Even George McClellan looked for Cerro Gordos, beginning at Rich Mountain in western Virginia in early 1861. He won that little battle with a flanking strategy, but unlike his peers, McClellan possessed little of the audacity that successful flanking movements require. He was never able to successfully repeat the maneuver.

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One lesson Scott taught ran counter to accepted military practice. During the march toward Mexico City, he boldly abandoned his lines of supply and communication. Many who weren’t on the scene predicted disaster, but his army lived successfully off the countryside and was able to win battles even while it was isolated. Lee emulated this strategy later in both of his invasions of the North — into Maryland in 1862 and Pennsylvania in 1863. Grant also boldly abandoned his lines of supply and communication, Scott-style, at Vicksburg in 1863. And Sherman, Grant’s protg, took the tactic to its zenith in his march through Georgia and the Carolinas in late 1864 and early 1865.

Scott also taught a healthy respect for fortification. Under Scott’s command, Lee placed the batteries at Vera Cruz and at Chapultepec. He had also seen well-laid-out Mexican fortifications at Cerro Gordo and Contreras that had failed to work only because the Mexican generals didn’t know how to use them properly. Scott did know how to use them, and so did Lee.

Not everyone who marched with Scott learned the same lessons, or learned them so well. McClellan, perhaps more than any of his peers, loved the siege. He, like Lee, Jackson, Grant, and so many others, had seen a classic siege at Vera Cruz. He saw yet another as an observer of the Crimean War in the 1850s. He was sold on them. Lacking the audacity of his contemporaries, who used it only as a last resort, siege was one of the first tactical tools McClellan thought of. It was, for instance, a Vera Cruz and not a Cerro Gordo that he thought of when he laid siege to Yorktown on the Virginia Peninsula in 1862. Given the choice, Lee, Grant, and certainly Jackson, would have tried a number of other approaches before resorting to a siege.

But of all the things the commanders in the Civil War learned in Mexico under the brilliant Scott and the dogged and confident Taylor, the most valuable may have been what they learned about one another.

Grant later put it this way: The Mexican War made the officers of the old regular armies more or less acquainted, and when we knew the name of the general opposing we knew enough about him to make our plans accordingly. What determined my attack on Donelson [Fort Donelson, Tennessee] was as much the knowledge I had gained of its commanders in Mexico as anything else. But as the war progressed, and each side kept improving its army, these experiments were not possible. Then it became a hard, earnest war, and neither side could depend upon any chance with the other. Neither side dared to make a mistake.

One of the men Lee came to know best in Mexico was McClellan, who had served with him as an engineer. They had labored side-by-side in reconnoitering, constructing batteries, building roads, and serving artillery. Lee was acquainted with McClellan’s strengths and weaknesses. When they met as opposing generals on the Virginia Peninsula and later at Antietam, Maryland, in the Civil War, Lee knew his man well and was able to base his strategy and tactics on that knowledge. McClellan had had as much opportunity in Mexico to observe and learn about Lee, but if he learned anything, he used it far less effectively. Had he been able to exploit his friend Lee as well as Lee exploited him in those important early campaigns of the Civil War, that conflict might have turned out far differently than it did.

Whether or not the generals of the Civil War absorbed their lessons well in Mexico, there is no denying that the lessons had been offered. Those who did absorb them and then used them, generally went on to greatness. Many of them stand today in the pantheon of great American generals, in large part because of what they learned in that little foreign war that took them so triumphantly together to the halls of the Montezumas.

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