The Man Who Saved the Union (6 page)

Grant took something else from Taylor. “General Taylor was not an officer to trouble the administration much with his demands, but was inclined to do the best he could with the means given him,” Grant recalled. “If he had thought he was sent to perform an impossibility with the means given him, he would probably have informed the authorities of his opinion and left them to determine what should be done. If the judgment was against him he would have gone on and done the best he could with the means at hand without parading his grievance before the public. No soldier could face either danger or responsibility more calmly than he. These are qualities more rarely found than genius or physical courage.”

T
aylor’s force remained at Matamoros long enough for the arriving volunteers to fill out its ranks, and then it moved a hundred miles inland to Camargo, the head of Rio Grande navigation and the gateway to Monterrey, the most important city in northern Mexico. Monterrey beckoned not simply because its capture would indicate American seriousness about the war but also because, at a higher elevation than Matamoros and Camargo, it was less prone to the diseases that constituted Taylor’s principal concern for his troops.

“
When we left Matamoros,” Grant wrote Julia in mid-August, “it had been raining a great deal so that the roads were very bad, and as you may well guess, in the low latitude the weather was none of the coolest. The troops suffered considerably from heat and thirst.” Camargo had little to recommend it. “Matamoros is a perfect paradise compared to this place.” The village was small and poor, with adobe buildings with earthen floors lining its dirt streets. The water supply and sanitary facilities barely accommodated the resident population and were quickly overwhelmed by the needs of the invading force. Grant and the army regulars understood how to dig latrines and where to find clean water, but the volunteers made a horrible mess of their hydraulics and paid the price.
“
About one in five is sick all the time,” Grant wrote Julia. Many of the soldiers recovered,
but some fifteen hundred died of their illnesses.

Grant received a new assignment for the welcome journey away from the fever zone. His obvious ability with horses caused his commanders to think he would be good with mules, and so he was named quartermaster of the regiment, with the chief task of arranging transport for the provisions required for the advance to Monterrey. He resisted the reassignment. “
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,” he wrote his colonel. The protest was rejected.

The mules were necessary on account of the rough terrain between Camargo and Monterrey, and Mexicans were needed to help with the mules. This put Grant in the curious position of having to hire enemy citizens to support an invasion of their own country. Most who heard of Grant’s offer of employment refused, but others were glad for the work and pay.

The mules reminded Grant why he liked horses better. The troops would start marching early each day, leaving Grant and his helpers to break camp. “
The tents and cooking utensils had to be made into packages, so that they could be lashed to the backs of the mules,” he explained later. “Sheet-iron kettles, tent-poles and mess chests were inconvenient articles to transport in that way.” The loading took hours, and the delay caused the first-loaded mules to get restless. “Sometimes one would start to run, bowing his back and kicking up until he scattered his load; others would lie down and try to disarrange their loads by attempting to get on the top of them by rolling on them; others with tent-poles for part of their loads would manage to run a tent-pole on one side of a sapling while they would take the other.” The experience tested Grant’s patience. “I am not aware of ever having used a profane expletive in my life,” he said (in a statement none who knew him then or later would have disputed). “But I would have the charity to excuse those who may have done so, if they were in charge of a train of Mexican pack mules at the time.”

A
fter two weeks the American army reached Monterrey. Grant was more impressed than by anything he had seen in Mexico till then. “
Monterrey is a beautiful city enclosed on three sides by the mountains, with a pass through them to the right and to the left,” he wrote Julia. “There are points around the city which command it, and these the Mexicans
fortified and armed. The city is built almost entirely of stone and with very thick walls.”

The Americans pitched camp north of the city at a place they called Walnut Springs, apparently mistaking pecan trees for walnut. Taylor’s plan was to strike the city from three directions at once. The American general dispatched one division to the west to cut the road to Saltillo and then advance on the city from that direction. A second division would attack from the east, first reducing some gun emplacements at the edge of town and subsequently fighting toward the central plaza. A third division would close from the north, beginning with an assault on a structure called the Black Fort, which guarded the road by which the Americans had approached.

