man who obstructs a war in which his nation is engaged, no matter whether right or wrong, occupies no enviable place in life or history. Better for him, individually, to advocate “war, pestilence, and famine,” than to act as obstructionist to a war already begun.
This is prophecy; it says much about war in general and about how Grant analyzed the Civil War in particular. He knew that in American wars a general could do only what a president would allow him to do and that something in the politics of war ordained that, once started, a war had a life that could stop only when, somehow, it reached its own end.5
Unfortunately for President James K. Polk, the augmentation of the smugglers’ camp at Corpus Christi did not provoke the Mexicans to attack. So General Taylor was ordered to march 150 miles south to the Rio Grande. Grant was one of the men who did not relish the role of provocateur. He had not liked the lie, told the troops back at Camp Salubrity, that the United States Army had been moved to this outpost on the western border of Louisiana to stop American filibusterers from entering Texas. He knew the army was there “really as a menace to Mexico in case she appeared to contemplate war,” and he “was bitterly opposed to the measure.” Grant continued to “regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.”6
Grant accepted the thesis that the war was the result of a “conspiracy” to create new slave states, and was troubled still more by the United States’ having invaded a foreign country, even though he recognized that the prize was great—Texas and the far southwest. He knew this was “an empire and of incalculable value,” but thought “it might have been obtained by other means.” The means, in his view in the 1880’s, was commercial investment. Looking back to the 1840’s in a voice rare to Grant, he pronounced a moral judgment and discovered retribution: “The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican War. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.”7
The move to the Rio Grande succeeded in provoking war. Polk’s action was analogous to that of a bullfighter who torments his prey until, in exasperation, the animal is driven to an attack. The baited bull, on May 3, 1846, was General Mariano Arista, who knew that General Taylor had gone to the coast for supplies and additional recruits with which to goad further the Mexican force stationed in the town of Matamoros. At daybreak Arista’s artillery fired, and the Americans, north of the river, returned the fire. Twenty-five miles away at Point Isabel, Lieutenant Grant lay in his tent at the edge of the sea and listened to the sound. He had never heard a “hostile gun before” and “felt sorry” that he had enlisted. He got up and wrote Julia a calm letter about the deaths of certain men, which had been the immediate acts provoking the battle. “As soon as this is over,” he added, “I will write to you again, that is if I am one of the fortunate individuals who escape. Don’t fear for me My Dear Julia for this is only the active part of our business.”8
Grant put it in a one-sentence paragraph in his Memoirs: “The war had begun.” On the way back to Fort Texas, the besieged American outpost across from Matamoros, he fought in his first battle. There was an antique quality to the confrontation at Palo Alto, about eight miles north of the Rio Grande. The Americans, coming across the plain through shoulder-high grass “almost as sharp as a darning needle,” faced Mexicans ready for them in front of the trees; their “bayonets and spearheads glistened in the sunlight formidably. The force was composed largely of cavalry armed with lances.” The Mexicans outnumbered Taylor’s three thousand men, who were armed “with flint-lock muskets, and paper cartridges charged with powder, buckshot and ball. At the distance of a few hundred yards a man might fire at you all day without your finding it out.” In addition to these aged arms, Taylor did have howitzers, which were mobile, could be aimed with precision, and shot explosive shells rather than cannon balls. As the shells savagely decimated the Mexican ranks, other men quickly filled the vacancies. The Mexicans did not retreat, but neither did the slashing sabers of their officers compel an attack.9
The Mexicans had cannon, though not howitzers, and Grant’s company caught the fire. Three days after the battle he wrote Julia, “Although the balls were whizzing thick and fast about me I did not feel a sensation of fear until nearly the close of the [afternoon-long] firing a ball struck close by me killing one man instantly, it nocked Capt. Page’s under Jaw entirely off and broke in the roof of his mouth…. Capt. Page is still alive.” Albert D. Richardson, telling of the event in 1868, reported that the unnamed enlisted man had had his head blown off, “scattering his brains and blood in the faces of his comrades.” Whether Grant was one of these comrades we are not told; he was surely nearby. In his Memoirs, Grant (using precise details that occasionally give a tone of high macabre humor to his recollection of war) recalled that “the splinters from the musket of the killed soldier, and his brains and bones, knocked down two or three others, including one officer, Lieutenant Wallen,—hurting them more or less.” Ulysses Grant had seen a man die.10
