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.
CHAPTER II
PECULIARITIES OF SCOTT AND TAYLOR
As we gazed down from Chapultepec’s heights, on that fragrant day of 1898, across the beautiful valley of Mexico, the war of fifty years agone seemed but yesterday to him who on those fields had added a new star of the first magnitude to the galaxy of American valor.
Since those old days General Longstreet often speculated on the result if Taylor and Scott had been required to handle the armies of Lee and Grant and meet the conditions which confronted the great Union and Confederate leaders at the crucial periods of their campaigns. He concluded that both would have maintained their high reputations at the head of much larger bodies of troops than they marshalled in Mexico, even though confronted by abler opponents than Santa Anna, supported by stronger and better-disciplined armies than the half-starved, ill-appointed levies he brought against them at Buena Vista and Cerro Gordo. At all events, the young fellows of 1846–47 to a man believed Taylor and Scott adequately equipped to successfully meet any military emergency.