The Mexican War gave America’s young crop of army officers a taste of glory and opportunity for advancement, but it also gave them a look at what war was really like. They didn’t always like what they saw. After Mexico City fell, Jackson wrote his sister in Virginia that he had “seen sights that would melt the heart of the most inhuman of beings: my friends dying around me and my brave soldiers breathing their last on the bloody fields of battle, deprived of every human comfort, and even now I can hardly open my eyes after entering a hospital, the atmosphere of which is generally so vitiated as to make the healthy sick.” Jackson was finding that while battle elated him, war did not.

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Even as hawkish an officer as George McClellan lost some of his enthusiasm during the war. At Contreras he had two horses killed under him and was knocked flat when canister fire struck the hilt of his sword. By the war’s end, when he was in Mexico City and still alive, he would say: “Here we are–the deed is done–I am glad no one can say ‘poor Mac’ over me.”

When “the deed was done” and the participants looked back on the war, they all agreed it was an unparalleled military experience. Grant, who would one day have a few successes of his own on other fields, praised Scott and summed up the accomplishment this way: “He invaded a populous country, penetrating two hundred and sixty miles into the interior, with a force at no time equal to one-half of that opposed to him; he was without a base; the enemy was always intrenched, always on the defensive; yet he won every battle, he captured the capital, and conquered the government.”

Although from the beginning of the war to the end of it some 100,000 men, regulars and volunteers, entered the American army, at no time did more than 14,000 fight in any one battle. Scott entered the valley of Mexico with only 9,000 troops and was not reinforced until after Mexico City had fallen. In every battle fought, the Mexicans were superior–often overwhelmingly so–in numbers of troops and small arms and in numbers and weight of artillery. They had a superior cavalry and fought gallantly. Yet, the Americans consistently defeated them. Why?

What the American army had that the Mexicans didn’t was overwhelming superiority in military skill. The Mexicans were outgeneraled and outmaneuvered at the top. But even more important, they were outmanned in the middle by the solid core of young officers, West Pointers mostly, who formed the backbone of the army’s officer corps.

The group of officers who earned the most voluminous praise were West Point engineers. Lieutenants McClellan and Beauregard and Captain Lee were among the bright engineering talent that shone like burnished steel throughout the war. Their ability literally shaped victories for General Winfield Scott along the National Road from Vera Cruz to Mexico City in the spring and summer of 1847. All would go on to command huge armies in the coming Civil War. Even in that group of luminaries, though, one officer shone more brightly than most: Robert E. Lee.

There was not a general in the American army in Mexico who didn’t, between Vera Cruz and Mexico City, praise the work of this brilliant engineer at least once. Scott called Lee’s two trips across the Pedregal near Contreras on the night of August 19 “the greatest feat of physical and moral courage performed by any individual, in my knowledge, pending the campaign.” Lieutenant Ewell, who would one day command a corps in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, wrote in his account of that battle: “I really think one of the most talented men connected with this army is Capt. Lee, of the Engs. By his daring reconnaissances pushed up to the cannon’s mouth, he has enabled Genl. Scott to fight his battles almost without leaving his tent.”

A decade after the war, Scott was still aglow over Lee, describing him in an official letter as “the very best soldier that I ever saw in the field.” When the Civil War was just beginning in April 1861, Scott was the aged, overweight, and immobile general-in-chief of the U.S. Army. He still thought enough of Lee’s abilities that he suggested the colonel for command of the entire Federal force then being assembled to put down the rebellion. Lee refused–he could not take up arms against his people in seceding Virginia–but the offer was a signal honor.

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