Soldiers of Conquest Read Free

bark for his father’s tannery. Neighbors brought colts for Ulysses to break to ride. To show his horsemanship, he would sometimes gallop his steed down the main street standing on one foot on his horse’s back. At fourteen Ulysses provided limousine service with a two horse carriage taking people from Georgetown to Chillicothe sixty miles away and return, and to Cincinnati forty miles distant, and delivering mail about the county.
    Ulysses had but a few years of formal schooling, however Jesse had a thirty-five book library and required the boy to study. Jesse decided Ulysses should go to West Point, and persuaded his representative, Congressman Hamer, to sponsor Ulysses. Ulysses didn’t want to go, but Jesse insisted, and when Jesse insisted that was the way it went.
    So at seventeen, standing five foot one inch and weighing one hundred and seventeen pounds, Ulysses set off for West Point on the Hudson River in New York. Worried about passing the entrance examination at the Point, Ulysses took a book from Jesse’s library and taught himself algebra during the ten-day journey. He passed the exam and signed the enlistment papers on September 14, 1839. Ulysses graduated in 1843, and being unwilling to apply himself diligently to his studies, ranked twenty-one out of a class of thirty-nine. He was assigned to the elite Fourth Infantry under the command of General Worth.

CHAPTER 1
    â€œFind a flaw, some weakness in the defenses of the fort and city that will allow us to capture them,” General Scott, Chief of the American Army, directed his subordinate officers standing with him on the deck of the small naval steamboat Patrita lying on the Bay of Campeche. He made a sweep of his hand in the direction of Mexico’s largest seaport Veracruz and mighty Fort San Juan de Ulua a mile distant and standing out in sharp relief under a brilliant tropical sun.
    General Scott, a huge man at six feet five and huskily built, had arrived the day before from the States on his flagship, the warship Massachusetts. He had brought with him for the invasion ninety-nine large ships crowded with nine thousand soldiers and the holds full of cannons, muskets, and cavalry mounts.
    The Patrita rose and fell showing a portion of her copper sheathed bottom as the swells generated by a storm in the Gulf of Mexico forced their way under her keel. Balancing themselves against the movement of the ship, the blue uniformed army officers held their field glasses focused on Veracruz and the huge stone fortress. With the army men was Admiral Conner, Commodore of the American Navy’s warships that had been blockading the Mexican eastern coast for the past ten months.
    Robert E. Lee, Captain of Engineers and one of Scott’s staff officers, noted the beauty of the city, the scores of ships lying upon the turquoise water of the bay and Fort San Juan de Ulua located on the western edge of a coral reef one thousand yards directly seaward from Veracruz. The grand vista added to Lee’s pleasant feeling from being part of a band of men planning the invasion of a large nation and fighting great battles with its army. He regretted the killing and destruction that would be done to win the war. He pulled away from those dark thoughts and concentrated his attention on Veracruz.
    The city lay in the shape of a crescent moon and hugging the shoreline. Its landward perimeter was two miles long and enclosed many tall buildings of whitewashed masonry. Sixteen splendid white domed buildings promenaded along the waterfront and several magnificent Catholic churches pierced the sky with tall steeples each bearing a cross. The city contained such an abundance of white buildings that it glowed with a luminous sheen. Eight stone piers extended out from the quay and dozens of fishing boats with sails lowered were berthed along them. The city appeared immensely prosperous.
    Veracruz was protected from an attack from the sea by a massive granite seawall