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Taylor’s Army of Occupation / 31 nance Department who arrived in October, arranged for his tent to be erected next to Meade’s, and they spent many of their leisure hours together.19 Meade was pleased to hear that the army’s commander was rumored to be a “staunch Whig.” As a member of Taylor’s staff, the young topographical engineer had frequent contact with the general.He foundTaylor to be “a plain,sensible old gentleman, who laughs very much at the excitement in the Northern States on account of his position, and thinks there is not the remotest probability of there being any war.”While delighted at being invited to join the general ’s mess, Meade occasionally succumbed to depression. He thought his endeavors since graduating from West Point had been “a waste of energy and time.” The former classmates who outranked him at Corpus Christi—four of whom were first lieutenants and one a captain—served as reminders of how much his resignation in 1836 had cost him in terms of advancement in the army.20 Yet Meade did not brood about his relatively low status as a junior second lieutenant if he was in good health and engaged in what he regarded as important duties; and less than two weeks after reaching Corpus Christi he and his fellow topographical engineers, Cram and Wood, were ordered to reconnoiter the Nueces River as far north as San Patricio. Traveling in five Mackinaw boats with an escort of thirty troops and two infantry officers, they left on September 19 and reached the site of the deserted settlement in four days. While rowing upriver they had become lost amid bayous and lakes until, on the third day, Meade located the Nueces’s main channel. After their return from the otherwise uneventful expedition, Meade was happily engaged for a while in constructing maps of the river’s course.21 Meanwhile,for a month the Army of Occupation had only one artillery unit, Lieutenant Braxton Bragg’s field battery, which, lacking its own cannon, experimented with old pieces borrowed from Colonel Kinney. Bragg, admired by nearly everyone in his role as the senior officer on duty with Company E,Third Artillery, probably benefited from beingTaylor’s sole artillery commander during those days. As time passed it became evident that the demanding, opinionated young officer, after years of alienating his superiors, had won Old Zach’s unqualified respect. Bragg’s battery lost its unique position in the Army of Occupation toward the end of August with the arrival of the battalion of Louisiana artillery volunteers raised by General Gaines, and the Second Artillery regiment’s field battery. In the Second Artillery unit, commanded by Bragg’s close friend Lieutenant James Duncan of New York, was Ulysses Grant’s classmate Brevet Second Lieutenant John J. Peck, likewise from New York. Duncan ’s company, after a month on St. Joseph’s Island, joined the army’s camp at Corpus Christi in October, as did other artillery newcomers. Among the latter were the cadre of the Third Artillery light field battery C, commanded 32 / Taylor’s Army of Occupation by Major Samuel Ringgold, of which Lieutenant Samuel French, a New Jerseyan who would fight for the Confederacy, was a member. In addition, helping to bring Taylor’s army to around four thousand troops were a number of artillerists acting as infantry who would be prominent in the next war: Lieutenants John B. Magruder, Abner Doubleday, and Seth Williams (First Artillery ); Captain Charles F. Smith, and Lieutenants Arnold Elzey and William Hays (Second Artillery); and in the Fourth Artillery companies, Lieutenants John P. McCown, John C. Pemberton, Robert S. Garnett, Mansfield Lovell, and Joseph J. Reynolds.22 Also reporting to Corpus Christi for duty that fall were several members of the West Point class of 1845 who would serve as general officers during the Civil War, one being John P. Hatch, a brevet second lieutenant assigned to the Third Infantry. Hatch, a New Yorker, liked almost everything about his assignment to Hitchcock’s regiment. He wrote to his sister Eliza that his out- fit was one of the best behaved, with no drinking or gambling and, unlike the dragoons, no untidy long hair or bushy mustaches. The army’s camp, to him, was a pretty sight, extending more than a mile along the shore, close to the water. The officers in his regiment, most of whom ate together in a...

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