Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [14]
The fight over the annexation of Texas brought the slavery issue once again into sharp focus as the great national political divide, to the discomfort of many, but the matter was sealed when the Texans shrewdly set in motion negotiations in London to make the Republic of Texas part of the British Empire. Even staunch nonannexationists were startled and dismayed at the prospect of the British Empire reappearing on North American soil. This threat was one of the many factors that led to proannexationist James K. Polk’s victory in the presidential election of 1844, and to the subsequent annexation of Texas (which succeeded only by the skin of its teeth). Polk and the Southerners—not to speak of the Texans themselves, once they had joined the Union—had a greater ambition, however, which was to seize as much Mexican territory as they could, at least everything north of the Rio Grande. The unsettled dispute over the southern border of Texas, which had festered from the very beginning of the Texas Republic as a sore point between the Texans and Mexico, seemed tailor-made as a cause for war, if only the Mexicans could be provoked into beginning it. The Mexicans claimed that their border with Texas was on the Nueces River, while the Texans (and now the United States) argued that it was on the Rio Grande—a difference of about 120 miles. It was not much as a cause for war, but it was enough. Polk moved U.S. forces into the disputed region, calculating that their presence there would sooner or later provoke Mexico to fight.
The maneuverings that were to lead to the Mexican War were the background against which Ulysses and Julia’s engagement took place, meaning that during a great part of that time he was absent, as the Fourth Infantry was moved first to Nachitoches for a year, on the western edge of Louisiana, close to Texas, and then, via New Orleans, to Corpus Christi, Texas, a small part of a military show that was intended to overbear the Mexicans, and impress them with the might and the serious intentions of the United States. Grant was an unenthusiastic bit player in this drama—he was no friend to slavery, he disliked the idea of using the army to provoke the Mexicans into a war they would lose, and he had no great desire to fight Mexicans or anybody else. On top of which duty kept him separated from Julia, and from pressing Colonel Dent to agree to an earlier marriage.
As a result he wrote—long, detailed letters, full of intelligent observations and interesting detail, in which his passion for Julia occasionally surfaces quite movingly. These are not the letters of an ordinary second lieutenant. During his days in West Point, Grant’s superiors had complained that he wasted his time reading “romantic novels” (improbable as that might seem in a young man as dour as Grant), but if that was the case it did more for his style as a writer than reading Jomini’s classic text on tactics would have done. Like the young Winston Churchill, also a failure at school and military college, Grant learned how to master the English sentence. His spelling left much to be desired, but his prose is direct, clear, and never ambiguous, as it was to be for the rest of his life, and his letters certainly served their purpose in keeping Julia’s attentions directed toward him and lobbying her father (unsuccessfully) to let them marry sooner. They also make clear that Grant, however