Crucible of Command

by William C. Davis

  Also pressing Grant to resign was his father, who repeatedly told his son that every officer ought to resign after Polk’s civilian commissions. By April 1847 ’Lys seemed to agree, telling Julia, “I believe he is right and if there is no prospect soon of the War closing I will go any how.”36 The separation was becoming intolerable. He had seen her just once since their engagement. She signed her letters with X’s or the word “kiss” at the bottom, but kissing paper was scant satisfaction to a young man in love.37 “I begin to believe like some author has said, that there are just two places in this world,” he told her. “One is where a person’s intended is, and the other is where she is not.”38

  Of the broader debate raging in the United States over the war, the accusation of the Whigs that it was a land grab to extend slavery, he said nothing. He grew up in an environment unfriendly to slavery, but was hardly unfamiliar with blacks, free and slave. When he first came to Texas with his regiment he had what he called a “black boy” attending as a hired servant, and even an adult male was still a “boy” to him and his circle, which only put him in the mainstream of American attitudes.39 As with several matters of the mind and heart, like politics or religion, young Grant was at best indifferent to slavery at this stage of his life. However, as the war progressed he certainly revealed sympathy with one class of the poor and disfranchised, the common people of Mexico. On first contact they did not impress him much. “The people of Mexico are a very different race of people from ours,” he told Julia. They looked and lived more like Indians than whites, which was not a compliment. He feared that soldados conscripted from that base might be uncontrollable, and expected cruel treatment if he were ever taken prisoner. As for enemy officers, he did not like the class system that produced most of them. “It is a great pity that [the] people [who] compose the Mexican soldiery should be made the tools for some proud and ambitious General to work out his advancement with,” he lamented to Julia.40 He believed that the great mass of the soldados had little understanding of why they fought.41 “The better class are very proud and tyrinize over the lower and much more numerous class as much as a hard master does over his negroes,” he wrote, his earliest comment on the potential cruelty of slavery.42

  What allowed that tyranny in Grant’s mind was that the poor people of Mexico, though proud, were uneducated, subject to the will of an elite, “and they have no government to act for them.”43 To young Grant government was, or ought to be, an agency for the protection and benefit of all, not just those in power. “I pity poor Mexico,” he wrote as the war approached its close. “With a soil and climate scarsely equaled in the world she has more poor and starving subjects who are willing and able to work than any country in the world.” Yet poverty seemed universal and he saw beggars everywhere. The rich tyrannized the poor with “a hardness of heart that is incredible.”44 Just as disturbing was how he saw some of the undisciplined American volunteers in the army treating the Mexican people, especially Texans who combined racial intolerance with a spirit of vengeance dating back to their revolution of 1836. They “seem to think it perfectly right to impose upon the people of a conquered City to any extent, and even to murder them where the act can be covered by the dark,” he lamented early in the war. Worse, some men enjoyed the violence. “I would not pretend to guess the number of murders that have been committed upon the persons of poor Mexicans.”45 Grant may not have regarded Mexicans, or blacks, as equals, but he clearly believed that the presumed superiority of his race conferred no license to deny human rights to another.

  By February 1847 he was tired of the country, one of the reasons the subject of resigning kept recurring.46 Grant wrote Julia in April 1847 that if “there is no prospect soon of the War closing” he would resign. As a quartermaster he was going nowhere. “I have been a very long time ballancing in my mind whether I would resign or not,” he confessed. By this time he could have been in a comfortable and prosperous business with his father and married to Julia, or nearly as comfortable as a college professor.47

  Happily, Grant’s war took a different turn after Polk finally put Scott in command in January 1847. Scott ordered the bulk of Taylor’s army to march to the mouth of the Rio Grande on the Gulf of Mexico, and then it moved by transports to Tampico where it met several thousand fresh soldiers coming with Scott, who would lead the combined force in a joint land and naval assault on the port city of Vera Cruz, the start of a campaign to take Mexico City itself. For the first time Grant and Lee began to revolve in the same orbit.