Of Grant’s private response to the death of one man and the mutilation of another we have no indication beyond the preciseness with which he reported and recalled the event. Outwardly, at least, he seems to have been devoid of emotion. As for fighting, he responded by coming back for more. The next day, at Resaca de la Palma, nearer still to the Rio Grande, the Americans again met the Mexicans, this time in a dense thicket. Grant, a quartermaster and not in command of a company, was at the front of the line and took the lead in a charge: “I at last found a clear space separating two ponds. There seemed to be a few men in front and I charged upon them with my company. There was no resistance….” In the Memoirs he was modest about the initiative he had taken: “The ground had been charged over before. My exploit was equal to that of the soldier who boasted that he had cut off the leg of the enemy. When asked why he did not cut off his head, he replied: ‘Someone had done that before.’”11
The humility is engaging, but Grant’s bit of humor is almost too appropriate to the way the man next to him died. Speaking of this second day in a letter to Julia, he did not even mention having led a charge. Instead he gave general credit to the Americans for bravery in charging straight into the mouths of the Mexican cannon, and once again the quartermaster, told her of his task in language that is tightly controlled: “After the battle the woods was strued with the dead. Waggons have been engaged drawing the bodies to bury. How many waggon loads…would be hard to guess. I saw three….” He thought the victory important: “No doubt you will see accounts…in the papers. There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation. Now that the war has commenced with such vengence I am in hopes my Dear Julia that we will soon be able to end it. In the thickest of it I thought of Julia.” Neither here nor elsewhere did he write of killing anyone himself. It was probably not the actual experience of killing, but the general activity of battle that had so powerfully aroused him.12
The Mexicans were driven across the river, and Fort Texas (later named Brownsville, after a man killed in the bombardment) was relieved. Next, Matamoros, in indisputably Mexican territory, was taken. What had been first the army of observation and then the army of occupation was now the army of invasion, and in August 1846 Taylor marched to Monterrey, the leading city in the interior of northeastern Mexico. The heat made night marches essential, and the recalcitrance of the pack and wagon mules tested Grant’s patience. His vivid description in the Memoirs of his struggles with these exasperating animals ends with a passage that is at once an example of the discouraging lapses into conventional diction that take the fire out of so many of his stories and a clue to his personality: “I am not aware of ever having used a profane expletive in my life; but I would have the charity to excuse those who may have done so, if they were in charge of a train of Mexican pack mules at the time.” Though the politeness of Victorian letters leaves us fewer samples of the vernacular than are available to historians of the twentieth century, there is absolutely no doubt that rich language in ornate combinations was used in both the Mexican War and the Civil War; yet many observers have confirmed Grant’s statement that such was not his style of expression. His speech was terse, unimpassioned, detached, and not earthy.13
Talking about war did not stimulate Grant; participating in it did, as is shown by his conduct when the attack on Monterrey began: “My curiosity got the better of my judgment, and I mounted a horse and rode to the front to see what was going on. I had been there but a short time when an order to charge was given, and lacking the moral courage to return to camp [where, as quartermaster, he belonged] I charged with the regiment.” About a third of the men in the charge were killed or wounded in the assault on the Black Fort that protected the city; the survivors moved away from the fort to another position facing the city. Grant, the frustrated cavalryman, had been the only mounted man in the charge; as they reorganized themselves he yielded his horse to another officer and commandeered a fresh one from a soldier in his quartermaster corps. They began another charge: “…and the next place of safety from the shots of the enemy that I recollect…was a field of cane or corn to the northeast of the lower batteries. The adjutant to whom I had loaned my horse was killed, and I was designated to act in his place.” Momentarily, in the middle of a fight, Grant had shed the grocery-clerk guise of the quartermaster and forced his way into a position of small authority in a battle.14
