by John Waugh
McClellan had yearned for this to happen. He had had his heart set on graduating and going directly to the halls of the Montezumas to fight “the crowd—musquitoes & Mexicans &c.” Now the government in Washington had just obliged him by declaring war on Mexico. It didn’t get much better than this.1
A war with Mexico, which they could all go to, and star in, had been their true heart’s longing all spring, as ardently desired as graduating. “Nothing is heard but promotion, glory and laurels,” George Derby wrote his mother.2
The likelihood of war between the two countries had been present for months, even years; but it had been heating up in earnest since final U.S. annexation of Texas in December. Clashes of arms had broken out along the Rio Grande in the spring without benefit of a declaration of war. Things hadn’t been right between the two nations for some time. There had been long-standing claims by U.S. citizens against Mexico, and an itchy desire to possess not only Texas but all of the California and New Mexico territories—the entire southwest, if possible. James Polk, the Democrat elected president in 1844, had sent John Slidell, a Louisiana politician, to the City of Mexico to negotiate a purchase of the region.
When the Mexicans refused to sell, or even to receive Slidell, Polk prepared to acquire the property by other means. In March he ordered General Zachary Taylor’s Army of Observation to occupy Point Isabel on the Rio Grande. Mexico, which considered the Nueces River, not the Rio Grande, as the proper boundary between it and Texas, took an uncharitable view of this move. In Mexican eyes it was aggression, pure and simple.
When a force of eighty U.S. dragoons sent out by Taylor to reconnoiter near Matamoras was ambushed in late April, and eleven of his soldiers killed, six wounded, and most of the others captured, the fat was in the fire. When the Mexicans cannonaded Fort Texas across the river from Matamoras on May 3, that did it. Polk condemned these acts as shameful violations of American soil and indignantly called on Congress for a declaration of war.
As far as folksy, homespun Zachary Taylor was concerned, hostilities had already begun and he acted accordingly, not bothering to wait for Congress to make it official. On successive days he fought and won two battles against the Mexicans, at Palo Alto on May 8 and Resaca de la Palma on May 9. On the thirteenth the Congress caught up with the general, declared war, and made George McClellan a happy cadet.3
On the day war was declared the United States Army was far from being a juggernaut. Americans were not in the habit of keeping large standing armies. There were 6,562 regulars available for duty army-wide—counting all of the noncommissioned officers, musicians (war was essentially unwageable without music), and privates. There were but fourteen regiments—two dragoon, four artillery, and eight infantry.4 The president proposed to beef up this slim force dramatically, more than doubling the size of the regular army to fifteen thousand, and complementing it—or hamstringing it, depending on the point of view—with fifty thousand volunteers.
McClellan and his classmates were delighted with the plans to double the size of the regular army. That meant they were likely to be quickly promoted from their lowly graduate status as brevet second lieutenants. In peacetime they could stagnate in that rank waiting for the second lieutenants above them to be promoted, resign, or die. There was room only for so many second lieutenants in the army. In wartime, promotions came faster. Armies expanded and fought and people got killed. The war therefore seemed promising. It was very popular at West Point.
Members of the class were less thrilled with the idea of the fifty thousand volunteers. To the army regulars, and particularly to haughty young West Pointers such as these, volunteers were scum. McClellan viewed them so. It appeared to him that the government had placed General Taylor in a very dangerous situation, “from which, may the Lord deliver him, for it is pretty certain that the volunteers wont.”5
McClellan didn’t go to Mexico immediately after graduation as he had hoped he would. He was ordered instead across campus—an indirect route at best. Two days after Congress declared war on Mexico, it passed legislation creating a company of sappers, miners, and pontoners in the regular army—an engineering outfit. Such a company had long been needed. Up to then the army’s elite engineering corps had consisted solely of officers and was all chiefs and no Indians. The new legislation called for a one-hundred-man company of enlisted engineer soldiers to be trained and stationed at West Point, capable of going anywhere to construct military roads, build bridges, erect fortifications, place batteries, lay siege lines, and, if necessary, fight. They would be recruited from scratch: ten sergeants, ten corporals, thirty-nine artificers or privates first class, thirty-nine laborers or privates second class, and two musicians to play the essential music.
