Free The Man Who Saved the Union by H.W. Brands Page A

reason, he concluded. During the delay at Puebla he had pondered the best approach to Mexico City. “From my map and all the information I acquired while the army was at Puebla,”he wrote on the eve of Chapultepec, “I was then, and am now more than ever, convinced that the army could have approached the city by passing around north of it, and reached the northwest side”—near San Cosme—“and avoided all the fortified positions, until we reached the gates of the city at their weakest and most indefensible, as well as most approachable, points.… It seems to me that the northwest side of the city could have been approached without attacking a single fort or redoubt.”
    Grant had communicated his view to his immediate superiors, but he never learned whether they passed it up the chain of command. At the time he acceded to the wisdom of authority. “I am willing to believe,” he wrote a friend, “that the opinion of a lieutenant, where it differs from that of his commanding General, must be founded on ignorance of the situation.”
    Additional experience, however, confirmed his opinion of Scott’s misjudgment. “The battles of Molino del Rey and Chapultepec have seemed to me to have been wholly unnecessary,” he wrote many years later. Even allowing for a southern approach to the capital, Scott could have skirted Molina and Chapultepec, leaving the garrisons there to evacuate or be surrounded.
    But experience taught Grant something else as well—“that things are seen plainer after the events have occurred.” Scott’s success was the irrefutable riposte to criticism. “He invaded a populous country, penetrating two hundred and sixty miles into the interior, with a force at no time equal to one-half of that opposed to him; he was without a base; the enemy was always intrenched, always on the defensive; yet he won every battle, he captured the capital, and conquered the government. Credit is due to the troops engaged, it is true, but the plans and the strategy were the general’s.”
    Grant reflected on the two commanders, Scott and Taylor, he fought under in Mexico. “The contrast between the two was very marked,” he wrote. Scott, besides dressing in full uniform on every occasion, insisted on the stiffest protocol. “When he inspected his lines, word would be sent to all division and brigade commanders in advance, notifying them of the hour when the commanding general might be expected. This was done so that all the army might be under arms to salute their chief as he passed.… His staff proper, besides all officers constructively on his staff—engineers, inspectors, quartermasters, etc., that could be spared—followed, also in uniform and in prescribed order.” Scott’s full staff was essential to his style of command. “Scott saw more through the eyes ofhis staff officers than through his own.” And he treated communication as a self-conscious art form. “General Scott was quite precise in language, cultivated a style peculiarly his own; was proud of his rhetoric; not averse to speaking of himself, often in the third person.” His precision extended to the orders he issued. “Orders were prepared with great care and evidently with the view that they should be a history of what followed.”
    Taylor, on the other hand, was the soul of simplicity. Besides almost never wearing his general’s uniform, he eschewed a large staff. “He moved about the field in which he was operating, to see through his own eyes the situation. Often he would be without staff officers, and when he was accompanied by them there was no prescribed order in which they followed. He was very much given to sit his horse sideways—with both feet on one side—particularly on the battlefield.” He devoted little thought to his mode of expression but much to its substance. “Taylor was not a conversationalist, but on paper he could put his meaning so plainly that there could be no mistaking it. He knew how to express what