The Training Ground

by Martin Dugard

  CHAPTER FOUR

  William Hardee’s comments are taken from his official report. Taylor’s words denoting the start of the war come from his official message to Washington.

  When Captain Seth Thornton was charged with cowardice for his role in the battle at Carricitos, soon after having been returned to the American side in a prisoner swap, Hardee, fearful that his good name as an officer would be tainted, requested a court of inquiry to clear him. Both men were cleared of all charges.

  Hardee went on to serve with distinction in the Mexican War and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel by its conclusion. In 1855 he wrote a seminal book on tactical warfare titled Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics for the Exercise and Manoeuvres of Troops When Acting as Light Infantry or Riflemen (often shortened to Hardee’s Tactics).

  From 1856 to 1860, Hardee served as commandant of cadets at West Point. He resigned his commission on January 31, 1861, when Georgia left the Union, and accepted a new commission in the Confederate army. Lieutenant General Hardee led troops at the battles of Shiloh, Chattanooga, Perryville, Stones River, and Murfreesboro and during the fall of Atlanta. Hardee commanded his men with such distinction that he was nicknamed Old Reliable. Somewhat ironically, Hardee’s Tactics was the standard tactical manual for both the Union and the Confederacy.

  Hardee’s last engagement was in March 1865, at the Battle of Bentonville, in which his only son was killed in a cavalry charge. One month later, Hardee surrendered his depleted forces to Union general William Tecumseh Sherman. He died in Wytheville, Virginia, on November 6, 1873.

  As for Thornton, the man who inadvertently started the Mexican War with his tactical blunder, he was shot in the chest at the village of San Augustin, just outside Mexico City. He died instantly.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Napoleon Jackson Tecumseh Dana’s poignant, hilarious, and often extremely bawdy letters home are easily some of the most entertaining wartime correspondence ever written. All comments attributed to him come from those letters, now published. Dana recovered from his wartime injuries and remained in the army until 1855, then moved to Minnesota with Sue and began a successful banking career. He was appointed a brigadier general when the Civil War broke out, and he served with distinction at Antietam and Second Bull Run. He was wounded once again at Antietam during the thick of the fighting. Dana recovered from those wounds, too, and resigned his commission once again in May 1865. He went on to another successful business venture, this one in the railroad industry. He died in 1905.

  The account of Major Jacob Brown’s surgery is from the official battle report, written by Captain Hawkins, and from Dana’s own eyewitness accounts. Brownsville, the town that grew up around Fort Brown, still bears the major’s name.

  Captain Edgar S. Hawkins was promoted to brevet major for his heroism. Later in the war, he was placed on indefinite sick leave for injuries and illness suffered in the line of duty. Though technically still an active-duty major when the Civil War began, he was declared unfit for service and retired. He died shortly after that war ended, at the age of sixty-four.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Longstreet’s quotes are taken from his memoirs. Curiously, though Longstreet fought in the Mexican War until the fall of Chapultepec, his personal story ends rather abruptly after Resaca de la Palma. Either he got tired of trying to remember those years of his life (his memoirs were published in 1895), or he was being modest about his wartime accomplishments.

  The discussion of Jomini and tactics is elaborated quite well in Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson’s Attack and Die. My knowledge of artillery and armament was greatly enhanced by Naisawald’s Grape and Canister and Manucy’s Artillery through the Ages. For further information on the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, the official reports filed by Taylor make for a fine overview.

