The first speaker corrected him: “No, Santa Anna didn’t do the actual shooting. He wasn’t even there. But he did turn his men against the emperor and they did the shooting.”
At this point, as my grandfather noted in the brief memoir he left his family, they went in to dinner, for it was approaching the time when Mexicans took their evening meal, eleven o’clock at night, and when they seated themselves in the massive sheepskin-covered armchairs at the huge oak table, Señora Palafox said from her place at the foot of the table: “We have a special entertainment for our guest,” and signaled to a maid who brought into the dining room a girl of about eight dressed in a national costume of extraordinary charm: flowing skirt reaching to the floor, many lacy petticoats, colorful bodice, lovely shawl, high comb in her hair, and a bright ring on the middle finger of each hand.
“This is our Alicia,” Don Alipio said proudly as he placed his arm around her, “our little China Poblana, and now she will explain to our guest from the north the legend of her beautiful dress.” In a musical voice the child recited: “Many years ago on the Manila galleon that arrived in Acapulco came this beautiful Chinese lady, dressed as you see me tonight. She came as a slave, but she was so charming that everyone loved her and she married the king, and all the ladies at court had to dress the way she did. And today this is our national costume.” Bowing to each of the couples, she curtsied to her mother and left the room.
“A few minor corrections,” Don Alipio said. “We never had a king in Mexico since the time of Montezuma, and the ladies were not forced to dress like the Chinese slave. They wanted to, but Alicia was correct, that is our national costume for pretty women,” and each of the Palafox wives confessed that even till this day they kept as treasures the China Poblanas they had worn as young girls.
I have spent more time than I probably should have in writing about this evening, and especially the party dress of an eight-year-old girl, but that particular dress became one of the cherished treasures of my family, and Jubal, not an emotional man, wrote shortly before he died: “I was twenty-four that night I dined with the Palafoxes, and I confess I was struck by the peaceful character of their handsome home. They scarcely knew there had been a war.”
That night as he tried to sleep in his room at the House of Tile, he lay awake trying to decipher why the Palafoxes were being so attentive. He did not have to wait long for an explanation because the next day the three men who’d been at dinner came to the hotel and suggested that he ride with them out to the Mineral, and when they arrived at the site he had wanted to revisit, they began to explain how this precious property, which they owned, could be converted into one of the world’s top mines with the injection of substantial amounts of American money and especially engineering skills.
A man whom he judged to be Don Alipio’s brother kept hold of Clay’s arm as he explained: “It’s not just money we need, but machines, too. They make fine ones in Sweden, I’m told. But above all, we need bright young men like you. Am I correct that you studied mining?”
“I learned trying it on my land in Virginia, after reading books sent from England and Germany.”
“Is that why your general sent you out here? Is he a bright man, can he understand a business opportunity when it stares at him?”
Clay replied: “General Scott holds businessmen in contempt,” and the Mexicans laughed: “Like our generals, and what fools they are.”
In less than an hour the Palafoxes had shown Grandfather the entire surface structure of the Mineral, indicating which buildings and processes would be replaced if funds were available, and then they asked: “Suppose you were in charge? What would you do?” and Clay said: “Around the entrance to the mine I’d build a stone wall, maybe three feet high, with a gate through which you’d get to the shaft.”
“Why would you do that?”
“I like to see things neat. No, what I mean is, there are always certain things that ought to be done, just for their own sake.”
The Palafoxes asked: “Would you be willing to go down again?” and Clay said: “I would indeed. That’s why I wanted to come. This place is magical,” and on the descent he watched carefully to see if he could detect which of the hundreds of stone steps ought to be recut.
In the bottom cavern he saw, as if they were old friends, the donkeys, the Indian men working at the face, the women hefting baskets of ore, the high ceiling and the beginning of the shaft that would take the miners down to where the next cavern would be excavated. As he explored the present one and saw the rude beds used by the men who preferred not to climb back to the top each night, he began to contemplate seriously the improvements a real mining engineer would probably undertake, and he asked one of the Palafoxes: “How difficult would it be to square the sides of the shaft?”
“You mean, all the way down?”
“Yes. It’s one of those things that ought to be done.”
“You’d better ask him.” The man indicated the Spanish engineer, but Don Alipio said firmly: “That one knows nothing,” so there was no answer to Clay’s question.
“Well,” Clay continued, “if the shaft was squared off and we found an engine of some kind, and I’m sure they make them in England, you could have a long rope and a cage at the end, and you could haul the ore up to the smelter.”
“What would be the advantage?”
“Well, these women, they wouldn’t have to climb up and down those—”
“They’ve done it all their lives, Captain. That’s how they live—I mean, earn their living. If you did it with a machine from England, how would they live?”
On the climb up, Jubal had an opportunity to inspect at eye level each step as he approached it. At the top he told the Palafoxes: “I saw four steps that ought to be recut,” and one explained: “We keep careful watch, and if something bad happens, we’re there that afternoon.”
