CHAPTER I

THE WINNING OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE

Mexico will always be a land of romance. Her ruins are yet fragrant with memories of the mighty plans of Louis Napoleon.

After an absence of fifty years, General Longstreet revisited Mexico in the eventful summer of 1898, leisurely passing over some of the scenes of his early military experiences. Half a century had stolen away, yet architecturally he found Mexico but little changed. Few of the old landmarks were effaced. Modern ideas and inventions have been encouraged and do prevail in our sister republic, but the dream-like strangeness of its civilization is still all-pervading. Mexico is not unlike Egypt in some respects. Everywhere is the poetry of a past age. Egypt has its sphinx and the pyramids to illustrate a mysterious past; in Mexico we find the temples of the Aztecs and the monuments of their cruel conquerors. The Montezumas have left the impress of their race and civilization on every hand. To the northern visitor Mexico will always be the land of the Aztecs, worshippers of the sun.

To me the battle-fields of 1846-47 were of supreme interest. They are to most Americans doubtless the chief magnet of attraction. But the eye of an active participant in those glorious achievements of American arms sees more as it sweeps over the valley of Mexico than is comprehensible to the unprofessional casual observer. It was my great privilege--to-day a cherished memory--to go over the fields that stretch away from Chapultepec with a war-worn soldier who fifty years earlier had there learned his first lessons in real warfare.

Mexico will always be a land of romance. Her civilization stands apart. Her ruins are yet fragrant with memories of the mighty plans of Louis Napoleon. From the ill-fated Maximilian empire to our own war with Mexico seems but a step back, and yet between the steps great history has been written.

Excepting Vera Cruz and Cerro Gordo, the scene of all the leading events of General Scott’s campaign lie almost within cannon-shot of the Mexican capital.

The four battles of Contreras, Churubusco, Molino del Rey, and Chapultepec, which decided the fate of the war, occurred within a period of four weeks and within a radius of a dozen miles. The Mexican General Valencia was disastrously routed at Contreras August 19, 1847, and Churubusco was fought and won by the Americans next day. Then there was a short truce between the two belligerents, and terms of peace were proposed by an American plenipotentiary. These not proving satisfactory, hostilities were resumed. Scott moved with energy. On September 8 the battle of Molino del Rey occurred, the Americans winning, but at heavy sacrifice in killed and wounded. The successful assault on Chapultepec hill was made on the 13th, five days later, and on the morning of the 14th Scott’s splendid little army entered the Mexican capital and hoisted its flag over the public buildings. The belligerents engaged in these affairs were comparatively small and the losses on both sides very severe. The Mexicans fought well, but were execrably led. With the fall of Mexico Scott had conquered a nation with an army fewer in numbers than the single corps Longstreet commanded at Gettysburg.

Scott’s army, for the most part, was composed of veteran troops,--regulars, with a considerable contingent of fine and well-officered volunteers. Most of them were already battle-seasoned, having participated in General Taylor’s initiatory campaign of 1846 on the Rio Grande, where they had signally defeated the Mexicans at Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, and Monterey. Taylor’s crowning victory at Buena Vista, February 23, 1847, did not occur until after Scott had drafted away the best part of his regulars for the march on Mexico.

Among them were the Fourth and Eighth Infantry regiments. Lieutenant Longstreet had served in both,--in the Fourth as brevet second lieutenant after graduating from the Military Academy in 1842, up to 1845, when he was promoted and transferred to the Eighth, and he was lucky enough to be with the latter in the action at Palo Alto, May 8, 1846, at Resaca de la Palma next day, and in the siege and capture of Monterey, September 21 to 23, of the same year. It was on these fields that most of the young fellows who afterwards became conspicuous in the Union and Confederate armies flashed their maiden swords.

In the Fourth, among Longstreet’s earlier official and social intimates at Jefferson Barracks and Camp Salubrity, were Captain George A. McCall, Lieutenants Augur, Grant, Alex. Hays, and David A. Russell, all afterwards distinguished Union generals. Captain McCall was then forty-three years old, and was graduated from West Point in 1822, just twenty years ahead of Longstreet’s class.

The subsequent Civil War produced some singular anticlimaxes to these old Mexican War friendships. It so happened, for instance, that sixteen years afterwards, at the battle of Glendale before Richmond, Longstreet’s Confederate division was pitted against McCall’s smaller Union division, and the Confederates had the best of it. About dusk, after the heavy fighting was over, McCall and his staff accidentally rode into the Forty-seventh Virginia. Curiously enough, the Union general alone was captured and brought to Longstreet’s head-quarters.

