The Training Ground (4 page)

Grant galloped his horse Fashion to Julia’s house. The road was muddy from heavy rains. The Gravois Creek, normally nothing more than a trickle, was a raging torrent that had overflowed its banks. Yet Grant needed to cross, for the Gravois Creek lay between him and White Haven. “I looked at it a moment to consider what to do. One of my superstitions had always been when I started to go anywhere, or to do anything, not to turn back, or stop until the thing intended was accomplished,” he wrote. “So I struck into the stream, and in an instant the horse was swimming and I was being carried down by the current.”

Grant didn’t panic. Putting steady and even pressure on the reins, he guided the horse through the roiling waters. By the time Grant reached the far bank, his entire uniform was a soggy mess. Though careless and even sloppy in many ways, Grant was determined to look his absolute best for Julia. Instead of racing toward White Haven, he trotted Fashion to the home of Julia’s older brother John, two miles down the road. There Grant borrowed fresh, dry clothes and then resumed his mission.

Julia was lying down for an afternoon nap when her maid rushed in, saying that Sam Grant was riding up to the house — and in civilian attire. Julia leaped from her bed and rushed to the window.

“Sure enough, there he was,” Julia wrote. But rather than hurry from the bedroom to greet him, she did as Grant had done, taking a few extra minutes to look in the mirror and primp so she could look her finest. “As soon as I could arrange my toilet, I repaired to the sitting room, and to my surprise, found Lieutenant Grant in the dining room, not far from my door.”

Grant spent the next week riding back and forth between the Jefferson Barracks and White Haven. He and Julia attended a wedding together in Saint Louis, where she was surprised to discover that she was far more interested in her escort than in the society bachelors trying to win her attention.

Finally it was time for Grant to ship out, perhaps never to return. Once again, he sat down alone with Julia to discuss their future. This time, both understood the depth of their feelings. Said Grant, “I mustered up the courage to make known, in the most awkward manner imaginable, the discovery I had made on learning that the Fourth Infantry had been ordered away from Jefferson Barracks. The young lady afterwards admitted that she too, although until then she had never looked upon me as other than a visitor whose company was agreeable to her, had experienced a depression of spirits she could not account for when the regiment left.”

Once again, Sam Grant slipped his gold West Point ring from his finger and asked his beloved Julia to wear it, definitely proposing marriage. She said yes — under one condition: “I begged him not to say anything to Papa about our engagement, and he consented to this simply on account of shyness. When he asked me to wear his class ring I took it and wore it.” She, in turn, gave Grant a lock of her hair.

O
N JUNE 8, 1844
, the matter of annexing Texas was put to a vote.

American distrust for Great Britain had diminished little since the Revolutionary War and had only been reinforced by the War of 1812. It was a time when the sun truly never set on the British Empire, and there was widespread fear that Britain would seek to establish a new toehold on the North American continent by bringing Texas into the fold. Slavery in Texas would then be banned, as it had recently been in Britain’s other possessions. Many southerners feared that escaped slaves would then flood into Texas, seeking sanctuary. They also hoped to increase their power by adding Texas to the Union as a slave state.

Tyler had been extremely vocal in defending slavery, and his secretary of state, John C. Calhoun, had even written to the British government about the virtues of this practice. As a result, many senators who had no love for Britain but even less for slavery now lined up against Tyler’s resolution. When it came time to vote, the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly decided against the measure, thirty-five to sixteen. Texas would remain an independent nation.

But the battle was far from over. A cornerstone of the decade-old Whig Party was their staunch opposition to a strong executive branch. Yet rather than let the Texas matter die, Tyler decided to force it through Congress as a joint resolution (needing approval in the House and Senate, but by a simple majority rather than two-thirds). This last-ditch effort to push his agenda sealed his fate within his party. The Whigs turned their back on the unrepentant Tyler when it came to selecting their 1844 candidate, making him the first incumbent president in U.S. history not to win his party’s nomination. With just a few short months left in his term, Tyler rededicated himself to American expansion via the joint congressional resolution.