Three officers would command the company. One of them, a captain, Alexander J. Swift, had already been selected months before and had simply been waiting for the necessary legislation. Now he was in business; he could name his two other officers and recruit his men. Swift was a brilliant engineer, a West Point graduate fresh from study in the French school of engineering in Metz where he had learned all the latest advanced practices. While waiting for the legislation to pass he continued to teach practical engineering at West Point. There he had found the man he wanted as his first lieutenant, Gustavus W. Smith, also a brilliant young engineer and an assistant professor of civil and military engineering. And Smith, known as “Legs,” for his tall, spare, angular frame, had just the man in mind for the company’s second lieutenant: his good friend, brand new graduate, and star of the class of 1846—George McClellan. And so it was.
While Swift knew all there was to know about the latest French engineering practices, he knew little about the latest techniques for handling troops. A new set of drill procedures had been adopted by the army since his cadet days at West Point. But Smith, and particularly McClellan, knew all about that. So while Swift supervised the engineering instruction and collected the necessary tools and equipment, Smith and McClellan would whip the new troops into shape.
It took time just to get the troops. Although the pay scale for the new company was higher than ordinary, so were the standards, and the officers had to be more particular whom they recruited. The prospective engineer soldier had to be American-born, single, active and sound in body, able to read and write, and have a “mechanical trade.” It took about four months to find and attract enough men of such attributes to bring the company to three-quarter strength. Only four of the new recruits had ever served a prior enlistment. Three of those were immediately made sergeants and the fourth became the bugler. A dumpy Dutchman from Long Island, accustomed perhaps to eating his own cooking, became the company chef. Smith and McClellan soon had the seventy-one rank and file, called Company A, well fed, well led, well tuned, and ready for war.6
It hadn’t been easy. McClellan put in long hours—every day until about 10:00 at night. “The men are all raw recruits,” he wrote home, “& the whole affair is a new thing, both to officers & men, & we have not only to work but also to study.” But it was getting done and McClellan predicted they would “ ‘astonish the natives’ if they will only give us half a chance.”7
Company A sailed from New York City for Mexico on September 26, 1846, arriving at Brazos de Santiago fourteen days later. McClellan believed it was “probably the very worst port that could be found on the whole American coast.” They camped on a sandbar six miles long and half a mile wide, where “whenever a strong breeze blows the sand flies along in perfect clouds, filling your tent, eyes and every thing else.”8 But at least he was there. Mosquitoes and Mexicans beware.
Tom Jackson was at home on leave in western Virginia on July 22 when he was ordered to report to Fort Columbus on Governor’s Island in New York City. He left the next day, and on August 19 he and his commanding officer, Captain Francis Taylor, with their thirty artillerymen and forty horses, were on their way to Pittsburgh. There they caught a boat down the Ohio to the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. About the time George McClel
lan and his company of sappers, miners, and pontoners were shipping from New York, Jackson and his artillery company were leaving New Orleans.9
Dabney Maury was in Virginia visiting his mother and explaining his class standing to the Pathfinder of the Seas when his orders arrived. He was directed to report to Captain Stevens T. Mason commanding a squadron of Mounted Riflemen. The regiment of Mounted Rifles was mint-new, created by Congress in May to patrol the Oregon Trail. But the trail would have to wait. There was a war going on. Four other members of the class were assigned to this crack new cavalry outfit as well: Innis Palmer, Alfred Gibbs, George Gordon, and McClellan’s old roommate Jimmy Stuart. They were also ordered to the Rio Grande.
