The Training Ground by Martin Dugard Read Free Book Online Page A

unconcerned with military rituals such as daily drill, which meant that the junior officers had a great deal of free time on their hands — perhaps too much. Pete Longstreet and Sam Grant made regular trips into Natchitoches, where they played a rugged new game called football, drank, and wagered on horse races. After the discipline of West Point, and with the ongoing uncertainty of impending war, the officers of Camp Salubrity were more than happy to live it up.
    “There were five days of races at Natchitoches. I was there every day and bet low, generally lost,” Grant wrote his friend Robert Hazlitt on December 1.
    The Army of Observation had little to do but await further orders. As the blazing summer turned to a most bearable fall and winter, those orders were slow in coming, so the great pines were felled and cabins were built, giving the camp a more permanent air.
    U PON RECEIVING POLK’S directive, Taylor promptly ordered an elite mounted outfit known as the Second Dragoons to ride overland from Fort Jesup to Corpus Christi, a flyblown smuggler’s haven on the Gulf of Mexico. It took them thirty-two days to travel the 501 miles, but they arrived in the coastal fishing outpost in good shape, ready to take on the Mexican army, which was arrayed 200 miles south, along the Rio Grande. In a best-case scenario, the Mexicans would march north and attack first, instigating war and invading America in one fell swoop, making the United States a victim rather than a belligerent. If that were the case, antiwar protesters would be silenced and international opinion would likely favor America. Taylor would have no choice but to fight back, and Polk’s ambitious national expansion would begin.
    As the dragoons made camp, Grant and the rest of Taylor’s force traveled to the war by steamship. Departing Natchitoches, Louisiana, on July 2, 1845, they journeyed down the Red River, and then the Mississippi, to New Orleans, which was in the throes of a yellow fever epidemic. While they were there, Texas accepted the United States’ statehood offer. On December 29, 1845, as Grant shivered through a wet Texas winter on the beach in Corpus Christi, Texas became the twenty-ninth state, now within — and protected by — a much more powerful republic. Anson Jones, by necessity, was turned out of office. Thirteen years later, the man who would go down in history as the last president of Texas would die a lonely suicide in a Houston hotel room.
    Mexico responded to Texas’s statehood by ousting President Herrera. On January 4, 1846, General Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga took office in his place and immediately announced that Mexico considered its borders essentially the same as had existed before Texas won its independence. From a diplomatic standpoint, war now seemed inevitable.
    Meanwhile, Taylor’s army drilled in the rain on the beach in Corpus Christi. Their presence had not thus far incited a Mexican attack. “We were sent to provoke a fight,” Grant noted with an ironic shrug, as if he were an impartial observer instead of a would-be combatant, “but it was essential that Mexico commence it.”
    Mexico wasn’t taking the bait. Their army had more horses, more men, and more guns and was entrenched in well-fortified defensive positions on the southern side of the Rio Grande. There was no need to invade America and invite international judgment by waging war on Polk’s terms.
    Early in 1846, Polk ordered Taylor to give the Mexicans something to shoot at.
    In the second week of March, the young officers of West Point gathered to lead a march on Mexico. Some had fought in battles against the Seminoles, violent and bloody affairs involving great loss of life on both sides; yet in their minds, this conflict marked the first time they were actually marching off to wage war on another nation. Never did it enter the officers’ minds that the battlefields of Mexico might teach them the tactics and lessons they would later use to wage