Students of the Mexican War from Grant onward agree that Taylor’s attack on Monterrey was a tactical disgrace. There was, for example, no reason not to bypass the first gate rather than charge it, with resulting slaughter of the American attackers. On entering the city, the surviving Americans were fired on from rooftops by the defending Mexicans, but fought on block by block toward the main plaza. That open square had been brought into accurate range by one battery of Taylor’s artillery, and the cannoneers, methodically waiting for their weapon to cool between firings, were lobbing a ball into the square every twenty minutes. After the initial shot, this bombardment had little effect on the Mexicans safe behind sandbags on rooftops around the plaza, but did prevent the Americans from storming this central point.15
Grant was among the men who had darted from house to house, crossing the intervening streets at the risk of being shot. Halted two blocks from the plaza, his group realized they were short of ammunition, and Grant, probably still riding the unfamiliar horse, volunteered to go back. With his arm around the neck of the horse, his left foot up behind the saddle, his right in the stirrup, and his body protected by the right side of the horse, he rode at full run past the Mexicans shooting at him. Stopping briefly at one house, in American hands, he found some badly wounded men, one with a probably fatal head injury, another partly disemboweled, and promised to send them help. Then, on the horse again, he made it out of the city. As he was starting back with ammunition and support troops, he met the remnant of his force running out of the city in retreat, but General Worth’s men, entering the city from the opposite direction, soon reached its center. Because Taylor refused to resume his attack, he has been blamed for the absence of a decisive victory. Under a negotiated settlement General Pedro de Ampudia and his men left Monterrey armed. There were other costs; Grant observed that no one got back to the “poor wounded officers and men I had found, [they] fell into the hands of the enemy during the night, and died.”16
During the armistice following the battle Grant became acquainted with Monterrey. Something of the West Point artist returned. In perhaps his finest letters he deftly situated the “beautiful city enclosed on three sides by the mountains with a pass through them to the right and to the left,” and with lush economy captured the fragrant quality of Monterrey before it was industrialized, still “so full of Orange Lime and Pomgranite trees that the houses can scarsly be seen until you get into the town.” He paid Monterrey a left-handed compliment—“If it was an American city I have no doubt it would be concidered the handsomest one in the Union”—and in his next letter spoke of it with no chauvinism at all: “This is the most beautiful spot that it has been my fortune to see in this world.” But he added, his passion for Julia overthrowing his orthography, “Without you dearest a Paradice would become lonesom.”17
The sensual richness of the Mexican city stimulated Grant’s desire for Julia. If he described the city as “beautiful” twice in his first letter to her, he mentioned his “love” five times over. And one senses how hard it was for him to put down on paper what he meant by love. Surely he was not just observing forms of social address when he wrote to her, “Julia is as dear to me to-day as she was the day…more than two years ago, when I first told her of my love. From that day to this I have loved you constantly and the same and with the hope too that long [before] this time I would have been able to call you Wife.” He yearned for the day when they would be other than “mere lovers” corresponding.18
Julia knew what he meant. It was time to go to bed. In the long months of their engagement she kept her recollections of him alive in private talks with her sister and in dreams. In one of these dreams, about which she wrote him, her still fresh-faced Ulysses had a beard. There was a whiff of the erotic in this fantasy, as well as a hint of the slow maturation of the not-so-young soldier. We cannot know, of course, but something suggests that he had had very little sexual experience and sought to deny an excess of innocence by taking Julia’s hint. Five months later he wrote a male friend, “If you were to s[ee] me now you would never recognize me in the world I have a beard more than four inches long and it [is] red.”19
Enough men were killed in the battle of Monterrey, in September 1846, for the newspapers in the United States to conclude that it had been a glorious victory for Zachary Taylor. And they began talking about him for the job of president, then held by Polk, a Democrat. Polk was in a quandary. He had given the command to Taylor, a Whig, to keep it away from a more prominent member of the opposition party, Winfield Scott. Looking back, Grant claimed, disingenuously, that Taylor had had no aspirations to be president; at the time, calculating Democrats, dreading a Whig war hero, no doubt sought comfort in Taylor’s obscurity. But that comfort was shattered by his three successive victories in battle.20