Having for a time been a brevet second lieutenant under McCall in the old Fourth Infantry, and really commiserating his personal mishap, General Longstreet cordially advanced, offering his hand and proffering such hospitality as was permissible in the untoward circumstances. But, deeply chagrined by his defeat and capture, McCall sullenly repelled Longstreet’s friendly advances. It only remained for the Union general to be sent back to Richmond in charge of a staff-officer and guard. It was the last meeting between the old captain and his former lieutenant, and, strangely, was McCall’s last appearance in battle, though he was exchanged in a few weeks. He somehow fell into disfavor with the Washington authorities, resigned in March, 1863, and died on a farm near Westchester, Pennsylvania, in 1868. McCall was a fine soldier of the old school. Grant was also a second lieutenant with McCall in the Fourth, and liked him very much.

Alex. Hays and Longstreet had been associated in both regiments. Like Longstreet, Hays was promoted and transferred from the Fourth to the Eighth, though upward of a year subsequently. Grant never left the Fourth until he resigned as captain, about seven years after the Mexican War. Hays and Grant had been friends at West Point, though not classmates, and very chummy afterwards while subs. in the old Fourth Infantry. The official personnel of General Taylor’s army, scant three thousand men, was so small that they were almost like a family. Everybody knew everybody else.

Hays was detached from the Eighth when Scott advanced into the valley of Mexico, but was engaged in several severe affairs in defence of convoys of supplies to the front, and also at Heamantle and Sequaltiplan. After that war was over he resigned, but in 1861 immediately sought service again, and soon rose to the command of a Union division. His division contributed materially to the repulse of Longstreet’s attack at Gettysburg on July 3. But poor Hays was killed in front of Longstreet’s lines at the Wilderness in 1864, the first battle in Virginia after his old comrade, Grant, had assumed command of the Union armies. Such was the fortune of war of the civil struggle.

The Eighth Infantry furnished from its Mexican War contingent few conspicuous leaders to either side in the subsequent Civil War. The regiment was compelled to surrender to the local authorities of Texas early in 1861, and were detained at the South many months. Only a few of its old officers then remained. All those of Southern proclivities had already withdrawn. Longstreet left the Eighth in 1858, ten years after peace with Mexico, having been promoted to major and paymaster. By detention as prisoners of war the Union soldiers of the Eighth were deprived of the early promotion which fell to the lot of most regulars.

Out of all the officers of the two regiments engaged in Mexico, only seven, it appears, espoused the Southern cause, and of these but three attained to any considerable rank in the Confederate armies,--Longstreet, Pickett, and Cadmus E. Wilcox. Pickett was a magnificent soldier, one of the most daring in the Confederate army.

In the two campaigns of Taylor and Scott the Fourth and Eighth lost no fewer than twelve officers killed and fatally wounded, and eighteen others seriously wounded, a very heavy percentage. This alone proves that the Americans had no walkover. Every foot of the ground was bravely contested by the Mexicans.

To continue this digression a little farther, it may be said that the genesis of the two Mexican campaigns is not well understood. Winfield Scott was and had long been the commanding general of the United States army, and entitled as such, aside from his military renown, to the Mexican command. But Scott, a Southern Whig, was ambitious to be President. The Democratic administration of Polk was quite naturally chary of giving Scott an opportunity to win public applause through a victorious military campaign. Scott had early submitted a plan of operations, with request for permission to lead an American army into Mexico. But Zachary Taylor, then only a colonel and brevet brigadier, was chosen for the purpose, to the discomfiture of Scott and his coterie. Of course, the general-in-chief chafed because he had thus designedly been over-slaughed by a junior.

The administration overreached itself. Taylor’s small victories in northern Mexico in the Spring of 1846 were so greatly magnified by the press of the States that he at once became the hero of the hour. Soon he was the open candidate of the Whig party for the Presidency; for Taylor, like Scott, was a Southern Whig. Polk and his advisers were now between the devil and the deep sea. To beat back and neutralize the rising Taylor tide they precipitately turned to Scott. His original plan for bringing Mexico to terms _via_ Vera Cruz was adopted, and he assigned to the command, with fulsome assurances of ample and continued support, which were never fulfilled.

Scott was thereupon given _carte blanche_ to withdraw such force of regulars from Taylor as he deemed necessary to the successful prosecution of his proposed invasion, and meanwhile Taylor, with some five thousand volunteers and a slight leaven of regular troops, was to remain on the defensive. Then something happened. Taylor did not choose to remain stock still, but advanced. A few weeks after the depletion of his army, which began in January, 1847, and before Scott had landed at Vera Cruz with his raw volunteers, Taylor worsted Santa Anna at Buena Vista. He not only signally defeated the foreign enemy, but completed the rout of the Democratic administration at Washington, and the next year was nominated by the Whigs and elected President hands down, wholly on the strength of his military achievements. Scott, nominated in 1852, was disastrously beaten by the Democratic candidate, Franklin Pierce, one of his inconspicuous civilian brigadiers in Mexico. It must have been a galling blow to the old General’s pride. His defeat was the death-blow of the Whig party.

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