Preparations for the attack began during the night of September 20 when American soldiers established an artillery battery within range of the Black Fort. At dawn the next day the battery opened fire on the fort, whose gunners responded in kind. The sound of the barrages rolled back to the camp at Walnut Springs, where Quartermaster Grant remained with the reserves while the rest of the Fourth Infantry moved forward. “
My curiosity got the better of my judgment,” he explained afterward, “and I mounted a horse and rode to the front to see what was going on.” He was watching the exchange of salvos when the Fourth received the order to charge. “Lacking the moral courage to return to camp, where I had been ordered to stay, I charged with the regiment.”

The Americans raced forward, straight into a murderous fire from Mexican artillery and muskets. To Grant’s left and right his comrades fell by the dozen. Realizing their mistake, or rather their commander’s mistake, the regiment retreated to the east of the Walnut Springs road, where the terrain offered momentary shelter.

Grant was one of the few Americans on horseback, and a superior commandeered his mount. Grant looked about until he saw a subordinate on horseback and claimed that man’s animal in turn. He and the others sought better cover in a canebrake northeast of the city. There he learned that the officer who had taken his horse had been killed.

The other prongs of the attack went better. American troops gained the eastern edge of the city and climbed to the roofs of some of the houses there. From this elevation they fired down into the Mexican batteries and drove the gunners out. They turned the Mexican guns against other Mexican positions and began advancing toward the plaza. West of the city the Americans severed the Saltillo road and captured fortifications
nearby. By the end of the day Monterrey had been cut off from the outside world.

The Americans and Mexicans spent the next twenty-four hours consolidating their positions. For the Americans this meant resupplying forward troops and reinforcing the positions they had taken. For the Mexicans it entailed abandoning the least tenable of the buildings and streets they still held.

What the Americans hoped would be the final thrust began on the morning of the third day. Grant joined the forces fighting in from the east, against stiff resistance. The Mexicans had mounted artillery on rooftops from which they poured punishing fire upon American troops trying to advance along the streets. The Third Regiment lost nearly half its officers; Grant’s Fourth fared only a little better, although Grant himself escaped injury.

The Fourth had almost reached the central plaza when the ammunition ran short. The commanding officer asked for a volunteer to return to the rear with a message for help. Grant tightened the girth on his saddle and offered to go. “I adjusted myself on the side of my horse furthest from the enemy,” he explained afterward, “and with only one foot holding to the cantle of the saddle, and an arm over the neck of the horse exposed, I started at full run.” He was most vulnerable at the intersections of streets, where dozens of Mexicans had clear shots at him. Yet he dashed across at such a gallop that he was behind the next row of buildings before most of the defenders even saw him. He completed his ride winded but unscathed, only to learn that his effort had been wasted. Before the needed ammunition could be sent forward his comrades had been compelled to fall back.

The Americans on the western side of the city had better luck. Their commander, General
William Worth, ordered them to advance not through the streets but through the houses. The Americans would enter a house, drive out its defenders, and then with picks and axes cut holes through the wall into the adjoining house. They would hurl grenades through the holes, forcing the Mexican troops backward long enough to climb through and secure that dwelling. Slowly but inexorably they chopped and blasted their way to within a short distance of the plaza.

At the end of the third day the Mexican commander,
Pedro de Ampudia, concluded that his position was hopeless. He dispatched an emissary to Taylor to negotiate a truce. Taylor, with the momentum of battle on his side, initially demanded a surrender of the city and of
Ampudia’s army. Ampudia rejected the demand, pointing out that Taylor might capture the city and the army by force but only at great additional cost to the Americans. He offered to surrender the city but not his army, which would withdraw across the mountains. Taylor, not wishing to lose any more men, accepted the compromise.

