Chapter Ten: The Capitulation at Monterrey

I.

The dispatches had been arriving since Tuesday, and by Thursday morning they covered the better part of Buchanan's desk in a stratigraphy of consequence — Taylor's battle reports at the bottom, the thicker sheaves of commentary and intelligence above, and at the summit, delivered not an hour past by a liveried servant of the French legation, a single folded sheet sealed with the tricolour crest of the Baronne de Pageot's household, though the hand inside was recognisably that of Monsieur Pageot himself.

Buchanan had read it twice.

He stood now at the tall window overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, the sheet held at his side, watching a hackney cab negotiate the October mud below. The elms along the avenue had gone the colour of old copper, and the morning light came in at a low angle that caught the dust motes above his desk and made them briefly visible, briefly significant. He had been awake since five.

The French note was courteous, in the manner of instruments designed to wound through form rather than content. Monsieur Pageot regretted troubling the Secretary — he trusted the Secretary would understand the necessity — it was merely that certain communications had reached Paris from Monterrey, and the government of the French Republic found itself, in the present circumstances, desirous of some clarification regarding the intentions of the United States government, inasmuch as the reported terms of the armistice there concluded appeared, to certain observers, to suggest — the passive voice doing its customary labour — a degree of latitude in the field that the French government had not previously associated with the administration's stated objectives.

Whether the United States can govern its own armies. That was the sentence beneath the sentence, dressed in subordinate clauses and diplomatic solicitude, but legible enough to any man who had spent a fortnight in a foreign ministry's anteroom.

He returned to his desk. The coal in the grate had burned lower than he preferred — the mornings were cold now in a way that promised worse — and the room smelled of old ash and the faint turpentine odour of lamp oil his housekeeper had trimmed too liberally the night before. He could feel the chill from the window glass at his back through the wool of his coat. He pulled the chair forward and sat, and the ache that had settled into his lower back from the hard seat announced itself with the particular insistence of a creditor who has waited long enough. He stood, crossed to the side table, stood there a moment without purpose he could name, then returned.

He took a sheet of department paper from the drawer and uncapped the inkwell.

The reply he required was not a reply in any substantive sense — it was a placeholder, a diplomatic courtesy extended to prevent discourtesy from being inferred. He wrote the date, the form of address, the acknowledgment of receipt. He paused. His clerk, Milligan — a young man from Lancaster with a good hand and the professional discretion of someone whose employment depended upon it — had left the morning's other correspondence in a neat stack to his left, but Buchanan had not yet attended to it. The French note occupied the centre of the desk. The consul's dispatch from London occupied the right margin of his attention, still sealed in its envelope, though the handwriting on the direction suggested urgency in the slope of the letters.

He wrote three more lines. He acknowledged Pageot's note. He confirmed receipt. He expressed the Secretary of State's intention to communicate more fully at the earliest opportunity consistent with the press of current affairs.

He blotted it, read it, and found it precisely adequate. It committed nothing. It foreclosed nothing. It gave Pageot sufficient acknowledgment to report to Paris without embarrassment, while offering nothing that could be quoted in any subsequent dispatch as an admission of American disarray.

But even as he set the pen down, he understood that a placeholder was not a policy. Pageot's question — the real question, beneath the courteous subordinate clauses — would return, and with it the larger question that the armistice had made unavoidable: whether this administration possessed the will to speak to Europe in a single, coherent voice, or whether that voice would continue to be contradicted by whatever its commanders chose to do in the field. He had been managing the diplomatic surface of this war for eighteen months. He knew, with the certainty of long practice in reading the gap between what is said and what is meant, that the surface was beginning to crack.

He aligned the dispatches into a single stack, then picked up the stack and placed it two inches to the left, pressing each corner against the edge of the blotter. He did not examine what this accomplished.

The door opened. Milligan entered with an expression Buchanan had learned to read across three years of service in this office.

'A note from the Executive Mansion, sir.' He extended the folded paper. 'The messenger waits.'

