David S and Jeanne T Heidler American Historians

In 1877, the same year that Pofirio Díaz first came to power, the United States officially ended Reconstruction, the troubled government plan to reshape and readmit the formerly rebellious southern states, the last official remnant of the war that had nearly brought the Colossus of the North to its knees. At the end of that war, in April 1865, two men who had served in Mexico almost two decades before sat down in a modest house in northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House, one to dictate terms of surrender and the other compelled by necessity to accept them.

Here was a strange reversal of fortune indeed, for the victor, Ulysses S. Grant, had been a lowly lieutenant during the Mexican War while the vanquished, Robert E. Lee, had been a lionized captain, one of Winfield Scott’s indispensable engineers. Grant had met Lee only once before. During the Mexican War, Lee had briefly visited the brigade to which Grant was attached, and Grant always remembered the meeting vividly. When the two met a second time—the momentous meeting in the small parlor that April day many years later—Grant mentioned the first encounter, but Lee confessed he had no recollection of it, which was understandable, for Grant was habitually unkempt while Lee had the effortless ability to appear polished under the most trying circumstances. Grant’s service had not been unmemorable (he was cited for bravery in combat), but it had not been particularly glamorous. Lee’s record was the stuff of legend with his discovering the path at Cerro Gordo and crossing the impassable Pedregal to find a way through it with seeming ease. Winfield Scott was said to have thought, “God Almighty had to spit on his hands to make Bob Lee.” After the Mexican War, Grant’s fortunes had fallen to such a low state that he was nearly indigent with a weakness for whiskey, while Lee’s career had remained steady and constant as he scored significant engineering achievements and rose to the rank of colonel. Scott had wanted Lee to command the Union armies at the outset of the Civil War, but he had declined to bear arms against his native Virginia. Grant had been compelled to scramble for even a modest command, and his emergence as a talented general was gradual and marked by setbacks. Yet now the two men sat with their pasts completely irrelevant to their present circumstance. The impecunious and unprepossessing Grant at the head of the vast Army of the Potomac had won the war. The graceful and elegant Lee at the head of the dwindling Army of Northern Virginia had lost it.

For all their differences, though, their service in Mexico had struck them in a strangely similar way. In retrospect, both found that war troubling. Lee compared the American campaign to that of a bully browbeating a weakling, and Grant was later convinced that the entire episode was a direct cause of the Civil War. “Nations, like individuals,” he said, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.”

At the least, the conflict carried few of the trappings of honor, a quality that was equally important to the two men throughout their lives, one who desperately sought it and the other who wore it as a natural mantle. For soldiers, it might have seemed strange that the hard chores of soldiers, the marching and fighting and killing, had brought such bounty at such little cost, until the actual bill finally came due. The campaigns in Mexico had not been much of a war, as war was to be measured by Americans a decade and a half later. The fight had cost the country about 13,000 dead, most of those from disease, and like all wars had been the setting for notable acts of heroism and villainy. But it was as nothing for those two men, their fellow officers, and the survivors in their ranks, who could count a staggering 600,000 dead in the contest for the Union. That contest had been foreordained by the one years before in Mexico, the occasion when the scruffy lieutenant met the dazzling captain in the middle of nowhere, on a road that ultimately led to Appomattox.

The world would judge him as complex, but he was less complicated than clever, a collection of appetites and ambitions that found expression in one overarching trait, which was a capacity for survival. Santa Anna was born into privilege, a criollo whose heritage was peninsulare, the inheritor of a large estate in the high country of Jalapa, which he continuously added to and improved. He was also the inheritor of the caudillo tradition, the exaltation of the gentleman warrior who was born to rule through power, whose legitimate right to rule in fact derived from his wielding power, the distillation of the concept that might makes right. It was only natural for him to follow the path of the army, his lieutenancy secured in 1812 and his spurs won (as well as his first wound suffered) during the suppression of the Hidalgo and Morelos rebellions. Some writers claim that he learned cruelty during these campaigns, which is perhaps true, but it is not so easy to determine the reason for his habitual duplicity. Santa Anna climbed the officer ranks to become a lieutenant colonel through a combination of obsequious service and bona fide bravery, but he never cultivated loyalty as a habit. He instead remained vigilant for opportunities and rarely saw one he did not grasp. Betraying a cause that had earlier claimed his devotion was easy for him, and every single person who trusted him eventually regretted doing so. Strangely, however, Santa Anna’s betrayals never more than temporarily estranged his victims. He enchanted and alienated the Mexican people no less than eleven times, seizing power with their blessing and falling from grace in an astonishing cycle of recrimination and reconciliation. The only constant in his character was his artful talent to foist off transparent lies as obvious truths, for he was a chameleon who could be generous then stingy, brutal then kind, wise then foolish, affectionate then cruel. His pursuit of power was, like his seduction of women, more important than the attainment of it or the conquest of them. He never completed one of his eleven terms as leader of Mexico, and he proved remarkably indifferent to exercising power in any deliberate, diligent, or thoughtful way. Instead, he ruled in fits and starts, reacting with bursts of energy to circumstances or threats, otherwise retreating into languor and self-indulgence, all the while looting the treasury for costly personal pleasures. This was the man to whom Mexico fell victim in its crucial formative years.