Gods and Generals - Jeff Shaara [2]
In 1855 the army forms the Second Regiment of Cavalry in Texas, and Lee astounds friends and family by volunteering for command. He sees this as his last opportunity to command real troops in the “real” army, and thus spends five years in the cavalry, which ultimately becomes another thankless and unsatisfying job. Serving under the harsh and disagreeable thumb of General David Twiggs, Lee asks for and is granted leave, after receiving word that his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, the grandson of Martha Washington and the patriarch of his family’s home, has suddenly died.
WINFIELD SCOTT HANCOCK
Born 1824 in Pennsylvania, one of twin boys, he graduates West Point in 1844. Hancock serves in Mexico with the Sixth Infantry, but only after waging war with his commanders to let him fight. He leads troops with some gallantry, but misses the army’s great final victory at Chapultepec because he has the flu. He watches from a roof-top while his friends and fellow soldiers, Lewis Armistead, George Pickett, James Longstreet, and Ulysses “Sam” Grant, storm the walls of the old fort.
After the war, Hancock marries Almira Russell of St. Louis, considered in social circles, and by most bachelors there, to be the finest catch in St. Louis. She is beautiful and brilliant, and accepts her role as the wife of an army officer always with good grace and a superb ability to charm all who know her. They have two children, a son and a daughter.
Hancock, a large, handsome man, has the unfortunate talent of making himself indispensable in any assignment he is given, possessing an amazing talent for the drudgery of army rules and paperwork. This launches him into a dead-end career as a quartermaster, first in Kansas, then in Fort Myers, Florida, where the Everglades assaults the soldiers there with crushing heat and disease, snakes and insects, and the constant threat of attack from the Seminole Indians. He soon is transferred back to “Bloody Kansas,” as the army tries to maintain control of rioting civilians confronting each other over the issue of slavery. Moving farther west with the army, he is named Quartermaster for Southern California and assumes a one-man post in the small but growing town of Los Angeles. But Hancock is never content to be a quartermaster, cannot forget his days in Mexico leading infantry, and aches for duty as a real soldier.
THOMAS JONATHAN JACKSON
Born 1824, Jackson arrives at West Point as a country bumpkin with homespun clothes and no prep school training, unlike the brilliant George McClellan or the aristocratic Ambrose Powell Hill, and has great difficulty at the Point. Jackson struggles with the studies, but has no vices, and so spends his time improving, and acquires a reputation as rigid and disciplined, and graduates in 1846 in the upper third of his class. All who know him there are certain that if the courses had gone a fifth year, Jackson would have reached the top.
In Mexico, as an artillery officer, he quickly shows his commanders he is not only suited for the heat of battle, but thrives on it. Jackson leads his two small guns into the fight with an intensity that puts fear into the enemy, and into many who serve with him. He is promoted three times, more than anyone in the army, and returns home a major.
After the war, Jackson grows weary of peacetime army life and applies for a position as an instructor at the Virginia Military Institute, in Lexington, Virginia. He is far from the most qualified