Meanwhile, the army’s ranking general, Winfield Scott, was chafing to get into the war, in which he was being upstaged. Scott, an impressive and competent soldier, made no secret of his ambition to move up a notch and become commander in chief. His authority and experience went all the way back to the War of 1812, and he could not be kept out of battle indefinitely; keeping him out became less useful to Polk and the Democratic party after Taylor’s flamboyant successes. (Polk’s—and Scott’s—worries were well grounded, of course. Taylor was nominated and elected president in 1848; Scott, in many ways a more promising candidate in a decade of vacillating presidents, got his unsuccessful try at the presidency only in 1852.)21
These domestic aspects of the foreign war were not lost on Grant as he looked back on the events in his Memoirs: “The Mexican War was a political war, and the administration conducting it desired to make party capital out of it.” He disapproved of the politics that lay behind the Mexican War and found those of the Civil War more congenial, but he took politics for granted in both wars. By 1885 Grant had been both general and president, and the seasoned Republican dismissed his pre-Civil War allegiance to the Democratic party and accepted the Whigs as the forebears of Republicans. The Mexican War, he concluded, was a mistake of the Democrats, who were trying to extend slavery. Paradoxically, it was also a war that Whig generals won, thereby bestowing on their party a mantle of patriotism. But for the ordinary soldiers there was less elation. Looking at the bedraggled veterans of one battle, Grant wrote, “I thought how little interest the men before me had in the results of the war, and how little knowledge they had of ‘what it was all about.’”22
Scott, allowed to go to Mexico at last, moved in March 1847 directly to Veracruz, the port serving Mexico City. He spurned Taylor’s strategy of attacking cities and towns in the relatively unimportant northeastern area of Mexico in favor of a direct assault on the nation’s capital. Grant’s was one of the regiments rushed to Veracruz to support Scott’s siege of the port. This action was conducted with such skill and with so few casualties that newspaper accounts did not accord it the importance given to Taylor’s gaudier victory at Buena Vista, in February 1847, in a battle Grant missed. With Veracruz taken, Scott boldly left his sources of supply, and with a vastly outnumbered force, started for Mexico City. The effectiveness of this risky maneuver—of moving swiftly, unencumbered by supply lines—was not lost on Grant, who was to do the same in the Vicksburg campaign and, later, when he encouraged Sherman to leave Atlanta and head for the sea.23
Scott conducted the invasion, along a mountainous route, with great skill. Thus, in an assault on the mountain stronghold of Cerro Gorde, where the terrain was so steep that animals could not be used and men moved artillery pieces into place for the attack, the “surprise of the enemy was complete; the victory overwhelming.” Grant’s enthusiasm was unrestrained: “…perhaps there was not a battle of the Mexican War, or of any other, where orders issued before an engagement were nearer being a correct report of what afterwards took place.” And for this staff support of Scott, Grant credited, among others, Robert E. Lee, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, and George B. McClellan.24
Scott, preferring to coerce his enemy into surrender without destroying an army or terrorizing civilians, moved on to Puebla and to Contreras, and took Churubusco. He halted without storming Mexico City while an attempt to negotiate a peace settlement was made. When it failed, the bloody battles of Molino del Rey and Chapultepee were fought. Both of these, Grant decided later, were unnecessary; another route into the city should have been chosen. During the fierce fighting at the gates of the city itself. Grant took the initiative at San Cosme. With a small detachment of men and a howitzer, he forced his way past a protesting priest with explanations in halting Spanish, and dragged the gun into a church belfry. There, two or three hundred yards from the gate into the city, the Americans had the defenders in range. Grant could not understand why the Mexicans did not drive his tiny firing group out of the church, but they did not do so, and his effort was so important in the forcing of entry into the city that he was mentioned, for the only time, in the dispatches to Washington. Faced with the successful assault by the American army, General Santa Anna withdrew, and with great pomp and disregard for possible snipers, Winfield Scott entered the city and took the “Halls of Montezuma,” the great public buildings of the capital. In the peace settlement, Mexico relinquished all claim to Texas, New Mexico, and California in exchange for fifteen million dollars.25
