The Training Ground (6 page)
Rio Grande
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ARCH 20, 1847
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hanks to McCall’s act of kindness, Grant’s journey south was actually somewhat pleasant. A carpet of wildflowers covered the land, their vivid yellows and purples framed by budding shoots of green prairie grass, all set against the backdrop of a vast blue sky. “I observed in great abundance the spiderwort, phlox, lupin, fireplant, lobelia inflata, primrose, etc,” one officer wrote in great detail. Grant was amazed by a horizon so vast and empty that he thought he could see the curve of the earth. A few days out of Corpus Christi, Grant and a band of officers left the boredom of the march during a rest break, spurring their mounts out toward a series of low hills to gaze in awe at a great herd of wild horses. “As far as the eye could reach to our right, the herd extended,” Grant wrote. “To the left it extended equally. There was no estimating the number of animals in it.”
For soldiers on foot, the journey was far less idyllic. Their boots, those army-issue leather brogans, were designed to fit interchangeably on the right or left foot, making for great discomfort over such a long distance. Game was hard to come by, so they lived on rations of bacon, salted pork, and crumbling, barely edible, maggot-infested biscuits. Water was even scarcer than predicted. The troops’ thirst was made worse when Mexican scouts, seeking to harass the American advance, set fire to the prairie on March 14. The flames quickly raced inland and away from the army, driven by winds blowing in off the Gulf, but the damage was done. All that remained of the grass and wildflowers was a thick layer of soot. The Fourth Infantry’s footsteps sent the black gray dust flying up into their mouths and nostrils, forcing many of them to march with handkerchiefs tied over their faces. Their blue uniforms were coated in ash, with no cool stream nor even a muddy lake in which to wash it off. “The men,” Grant noted with understatement, “suffered.”
Nine days after setting out, filthy and exhausted, Grant and the Fourth caught up with the rest of Taylor’s army on the banks of a tidal river known as the Arroyo Colorado. Mexican soldiers had been spotted on the far shore. Taylor had no way of knowing how many enemy troops were hiding there, but from the scores of Mexican bugles blowing up and down the river, it certainly sounded as if the enemy had him outnumbered.
The Arroyo Colorado seemed just deep and wide enough to give the Mexicans a powerful tactical advantage. They merely had to wait for the Americans to begin crossing, and then let forth a hail of artillery and musket fire. Taylor’s men would be stranded midriver, battling the current, incapable of fighting back, and soon weakened if not decimated altogether.
Yet Taylor was a wily general, capable of seeing a battlefield with the same analytical calm with which other men viewed a chessboard. One way or another, he needed to cross that river. Conventional tactics stipulated that infantry and cavalry should be sent across to wage war on the ground as Taylor’s artillery batteries bombarded enemy positions from his side of the river. His army was vulnerable if they tried to ford piecemeal. Crossing en masse was still somewhat suicidal, but at least then the Americans had the benefit of numbers: many men might die, but many more might make it across to do battle.
Instead, Taylor halted the entire army. By the time Grant arrived, days later, the northern bank of the Colorado was a scene of organized chaos: thousands of soldiers; hundreds of mules, horses, and bellowing oxen; and, from the other shore, the annoying blare of unseen Mexican bugles, blowing nonstop from the thick scrub.
A work party of American soldiers swung their axes under the glaring Texas sun, chopping away trees and shrubs to clear a trail down to the water, even as a second group stripped to the waist and wielded shovels to level off the steep drop from the banks down into the sluggish current. The soldiers might have looked like a very determined band of settlers, were it not for the artillery crews calmly aiming their cannons toward the Mexican positions, eager, after year upon year of practice, to fire upon a live enemy for the first time.
Grant was a compulsive observer, constantly watching and appraising so that he might understand a person or an activity better. He normally revered Taylor, a man whose disdain for affectation and military pomp mirrored his own. Yet as he studied Taylor’s inability to cross the river, and the logjam of American troops now exposed to Mexican fire, anger flashed through the young lieutenant. The Arroyo Colorado should have been easy to cross. It was only a hundred yards wide and not much more than waist deep. From Grant’s point of view, Taylor had made a mess of things by neglecting to bring along materials for a temporary bridge.
