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

he wanted to say in the fewest well-chosen words, but would not sacrifice meaning to the construction of high-sounding sentences.” He didn’t pretend to anticipate every contingency and “gave orders to meet the emergency without reference to how they would read in history.”
    Grant saw the strengths in each general, though he had a preference. “Both were great and successful soldiers; both were true, patriotic and upright in all their dealings. Both were pleasant to serve under; Taylor was pleasant to serve with.”
    T he occupation of Mexico City began promisingly. “Everything looks as if peace should be established soon,” Grant wrote Julia. “The whole Mexican army is destroyed or dispersed; they have lost nearly all their artillery and other munitions of war; we are occupying the rich and populous valley from which the great part of their revenues are collected; and all their sea ports are cut off from them.”
    The fighting over, he couldn’t leave Mexico soon enough. “The idea of staying longer in this country is to me insupportable. Just think of the three long years that have passed since we met. My health has always been good, but exposure to weather and a tropical sun have added ten years to my apparent age. At this rate I will soon be old.” Many of his companions had died. “Out of all the officers that left Jefferson Barracks with the 4th Infantry, but three besides myself now remain.”
    Yet nothing about the war moved quickly. Scott was right to worry that the discrediting of Santa Anna would complicate peacemaking, for upon the Mexican general’s defeat at the gates of Mexico City he turned the presidency over to a caretaker government that proved unequal to the task of signing away half the country. For months the Mexicans dithered and dodged, hoping some stroke of fortune would spare them the increasingly inevitable.
    James Polk seemed intent on abetting the delay. The president wished to capture for the Democrats the fruits of victories won by Whig generals, and he feared thatNicholas Trist, the envoy he had sent to Mexico City to negotiate a treaty, was falling under the influence of soldiers who, like Grant, wanted nothing more than to get home. Polk summarily ordered Trist back to Washington. But Scott talked Trist into ignoring the order and continuing the negotiations.
    The political pressure on Trist persuaded the Mexican government to get more serious, and within a few weeks he and they had the outlines of a treaty in hand. The boundary between the United States and Mexico would run west from the Gulf of Mexico along the Rio Grande to New Mexico, then west via the Gila River to the Gulf of California and overland to San Diego. The American government would assume responsibility for the claims of its citizens against Mexico and would pay the Mexican government $15 million for the territory transferred from Mexico to the United States.
    The treaty was signed on February 2, 1848, at the village of Guadalupe Hidalgo, outside Mexico City. Trist shortly left for Washington to deliver the treaty and explain why he had exceeded his orders. Polk was livid but perceived no alternative to submitting the treaty to the Senate. And when antislavery Whigs in the Senate tried to prevent its ratification, on grounds that it would open new territory to slavery, the president swallowed his anger at Trist and praised the treaty as a coup. “If the treaty in its present form is ratified,” he said, “there will be added to theU.S. an immense empire, the value of which twenty years hence it would be difficult to calculate.” Most Americans agreed with Polk, in principle if not in specifics, and after Southern Democrats began complaining that the treaty transferred too little territory to the United States and calling for the negotiations to be reopened, the Whigs swung to Polk and the treaty was ratified. TheMexican senate required longer to conclude that the treaty had to be approved, but in late May