The battles were over. Early on, Grant had confided to a friend, “War seems much less horrible to persons engaged in it than to those who read of the battles.” By then he had fought at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma; after the exhilarating battle of Monterrey, he told Julia that “fighting is no longer a pleasure.” No longer a pleasure—but it had been. Grant was insulted when his future father-in-law comforted Julia by telling her that he was safe as the quartermaster and commissary of the Fourth Infantry Regiment. In rebuttal, Grant reminded her that he had entered the fighting at Monterrey despite his job. Indeed, he had sought a transfer to a combat assignment, only to be refused because he was too “useful” as a quartermaster. He continued not to let this task keep him out of battle, and he told Julia that what he would like was a leave—to get married—and then a chance to “come back…and see the war out.”26
These and similar hints of Grant’s attitude toward fighting lead one to take a close look at the language of the Memoirs. The bland words can be deceiving. Take the story of the war’s beginning. After describing with low-keyed honesty how he wished he had not enlisted when he woke to the first gunfire of the war back at Point Isabel, he went on to reflect—looking back over a lifetime—on how men feel at such moments: “A great many men, when they smell battle afar off, chafe to get into the fray. When they say so themselves they generally fail to convince their hearers that they are as anxious as they would like to make believe, and as they approach danger they become more subdued. This rule is not universal, for I have known a few men who were always aching for a fight when there was no enemy near, who were as good as their word when the battle did come. But the number of such men is small.” At first glance, Grant would seem to be merely the wise old observer of others. A second look makes one wonder if he did not, at least privately, admit to the ache, and number himself in that latter small band.27
Virtually unnoticed himself in the Mexican War, Grant watched his fellow warriors carefully. With a sharp eye and neat detail, he caught the essential differences in the command personalities of the generals under whom he served. “General Taylor never wore uniform, but dressed himself entirely for comfort. He moved about the field…to see through his own eyes…. He was very much given to sit his horse side-ways—with both feet on one side—particularly on the battle field.” This was courage; Taylor was poised and relaxed, and took everything in. “General Scott,” wrote Grant, “was the reverse in all these particulars.” He always wore all the uniform allowed by law. For frequent reviews of troops, he wore his “cocked hat, aiguillettes, sabre and spurs…. [He] was precise in language, cultivated a style peculiarly his own; was proud of his rhetoric; not adverse to speaking of himself, often in the third person…. Scott saw more through the eyes of his staff officers than through his own.” General William J. Worth, though acknowledged to have been a brave man and a bright one when he broke through the walls of houses rather than expose his men to bullets in the streets of Monterrey, was dismissed by Grant: “He was nervous, impatient, and restless on the march [to Veracruz] or when important or responsible duty confronted him.” Later, at Puebla, “General Worth had the troops in line, under arms, all day, with three days’ cooked rations in their haversacks. He galloped from one command to another proclaiming the near proximity of Santa Anna with an army vastly superior to his own. General Scott arrived…and nothing more was heard of Santa Anna and his myriads.” Grant had no respect for panic. He said no more about Worth; of Scott and Taylor he wrote, “Both were pleasant to serve under—Taylor was pleasant to serve with.” And Grant, the old general of the Civil War looking back on the first generals he had seen in battle, saw himself in both men. But surely in personality he recognized more of himself in Taylor—and never more than when he wrote, “Taylor was not a conversationalist, but on paper he could put his meaning so plainly that there could be no mistaking it.”28
After the war was won, Ulysses Grant and some army friends went hiking on Popocatepetl. Simon Bolivar Buckner, who had been a year behind Grant at West Point, was the leader of the expedition, which included a goodly number of other future rebels, among them Richard H. Anderson, who was to take Spotsylvania, and George B. Crittenden. They went by horse high up on the mountainside—at one point losing an overladen mule from a cliff-side ledge. The weather on the trip to the base camp was wet and ominous, and they tried unsuccessfully to sleep in a roofless cabin. The next morning they set out to reach the summit in spite of snow and strong winds. They struggled to get above the storm, and as they came out into the sun the clouds behind them broke momentarily and they could see the valley below. The world was beautiful, but everywhere there was snow; late in the day, they agreed they could not reach the top of the mountain, and quickly headed back.29
