by Ron Chernow
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 batt
le,” 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.