Again Mexico had protested.
Whereat, President Polk had sent an old Indian fighter, Zachary Taylor, to the Rio Grande with four thousand troops, to maintain the frontier. Taylor, with his handful of men, had calmly plowed his way southward, thrashing Mexican armies double the size of his own, until all northern Mexico was his.
President Polk, “viewing with alarm” the repute that Taylor, a political foe of his own, was gleaning, hustled the army’s commander-in-chief, General Scott, south to snatch any remaining laurels.
Scott stripped Taylor’s little band of its best officers and men and continued the war to a triumphant end; Taylor, meantime, at Buena Vista, opposing his own remnant of an army to a Mexican force five times its size and nearly annihilating the enemy in the most important and spectacular battle of the whole war.
But now that the conflict was over, Scott was in his element. He was the ideal god of war; a far more impressive figure on this climax day than down-at-heel, tobacco-chewing old Zachary Taylor could have hoped to be.
The regiment came to a halt. At a barked order, eight hundred cumbrous muzzle-loading muskets clicked to the “present,” then, with a double click, to the “carry.”
The last off-key strains of “Columbia” moaned out, and the sweating musicians laid aside their instruments.
A gold-laced Mexican, whose uniform coat bore as many decorations as a champion swimmer’s, stepped into the open space in front of the platform, unrolled a terrifying parchment document that jingled with seals, cleared his throat and prepared to read. General Scott folded his plump arms across his plumper chest, assumed an air of gracious dignity, and prepared to listen.
His staff and the civilians on the dais stood in impressive attitudes to hear a document in a tongue few of them had troubled to master; and prepared to be bored.
None of the three sets of preparations was destined to ripen into fulfillment.