The Training Ground (2 page)

In the meantime, Lee’s career beckoned. He was often away from home, sent to build forts, embankments, wharves, locks, and other vital infrastructure in faraway outposts on the Georgia coast and the upper Mississippi and in closer locales such as New York Harbor. He wore the uniform of a soldier, but his daily duties were those of a highly trained engineer. This pattern would solidly define the next fifteen years of his life — a series of summer construction projects followed by winter journeys home to be with Mary and the children, who usually did not travel with their father.

Lee was thorough in his work, careful in his dealings with his fellow officers, and in every way the opposite of his father, never associated in the least with scandal. But the peacetime army was no place for advancement, even for a man of his caliber. By the spring of 1844, almost a decade and a half after graduating, he was still just a captain.

As luck would have it, Lee received orders to return to West Point at that time, assigned, along with several of his fellow officers, to spend two weeks helping to administer the cadets’ final exams. Among these officers was Major General Winfield Scott, commanding general of the army. The two got to know each other on a somewhat formal basis, and Scott came away with a favorable impression of Lee. This likely would have meant nothing at all, had hostilities between the United States and Mexico not increased over the next two years. When they did, however, Scott would remember Lee and call upon him to prove himself on the field of battle.

S
OMEWHERE IN THE
middle of the West Point alumni hierarchy, between the capricious nature of the class goats and the perfection of Lee, was a small young man from Ohio. His given name was Hiram Ulysses, but his fellow cadets called him simply Sam — or if a last name was required, Sam Grant. The Ohioan wanted little to do with the army and had only come to West Point to please his father. Grant was clean shaven and square jawed, stood five eight, and weighed just 120 pounds; he had steel blue eyes, auburn hair that he would part on the left until the day he died, and, concurrent with his arrival along the Hudson, a nagging cough — compliments of West Point’s drafty dormitories — that made him wonder if he had tuberculosis. Friends considered him noble and powerfully loyal and thought it obvious that the introverted young man had little if any experience when it came to the opposite sex. Yet they marveled at the way he sat a horse and at his almost spiritual connection with those animals. Still basically a boy, he was already complicated.

Grants had lived in America for eight generations, dating back to the arrival of the Englishman Matthew Grant, who sailed to Massachusetts on the
Mary and John
in 1630. Sam’s great-grandfather had been a commissioned officer in the British army who died in 1756 during the French and Indian War. His grandfather Noah fought for the colonists at the Battle of Bunker Hill and then served clear on through the Revolutionary War, mustering out after the grand finale at the Battle of Yorktown. Afterward, Noah joined the large number of settlers marching westward in search of opportunity. He ended up in Ohio, where he fathered nine children. Unable to support them all, Noah sent the more capable off to make their way in the world. Noah’s fourth child, Jesse, was kicked out at the age of eleven. Never having forgotten the years of poverty that ensued, he grew into a tightfisted and controlling man with an ironic fondness for personal luxury. A tanner by trade, he married the warm and devout Hanna Simpson in 1821. Their first child, a son, was born on April 27, 1822, in Point Pleasant, Ohio. Selecting the boy’s name was no easy matter. Relatives gathered from far and wide to offer their opinions before the family finally settled on Hiram Ulysses — his father being partial to the former and his grandmother having a fondness for the Greek hero. His father’s preference would go to waste when Grant applied to West Point seventeen years later. The congressman making the appointment knew that the child went by Lyss, so he assumed Ulysses to be a first name. He also made the mistake of believing that the Grants had followed the common practice of using the mother’s maiden name in the middle. Thus Hiram Ulysses Grant became Ulysses S. Grant. Lyss didn’t learn that his name had been changed until he signed in at West Point, and officials there, showing the stubborn military logic that Grant would come to despise, refused to reverse the blunder. His fellow cadets soon took the mistake a step further. “I remember seeing his name on the bulletin board, where the names of all the newcomers were posted,” noted William Tecumseh Sherman, a cadet three years ahead of Grant. “I ran my eye down the columns, and there saw ‘U.S. Grant.’ A lot of us began making up names to fit the initials. One said, ‘United States Grant.’ Another ‘Uncle Sam Grant.’ A third said, ‘Sam Grant.’ That name stuck to him.”