  Artillery specialist “Prince” John Magruder fought for the South during the Civil War but fell out of favor with Robert E. Lee and was reassigned to Texas. He was victorious at the Battle of Galveston in January 1863 but spent the rest of the war away from the larger action. Afterward he served as a mercenary in the Mexican army, but when Emperor Maximilian was toppled, Magruder fled back to Texas, where he lived out his days. He died in 1871, at the age of sixty-three.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Meade’s comments can all be found in his letters and memoirs. Freeman Cleaves’s excellent Meade of Gettysburg offers great history and insights into this man. All quotes attributed to and referring to Meade in this section come from those two sources. Adrian George Traas’s From the Golden Gate to Mexico City, published by the U.S. Army’s Center of Military History, not only tells the story of the Topographical Corps during the Mexican War but also describes the job requirements of a topo in great detail.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The differing battlefield accounts of Longstreet, Grant, and Meade make for a nice study of each individual. Grant shows himself to be pensive and prone to study before acting; Meade is heroic, though uncharacteristically vainglorious; and Longstreet is humble and reflective. General Díaz de la Vega’s comment is taken from K. Jack Bauer’s The Mexican War and was originally overheard by Captain McCall.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Of all the characters in this story, none was quite so enigmatic and difficult to understand as Jefferson Davis. He is undoubtedly one of the most accomplished Americans of his, or any, time. I leaned heavily on various biographies of him, as his own letters and personal papers were not often revealing. The quote from the North American was taken from Johannsen, and notes on the nation’s mood were influenced both by Johannsen and by Justin W. Smith’s compelling The War with Mexico.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Grant’s comments about his beard can be found in his letters, as can Dana’s reference to Brown’s death. Grant wrote of Taylor’s “no pillaging” policy in his memoirs, which were also the source of his comments on the volunteers. Meade was extremely outraged about the influx of volunteer regiments, particularly when his worst fears about their character and bravery were proved all too true in Matamoros. It is interesting, by the way, to read the different descriptions of that riverfront city by the wide variety of soldiers who served there and wrote down their impressions. Some soldiers were pleasantly surprised at the city’s quaint character, while others found it filthy and oppressive.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The “bake one’s brains” comments came from Dana, with his typical tendency toward the dramatic, as did the descriptions of fandangos. Monterrey Is Ours! a collection of Dana’s letters, shows a man conflicted by his love and concern for his wife, and the more carnal desires arising from such a lengthy separation. His words describe that timeless conflict fighting men struggle with to this day, and he is alternately lusty, flirtatious, jealous, and quietly accusing in letters to his wife, Sue. The fandango descriptions were just the tip of the iceberg.

  The insights into the Quartermaster Department can be found in Dr. Alvin P. Stauffer’s article in the May–June 1950 edition of the Quartermaster Review. He displays a deep zeal for logistics in the piece, and it is a treat to read.

  Walt Whitman’s comments and the description of religion and the American psyche lean heavily on Johannsen.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Mexican-American War and the Media (http://www.history.vt.edu/MxAmWar) Web site, compiled by the University of Vermont, was an astounding source of newspaper knowledge, with complete articles from newspapers around the nation and around the world detailing the war as it unfolded. Such a resource saved countless hours in newspaper libraries, staring at microfilm in the hope of finding that one sentence or paragraph to fit a particular passage. Most newspaper articles mentioned in this book can be found there, including this chapter’s quote from the Times.

  As always, the simple overview came courtesy of Bauer’s The Mexican War. Davis’s quotes came from William J. Cooper’s and Felicity Allen’s works on Davis.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

 
Sherman’s trip aboard the Lexington was quite well documented in his memoirs. All quotes are taken from there. It’s interesting to note that Charles Darwin visited Puerto Soledad, the site of the Lexington’s participation in the 1831 Falklands crisis, aboard the HMS Beagle in 1833. He made a point to note that the small port and former penal colony was populated by “runaway rebels and murderers.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The story of the Mississippi Rifles is told in splendid detail in Joseph Chance’s Jefferson Davis’s Mexican War Regiment. Anyone seeking to know more about that regiment would do well to give it a read. Both that book and the various Davis biographies offer a compelling discussion of the superior ballistic capabilities of the rifle over the standard-issue musket.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  There is no lack of research on Abraham Lincoln, but I relied mostly on Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years as the definitive source on his life and political ambitions. Illinois in the Mexican War, by Samuel Bigger McCartney, offered details about the men from that state and the economic reasons they were eager to volunteer for duty. Among those men was Lincoln’s friend Edward Dickenson Baker, who went on to live a long and prolific life. During the Mexican War, he served as a colonel with the Fourth Regiment of the Illinois Volunteers, seeing action at Veracruz and Cerro Gordo. After the war, he served another term in Congress as a representative from Illinois and then moved to San Francisco to practice law. In 1860 he moved to Oregon, where he was promptly elected to the U.S. Senate. When the Civil War broke out, he was authorized to form a volunteer infantry regiment and was killed in action during the Battle of Ball’s Bluff on October 26, 1861. The Senate mourned him for thirty days, wearing black crepe armbands in Baker’s memory. A city and a county in Oregon are named in his honor, as are several military forts. A life-size marble statue of Baker stands in the Capitol.