For years, American political writers had argued that the United States had a God-given right to expansion, because it was more virtuous than other nations. John L. O’Sullivan, a zealous Democrat, had argued that America was “the Great Nation of Futurity” in a November 1839 issue of the
United States Democratic Review.
“Our annals describe no scenes of horrid carnage, where men were led on by hundreds of thousands to slay one another,” wrote O’Sullivan. He repeated two words over and over in that essay:
manifest
and
destiny,
both in reference to America’s inherent moral authority to expand its boundaries. He would later combine the words into a single sweeping pronouncement. The United States, O’Sullivan would write, had a “manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.”

That vainglorious notion was a subcurrent to American life during the 1840s, as evidenced by the ever-growing number of pioneers flooding to settle lands west of the Mississippi. To Tyler and an increasing number of politicians, the next logical step was to wrestle Oregon away from Britain, snatch California and New Mexico away from Mexico, and add Texas to the Union. That last item on the list, thanks to Texas’s pro-American leanings, was the most logical place to start.

Annexation became a vital part of each candidate’s campaign platform in the 1844 presidential election. When Martin Van Buren, a northern Democrat who had been leading in the polls and was the favorite to win his party’s nomination, went on record as opposing annexation, the southern voting bloc threw their weight behind Tennessee firebrand James K. Polk, who sought a “reannexation” of Texas, as if the territory had once been American. The dark horse Polk prevailed for the Democratic nomination and would face Whig Henry Clay, who wanted Texas to join the Union, but only if it could be accomplished without war.

Polk was a lawyer and a slave owner whose gift for oratory had earned him the nickname Napoleon of the Stump. He was dogmatic in his Jacksonian belief in American expansion — so much so that he had earned a second sobriquet: Young Hickory. A small, thin man with pursed lips, steel gray eyes, and graying black hair that he combed straight back from his high forehead, Polk had a peevish and self-important air and the habit of affecting a folksy twang when speaking before constituents. His childhood had been marred by a surgery that left him impotent (a hole was drilled through his prostate — without the use of anesthetic — to alleviate painful urinary stones). As an adult, Polk was known for his zealous pursuit of personal ambition and ideals, as well as for an enormous personal dislike for the Whigs. Polk would be forty-nine on November 2, which would make him the youngest president in history if elected.

By cleverly twining the possible annexation of Oregon with the Texas issue, Polk succeeded in winning not only the southern states, but also portions of the industrial North. Still, it was clear that Polk, with his eagerness to wage war, did not enjoy the backing of the entire nation. He won by the narrowest of margins: Polk and Clay each received 48.1 percent of the popular vote. The difference was Polk’s 170 electoral votes to Clay’s 105.

On February 28, 1845, just days before leaving office (until the passage of the Twentieth Amendment in 1933, the inaugural date was fixed by the Constitution as March 4), Tyler finally pushed his joint resolution for Texas annexation through Congress. On March 1, he signed it. In one of his last acts as president, Tyler then instructed the U.S. chargé d’affaires to Texas, Andrew Jackson Donelson — an 1820 graduate of West Point and a nephew of the former president — to relay the terms of statehood to Texas president Anson Jones. If Texas voted to join the Union, it would become a single slave state, which could then divide itself into as many as four additional states if it chose. In addition, Texas would enjoy all the benefits that came with being a state, among them political stability, a sound currency, military protection from Mexican and Indian forces, a postal service, and congressional representation. The deadline for acceptance was set at January 1, 1846. After that, the deal was off the table.

Polk made Texas the centerpiece of his inaugural address. As he spoke, thunderstorms raged. Gazing out from the Capitol’s east portico onto a sea of umbrellas, Polk could see spectators standing ankle deep in freezing mud. “Foreign powers should therefore look on the annexation of Texas to the United States not as the conquest of a nation, but as the peaceful acquisition of a territory once her own,” he gravely intoned.