The lack seemed a glaring omission, for it had been known all along that the predominant geographical obstacles Taylor’s army would face on its path into Mexico were Texas’s broad, sluggish rivers, among them the Nueces, the Arroyo Colorado, and the Rio Grande. Yet neither Taylor nor his staff had had the forethought to bring along pontoons, an engineering novelty that had been developed during the Seminole Wars. Such an oversight seemed to Grant not only ludicrous but humiliating. If the American army was trying to intimidate the Mexicans with their professionalism, they were doing a very poor job of it.
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HERE WERE MORE
than just buglers on the opposite bank of the Colorado. “Mexican lancers were on the southern side,” noted Second Lieutenant Pete Longstreet, “and gave notice that they had orders to resist our further advance.” He had no doubt that there would be a battle if Taylor’s army crossed the Arroyo Colorado.
Longstreet could hardly wait.
Since childhood, he had dreamed of being a soldier. And unlike those men whose dreams and physical attributes didn’t mesh, the strapping southerner was born to be a great warrior. He was tough, having spent his childhood roaming the rugged Appalachian forests. He was shrewd, a serious cardplayer who won far more than he lost. His personal charisma was so great that some considered him a giant, even though he wasn’t much more than six feet tall. But most of all, Longstreet was calm under pressure and deeply persevering. If the Mexicans contested the crossing, Longstreet would happily be in the thick of the fight. And then, he was sure, he would methodically dispose of anyone who tried to stop him.
Longstreet was Dutch on his father’s side, descended from Puritans who had fled to America in 1630 and settled in New Jersey. It was Longstreet’s grandfather William who moved his family south, settling near Augusta, Georgia, where he invented a steamboat prototype that successfully traveled eight miles on the Savannah River. But William was unable to procure a patent, despite years of trying, and never received proper credit for his revolutionary invention. Ten years later he moved again, this time to South Carolina.
It was on his grandfather’s plantation in Edgefield, 20 miles north of Augusta and 150 miles northwest of the bustling port at Charleston, that James Longstreet the future soldier was born on January 8, 1821. The third of seven children, he was named after his father. His mother was the former Mary Ann Dent, who claimed she could trace her lineage to both Chief Justice John Marshall and William the Conqueror. Longstreet had no middle name but was given the nickname Peter at an early age — “rock” in Greek — for his strength and sturdy character.
Longstreet spent his childhood roaming the fields and forests around his father’s large farm, learning to shoot and ride, feeling at home in the out-of-doors. Daily chores developed muscle to go with instinct, and Longstreet grew into a strapping, independent young boy, seemingly destined for a life in the country.
But he dreamed of being a general. Longstreet loved reading books about great warriors like Napoleon and Washington, and believed wholeheartedly that his ancestral link with William the Conqueror made him a natural soldier.
His father not only respected those dreams but also put forth a plan to help make them come true. When the boy was nine years old, his father packed him off to Augusta, where he would live with his uncle and get the sort of proper education that would allow him to enter West Point. The move from countryside to city was a dramatic lifestyle change, yet Longstreet adapted and even flourished. His uncle, a portly and influential local figure, sent the youngster off to the Richmond County Academy, a rigid private school where classes were conducted from dawn until dusk, ten months a year. By the time Longstreet matriculated at West Point at the age of sixteen, he had been educated in math, Latin, and Greek.
Sadly, his father didn’t live to see Longstreet become a soldier. A cholera epidemic killed him in 1833, and Longstreet’s mother moved away from the farm and relocated to the Alabama coast. Longstreet never saw much of her after that.
At West Point, Pete Longstreet was an even greater rebel and poorer cadet than Sam Grant. He graduated fifty-fourth out of fifty-six in the class of 1842, an esteemed bunch that would see seventeen of its members become generals. Longstreet was their equal in many ways, but his standing was pulled down by demerits, a fondness for sports above study, and a disdain for military discipline. (For instance, the food at West Point was a daily variation on overcooked beef, with boiled potatoes thrown in for variety, so Longstreet was fond of sneaking off the grounds to eat and drink at a local inn that was expressly off-limits to cadets.) Comfortable in his own skin, he was equally at home displaying proper etiquette at a formal military ball and swearing crudely in the field. “As I was of a large and robust physique,” Longstreet admitted years later, “I was at the head of most larks and games.” His classmates, noting that physique, named him Most Handsome Cadet. That description would stick for years to come, though he would eventually grow a long beard to hide his mouth, which a classmate once described as coarse.