The Mexicans evacuated the city the next day. Grant and the other Americans for the first time got a good look at their foes. “Many of the prisoners”—they weren’t actually prisoners but seemed so to Grant—“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. The men looked in but little better condition. I thought of how little interest the men before me had in the results of the war, and how little knowledge they had of ‘what it was all about.’ ”

5

O
NE OF
G
RANT’S COMRADES AT
M
ONTERREY WAS
T
HOMAS
H
AMER
, the Ohio congressman who had nominated him for West Point. Hamer had volunteered for service upon the outbreak of the war, and he joined Taylor’s army at Camargo. He was a generation older than Grant and a major to Grant’s second lieutenant, but the two Ohioans spent spare time together, as Hamer observed in a letter home. “
I have found in Lieutenant Grant a most remarkable and valuable young soldier,” Hamer wrote. “I anticipate for him a brilliant future, if he should have an opportunity to display his powers when they mature. Young as he is, he has been of great value and service to me. Today, after being freed from the duty of wrestling with the problem of reducing a train of refractory mules and their drivers to submissive order, we rode into the country several miles, and taking our position upon an elevated mound, he explained to me many army evolutions; and, supposing ourselves to be generals commanding opposing armies, and a battle to be in progress, he explained suppositious maneuvers of the opposing forces in a most instructive way; and when I thought his imaginary force had my army routed, he suddenly suggested a strategic move for my forces which crowned them with triumphant victory, and himself with defeat, and he ended by gracefully offering to surrender his sword! Of course, Lieutenant Grant is too young for command, but his capacity for future military usefulness is undoubted.”

Hamer survived the
battle of Monterrey only to fall ill afterward. He died within days, leaving Grant to console the widow. “
He died as a soldier dies,” Grant wrote, “without fear and without a murmur. His regret was that, if death must come, it should not come to him on the
field of battle. He was mindful the last of all of those at home who would most suffer.… Personally, his death is a loss to me which no words can express.”

Years later Grant mused on how things might have happened had Hamer lived. “
Hamer was one of the ablest men Ohio ever produced,” Grant wrote in his memoirs. “I have always believed that had his life been spared, he would have been President of the United States during the term filled by President Pierce. Had Hamer filled that office his partiality for me was such, there is but little doubt that I should have been appointed to one of the staff corps of the army—the Pay Department probably—and would therefore now be preparing to retire. Neither of these speculations is unreasonable, and they are mentioned to show how little men control their own destiny.”

T
he capture of Monterrey made Taylor a national hero, causing Polk to recalculate the politics of the war. Perhaps Taylor, not Scott, was the larger threat to a Democratic succession. Polk talked himself into discounting Taylor’s accomplishment—he complained that Taylor shouldn’t have let
Ampudia’s army march away—and maligning Taylor’s motives. “
He is evidently a weak man and has been made giddy with the idea of the Presidency,” Polk wrote in his diary. “He is a narrow minded, bigoted partisan, without resources and wholly unqualified for the command he holds.” To undermine Taylor, Polk commenced to favor Scott. He endorsed Scott’s plan for an invasion of central Mexico and let Scott strip Taylor of some of his victorious troops.

Grant’s regiment was one of those reassigned to Scott. Grant admired Taylor and was proud of what the army had achieved under the general, but he was happy to be heading to what promised to be the decisive theater of the war. The excitement of the victory at Monterrey had been followed by the tedium of camp life. “
Here we are, playing war a thousand miles from home, making show and parades but not doing enough fighting to much amuse either the enemy or ourselves, consuming rations enough to have carried us to the capital of Mexico,” Grant wrote from Monterrey in December 1846. “If our mission is to occupy the enemy’s territory, it is a success, for we are inertly here; but if to conquer, it seems to some of us who have no control that we might as well be performing the job with greater energy. While the authorities at Washington are at sea as to who shall lead the army, the enterprise ought and
could be accomplished.” In his memoirs Grant would say he had doubted the justice of America’s policy toward Mexico from the moment of the annexation of
Texas. “
I was bitterly opposed to the measure,” he wrote, “and to this day regard the war which resulted as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory.” But at the end of 1846 he wasn’t writing so broadly. He simply told Julia he wished the war had never started. “
I begin to think like one of our captains who said that if he was the Government he would whip Mexico until they would be content to take the Sabine for their boundary and he would make them take the Texans with it.”