  Edward Baker Lincoln, his namesake, died of tuberculosis in Springfield, Illinois, in 1850. The boy was just three years old.

  Another political acquaintance of Lincoln’s who went off to fight was General James Shields. He was seriously wounded at Cerro Gordo, recovered, and then was wounded again in the fighting around Mexico City. Shields returned to civilian life after the war. He represented Illinois in the U.S. Senate from 1849 to 1855 and Minnesota in the same capacity from 1858 to 1859. He resumed his military service during the Civil War and was notably defeated by Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson during the Valley Campaign of May and June 1862. He died on June 1, 1879, in Ottumwa, Iowa.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The tortuous journey upriver to Camargo was something Grant and Dana wrote home about in great detail. Their comments are taken from those letters, as are Dana’s descriptions of Camargo. A fascinating reference source was The March to Monterrey: The Diary of Lieutenant Rankin Dilworth, though for an unusual reason. Although his journal was insightful, the book’s editors saw fit to add great amounts of historical minutiae to round out Dilworth’s words. Among those facts were the specifics on the Aid.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The man responsible for making sure Grant remained a quartermaster was Taylor’s chief of staff, Major William W. S. “Perfect” Bliss. This young officer was an extraordinary individual. He graduated from West Point in 1833 at the age of seventeen, finishing ninth in a class of forty-three. It was there that he earned his nickname, thanks to his classmates’ belief that he was a genius. Indeed, Bliss could read thirteen languages and speak six fluently. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of philosophy, military tactics, and even poetry. After a year fighting the Cherokees as an infantry officer, Bliss returned to the academy and taught math for seven years. He fought against the Seminoles in 1840–41 and then began a decade of service to Zachary Taylor. Bliss served as Taylor’s chief of staff until the end of the Mexican War, married the general’s daughter in 1848, and served as personal secretary to Taylor during his presidency. He returned to military life in 1850 and died three years later in Pascagoula, Mississippi, from yellow fever. Both the Fort Bliss Military Reservation and the Fort Bliss National Cemetery bear his name.

  Second Lieutenant Alexander Hays, the son of a congressman, graduated from West Point a year behind Sam Grant, finishing twentieth in a class of twenty-five. The two became close friends during the Mexican War. Hays resigned his commission in 1848 and headed out for the gold fields of California. Failing utterly as a miner, he returned home to Pittsburgh and worked as an engineer.

  During the Civil War he enlisted as a private, but he distinguished himself on the field of battle, was promoted steadily, and soon became an officer again. Hays was injured at the Seven Days’ Battles near Richmond, Virginia, in June 1862 and then had his leg shattered by a bullet during the Second Battle of Bull Run. Shortly after his convalescence from that wound ended, he was promoted to brigadier general. Hays’s most famous moment came while commanding the Third Division of the Second Corps during the Battle of Gettysburg. Hays played a pivotal part in repelling Pickett’s Charge, riding up and down the lines on horseback and ordering his troops to “stand fast and fight like men.” He had two horses shot out from under him that day, but his actions broke Pickett’s attack and preserved the Union victory. When the battle was won, Hays promptly kissed his aide and then rode up and down his lines dragging a captured Confederate flag in the dirt. Hays was later killed at the Battle of the Wilderness in April 1864, shot through the head by a rebel bullet.

  Hays’s quotes in this text come from Smith’s Grant.

