Lee may have been the star of Scott’s campaign, but he was by no means alone in earning the commanding general’s praise. Scott gave credit generally to his young West Point-trained officers. At Contreras, he exclaimed to Beauregard, If West Point had only produced the Corps of Engineers, the Country ought to be proud of that institution. Later, at a dinner in Mexico City, he said that but for the science of the military academy this army, multiplied by four, could not have entered the capital of Mexico.

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After the war Scott said flatly: I give it as my fixed opinion that but for our graduated cadets the war between the United States and Mexico might, and probably would, have lasted some four or five years, with, in its first half, more defeats than victories falling to our share; whereas in less than two campaigns we conquered a great country and a peace without the loss of a single battle or skirmish.

The same officer corps that earned such overwhelming praise in the Mexican War would rise to the highest commands of the Civil War. Of course, not every great Civil War general learned to lead armies from the experience in Mexico. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the unschooled military genius who rose from private to lieutenant general of cavalry in the Confederacy, was never in Mexico. William T. Sherman spent the Mexican War on garrison duty in California, a thousand miles from the heart of the action. Philip Sheridan was part of an entire generation of great Civil War commanders who were too young for the Mexican War. But for many of the generals who rose to highest command in the Union and Confederate armies, the Mexican War was their war college, their main preparation for command in the Civil War. Lee, Grant, Jackson, McClellan, Beauregard, Longstreet, Albert Sidney Johnston, Joseph E. Johnston, George Gordon Meade, Edmund Kirby Smith, George H. Thomas, Braxton Bragg, Joseph Hooker, and dozens of others all learned to make war in Mexico.

Not all of them would apply what they learned equally well, and some would forget the lessons altogether in the heat of combat, but Mexico would influence the way they fought nearly every battle in the Civil War. So it is a fair question: what exactly did the Mexican War teach them that they then fell back on in the 1860s, when suddenly they found themselves fighting one another?

To begin with, they had good teachers in Generals Taylor and Scott. The two men were cut from entirely different cloth, but both offered important role models for their young subordinates. Taylor was the soldier’s general. He often came up short on tactics and he lacked skill in the logistics of war, but when his men called him Old Rough and Ready, they meant it as a compliment. He was somebody to have confidence in. He shared every hardship in the field with his troops and demonstrated an astonishing personal courage.

A reporter with Taylor’s army wrote in the Cincinnati Chronicle in early 1847, Gen. Taylor has gained more influence over his army than any other general, save Napoleon, that ever lived. There is not a man of them, I suppose, who ever thinks of any thing else than success, when Taylor leads them in battle. A certain conviction rests upon the mind of the soldier that old Rough and Ready cannot be whipped, and it nerves his arms and strengthens his heart to do and dare more than he could with any less feeling of confidence.

It was the same sort of confidence Civil War soldiers were to feel in Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and U. S. Grant. Probably no commander in the Civil War patterned himself on Taylor as closely as Grant did. In describing Taylor in his memoirs, Grant might have been describing himself. No soldier could face either danger or responsibility more calmly than he, Grant wrote. These are qualities more rarely found than genius or physical courage. General Taylor never made any great show or parade, either of uniform or retinue. In dress he was possibly too plain, rarely wearing anything in the field to indicate his rank, or even that he was an officer; but he was known to every soldier in his army and was respected by all.

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