Civil Warfare Generals By no means Forgot the Blood and Misplaced Associates within the US Showdown with Mexico

In September 1861, whereas stationed in Paducah, Ky., Personal John H. Web page of the first Illinois Gentle Artillery obtained discover that he had been promoted to second lieutenant within the third U.S. Infantry and was to report for obligation in Washington, D.C. After packing his belongings, Web page caught a ship for Cairo, Sick., the place he reported to the overall answerable for the District of Southeast Missouri earlier than acquiring transportation for the following leg of his journey.

Web page instantly acknowledged Ulysses S. Grant perched behind a wire display screen at a neighborhood financial institution the place the overall had arrange his headquarters. “He checked out my fee and appeared buried in deep thought,” Web page recalled. “He checked out me intently and repeated a number of instances, Jno. Web page,” apparently misplaced in reverie. It took a faucet on the shoulder by a gray-haired officer in attendance to snap Grant out of his trance.

Assuredly, Grant had been reminiscing concerning the Mexican Warfare, Web page suspected, when he, then a 24-year-old second lieutenant, personally witnessed a Mexican cannonball mortally wound Web page’s father, Captain John Web page Sr., throughout the fierce Battle of Palo Alto. “Little doubt,” Web page concluded in observing Grant’s uncommon response, “his ideas, when taking a look at my fee had been wandering again to his early days.”

Grant and Personal Web page had each misplaced one thing particular throughout the U.S. victory at Palo Alto on Could 8, 1846: Web page in the end his father, and Grant his innocence.

We, in fact, won’t ever know for positive what crossed Grant’s thoughts when the younger personal handed him his fee, however the now 39-year-old brigadier had maybe revisited the senior Web page’s disfiguring wound, him writhing in agony on the plains of Palo Alto…the comrade he had misplaced 15 years earlier.

For lots of the greater than 500 Mexican Warfare veterans who turned Accomplice or Union generals throughout the Civil Warfare, battle deaths evoked sturdy emotional reactions. These traumatic experiences had launched them to the dreadful classes of struggle: that it was horrible, that loss and grief had been regular, and the way to deal with them. Inevitably, dying in battle performed a big position in shaping their identities.

Dr. Nigel C. Hunt, who research struggle trauma and reminiscence, stresses that the majority people who undergo such ordeals react with intense reminiscences or feelings when recalling what they witnessed, though that doesn’t essentially imply they’ll undergo from long-term or debilitating issues. Even with these reminiscences indelibly etched into their minds, most proceed to reside regular lives. Grant and his comrades always remember what they noticed or how they felt when confronted with dying on the battlefield in Mexico.

“I can not really feel exultation”

Mexican Warfare battles had been bloody affairs, particularly for U.S. Military officers. They made up 8 p.c of the struggle’s battle deaths, which surpassed the mortality charge of different U.S. Nineteenth-century conflicts. Famend historian James M. McPherson says that within the Union and Accomplice armies throughout the Civil Warfare, the proportion of officers killed in motion was about 15 p.c increased than that of enlisted males. Throughout the Mexican Warfare, the proportion of officers killed in motion or who died of their wounds was greater than 40 p.c increased than the rank and file.

Throughout Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott’s 1847 Mexico Metropolis Marketing campaign, as an illustration, his military misplaced 61 officers killed to roughly 703 troopers (8 p.c). As compared, throughout the Seven Days’ Battles in 1862, the Military of Northern Virginia misplaced 175 officers killed to three,494 troopers (5 p.c). If the losses sustained amongst Accomplice officers throughout the spring and summer season of 1862 had been staggering, as Dr. Joseph T. Glatthaar suggests, the mortality charge amongst Scott’s officers in Mexico was catastrophic.

Main Edmund Kirby, who misplaced many expensive pals and cherished companions, together with his nephew, throughout Scott’s marketing campaign, wrote to his spouse, Eliza: “Blood. Blood. Blood. Sufficient has been shed to excite the worst enthusiastic pleasure all through our expensive nation. Sufficient to trigger tears to circulation enough to drift a ship of struggle.”