  Texas Ranger Samuel Walker was lanced in the back by Mexican guerrillas while escorting a supply convoy from Veracruz to Mexico City in October 1847. He was originally buried in Mexico, but in 1856 his remains were exhumed and moved to the Odd Fellows Cemetery in San Antonio.

  Abner Doubleday’s comments are taken from the footnotes to Dilworth’s journal. Doubleday, who was a major at the start of the Civil War, was present at Fort Sumter when the first shots were fired, and over the course of the war he was promoted all the way up to colonel, with a secondary rank as a major general of volunteers. He led men at the battles of Second Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg. He was relieved of his command on the second day at Gettysburg, however, when Major General George Meade questioned his combat effectiveness. Returning to the field in a lesser capacity, Doubleday was soon wounded in the neck. He served in Washington for the remainder of the war. He died on January 26, 1893, at the age of seventy-three. Despite prevailing myths to the contrary, he did not invent baseball.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Taylor’s comments can be found in The Mexican War and Its Heroes. Dana was the officer who made reference to Monterrey’s being a veritable Gibraltar. The comments about military life for regular soldiers come from Ballentine.

  Brigadier General William Worth became a major national hero after the Mexican War. He was a boastful man, and proud of saying that he was the first man to go ashore during the invasion of Veracruz and the last man to leave Mexico City at the end of the American occupation. He died of cholera shortly after returning, however, at the age of fifty-five. Worth’s remains were buried in Worth Square in New York City. A massive obelisk at the juncture of Broadway and Fifth Avenue marks the site. Fort Worth, Texas, bears his name.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  As one of the Mexican War’s seminal and most viciously fought battles, Monterrey was a favorite memoir topic. Even though Meade, Grant, and Dana all wrote capably about the action, my favorite is John R. Kenly’s Memoirs of a Maryland Volunteer. His descriptions of the battlefield have a powerful narrative quality that transports the reader into the action. Also worth noting is Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue.

  Major Joseph Mansfield, designer of Fort Brown, ended the Mexican War as a colonel. He remained in the army for the rest of his life and was promoted to brigadier general at the start of the Civil War. Mansfield, whose beard and hair were snowy white by then, was known for being vigorous and more than a little fu
ssy. He was, however, a very capable leader and in September 1862 assumed command of the Army of the Potomac’s XII Corps. Shortly thereafter, he was shot in the stomach at the Battle of Antietam and died of his wounds — one of six generals killed in that engagement. A monument marks the spot where he fell.

  The comments of Meade and Grant are taken from their letters and memoirs. Worth’s comments come from The Mexican War and Its Heroes. The description of Twiggs is from Maury. Davis’s quotes come from Chance’s Jefferson Davis’s Mexican War Regiment and Cooper’s Jefferson Davis, American. Kenly’s Maryland Volunteer, Reid’s Scouting Expeditions of the Texas Rangers, and Chamberlain’s Recollections paint a vivid picture of the hellish fighting inside Monterrey. Meade attempts to tell the same story in his letters and does so well enough, but as he was on the other side of the city, all of his observations are secondhand. Nevertheless, I chose to include his comment about “ten of our gallant officers” being slaughtered.

  In John Russell Bartlett’s 1848 Dictionary of Americanisms, he noted that seeing the elephant was primarily a southern term but was later adopted by soldiers throughout the Mexican War. In time it came to mean more than just the first taste of battle and soon included the entire weary experience of military life in Mexico. “Men who have volunteered for the Mexican war, expecting to reap lots of glory and enjoyment, but instead have found sickness, fatigue, privations, and suffering, are currently said to have ‘seen the elephant,’ ” wrote Bartlett.

  Colonel John Garland was breveted to brigadier general after the Battle of Churubusco. He was shot in the chest by a Mexican sniper after Chapultepec, while marching his army into Mexico City. He recovered and returned to active duty as a full colonel once the war ended. He would remain in the army for the rest of his life. During the Civil War he chose to side with the Union, although he hailed from Virginia. Both his son-in-law, James Longstreet (who had married Garland’s daughter in 1848), and his nephew Samuel Garland Jr. became generals in the Confederacy. Garland died suddenly while in New York City, just months after the Civil War began.