  Lee stayed reticent about America going to war with Mexico. He believed it might have arisen from acts of either contestant, or “force of circumstances,” observing only that if the United States did not understand the causes before going ahead, it should have. Before long he confessed a belief that Polk had “bullied” Mexico into war, and expressed himself ashamed of the fact, while in May 1846 he put himself squarely in the Whig camp when he said he doubted “the justice of our cause.” Still, he went on to say that a soldier’s duty was to implement government policy, not to try to influence it.48 As a soldier he felt “it is rather late in the day now to discuss the origin of the war.”49 Still, it was a relief when war relieved him from more bureau duty in Washington. On August 19 orders sent him to report to Brigadier General John E. Wool at San Antonio, Texas.50

  Before leaving Lee made out his will, leaving everything to Mary, including Nancy Ruffin and her children at White House. Little had changed in his attitude toward slaves. A year earlier Mary Lee had agreed to a proposition from Senator Albert S. White of Indiana to hire “her girl” Judy Meriday for a period of six years, “after which she will be considered as fully liberated.”51 But Lee was not giving her freedom. As an Arlington slave, she belonged to Mary Lee’s father, and in arranging her hire and then freedom Lee simply carried out his father-in-law’s wishes—and likely Mary’s—for a favored servant, as he would do in future as Custis’s agent. Lee himself no longer owned his only other slave. Gardner’s hire had gone from $60 a year when Lee inherited him to just $30 in 1844, and though Lee wanted him hired in 1845, no one engaged him and he was still unemployed. Gardner was at least forty-nine now, possibly as old as seventy-two, and no longer an income-producing asset. Sometime during the past eighteen months Lee had either freed him, sold or given him to Hill Carter, or let him purchase his freedom with money Lee allowed him to earn over the years.52 Now Lee stipulated that in the event of his death, Nancy Ruffin and her children were to be “liberated so soon as it can be done to their advantage & that of others.”53

  It was an equivocal sort of emancipation. He might have freed them that moment if he wished. By these terms they remained slaves as long as he lived and perhaps much longer. Should he die in Mexico, they could remain in bondage as long as Mary—or their children after her—wished, since they were the obvious “others” to whose advantage he referred. His intent was most likely to keep the slaves producing income for his widow and orphans, and leave it to Mary to decide when to emancipate them, probably when they became more trouble than they were worth. That was another reason for freeing or giving away Gardner now that he was not an earner, and might only be a headache for Mary to look after. The only implicit promise was that his heirs would not sell them. Beyond that he hinted at freedom, but gave nothing. Of course, he need not have mentioned liberation at all if he resolutely wanted the Ruffins to remain his family’s property. Lee was still ambivalent toward voluntary emancipation. His mother had been content to have slaves if they produced income and caused no problems, and his attitude had been much the same, but he was evolving. The influences of his wife and her family, as well as others, had brought him to the place where he could contemplate manumission, even if only tentatively. It remained to be seen if he could travel farther down that road.

  On September 21 Lee rode into the city of the Alamo to find Wool’s forces gathering. He missed the Battle of Monterey, which commenced that very day three hundred miles to the south, but reconnoitere
d in advance of the column on its march to the Rio Grande, finding roads where there were any, making roads where there were none, and bridging streams. On October 12 Wool and Lee crossed the river into enemy territory only to learn of the eight-week armistice. Wool marched on to Monclova and halted to wait out the cease-fire, Lee the engineer meanwhile mapping the town for possible defenses, probably his first such exercise in the field.

  The armistice lapsed on November 19, and Wool received word from Brigadier General William Worth that an attack on his command at Saltillo by a Mexican force seemed imminent. Wool immediately put his men on the march, and Lee again rode ahead to clear the road, but after a forced march to link with Worth they found that the feared Mexican attack proved to be only rumor. More false alarms followed, at one of which Lee and a Mexican guide rode some distance from the army looking for the enemy. Finally in the moonlight he spotted their white tents on a distant hillside, only to discover on closer inspection that it was really a flock of sheep. Still, he learned from the shepherds that soldados were some distance away and no immediate threat. Pleased at genuine intelligence of the foe’s actual position, Wool added the duty of acting inspector general to Lee’s brief as his ranking engineer officer.