Maury’s squadron shipped from Baltimore on a brig, the Soldana, an unseaworthy craft of about two hundred tons. With Maury, seven other officers, and 160 men ricocheting about inside, the Soldana rolled wretchedly in a gale, snapped a mast—a new one was hurriedly pieced together at sea—endured several other storms, was reported lost with all hands, and finally arrived at Point Isabel thirty-two days later. The news awaiting them as they swayed drunkenly down the gangplank was even worse than the trip. General Taylor had just wrested another city, Monterey, from the Mexicans—without any help at all from them.10 McClellan had missed it too, “a piece of bad luck, which I shall regret as long as I live.”11 They all had.
William Montgomery Gardner, relegated by his final class standing to the infantry, received his orders about the same time as the others. As he was steaming up the Rio Grande, he caught the measles, and when he arrived at Camargo, General Taylor’s base on the river, he was “in a pretty bad fix.”12 It was sad enough that he had landed at what a fellow officer described as “certainly the most filthy and disgusting place on this dirty earth,”13 but Gardner had to be carried unheroically ashore ridden with the measles, and dumped in an abandoned abode house. There, or so it seemed to him, he was forgotten.
He was soon rediscovered, however, and moved to the post quartermaster’s quarters where he continued to convalesce, but with an easier mind. No sooner had he recovered and reached his regiment, on the noon following the battle of Monterey, than he caught something else. This time he was put in a common private’s tent, with a soldier detailed to wait on him, and began all over again the recuperating process. War was not a healthy thing for William Gardner. It wasn’t at all what he expected. There was no glory in this.14
Whatever they expected, McClellan, Jackson, Maury, Gardner, and some thirty classmates had arrived at one place or another near the seat of war by the end of 1846.
Soon after Maury staggered ashore from the Soldana, he discovered that it was a very small world indeed and that nothing in it had changed very much. His squadron’s first assignment was to escort some siege pieces being hauled to Monterey under the charge of that stern and unsociable cadet from his West Point days, Tom Jackson. Maury noted that Old Jack was working those siege pieces down the road as he used to work everything at West Point: they “had to move along.”15
The company of sappers, miners, and pontoners was also working its way along, from Point Isabel to Camargo. McClellan, riding at its head with Captain Swift and “Legs” Smith, was the picture of military preparedness. He carried a double-barreled shotgun, two revolvers, a saber, a rapier, and a bowie knife. He was expecting trouble.16
Trouble soon came, not from the Mexicans, but from the mosquitoes. At Matamoras he began feeling no better than William Gardner. Racked with malaria and dysentery, he checked into the hospital and was there for nearly a month, nursed by his old West Point roommate, Jimmy Stuart, who had arrived with the Mounted Rifles.17
As it worked out, he missed very little. There was no transportation available to take the engineer train from Camargo to Taylor’s headquarters at Monterey, so as he recuperated the company settled in and resumed engineer and infantry instruction. The amused army watched, and was soon calling it “the pick and shovel brigade.”18 There was little fighting at the time and not much else to keep a restless army amused. It was now simply a matter of waiting for the next battle.
The army had changed its job description. It was no longer an army of observation, but an army of invasion, and General Scott himself was on his way to Mexico to give new meaning to the concept. The canny Scott, a thinking man’s general, was coming with a different idea about how to get to Mexico City. He planned to go by way of Vera Cruz, capturing that principal seaport first, then battering his way the 260 miles from there up the national road to the capital.
It wasn’t an original idea. Hernando Cortez, the first non-Indian conqueror of Mexico some three centuries before, had done the same thing. The strategy worked then and ought to work again. The route was direct, and the road—the great national highway that the Aztecs had built—was ready-made for an invading army. To undertake this feat of arms, Scott simply appropriated most of Taylor’s army, his right as general in chief, including virtually all of the young officers of the class of 1846.
Its objective thus refocused, the army began collecting at Tampico in the winter of 1846-1847 to await the general in chief’s arrival.
Winfield Scott was certain of one thing. He needed West Pointers. All of his years of chairing the board of visitors at the June examinations had taught him something—that the talent of the army was embodied in the officers who had been graduating from the academy over the last few decades. He had heard enough recitations to be convinced of that. None of his generals, himself included, had that kind of engineering training. And he clearly saw that the conquest of Mexico would require it.