The Mexican Warfare was an emotionally taxing expertise for its troopers, particularly its officers, who witnessed a disturbing proportion of their comrades die in battle. When Scott’s military seized Mexico Metropolis, 1st Lt. John Sedgwick wrote his sister, Olive, that “had been it not for the lack of so many close to and expensive pals,—pals with whom we’ve loved all of the pleasures of a protracted peace, and with whom we’ve shoulder to shoulder encountered and vanquished the enemy…our scenario can be nice.”

Captain Isaac I. Stevens, additionally with Scott’s military, advised his spouse, Margaret, that whereas he was alive and wholesome, he might hardly have fun. “I can not really feel exultation,” he admitted. “Now we have misplaced many courageous officers and males, some my private pals; streams of blood have in actuality flowed over the battlefield.” Each generals had been later killed whereas serving within the Union Military throughout the riot—Sedgwick on the Wilderness in Could 1864, and Stevens at Chantilly (Ox Hill) in September 1862.

After the August 1847 Battle of Contreras, Captain Robert E. Lee, finally the Confederacy’s most well-known common, finest captured the emotional misery it brought on many when he declared: “It’s the dwelling for whom we must always mourn, and never the lifeless.”

Research that deal with Civil Warfare generals and their position within the Mexican Warfare usually focus on the army classes they took away from their service and the way they utilized them on Civil Warfare battlefields. That’s vital, however what is usually neglected is the emotional influence the struggle, particularly battle deaths, had on them throughout the quick however expensive wrestle. The sickening sights on battlefields or in hospitals, and the sudden and violent lack of comrades, pals, or kin, evoked a flood of intense feelings reminiscent of grief, horror, shock, melancholy, guilt, loneliness, helplessness, and numbness. The deeper the bond with the deceased particular person, the extra emotionally impactful the loss. To raised perceive the people who fought in Mexico earlier than the Civil Warfare, we should start to look past the struggle as merely a “coaching floor” or a jovial gathering of friends-turned-enemies and acknowledge the emotional influence battlefield deaths had on them.

Misery and Detachment

Second Lieutenant Henry M. Judah, a Union brigadier common who commanded a division throughout the 1864 Atlanta Marketing campaign, discovered it unsettling to remember to his mom, Mary, what he had skilled on the Battle of Monterrey in September 1846.

“Their cries and groans, the horrible hissing of the cannon and musket balls, which crammed the air, added to the roar of artillery in each route, made an impression that I might by no means describe,” he wrote to her three days after Brig. Gen. Zachary Taylor’s military captured town.

Throughout the battle, a number of musket balls had grazed his cheeks, and had his sword knocked from his hand by a cannonball. An 1843 West Level classmate and fellow lieutenant fell lifeless mere ft away from him. Dazed and dirtied, Judah hunkered down behind a mound of earth as a bathe of artillery and musket hearth handed simply ft above his head. “[E]very face seemed clean—all had been exhausted—and the wounded and the lifeless had been blended with the dwelling,” he recalled.

When Mexican troopers started to advance on their place, a sense of indifference overtook the younger lieutenant. The emotional callousness alarmed him greater than anything he felt that day. “My emotions at this second had been extra horrible than these of dying,” he admitted to his mom. “I started to really feel reckless, and cared not how quickly it got here.”

Inside solely a brief interval, Judah skilled a surge of worry, pleasure, nervousness, horror, dread, and detachment.

The emotional highs and lows of fight, as Judah skilled, may be overwhelming for a soldier, however the battle’s aftermath may be equally—and arguably extra so—distressing emotionally.

The primary two battles fought throughout the Mexican Warfare, on Could 8-9, 1846, left each fields suffering from dying and destruction. Mutilated males and horses, deserted wagons, discarded weapons, and every part of which a military consists carpeted the landscapes at Palo Alto and, the next day, Resaca de la Palma. Metal, lead, and iron inflicted horrific wounds—mangling limbs, crushing heads, and severing our bodies and trunks. Most Civil Warfare generals who fought at these two battles had been uncovered to the butchery of struggle for the primary time of their lives.

“Such a subject of carnage by no means was earlier than witnessed by any of us,” 1st Lt. William H.T. Brooks, who commanded a sixth Corps division throughout the Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville campaigns of 1862-63, wrote house after the battle.