Mexican officials read between the lines of Polk’s speech and immediately broke off diplomatic relations with the United States. Using the only bit of political leverage they possessed, they belatedly offered to formally recognize Texas as an independent nation. They were acting at the behest of Britain and France, which favored a buffer nation between Mexico and the United States. The two European nations feared that if American expansion was left unchecked, the United States might someday take on dimensions even larger than New Spain, covering the entire North American continent — including Canada. As long as Texas held fast, remaining a nation unto itself, Britain and France were confident that they could control the size and shape of the budding American empire.

Of the two countries, Britain fretted most about America’s growth. Years before, the two nations had signed the Anglo-American Convention of 1818, establishing peaceful cohabitation of Oregon. But rampant American settlement of that territory was putting a strain on the joint ownership agreement. And with Polk’s election, there was a growing national clamor in the United States to annex Oregon and remove the British altogether — by force, if necessary.

Britain and France formally requested that Texas take at least ninety days to study all sides of the annexation issue. Texas president Jones, who reveled in being at the center of all the international wheeling and dealing, agreed. He saw the two European powers as allies — Britain in particular — to the point that he became blinded to the reality that their interests were entirely self-motivated. “Texas was then a rich jewel lying derelict by the way. She was without a friend who thought her of sufficient consequence to take her by her hand and assist her in her accumulated misfortunes,” Jones later wrote. “Guided by her interests and a far-reaching policy, England had become such a friend.”

For his part, Mexican president General José Joaquín de Herrera feared war with America. Land speculators had flooded into Texas during 1844, bringing the non-Mexican population up to one hundred thousand — a formidable number of people allied against his nation. But for the sake of appearance, Herrera could not bend to American pressure. Polk didn’t help matters any by opening diplomatic talks with a proclamation that the only issue not open to discussion was Texas.

As tensions mounted between the United States and Mexico, international opinion came down solidly on Mexico’s side. The
Times
of London wrote of “the enormous wrong done to Mexico by this aggression of the United States, and the probable consequences of that wrong to British interests.” On May 17, in Mexico City, the Mexican government initialed a British-brokered treaty recognizing Texas as an independent republic. President Jones began playing both sides against the middle, using the diplomats of Britain and France as power brokers, seeking to gain the best deal for his nation as he decided whether independence or annexation was the wiser move. But on June 4, Herrera reneged. He once again stated that Texas rightfully belonged to Mexico. He ordered his army to assemble for war.

Polk did the same. He commanded Brevet Brigadier General Zachary Taylor to march the American army on Texas.

T
AYLOR, A SHORT
and fiery second cousin to former president James Madison, went by the nickname Old Rough and Ready. “In his manners and in his appearance, he is one of the commonest people in the country,” marveled one of Taylor’s fellow generals. “Perfectly temperate in his habits, perfectly plain in his dress, entirely unassuming in his manners, he appears to be an old gentleman in fine health, whose thoughts are not turned upon his personal appearance, and who has no point about him to attract particular attention. In his intercourse with men, he is free, frank, and manly; he plays off none of the airs of great men I have met, and the more closely his character is examined the greater beauties it discloses.”

Taylor had been raised on the Kentucky frontier and had little formal education, and he possessed such disdain for military decorum that he almost never dressed in uniform. Yet he was an officer through and through. The sixty-year-old Taylor had been thoroughly schooled in the art of warfare during a military career spanning almost four decades and a vast assortment of armed conflicts that ran the gamut from the somewhat conventional battles of the War of 1812 to the guerrilla engagements of the Seminole Wars. War with Mexico, with its European-trained generals and vast spaces, would likely mean a little of both. Old Rough and Ready was the ideal man for the job.

D
ESPITE ITS TICKS
and mosquitoes, Camp Salubrity (as the bivouac near Fort Jesup was known) turned out to be a relatively pleasant posting. Grant even gave the Louisiana woods credit for improving his health. “I kept a horse and rode, and stayed out of doors most of the time by day, and entirely recovered from the cough which I had carried from West Point, and from all indications of consumption,” he wrote.