Crucible of Command

by William C. Davis

  Scott did not move again until August 7, and Lieutenant Grant put some of that time to use doing his own investigation of the campaign thus far and what lay ahead. Scott met and fought Santa Anna’s army at a series of fortified positions of the Mexicans’ choosing. Despite the American success, Grant wondered if there might be another route to approach Mexico City “without meeting such formidable obstructions, and at such great losses.” At Cerro Gordo he saw how Lee’s reconnaissance enabled Scott to bypass a fortified position and force the enemy to retreat without a severe battle, and that suited Grant’s idea of strategy better than costly assaults. “If I should criticize, it would be contrary to military ethics, therefore I do not,” Grant went on, but he left little doubt as to what policy he would have preferred.71

  Grant got a map, interviewed scouts and friendly locals, and then noted the roads leading to Mexico City and what he could learn of the location and strength of its defenses. He concluded that instead of heading directly west and encountering the heaviest of the foe’s defenses, the army could pass north of the city by an alternate route and then hit its northwestern suburbs where the foe anticipated no threat, without having to take any forts. Moreover, that route was over solid ground, whereas the direct approach crossed swamps, ditches, and other hazards before confronting heavily fortified positions outside the city. Grant sent his map and suggestions through the chain of command, but they probably never reached beyond Garland, if they got that far.72 Grant never heard from headquarters. Rather than be offended, he assumed that “the opinion of a lieutenant, where it differs from that of his commanding General, must be founded on ignorance of the situation.” Surely Scott knew better than he. Grant might daydream of being a commander, but he never lost sight of how to conduct himself as a subordinate.73

  He also reflected on the contrasting management styles of the two army commanders he had served. He preferred Taylor. That general rarely if ever wore a uniform, and Grant himself already felt ambivalent about military costume. Taylor was plain and unaffected, which very much suited the lieutenant’s temperament and personality. He did his own reconnaissance as often as not, cared little for a large retinue of staff officers, and wrote orders in brief, simple, unmistakable language so that there might be no confusion as to his intent. “He knew how to express what he wanted to say in the fewest well-chosen words,” Grant later observed, “but would not sacrifice meaning to the construction of high-sounding sentences.” Grant took that last to heart. Still, he saw much to emulate in Scott as well. Setting aside his ornate uniform and flashy staff—Lee included—Scott was also precise, though wordy in orders and pronouncements, as if conscious that he wrote for posterity. Grant admired both of them, yet concluded that while he was fortunate to serve under either, it was a pleasure to serve with Taylor.74

  On August 10 Scott launched his army toward Mexico City. Two days later Lee began a series of reconnaissances that directed the army around heavily fortified Mexican positions, engaging a local guerilla leader named Dominguez and some of his followers to ride with him as scouts.75 Their route took them south of the city via an indirect approach, to the village of Churubusco, and there on August 19 and 20 Lee repeatedly took a prominent role in placing artillery and directing its fire against enemy positions. He made two daring midnight traverses across a barren no-man’s-land between separated columns to carry information, and went without sleep for a day and a half, the first evidence of his considerable physical stamina in the field. No officer in the army did more to pave the road to victory, and when the engagement was done, the way to Mexico City lay open and every high-ranking officer in the army paid tribute to his services. In due time, the war department produced another brevet to lieutenant colonel.

  Mexico asked for an armistice and Scott granted it on the understanding that peace negotiations would resume, but after two weeks of inactivity he terminated the armistice at midnight September 6, and immediately called Lee to reconnoiter approaches to the city. Meanwhile, Grant still languished doling out “the Pork and Beans.” He saw engagement after engagement from the rear, and finally got a chance for action again, though at first it seemed anticlimactic. On September 8 at Molina del Rey, he and other officers entered some mill buildings in their advance and he spotted soldados on top of one. Ordering a few soldiers to help him tip an abandoned cart upright against the outside wall, he climbed the cart’s harness shafts to the roof of the building hoping to capture the riflemen, only to find that another infantryman beat him to it.

