by Ron Chernow
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 exhi
larating effects of intoxicants, but he was at all times a level headed man.”56
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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.