Jesse Grant had submitted Sam’s application without telling his son; Grant got his revenge by being an indifferent cadet. “A military life had no charms for me. And I had not the faintest idea of staying in the army even if I should be graduated, which I did not expect,” he once explained. “I did not take hold of my studies with avidity. In fact, I rarely ever read over a lesson a second time during my cadetship.”

Engineering, that backbone of the West Point curriculum, was a dry topic for the detached and somewhat romantic Grant. Making matters worse, he had a limited background in math, a topic vital to engineering success. Rather than tackle the problem through study and self-discipline, Grant preferred to read novels and other books unrelated to military life whenever possible. His disdain for West Point was so great that when Congress introduced a resolution in December 1839 that would abolish the military academy, Grant pored over newspaper accounts of the ensuing debate, praying the measure would succeed so he could return to Ohio without being considered a failure. “I saw in it an honorable way to obtain a discharge,” he stated plainly. The bill, much to Grant’s chagrin, failed.

Year by year, his apathy grew. Grant was promoted from cadet private to the rank of corporal as a sophomore, and then to sergeant during his junior year. But he received so many demerits that he was stripped of rank and was made a private once more; he was in the bottom half of his class academically — ranking 25th in his class of 39 in artillery tactics, 28th in infantry tactics, and, when it came to conduct, 156th out of 253 in the entire school. Surprisingly, the only class at West Point in which he performed well was mathematics, for which he had such a natural aptitude that his earlier lack of education was soon forgotten.

Yet there was more to this quiet cadet than even he realized. “He was proficient in mathematics but did not try to excel at anything except horsemanship,” remembered a fellow cadet. “He was very daring. When his turn came to leap the bar, he would make the dragoons lift it from the trestles and raise it as high as their heads, when he would drive his horse over it, clearing at least six feet.” Grant had a steadfast quality that drew others to him, and a powerful gift for observation and analysis. He was elected president of the Dialectic, the cadet literary society, and was chosen to join a secret society called the T.I.O. — twelve in one — whose members wore rings engraved with those initials, promising to wear them until their wedding day, at which time they would give the rings to their wives. “We all liked him. He had no bad habits,” remembered his classmate D. M. Frost, who would go on to become a general. “He had no facility in conversation with the ladies, a total absence of elegance, and naturally showed off badly in contrast with the young Southern men, who prided themselves on being finished in the ways of the world.”

One of those much more refined southerners was James Longstreet, a strapping young man born in South Carolina and raised in the Georgia hills, who went by the nickname Pete. Longstreet was a year ahead of Grant and had the careless grace of a man thoroughly comfortable in his own skin. He was loud and larger than life, fond of whiskey, practical jokes, cards, and breaking academy rules. The tall, broad-shouldered Longstreet and the diminutive Grant were physical opposites, but they were also kindred spirits who formed a lasting bond. “We became fast friends the first time we met,” Longstreet said of Grant, whom he described as possessing “a noble heart, a loveable character, and a sense of honor which was so perfect.” The unlikely friends would later see battle in two wars. The first time they would fight on the same side; the second time they would not.

A
S ADMISSION TO
West Point required a recommendation from the applicant’s congressman, the student body revealed a geographical diversity uncommon at most American educational institutions. Here a boy from Vermont could meet another from Georgia; a Maryland native would room with someone from Massachusetts.

There was, however, not a single Texan to be found during Grant’s time along the Hudson. The reason was simple: West Point students had to be Americans. Texas was an independent nation, a democratic republic with its own president and congress, almost constantly at war with the Comanche and Mexican nations, and so vast that the combined square mileage of America’s original thirteen colonies could almost fit within its borders.

Some saw Texas as a buffer between the United States and Mexico. Others saw Texas as an impediment to America’s growth. Therein lay the roots of war.