So he started surrounding himself with West Pointers, beginning with Colonel Ethan Allen Hitchcock, who had graduated from the academy in 1817 and served a tour of duty as its commandant of cadets. He installed Hitchcock as his inspector general, then brought in an elite group of West Point-trained engineers, all of them high graduates of their classes—the gods and demigods.
Chief among them was a gracious, exceedingly competent captain of engineers from the class of 1829, Robert E. Lee of Virginia. Another was a Creole lieutenant from Louisiana and from the class of 1838 with a fiery disposition and a Gallic name, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard. Also among them, newly minted from the class of 1846, were young brevet second lieutenants George McClellan with the pick and shovel brigade, and two new topographical engineers, Edmund Lafayette Hardcastle and George Derby.
The wait for the invasion gave the members of the class of 1846 time to look around and register their disgust with those not as favored as they—the Mexicans and the volunteers. McClellan decided Mexico was “altogether the queerest place I ever came across—it is chaparal, chaparal, nothing but chaparal, so far.” He concluded it was “very romantic perhaps at a distance, but there’s a great deal of plain reality in it down here.”19 As for the Mexicans, “they are content to roll in the mud, eat their horrible beef and tortillas and dance all night at their fandangos.”20
McClellan was even harsher in his judgment of the volunteers, now that he had seen them firsthand. The “confounded Voluntario,” he raged, “a miserable thing with buttons on it, that knows nothing whatever.”21 Some “don’t know the butt from the muzzle of a musket,” another regular officer agreed. “They are useless, useless, useless,—expensive, wasteful—good for nothing.”22 The regulars were dismayed by the uncivilized conduct of many of the volunteers in Mexico. A. P. Hill, still at West Point, complained that some of them “have committed outrages … which would call the blush of shame to the cheek of a Goth.”23
The one good-for-nothing thing with buttons on it that disgusted the class members and virtually every other West Pointer more than any other was Brigadier General Gideon Pillow. If there was ever an officer elevated undeservedly to high rank by political pull, they figured he was it. A former law partner of President Polk with no discernible military talents, Pillow offended the West Pointers with virtually everything he did. At Camargo he was credited in the press with having fortified th
e city by digging the ditch on the inside instead of the outside of the stronghold, thus raising a work to protect the attackers rather than the defenders. Even the lowest “immortal” at West Point knew that wasn’t right. To underscore their scorn, Jimmy Stuart hilariously mounted a Texas mustang, galloped at the fortification and leaped the parapet and ditch in a single bound.24
George McClellan was out of bed and fit again. But now Captain Swift was sick. When the engineer company filed out of Matamoras four days before Christmas, there were only two officers, McClellan and Smith, and forty-five men still on their feet. The captain and twenty of the company were left behind in the hospital with their Mexican diarrhea and fevers.25
The company had been ordered to proceed overland with a column of volunteers under the command of Irish-born Major General Robert Patterson. The company’s job was to move in front of the column and make the road passable for the artillery and wagon trains that followed. On the 350 miles to Tampico, the sappers and miners hewed roads out of what had been little more than mule paths over which no wagon had ever rolled. The little company learned to build bridges over streams with no other material than the wretchedly stumpy crooked chaparral growing by the side of the trail.26
But the life suited McClellan. He wrote home that he could live this way for years without becoming tired of it. Around the campfires at night, he wrote his mother, “you never saw such a merry set as we are—no care, no trouble—we criticize the Generals—laugh & swear at the mustangs & volunteers.…” A regular officer, he assured her, has no habits—“it is immaterial to him whether he gets up at 2 A.M., or 9—or whether he don’t go to bed at all. When on a march we get up at 2 or 3, when we halt, we snooze it, till 8 or 9—when we have cigars we smoke them, when we have none, we go without—when we have brandy, we drink it, when we have not, we make it up by laughing at our predicament—that is the way we live.”27