Second Lieutenant John J. Peck, who for a time throughout the Civil Warfare commanded all Union troops in Virginia south of the James River, advised his father that whereas the 2 armies battled at Resaca de la Palma, the American troopers paid little consideration to the lifeless Mexican troopers. “[B]ut after the thrill of battle has handed away,” he admitted, “our sympathies had been aroused, and I felt keenly all of the horrors of struggle.”

Judah, who offered his mom with a vivid account of his Monterrey ordeal, admitted that the mutilated our bodies on the Resaca battlefield had been a horrible imaginative and prescient. He couldn’t discover the phrases to explain the horror.

A day later, he remained haunted by the expertise, writing her: “The cries of the wounded nonetheless ring in my ears.”

Processing Trauma

Battlefield dying left a long-lasting impression on the survivors. “I used to be considerably affected by the sight,” stated 1st Lt. Charles S. Hamilton, later a Union main common, after coming upon the mangled our bodies of Mexican troopers killed at Monterrey, “however ere the evening of that day had closed I discovered to look upon the lifeless with as little emotion as I might regard a stone.”

Consciously or subconsciously, Hamilton was utilizing repression as a defensive mechanism. In accordance with Dr. Dillon J. Carroll, who studied and wrote about psychological sickness throughout the Civil Warfare, troopers used emotional desensitization or “hardening” to deal with dying—as did Mexican Warfare troopers.

In his memoirs, Hamilton confessed the sight of these lifeless Mexican troopers at Monterrey “affected me greater than another scene throughout all the struggle.”

When Hamilton arrived at Bishop’s Palace the morning after the battle, he witnessed extra horror, later offering a graphic account. He watched a Mexican soldier struck by a shell that had burst and obliterated him because it handed via his physique. “When you think about a human being floor by two avalanches crushing him between them,” Hamilton would write, “you’ll have an identical sight.”

The opposite soldier had been hit within the brow by a musket ball. His mind oozed from a gap at the back of his head and dried foam clung to his lips as he had taken his final gasping breaths. “Sufficient of those descriptions,” Hamilton would be aware. “[Y]ou will little like them, whereas I’ve turn out to be callous to probably the most ghastly sights.”

Dr. Carol Acton, who has studied wartime grief, says that, for troopers, writing a few traumatic expertise affords them the means to precise and deal with emotional misery and grief. Conceding that his family members may wince at his graphic descriptions, Hamilton shared what he noticed and felt anyway, probably as a option to course of the trauma.

Returning to a selected battlefield typically triggered feelings a few years later. Lew Wallace, a second lieutenant in Mexico who would maintain vital Civil Warfare instructions at each Shiloh (1862) and Monocacy (1864), stated that, regardless of all his subsequent experiences in struggle, one part of the Buena Vista battlefield was probably the most horrible after-battle scene he had witnessed. “The lifeless lay within the pent area physique on physique, a mixing and interlacement of elements of males as defiant of the creativeness as of the pen,” the longer term creator of the famed novel Ben-Hur would write.

Wallace made three pilgrimages to the Buena Vista battlefield over a seven-year-period. On one in every of his visits, he seen a Mexican farmer with a hoe casually digging a path within the grime and main a stream of water to irrigate a wheatfield. It was the identical subject he had described above. Wallace questioned if the healthy-looking wheat had been nurtured by the blood of the American troopers struck down there in February 1847.

Everlasting Camaraderie

It’s one factor for a soldier to watch the dying of one other with whom he had no intimate relationship than to look at a mentor, messmate, or shut pal die in fight. The emotional bond shaped amongst troopers is distinct, as they undergo and face risks collectively, danger their lives for each other, and depend on one another for emotional assist and survival.

For lots of the U.S. Military’s junior officers who served within the Mexican Warfare, that they had spent years collectively earlier than the battle, as West Level classmates or for lengthy intervals at remoted frontier outposts. When a comrade was killed in battle, this everlasting camaraderie understandably introduced forth intense feelings corresponding to the lack of a member of the family.

Ulysses Grant turned conversant in shattered friendships and loss in Mexico. Although Palo Alto was Grant’s first battle, it was not the worry of dying that the majority affected him, however the sight of a colleague (particularly a pal) struggling a horrific wound.