Longstreet’s poor grades meant that he, like his good friend Grant, couldn’t select his postgraduate posting. As a result, all that West Point engineering training went by the wayside, and he was assigned to the infantry, which almost guaranteed that promotions would be few and far between.
Also like Grant, Longstreet fell in love after reporting for duty at the Jefferson Barracks, just outside Saint Louis. The woman in question was Louise Garland, and her father was Lieutenant Colonel John Garland, the regimental commander. Longstreet’s eccentric classmate and fellow infantry officer Lieutenant Richard Ewell (the man who allowed Grant his predeployment leave to see Julia at White Haven) considered Louise to be one of just two attractive women in Missouri — the other being her sister Bessie. “This is the worst country for single ladies I ever saw,” Ewell wrote to his brother. “They are hardly allowed to come of age before they are engaged to be married, however ugly they may be. Except the Miss Garlands, I have not seen a pretty girl or interesting one since I have been here.”
Louise was seventeen when she first met Longstreet in the spring of 1844, a petite beauty who owed her dark black locks to her Chippewa Indian mother. The attraction between Louise and Pete Longstreet was obvious to both of them early on, and before shipping out for Camp Salubrity, Louisiana, he asked her father for permission to marry her. The request was approved, with the stipulation that the wedding not take place until Louise was a few years older.
Thus Brevet Second Lieutenants Pete Longstreet and Sam Grant were both engaged men as they settled in at Camp Salubrity. But whereas Grant was heartsick for Julia, writing letters that pleaded for her to reaffirm her love (which she did, though not as often as Grant would have liked), Longstreet had taken the separation from Louise in stride. He had passed the time near Fort Jesup among the rogues and rascals, playing poker, particularly a game called brag. (Longstreet was renowned for his ability to bluff. Grant, on the other hand, was miserable at cards.) A brevet second lieutenant earned less than thirty dollars a month — not quite a dollar a day. “The man who lost seventy-five cents in one day was esteemed a peculiarly unfortunate person,” Longstreet said of Grant, who frequently lost that much before excusing himself from the table.
Longstreet had been transferred to the Eighth Infantry in March 1845 and reassigned to Fort Marion, Florida. More than two hundred years old, the fortress had a decidedly medieval feel, with moats, a dungeon, and twelve-foot-thick walls facing out at the Atlantic. The Eighth was a battle-hardened outfit, having spent the previous few years waging war against Florida’s Seminole tribe. A far cry from the horse races and poker games of Camp Salubrity, Fort Marion was an appropriately disciplined military garrison for a self-confident young soldier to make the mental transition to his first taste of combat.
By September 1845, Longstreet and Grant were reunited in Corpus Christi, where they spent that awful winter awaiting the order to march on the Rio Grande. By the time Taylor’s army proceeded south the following March, they had spent two full years living under the shadow of war. It had been a stretch of boredom and inertia, card games and hunting trips and living in tents, their personal lives on hold until politicians in Washington and Mexico City could decide their fate.
But now all that was past. As Pete Longstreet and Sam Grant faced south on a fine spring morning, looking across the muddy, inconsequential tidal flow of the Rio Colorado, battle was no longer some abstract image but was being vividly brought to life by the horns and lancers they could hear and see on the far bank.
Longstreet had laid eyes on few, if any, foreign soldiers in his life. The same was true of almost every officer and enlisted man along the river. It was titillating to stare over at the nameless, faceless army on the opposite shore, with their brightly colored uniforms and their exotic language, which very few Americans spoke and even fewer saw the need to learn. Most of the Americans didn’t know, for instance, that the Mexican army was much like their own in many ways, structured in the European manner, with infantry, cavalry, engineers, and artillery, or that the total size of the Mexican army — 18,882 regular soldiers, 10,495 militiamen, and 1,174 irregulars — outnumbered theirs almost five to one, which was perhaps a case of ignorance being bliss.