Getting below the snow line, they rode their horses down the treacherous mountain trail and, exhausted, reached the village. They slept on blankets on a dirt floor until “one and then another of our party began to cry out with excruciating pain in the eyes” caused by the preceding day’s exposure to the glare of the snow. They were frightened that they had gone blind; the eyes of several of the men were swollen shut, and the next day they had to be led on their horses down to a more comfortable village. There, after another night, all were “entirely well and free from pain.”30
The weather that morning, wrote Grant, “was clear and Popocatapetl stood out in all its beauty, the top looking as if not a mile away, and inviting us to return. About half the party were anxious to try the ascent again, and concluded to do so. The remainder—I was with the remainder—concluded that we had got all the pleasure there was to be had out of mountain climbing.” While Buckner and his crew went up to the top of the mountain, Grant and his half of the party explored the villages of the Valley of Mexico. Recalling the experience in the Memoirs, he wrote, “I made no notes of this excursion, and have read nothing about it since, but it seems to me that I can see the whole of it as vividly as if it were but yesterday.” He could have said the same of the Mexican War or the Civil War, for he had an extraordinary sense of the whole of these far larger and more complex events as well. His memories of the wars came back to him with sequential clarity, the details always illustrating rather than obliterating the total story. When, forty years later, he wrote his excellent history of the Mexican War in the Memoirs, he had available to him the letters he had written Julia at the time and the account of his role in Mexico in the biography written by Albert D. Richardson in 1868. But more importantly, he had his own splendid memory. His command of fact was great, and he shaped fact into history with skill. He was impressive in his mastery of chosen episodes of his past.31
There was no mistaking the fact that Grant loved Mexico. Perhaps his letters and the Memoirs do not elevate him to the fine company of visitors like Fanny Calderón de la Barca, who have richly evoked the beauty of the country, but Grant’s observations are keen and sympathetic. The obligatory Protestant contrast between the poverty of the people and the costliness of the rich churches is made, but the churches are dismissed out of hand. Grant took a good many long looks at the fine edifices, so different in their baroque splendor from the buildings he had seen when prowling the streets of Philadelphia and New York. He gave nature its due as well, and the country through which he passed was superb. The mountains, beautiful themselves, made splendid the cities they framed. This was so at Monterrey and perhaps more so in the Valley of Mexico. Writing to Julia in March 1848 he told her, “I generally gallop into town every day…. I wish you could be here to take one of these rides with me and see the beautiful Valley of Mexico. The whole Valley is spread out to the view covered with numerous lakes, green fields, and little Villages and to all appearance it would be a short ride to go around the whole valley in a day, but you would find that it would take a week.”32
If Grant got to see ordinary people only in crowds on the trips to forty-odd foreign countries that he made after he became famous, he had had, in Mexico in the 1840’s, a chance for intimacy. He achieved a bit of Spanish, and as he walked unobtrusively through the streets and talked to the Mexican people, going about their business, he found them tolerant rather than distrustful of the invading soldiers. The poverty troubled him: “I pity poor Mexico. With a soil and climate scarsely equaled in the world she 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.” Grant was observant, but he did not offer a comparison between the farmers of Mexico and the people hacking subsistence farms out of the woods of Ohio or working as slaves across the river in Kentucky.33
In his realistic look at the Mexican people, Grant sensed their confusion and resignation at being caught in poverty and the events of civil war and foreign invasion, and yet he himself participated in the moral ambiguity of the time and place by taking home with him as a servant a young boy, Gregorio. Grant did not forget that he was an intruder in Mexico and took note of, but could not quite sort out, the contrasts between the warm Mexican welcomes and the cruel treatment by some Yankees of those who were too welcoming. For misguided reasons, presumably of gentility, one or two of Grant’s descendants saw to it that when his letters to Julia were published (over a century after they were written), certain of his descriptions of Mexicans were deleted. Too bad. Even if the terms used were pejorative it would have been interesting to see what they were. Grant looked about him clearly and saw the people with sympathy but not sentimentality. His days in Mexico were marked by keen alertness, and his friend Simon Bolivar Buckner was not far wrong when he said, “The Mexican War was our romance.”34