  Finally on January 16, 1847, General Winfield Scott, assuming overall command in Mexico, sent an order for Lee to join his staff as engineer for the campaign. Fortresses ringed Mexico City, and Scott needed an engineer to aid in their reduction. After a trip of more than 250 miles, Lee reached Scott at the mouth of the Rio Grande, where the general immediately placed him on his staff along with Lee’s old friend Joseph E. Johnston. On February 21, after a rough voyage south along the Mexican coast, Lee saw the shores of the Island of Lobos near Tampico, Scott’s staging area for the landing at Vera Cruz 200 miles farther south. “I shall have plenty to do there,” Lee wrote his sons a few days later, “and am anxious for the time to come.”54 So was Lieutenant Grant, already there for some days. By March 3 they were at last ready to finish the voyage, Lee on a vessel named for a Northern state, the Massachusetts, and Grant on one named for a Southern state, the North Carolina. Two days later they both saw Vera Cruz.

  Lee heard his first hostile shot when cannon mounted in the fort San Juan de Ulloa opened fire on his transport without harm. Five days hence, on March 9, Scott made the landing. The regulars went ashore first, Grant and the 4th Infantry among them, and incredibly there was no Mexican resistance whatever. The next day Scott and his staff went ashore, looked about, and concluded to lay siege to the fort rather than attempt a massed attack. A siege was engineering work, and Lee saw plenty of it in the slow but methodical preparation of lines of defensive works and gun emplacements. One day riding with Scott inspecting progress, they came upon a young officer walking alone in a field despite orders for officers to remain in quarters unless on assignment. The lieutenant said he had not received the order, but Lee peremptorily sent him back to his quarters, then rode away. Later that day Lee came to apologize for his abruptness, and he and Lieutenant George B. McClellan parted amicably.55

  Lee positioned heavy cannon, constructed field works, and on March 24 actually directed the fire of naval guns from the Mississippi and a detachment of her sailors commanded by none other than his brother Lieutenant Smith Lee. In a twist of irony, the first bullet ever aimed at Captain Lee came from a fellow soldier’s pistol during a reconnaissance when a trigger-happy American sentinel accidentally fired at him from a post so close that the flame from the muzzle singed Lee’s uniform even as the bullet missed him.56 Three days later the city surrendered, and when Scott filed his formal report of the operation, he included Lee among others for special mention. Thereafter Scott, who liked to quip that “boys are only fit to be shot,” turned more and more to the Virginian, and the ensuing daily intimacy with Winfield Scott would be the making of Lee, provided he did not get shot.57

  There was no making of Lieutenant Grant at Vera Cruz, however. He felt little but frustration during the twenty-day siege. He saw and heard the army in action, but remained in the rear. “I had but little to do except to see to having the Pork and Beans rolled out,” he complained to Julia.58 Determined not to be left out of the action, Grant tried to resign the assignment as supply officer. “I must and will accompany my regiment in battle,” he told Garland in a tone approaching insubordination, adding that he would willingly face a court martial should the government suffer any loss of public property while he was in action. Garland sternly told Grant that his current duty was “an assigned duty, and not an office that can be resigned.” He needed Grant where he was. “However valuable his services might be, and certainly would be, in line,” said Garland, “his services in his present assigned duties cannot be dispensed with.”59

  A supply officer was a bookkeeper, among other things, and Grant had a quick mind at mathematics. The maintenance and management of wagons and horse or mule teams was essential, and when it came to draft animals, especially horses, Grant likely had no superior in the army. His late friend Hamer reportedly spoke of how Grant once reduced “a train of refractory mules and their drivers to submissive order.”60 With those skills he could be an asset in a staff role, but that hardly made relegation to the rear during action any less galling. After the fall of Vera Cruz on March 29, and after Scott’s army started the two-hundred-mile march toward Mexico City, Garland made Grant’s appointment as quartermaster and commissary permanent.61