  Lee only observed the fighting that day, then continued trying to find for Scott the best avenue of approach to take the city. A few days later the army marched toward the city in the distance, and Quartermaster Grant joined Worth’s advance on the western approaches rather than remain in the rear. Suddenly a field piece backed by Mexican infantry halted them. Grant ran across the road to a stone wall extending some distance beyond their position and discovered a vantage from which snipers might suppress the enemy fire. Running to the rear he asked for a dozen volunteers to follow him, then led them forward under what Colonel Francis Lee called “the most galling fire,” covered by musketry from the rest of the column.76 Once behind the stone wall again, Grant led them forward to a position on the flank of the enemy cannon and infantry where “by a rush, and well directed fire” they disrupted the Mexican defenders and forced them to pull back. Grant had opened the road to advance once more.

  Having been in the forefront thus far, he stayed there, up the street to the city gate at San Cosme Garita. He saw a church belfry that afforded a commanding view of the enemy rear if a cannon could be emplaced atop it, and on his own initiative commandeered a small howitzer and crew. The enemy still held the road leading directly to the church, so Grant and his men disassembled the howitzer and carried the gun over a field and through a series of ditches breast-high with water. Rather quaintly, instead of barging in when he reached the church, Grant knocked at the door. When the priest answered and declined to give him entry, Grant employed the little Spanish he knew to explain that he was coming in whether the padre liked it or not. That opened the door, and soon Grant’s party had the howitzer atop the belfry, reassembled it, and began lobbing balls into the enemy rear, creating consternation.

  General William Worth saw the gun’s effect and sent Lieutenant John C. Pemberton to bring Grant to him. Worth complimented Grant and sent him back with another howitzer, hoping to double the effect, though Grant was unable to use it. Still, aided by Grant’s gun and others similarly placed, Worth took the gate leading into the city before dark. That night Grant and others spent the hours cutting through walls connecting one house to another up to the gate to allow them to assault under cover the next day, but that night the Mexican army evacuated.77

  Months of tedious garrison duty followed as peace negotiations dragged on. Grant’s regiment moved to Tacubaya about four miles from Mexico City, with little for him to do but file forms and write reports. He let his reddish beard grow nearly halfway to his waist and enjoyed wonderful health, but found life oppressively dull. He rode into Mexico City almost every day to attend the theater, see an internationally famous juggler perform, and more. He indulged his traveler’s curiosity by joining a two-week expedition up the great mountain Popocatepetl and explored a mammoth cave near Cuernavaca. Yet he could think only of Julia and three years of engagement during which he had seen her but once. “I have the Blues all the time,” he wrote her in June. To pass the time he may have played cards occasionally, and of course there were taverns.78

  His old friend John W. Lowe of Brown County, now a captain in the 2d Ohio Infantry, passed through in May 1848, and left afraid that Grant spent some of those idle hours drinking, though Lowe did not say whether he saw Grant imbibing or merely repeated hearsay. Moreover, Ohio volunteers resentful of Grant’s earlier criticism might have retaliated by malicious gossip. Perhaps Grant did overindulge.79 He was twenty-six years old, fifteen hundred miles from home, engaged to a woman he had
not seen in years, bored and lonely, and surrounded by hundreds of others in the same situation—a virtual prescription for treatment by bottle. If he drank too much, no superior complained of inefficiency, and nowhere in a stationary army would such laxity show up more quickly than in a quartermaster’s duties. Fred Dent saw Grant almost daily at Tacubaya. If he found Grant drinking too much, brotherly concern might have passed a warning to Julia, yet nothing suggests her awareness of such behavior. Soldiers away from home did drink frequently, and sometimes too much. Grant was a soldier away from home.

  He certainly spent many of those idle hours reflecting on the recent successful campaign, and noted something about the soldiers his army fought. “The Mexicans fight well for a while, but they do not hold out,” he observed. “They fight and simply quit.” They had scant drill or discipline, inadequate rations, and little or no pay. Relieve those deficiencies, he believed, and “they would fight and persist in it.” As it was, they fought as much as anything out of fear of their officers.80

  Others looked back on his performance before Mexico City. General Worth singled out Grant for special mention in his report. Major Francis Lee, now commanding the 4th Infantry, complimented the lieutenant for distinguished gallantry. Grant’s actions on September 13 took place early in the day and his spontaneous drive to the city gate was “the first and most advanced demonstration on the city,” Lee believed. “I look on them as the most gallant acts of the day.”81 Garland added that Grant “acquitted himself most nobly upon several occasions.”82 In fact, he won brevet promotions to first lieutenant and captain, and at virtually the same time gained confirmed permanent rank as first lieutenant to fill a vacancy in his regiment.