For Grant, that had been “the ghastly hideousness of his visage” as Captain John Web page, his face shot away by an enemy cannonball, “reared in convulsive agony from the grass.” As he wrote his pal John W. Lowe about Captain Web page’s disfiguring wound: “The below jaw is gone to the wind pipe and the tongue hangs down upon the throat.”

In his memoirs, written almost 40 years later, Grant relived the element of that enemy cannonball that had decapitated one soldier after which mutilated Web page, splattering close by American troopers with mind matter and bone fragments.

Web page was the primary of a lot of Grant’s comrades killed throughout the struggle, however he was the closest with 2nd Lt. Robert Hazlitt, a fellow Ohioan and graduate of West Level’s Class of 1843, one in every of 18 U.S. officers killed or mortally wounded at Monterrey. Hazlitt often accompanied Grant on his visits to the White Haven Plantation close to St. Louis when he started courting Julia Dent.

Grant tended to internalize his feelings, however, having misplaced so many pals at Monterrey, lastly broke down. “How very lonesome it’s right here with us now,” he wrote to Julia a month after the battle. “I’ve simply been strolling via camp and what number of faces that had been expensive to probably the most of us are lacking now.”

Three different lieutenants within the regiment had been struck down storming town apart from Hazlitt, and remained always on Grant’s thoughts: Charles Hoskins, Richard H. Graham, and James S. Woods.

Was Grant experiencing bereavement overload, survivor’s guilt, or each? To drive away “the Blues,” Grant retrieved some previous letters and a journal he stored whereas stationed at Jefferson Barracks, Mo., and reminisced about happier instances.

Grant expressed his shut friendship with Hazlitt in a November letter to Hazlitt’s brother, James, assuring him that solely his expensive pal’s household might really feel his dying extra deeply. Monterrey, Grant wrote, “will probably be remembered by all right here current as one of the vital melancholy of their lives.”

As Grant’s fame grew throughout the Civil Warfare, he used his affect to help the kin of one of many officers he mourned in 1846. In late 1863, Charles Hoskins’ widow, Jennie, wrote to Grant from New Rochelle, N.Y., imploring him to assist her 17-year-old son, John Deane Charles Hoskins, safe an appointment to the U.S. Army Academy. Grant had lent the boy’s father his horse shortly earlier than he was killed at Monterrey.

In January 1864, Grant had Illinois Rep. Elihu B. Washburne ship a be aware to President Abraham Lincoln asking him to nominate the boy to West Level. On a army telegraph approving Hoskins’ appointment, Lincoln scribbled the phrases “Gen. Grant’s boy” subsequent to the cadet’s identify. A month after Grant was appointed to the rank of lieutenant common, Jennie Hoskins wrote him reporting that her son had obtained the appointment. (He would graduate in 1868, serve for 40 years, and retire as a brigadier common.)

Household Bonds

Captain Robert E. Lee’s eyes stayed glued on his older brother, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Sydney Smith Lee, when the American weapons opened on the Mexican defenses at Vera Cruz in March 1847. Robert’s brotherly intuition kicked in, and he was decided to defend Sydney from hazard, although there was little he might do to guard him from the enemy’s shells. The considered Sydney being wounded or killed, nevertheless, petrified him. As he would write his spouse, Mary, afterward: “[W]hat would I’ve achieved had he been lower down earlier than me!”

Thankfully for Lee, he didn’t have to seek out out. However there have been a handful of different Civil Warfare generals who skilled Lee’s worst worry and extra when a blood relative was killed.

Troublesome to understand maybe, the following U.S. assault at Molino del Rey would eclipse something Grant and different U.S. troopers had skilled at Monterrey. On September 8, 1847, Basic Scott ordered an assault on a cluster of stone buildings and earthworks to seize a foundry through which he believed the Mexicans had been melting church bells to solid cannons. In solely two hours, nevertheless, Brig. Gen. William Price misplaced almost 25 p.c of his drive, and 17 U.S. officers had been both killed throughout the battle or would die of their wounds.

When Ethan Allen Hitchcock, performing inspector common to Scott, visited the sphere after the debacle, he stumbled on Captain William Chapman of the fifth U.S. Infantry. In a second jarringly just like the one Accomplice Maj. Gen. George E. Pickett famously had on July 3, 1863, after Pickett’s Cost at Gettysburg, Chapman pointed to the regiment’s survivors—now diminished roughly to the scale of an organization—and exclaimed with tears rolling down his face: “There’s the Fifth.”