The seeds themselves had been planted centuries before, when the first intrepid English (and later, American) men and women struck inland from the Atlantic, seeking better places to live. This individual penetration was the hallmark of America’s expansion — not growth by governmental decree, but colonist after colonist, striking out to find a better life in the wilderness. For generations they pushed inexorably west, until they were no longer called colonists but settlers and pioneers, in a nod to their courage, sense of exploration, and proprietary interest in land that was frequently not theirs to take.

Not many of those adventurers favored Texas — not at first. The landscape didn’t extend an easy welcome, the climate was contrary, and the dearth of natural resources meant there were few obvious opportunities to accrue wealth. Texas was a land of low mountains, few lakes, sediment-filled rivers, thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, withering heat, bracing cold, and an abundance of freshwater streams — the lone natural feature that could possibly be considered an asset, were it not for their tendency to become utterly dry in the summer and unrepentantly torrential during the long, rainy winter. Texas was the nesting ground of alligators, catfish, snapping turtles, bloodsucking insects, fifteen varieties of poisonous snakes, and a small, undeniably odd mammal whose body was cloaked not in fur but in a bony shell that looked like battle armor — the armadillo.

It took a sturdy individual to make a life among those biblical hardships, and Texas’s settlers possessed a desperate, hardscrabble quality, partly because many of them had failed elsewhere. Texas was their last stand, and those who came and stayed bonded fiercely with the land, realizing, quite rightly, that its challenges molded their characters and toughened their hides each and every time they stepped outside.

These American pioneers were not the first people to experience Texas’s challenges. Its first inhabitants had crossed a land bridge from Asia ten thousand years earlier. Some of those migrants settled on the flat coastal plain fronting what would become known as the Gulf of Mexico. Others preferred the arid land far to the west, and others still the forested hills and rolling plains in the center of the region. A tribe known as the Caddo, who lived in the pine forests of east and northeast Texas, first used the word
taysha
to describe a friend or an ally. The Spanish, who arrived in the sixteenth century with their horses and dreams of building roads and Catholic missions, gave the word a Castilian spelling and applied it to the region at large. Thus the land became known as Tejas and then Texas, the benevolence of the original term diminishing with each spelling change and the flow of blood and history. In 1716, Texas became part of a larger colony known as New Spain, overseen by a Spanish viceroy in Mexico City. New Spain’s southern border was the Central American isthmus; its northern border was unspecified but was thought to be somewhere around North America’s forty-second parallel, where the lands later known as California and Oregon met. A stubborn brown river neatly bisected New Spain, marking the distinct border at which Texas began. Born as a snow-fed mountain stream at the Continental Divide, some twelve thousand feet up in the San Juan Mountains of the New Mexico region, the river was known as the Posoge (big river) by the Pueblo Indians. Others would name it Río de Nuestra Señora, River of May, and Río Turbio (Turbulent River). It was the explorer Juan de Oñate, in 1598, who reverted back to the Pueblo name, only now in Spanish: Río Grande (or Rio Grande in English).

Over the next years, famed explorers such as Francisco Coronado and Hernando de Soto made forays across the Rio Grande and throughout Texas. The Spanish were not usually welcomed by the local tribes — as evidenced by the 1554 massacre of shipwrecked sailors on what would later become known as Padre Island. Such hostility, combined with a lack of the gold and other mineral resources that had been discovered farther south, meant that Texas was among the last regions of New Spain to be settled. The New Mexico region to the west, for example, contained twenty missions built between 1598 and 1680, but the first mission built on Texas soil was not erected until 1682.

With or without churches, the settlers systematically subjugated the indigenous cultures. Scores of Indians were slaughtered. Many of the women were taken as brides or used as concubines, and children born out of these relations between the Indians and the Spanish invaders were known derogatorily as
mestizo.

For decades, the Spaniards mapped the land, naming rivers, towns, and geographic features and claiming every inch of the territory as their own, even though it was so vast that when the French tried their hand in Texas in 1685, it took the Spanish four long years to find them (though by then the French, too, had been massacred). In 1820, a failed lead industry kingpin named Moses Austin traveled from Saint Louis down to the regional capital in San Antonio to ask the Spanish government for a land grant and permission to settle the first American colonists in the region. Spain agreed. Austin died soon after, so it was left to his son, Stephen, to finish the job.