  At least the march to Mexico City gave Grant a chance to see more of Mexico, and he determined to see as much as possible.62 It also gave him a chance to refight the war in his mind. Barely had the conflict begun before he indulged in first speculation, and then as he grew more confident, second-guessing and even criticism, though none of it went beyond his letters to Julia. He had been frustrated even while en route to join Scott. “Just think in all this time there has been but three battles fought toward conquering a peace,” he grumbled. “If we have to fight I would like to see it all done at once.”63

  After a few weeks the army set out to find the main Mexican army, or take Mexico City, or both.64 Thanks to Lee’s reconnaissance Scott was able to keep going. When the army approached Cerro Gordo, Lee’s scouting took him so close to the foe that he found himself behind Mexican lines and had to hide beneath a fallen log by a spring while Mexican soldados came for a drink. In the end he escaped and reported a possible path for the army. The next day, April 17, Scott sent Lee to guide men of one division by his newfound route, while the rest of the army waited to advance until Lee’s party routed the foe from their defenses. It worked almost to perfection, and the following day Lee ably positioned two batteries to pummel the foe, before Scott sent him to lead yet another party around Cerro Gordo to the enemy rear, to cut off an avenue of retreat. Lee succeeded in time for Scott’s main assault to put the Mexican army and its commander General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna to flight, resulting in the capture of nearly one-third of their numbers and the disorganized dispersal of most of the rest.

  No man in Scott’s army was more pivotal in the victory. In his first real battle as a soldier, Lee remained cool, acted judiciously, and showed more than the ordinary quotient of bravery. The dead and dying all about were the first casualties he had ever seen, and his impressions echoed Grant’s. “You have no idea what a horrible sight a battlefield is,” he wrote his oldest son a week later. At one point Lee helped collect Mexican dead and wounded and got them to one of their own surgeons, and then he heard the cries of a little girl and followed them to a hut where he found a soldado little more than a boy, his arm shattered by a musket ball. Lee got the boy to a doctor, to the sound of the girl crying “mil gracias” to him over and over again.

  Again Scott singled him out for praise. Several months hence the war department gave Lee a brevet promotion to major for gallantry at Cerro Gordo.65 For his part, Lee idolized Scott. “Our Genl. is our great reliance,” he wrote soon afterward. “He is a great man on great occasions.” Scott kept his eye constan
tly on his objective, never lost confidence in his strength and resources, took good care of his men, and did not send them into battle until after he had—often with Lee’s aid—given them every possible advantage of position and intelligence. “His judgment is as sound as his heart is bold & daring,” said Lee, who clearly had found his model of the great commander.66

  Scott sent Lee ahead once more with the advance to take the town of Jalapa, and immediately afterward Lee moved on to La Hoya and Perote, where he surveyed more Mexican defenses. He was in Perote the first Sunday after the recent battle, and attended an Episcopal church service presented for the army’s officers. “I endeavored to give thanks to our heavenly Father for all his mercies to me, for his preservation of me through all the dangers I have passed,” he wrote Mary, “for I know I fall short of my obligations.”67 Lee may have been telling his wife what he knew she wanted to hear, but seeing the face of battle at last also may have started the process of impelling Lee to turn his face more heavenward on his own.

  During that march Grant studied the landmarks of the battles they fought, like the Castle San Juan de Ulloa and the mountain pass at Cerro Gordo, which he thought impregnable.68 Scott halted at Puebla on May 15 to refit and await reinforcements, while sending engineers like Lee out to reconnoiter.69 The general also sent Quartermaster Grant out with a train of wagons and several hundred men as escort to collect foodstuffs from planters to sustain his army on the next march. It was Grant’s first independent command in an enemy country, and a valuable experience in living off the land.70