  Mexico and Mexicans impressed Lee far less than Grant, but Lee was not a traveler, and throughout his life no place or people compared to Virginia and Virginians. He did like the way Mexico City’s women eschewed stockings and showed their “polished ankles,” but even the señoritas posing on their balconies failed to interest him. “There is ugliness enough in this city to sink it,” he thought.83 He found the “miserable” populace “idle worthless & vicious,” he wrote Mackay. Condemning the “power & iniquity of the church,” Lee concluded that if the conquered nation was to progress, the influence of the Catholic church must be curbed, and free opinions of government and religion introduced instead.84 This streak of anti-Catholicism grew in him in the years to come. Suspecting that the peace might break down, he promised “they will be taught a lesson.” In fact, for the first time Lee revealed a hint of “manifest destiny” sentiment. “They will oblige us in spite of ourselves to overrun the country & drive them into the sea,” he said. “I believe it would be our best plan to commence at once.” European immigration could then bring an energetic and free-willed Protestant population to take the country from the Mexicans and develop it properly. “It is a beautiful country & in the hands of the proper people would be a magnificent one.” Now that they were there, he believed they should occupy and hold all of it. If they simply defeated the Mexicans and then withdrew to the Rio Grande, they would be confronting them on the other side again soon enough. “By confining ourselves to the boundary we desire,” he predicted, “we shall have a warlike peace, or a peacelike war for years.85

  Lee had never spoken like an expansionist before. Even now he did not sound much like the typical Southern expansionist, usually a Democrat, bound on gaining new territory for the spread of slave-based plantation economy. Rather, he saw a promising country lying fallow under the stewardship of a lazy native population ruled by a corrupt Catholic aristocracy. If the United States was to be safe from further conflict, it needed a stable and prosperous democratic neighbor on its southern border. Only white Protestant Europeans, the stock that built his own country, could provide that.

  To achieve it, however, the Americans would have to avoid fighting among themselves. Close as he was to army headquarters, he saw firsthand the unseemly jockeying for position and favor, the feuds between generals like Winfield Scott and Gideon Pillow over credit for successes. If he had not already been disdainful of such vainglory, this campaign made him so. “You will hear of many more things than have taken place,” he told Mackay.

  We are our own trumpeters, & it is so much more easy to make heroes on paper than in the field. For one of the latter you meet with 20 of the former, but not till the fight is done. The fine fellows are too precious of persons so dear to their countrymen to expose them to the view of the enemy, but when the battle is won, they accomplish with the tongue all that they would have done with the sword, had it not been dangerous to do so.86

  The seemingly endless months of negotiations that followed left Lee “nauseated,” especially when they resulted in a treaty that paid Mexico millions for territory already taken by conquest.87 “We are the Victors in a regular war,” he wrote brother Carter in March 1848. The Mexicans had been “whipped in a manner of which women might be ashamed,” and the Americans had “the right by the laws of war of dictating the [terms] of peace and requiring indemnity for our losses and expenses.”88 More to the point, Lee could not forget the friends maimed or lost forever. He tried to be bravely flippant about it, writing a cousin that “there is a terrible deficiency of Arms & legs among them, but I have come to the conclusion that one of each is sufficient for a man, & its duplicate Superfluous,” but he could not sustain the pose after burying three friends. He felt no exultation in victory. “Give me back our brave officers & men, & I will return all we have taken,” he went on. “Their whole country cannot replace in my feelings what it has cost us.”89

