Trailing Clouds of Glory: Zachary Taylor's Mexican War Campaign and His Emerging Civil War Leaders

7. March to Monterrey

Matamoros, Reynosa, Camargo, Mier / 105 for the First, Second, and Third Artillery regiments), plus Bragg’s, still considered technically “foot artillery.” Only a relatively few volunteer units traveled by land to Camargo, General Taylor having arranged for most of them to be transported by the shallowdraft steamboats that made two miles an hour against the Rio Grande’s current . Among those whose volunteer regiments traveled by water were a number of future Civil War generals: Major Goode Bryan and Lieutenant William H. Forney (Alabama); Colonel Henry R. Jackson and Captain Allison Nelson (Georgia); Captain Speed S. Fry and Lieutenant Edward J. Hobson (Second Kentucky); and Colonel Jefferson Davis, Captain Douglas H. Cooper, and Lieutenants Carnot Posey and Richard Griffith (Mississippi Rifles).Two such volunteer officers were in units divided between the land and water routes: Colonel George Washington Morgan (Second Ohio) and Captain John R. Kenly (Maryland and District of Columbia Battalion). Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston and a portion of his Regiment of Texas Rifle Volunteers boarded ship at Matamoros on August 5, after having been transported from Point Isabel under special orders, and landed at Camargo on the thirteenth.64 The tragedy that linked General Taylor and Colonel Jefferson Davis had occurred eleven years earlier. Davis had married Taylor’s daughter Sarah Knox against her father’s wishes. The wedding, at the home of Taylor relatives in Kentucky without the presence of either of the bride’s parents, took place in June of 1835. Three months later, while visiting Davis’s sister Anna in Louisiana , the bride and bridegroom both became desperately ill, probably with malaria or yellow fever, and Sarah Knox Taylor Davis (usually called “Knox”) could not be saved.65 Davis had met Knox in 1832, four years after graduating from West Point, while serving as Taylor’s adjutant at Fort Crawford, Michigan Territory.Why her father objected to the courtship is unknown—he may have heard that the young lieutenant was a far-from-model cadet while at the Academy, or he may have observed conduct of which he disapproved— but at any rate Old Zach went so far as to forbid Davis from visiting the family ’s Fort Crawford home. The following year Knox’s suitor transferred out of Taylor’s First Infantry command, joining the First U.S. Dragoons as a first lieutenant, but he and Knox kept in touch by mail. Before the wedding Davis resigned his army commission, intending to build a home a few miles below Vicksburg on a farm belonging to his eldest brother, Joseph. The residence of their widowed mother was located further south, near Woodville, Mississippi, where the ten Davis children were reared following moves from Georgia and later Kentucky, the birthplace of Jeff, their youngest, in 1808.66 For eight years after Knox died, Davis led a reclusive life. With the assistance of slaves he cleared his plantation, Briarfield; planted cotton and other 106 / Matamoros, Reynosa, Camargo, Mier crops; read extensively; and occasionally visited his mother as well as friends farther north. Finally, in 1845, having become active in his state’s political affairs , he was elected to a seat in the U.S. Congress as a Democrat. Thus, while General Taylor was advancing toward the Rio Grande in the spring of 1846 Jefferson Davis was in Washington as a first-term member of the House of Representatives, where he rose to speak occasionally in support of President Polk’s policies.67 With Davis in Washington was his second wife, twenty-yearold Varina Howell Davis. She pleaded with her husband not to volunteer when war with Mexico was declared, to no effect.Waiting only until July 4, by which time Davis had been elected in absentia as colonel of the regiment of volunteers being organized in Mississippi, he and Varina returned to Briarfield, where he arranged for his slave James Pemberton to oversee plantation affairs in his absence.By July 17 Davis was in New Orleans,accompanied by one of his brother Joseph’s slaves. The ten companies of the First Regiment of Mississippi Rifles-Volunteers were already there, awaiting transport to the war zone, but they had not yet been outfitted with the new Whitney percussion-cap rifles which, at Davis’s insistence, President Polk and General Winfield Scott had agreed to secure for the Mississippians in place of the smoothbore, flintlock muskets then in use throughout the army. By July 29 Davis, aboard the Alabama...