Among the many mortally wounded was Captain Ephraim Kirby Smith of Chapman’s regiment. A musket ball had struck him within the face below the left eye and handed via his head, exiting close to the left ear. Smith’s uncle, Main Edmund Kirby, had Ephraim (“Kirby” to members of the family) taken to his quarters in Tacubaya.

Second Lieutenant Edmund Kirby Smith, the fallen warrior’s brother, would turn out to be well-known as a Accomplice lieutenant common and commander of the Trans-Mississippi Division throughout the Civil Warfare. Identified by members of the family as “Ted,” he would go to his mortally wounded sibling a number of instances, however when he arrived on September 11 to the hospital the place “Kirby” had been moved, Ted discovered his brother had died.

Having misplaced his father, Joseph Lee Smith, in Could and now his older brother simply 4 months aside was deeply distressing, and Ted additionally feared for his brother’s three younger youngsters—Joseph, Emma, and George—left to develop up with out their father.

The younger lieutenant was additionally pained by his sister-in-law’s monetary welfare, as no pension system existed within the Military on the time for troopers’ widows. How would she and her youngsters cope? Among the many eerie ideas plunging via his anguished thoughts was that it might have been higher had he been killed and never his brother.

“Burned into the Soul”

When Captain John W. Lowe arrived in Mexico Metropolis within the spring of 1848, he famous that his pal Ulysses Grant had undergone a change, writing to his spouse: “[H]e is a brief thick man with a beard reaching half manner down his waist and I worry he drinks an excessive amount of however don’t you say a phrase on that topic.”

Whereas some writers consider that Lowe’s assertion was an early indication of Grant’s alcoholism, they overlook what he may actually have been making an attempt to convey: that Grant was battling his traumatic struggle experiences.

The lieutenant had been in Mexico for 2 years, away from Julia for 3, and had participated in almost all of the struggle’s main battles with out a possibility to take go away. He had witnessed a lot dying and plenty of shut pals die. After the dying of Sidney Smith, a pal and second lieutenant within the 4th U.S. Infantry, in 1847, he advised Julia that out of all of the officers that left Jefferson Barracks with the 4th, solely three, together with himself, remained. In actual fact, 21 p.c of the officers who began the struggle in Grant’s regiment had been killed or died of their wounds, and 11 p.c of the 4th’s battle deaths consisted of officers. The excessive fatality charge amongst officers in Grant’s regiment led to the nickname “the Bloody 4th.”

In 1884, the yr earlier than Grant died of throat most cancers, The Salt Lake Tribune reported that Grant retained vivid recollections of his pre-Civil Warfare years: “[T]he Mexican Warfare appears extra distinct to him than the Rebel,” the newspaper declared, and likewise maintained that the struggle’s battles had been “burned into the soul of Grant as with a model of fireplace.”

In his memoirs, Grant claimed that he significantly benefited from the “many sensible classes it taught,” however he omitted his extra personal experiences. As he was hesitant to brazenly specific his interior emotions, notably when he anticipated them to be printed and shared with the general public, it isn’t stunning Grant determined to omit the grief and loneliness he had skilled with the dying of comrades in Mexico. These feelings, nevertheless, are evident in his personal letters.

Grant wasn’t alone in expressing this interior turmoil. Many Mexican Warfare veterans who turned Civil Warfare generals likewise expressed their deepest emotions in personal journals, letters house, and postwar memoirs. Definitely, each Union and Accomplice generals gained worthwhile army expertise in Mexico that they might apply within the Civil Warfare. It is vital, nevertheless, to acknowledge that the Mexican Warfare additionally served as an emotional coaching floor for these leaders. The deaths they witnessed taught them harsh classes concerning the realities of struggle, triggered highly effective emotional responses, and left a long-lasting influence on their character and values lengthy earlier than the Civil Warfare.

Frank Jastrzembski, a daily America’s Civil Warfare contributor, writes from Hartford, Wis.

This text initially appeared within the Spring 2024 concern of America’s Civil Warfare journal.