Grandfather stayed in Toledo three weeks, making excursions out into the country, and on one he came upon Valley-of-the-Dead, from which the Altomecs had launched their conquest of the Drunken Builders, and he appreciated what an enticing sight the buildings of Toledo must have been in 1151, when the strangers swept in to take control. He also visited the Palafox bull ranch again, and twice more he climbed to the top of the pyramid, trying to visualize the fearful things that had occurred there. But most of all he frequented the central plaza, with its fine buildings, and the splendor of this colonial city was impressed in his mind.
When it came time to say good-bye to the Palafoxes, they said they hoped he would report favorably to the general, and he promised he would. He bade farewell to each of the Palafox women, and then saw little Alicia, to whom he bowed deeply: “Farewell, Señorita China Poblana,” and he was off.
On the ride back to Mexico City his troops ran into trouble, not from the Mexican army, which had been instructed to honor his safe conduct, but from the bandits who infested all highways and who had learned that an attack on an American unit, while risky, produced rich rewards. About ten miles past Queretaro, where wealthy travelers were often spotted on their way to the capital, the bandits struck, and for nearly half an hour there was heavy firing, but Jubal and the petty officer in charge of the cavalry so ably kept their men under control that the sorties were repulsed with two bandits dead and no Americans killed. It had been a spirited fight, for which Clay would earn another commendation and a medal.
Upon his return to the office he occupied with the other aides he found General Scott in pitiful condition. Still convinced that everyone was plotting against him—and many in fact were—he had ordered the arrest of three of his subordinate generals, including President Polk’s personal spy, the infamous General Pillow; but they in turn had brought charges against him. The liberal Democrats in Washington, seeing a chance to spike Scott’s conservative Whig ambitions for the presidency, ordered the charges against the three generals dropped, while those against Scott were to be prosecuted with a general court-martial. Clay helped Scott write his p
rotest to headquarters: “Never has a general accomplished so much with so little and in reward has been so savagely abused and humiliated by his superiors.”
In later years when Clay told this story he would conclude: “And I wanted to add my postscriptum: ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourselves to treat a general this way,’ but when I tried to say this to the general himself, he brushed me aside: ‘It’s what happens when politicians try to direct wars.’ ”
My grandfather told one more story about his duty with Scott: “At breakfast on the morning I was to leave, Scott was under a kind of military arrest. Charges that he had stolen funds or something like that, and when it came time to say good-bye he said: ‘You know, Clay, I never intended being a soldier. Back in 1807 I was admitted to the bar and considered my course in life well set. But I had barely started when the British frigate Leopard committed an outrage against our ship Chesapeake. I heard about it late in the evening, and that night, with no sleep, I bought a fine charger, rode twenty-five miles in the dark, and borrowed the uniform of a tall trooper. At sunrise I offered myself as a volunteer to a cavalry unit.
“ ‘I never looked back, Clay, and when this mess is cleared up, which I’m sure it will be, I propose to be the chief officer of the United States military forces.’
“ ‘How could that be?’ I asked in amazement, and he said: ‘Because if they have any sense they’ll see that I’m the best man available—by far. And they’d have to choose me.’ And it happened just as he said. When our Civil War broke out, he was placed in charge of all Union forces, and he did a brilliant job of establishing the great design that defeated us. Three hundred and fifty pounds, subject to fainting fits, suspicious of everyone and hated as few military men have ever been, he was the architect of Union victory, and as a Confederate fighting against his strategy, I cursed every time his name was mentioned.”
In the thirteen years between 1848, when he left Mexico, till 1861, when he became intensely concerned about the efforts of the Northern politicians to deprive Southern planters like himself of their right to own and work slaves, Jubal Clay lived a happy life on Newfields, his cotton kingdom northeast of Richmond. Now most of his family’s two thousand acres had been cleared of trees that had once formed a part of the Wilderness; carefully cleaned and graded, his cotton was drawing top prices in Liverpool, his slaves were passive again after creating minor disturbances fomented by Northern radicals, and he and Zephania, with their two boys and a girl, lived the stately life of Virginia planters. At home they entertained the gentry of their district and participated in musical evenings in which Jubal’s mother, in her seventies, played the piano while Zephania played the cello, an instrument she was still learning to play, and he the flute. Among the neighbors were several fine voices, both male and female, so that varied concerts of high quality could occasionally be offered the neighbors in the county.
But the highlight of any month came when Jubal and Zeph, as everyone called his wife, drove into Richmond for the richer social life there. On these occasions the Clays saw Southern culture at its best. Businessmen trained in the fine universities of the North mingled with religious and political leaders educated at William and Mary or Tom Jefferson’s University of Virginia. But any Richmond gathering carried a somber, stabilizing influence exerted by the military men who had been trained at West Point. These were men of honor, who, in those excitable years, were already grappling with some of the gravest dilemmas a man can face: Do I owe my allegiance to the army at whose headquarters I was trained or to my home state, which nurtured me and instilled in me the scale of values to which I subscribe? At one informal meeting in 1860 a colonel named Longstreth who had served in the Mexican War with two junior officers he admired told Clay’s social group: “I knew no finer Virginian than young Robert E. Lee, a West Point man devoted to the army, but also a staunch Virginian. If trouble comes, and I’m increasingly sure it will, he’d face a difficult choice. Fight for the North or the South? But I also watched another type, an aggressive, almost uncivilized lout from some Western state, name of Grant—he was also West Point—and I’m sure he’d remain with the North. I liked Lee, disliked Grant intensely for his lack of any culture whatever, but judged they’d each be honest military men according to their different lights.”