  That disillusionment only grew when Scott brought charges against Pillow for insubordination and outrageous claims of credit for victories in which he scarcely participated. Lee tried to mediate between the two, but failed, and feared Scott would destroy his own reputation in the acrimonious feud. By March, Lee thought seriously of leaving the army to give more attention to his family when he returned home, but in May when Polk recalled Scott and Lee could have gone with him, he opted to remain longer to prevent Scott’s enemies from accusing the general of taking good officers away from the army in Mexico.90 Finally on May 21, 1848, he learned that one branch of the Mexican congress had voted final passage of a treaty of peace, and the other was expected to do likewise. “We all feel quite exhilarated at the prospect of getting home,” he wrote his brother Smith.91 The ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the end of the month made that prospect a reality. Captain Lee had fought his war with sword, wits, and ingenuity, not his tongue, and everyone around him saw that, most of all Scott, who marked him. He would continue to watch Lee, even give his career a gentle boost when he could. He might have need of such a man in years to come.

  When they left Mexico, Lee and Grant could reflect that each had experienced a good war. To the extent that Grant went home a hero, the names Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, and Monterey on his record made him already a distinguished veteran before Lee ever set foot in Mexico. For the first time Grant’s name appeared in a few newspapers, and not just thanks to his father’s promotion. Of course, the Mexican War made Lee professionally. He emerged to much more notoriety than Grant, thanks in no small part to the war catapulting him into the intimate orbit of Scott, who virtually became a father figure. The Virginian’s contribution to the final victory was undoubtedly greater than Grant’s, too. Lieutenant Raphael Semmes, commanding a sloop in the blockade of Vera Cruz, soon afterward declared that Lee was “endowed with a mind which has no superior in his corps,” a peculiar instinctive grasp of topography that seemed intuitive, and “a judgment, tact, and discretion” that made him invaluable to Scott.92 His name saw print virtually hundreds of times from Texas to Wisconsin, and Louisiana to New England, making him, if not quite a household name, easily the best known and most highly complimented engineer officer of the war. That, and the widespread acknowledgment that Lee stood higher than any other in Scott’s esteem, propelled him to an almost exclusive strat
um within the army. Engineers did not become field generals, and should he stay in his corps, he could expect little more than another promotion or two and an administrative position in Washington. Should circumstances and his reputation for energy, insight, and daring secure him a shift to a line regiment, however, advancement might be much more rapid. If another conflict came, that rise might be dramatic indeed.

  Grant saw more action and wider service under both Taylor and Scott, but also more of the tedium of long weeks immobile during the armistices. Lee’s war was compact, a single but climactic campaign. Taken together, their actions spoke well indeed for West Point, and for the initiative and bravery of the men of the United States Army. Sometime while they were in Mexico they met. Lee thought he recalled it but could never picture Grant’s face, for diminutive, red-bearded “Toad” Grant was not then a man to remember. Grant never forgot their meeting, for the magnificent Lee was not a man to forget.

  What remained to be seen was how well they readjusted to the tedium and inactivity that constituted the bulk of the real world of soldiering.93

  4

  TIMES OF TRIAL

  IN 1854 John Livingston, compiler of illustrated books on outstanding men of the time, approached first Grant and then Lee asking each to provide photographs and details of his war experiences for the new edition of his American Portrait Gallery. Clearly he regarded their exploits as on a par. Neither appeared in the final book. Grant may not have responded at all, while Lee declined, saying, “I fear the little incidents of my life would add nothing to the interest of your work nor would your readers be compensated for the trouble of their perusal.”1 For the first time their names were almost linked.

  Captain Lee came home in the summer of 1848, with brevets to major, lieutenant colonel, and colonel, but disillusioned with the army after what he saw in Mexico. A soldier prepared for war all his career, but once it commenced “a Sett of worthless, ignorant, political aspirants or roués, are put over his head, who in spite of themselves, he has to tug on his Shoulders to victory.”2 It made him sick to witness. Henceforward leaving uniform for another pursuit came often to mind, but he could never make the break. Before long he was sent to Baltimore to oversee construction of Fort Carroll, where Mary and the children joined him and they spent the next three years.3 Though Lee sometimes complained that “times are pretty dull,” in fact he enjoyed those years. The construction challenged his ingenuity, but as he told son Custis, “all difficulties can be overcome by labour & perseverance.”4 Then in May 1852 orders reassigned him to the superintendence of the Military Academy. It was a comfortable post, and he could expect to be there for several years. He assumed command on September 1.