This concept of two men, each a graduate of West Point, heading in two radically different directions, and each with ample justification, fascinated Clay: “Maybe men like me were luckier. We didn’t go to West Point to absorb Northern ideas. We stayed home and sharpened our Virginia, Carolina and Georgia loyalties, then got our military training on the field, in Mexico. Our choice is a lot simpler. Let the North make one false move against us, and it’s war.”
“Do you expect it?”
“No. I see quite clearly that the commercial interests of both North and South require a prolonged period of peace.” Several in the group agreed, with one planter named Anderson making an interesting observation: “Of the two nations”—here he pondered the appropriateness of that term—“yes, I do believe we’ve become two nations, whether we wanted it that way or not, but of the two, the South has far more to gain by an extended period of peace than the North.”
This differentiation was far from self-evident to most of the listeners, all ardent partisans of the South, and one planter argued: “You’ll have to explain that, Anderson. Seems to me that our position, what with our command of cotton, which Europe must have, is secure.”
“No,” Anderson countered. “The true situation is that each day of peace we have a chance to grow stronger relative to the North.”
“Good God, man! Are you trying to argue that the North is stronger than us?”
“Sir, I’ve said that the present drift of peace is all in our favor. But only a madman would argue that as of the present we’re as strong as they are.”
This unpatriotic reasoning exasperated the planter: “Anderson! Look at the balance sheet. We’ve got twice as much money from Europe as the North does. Our financial structure is much sounder, and our system of management and control is superior. We’re in a favorable position financially.”
Anderson, a studious man in his fifties, had traveled in the North and could not be dislodged from conclusions that he had judiciously developed: “A nation’s survival capability is not measured by deposits in a bank. Factories are what count, miles of railway line, shops in cities, and above all, the number of men of fighting age that can be called upon.”
“None in the North have men that can fight like ours,” another planter argued, to which Anderson replied: “True, but fifteen men who can keep coming at you, one after another as required, must overwhelm the one trained rifleman.”
“Now, that’s a dangerous theory, brother Anderson,” a man in his thirties said. “I signed up yesterday to lead a company in case trouble starts.”
“So did I,” Anderson said, and the men laughed at the thought of a fifty-year-old volunteering for active duty, but Anderson explained: “I’ll be training our young men in military tactics, how one properly trained Southern boy with his good rifle, revolver and saber can hold off fifteen Northerners—for a while.”
On the ride back to the plantation that evening Jubal Clay found persistent images forming in his brain: “Trains, factories, unlimited numbers of men. And those figures growing larger every day. Hell, we don’t even have a train heading northeast out of Richmond, and won’t have one for another ten years.” As he plunged into the Wilderness other images appeared: “New men up there, as he said, piling out of every boat from Europe. No training, no traditions. But there they come. And down here? Half of our men are black and they don’t count. More important, they can’t be counted upon.” As he broke out of the Wilderness and saw the neatly tended boundaries of Newfields, its image superseded all others: “This plantation is what the fight will be about—supposing it comes. An orderly way of life in which a family can grow.”
He had always been pleased with the name the old C
lays had given their plantation, Newfields, rather than some classical name like Sparta or one like The Oaks or The Pillars. He could picture his ancestors girdling the last tree, pushing it over when it died, lopping off the branches, burning them around the fallen trunk and scattering the fertilizing ashes over the newly formed field. “It must have been exciting,” he said to himself as he approached the big house, “to see a new field come into life and to know that it did so through your work. But the delight in seeing that first crop of cotton white as far as you could see on what had once been black forest! That’s what a man lives for.”
When he reached the portico, gleaming white in the moonlight, he turned his horses over to the Negro groom and hurried immediately to his office, sat in a big chair at his kneehole desk and rang for the maid: “See if Mrs. Clay can join me.” As he waited for his wife the persistent images returned: “Factories, railroads, men, slaves, fifteen against one.” Staring at the walls of his office he thought: From this desk the Clays before me built our little kingdom. They cleared the land, planted the cotton, bought the slaves and handled them properly, found the markets and educated their children. It’s inconceivable that I would commit mistakes that would destroy all they accomplished. Nor shall I.
When his wife joined him she immediately asked: “What happened in Richmond?” for she had learned that when Jubal invited her into his study rather than joining her in the pleasant sewing room, she could be sure that matters of gravity were involved.
“Zeph, take the easy chair. This could be a long one.”
“Is this about those fields we wanted to buy?”
“I’m talking about all Virginia. The entire South. Maybe the nation itself.”
“Jubal, what are you saying?”
“It was one of those questions that cut to fundamentals. A military man, I think he was, talked seriously about North and South. Pointed out that they have the factories to produce weapons and gunpowder. They have the railroads to move them quickly here and there. And they have almost unlimited men to press these advantages.”
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