Buchanan took it. The seal was Polk's, and the language inside it was the language of a man whose anger had already passed through its first heat and arrived at something colder and more considered. The President's presence was required within the hour.

He folded the unread London dispatch into his coat pocket and reached for his hat.

---

II.

The President's study was smaller than it had any right to be for the work conducted within it. Polk had drawn the curtains against the October light, and the room held a dense, accumulated heat from a fire built far beyond what the season demanded. Buchanan felt sweat gathering at his collar within moments of the door closing behind him, and he did not touch his cravat. The air tasted of tallow and warm wool and something else — the particular closeness of men who have been arguing before the newest arrival appeared.

Marcy occupied a side chair with the posture of someone who had arrived early and already regretted it. Taylor's dispatches lay spread across Polk's desk in a loose fan, the pages handled enough to show it — edges soft, one corner folded back where a reader had returned repeatedly to the same passage.

Polk did not look up when Buchanan entered.

'He granted them eight weeks,' Polk said, to the dispatch in his hand. 'Eight weeks, Mr. Buchanan. General Ampudia's army marches out of Monterrey with its arms. Its colours. Its field artillery.' He placed the page down. 'General Taylor has conducted foreign policy.'

'The terms were harsh by any—'

'I will say plainly that the terms are not the matter before us.' Polk's eyes came up then, flat and without heat, which was worse than heat. 'Whether General Taylor might have extracted better terms from a garrison that had fought three days in its own streets and exhausted its ammunition — that question interests me considerably less than the question of by what authority a brevet major general concludes an armistice with a foreign power. Does the Secretary of State consider that a military prerogative?'

Marcy shifted in his chair. The fire popped once, settling. Somewhere behind the curtained window, a cart passed in the street below, its iron wheel-rims loud on the stone, and then the sound diminished and was gone.

Buchanan understood the construction of the question. To defend Taylor's authority was to defend Taylor. To deny it invited Polk to ask why the Secretary of State had not said so sooner, and more publicly. He let the silence extend one beat past comfort — long enough to be noticed, short enough to be deniable — and then he moved.

'It must be acknowledged,' Buchanan said, 'that General Taylor acted without instruction, and that the armistice admits of no diplomatic justification under the law of nations.' He drew the London dispatch from his coat — the paper had grown warm from his body — and extended it across the desk. 'What I would urge upon the President's attention is that Lord Palmerston's Foreign Office has already formed its reading of the event. Our consul's assessment arrived this morning.'

Polk took it. He read without expression, which meant he had already known, or had decided what to know.

'Palmerston,' Polk said, 'will read American weakness in whatever we give him occasion to read it in. That is the Foreign Office's occupation.'

'With respect, the occupation of this department is to ensure that we give him no such occasion.' Buchanan kept his voice even. 'The armistice has been read in London as evidence that we cannot govern our own commanders. If the President intends to overrule Taylor's terms — and I understand he does — that overruling must be accompanied by a diplomatic signal to Mexico City that peace remains available on terms this government will name. Otherwise we repudiate our general and gain nothing from the repudiation. The European courts will draw their own conclusions, and they will not be flattering.'

The dispatch went down onto the desk beside Taylor's papers.

'General Scott,' Polk said, 'will land at Vera Cruz in the spring. He will take the National Road. He will take Mexico City.' He spoke these sentences the way a man reads a surveyor's report — each element established, each following from the last. 'Taylor will hold his present position and advance no further. The armistice is overruled by dispatch before Friday. Secretary Marcy will prepare the orders.'

Marcy wrote something in his memorandum book without being asked.

'And the diplomatic channel to Mexico City?' Not a request. A demand for accounting.

'Will be addressed,' Polk said, 'when General Scott has given us something to negotiate from.'

Buchanan held his ground at the desk's edge. 'That may be six months hence, Mr. President. The European powers will not wait six months for clarification of our intentions. If we cannot tell them what we want from this war, they will tell each other what they suspect — and what they suspect will be that we mean to hold all of Mexico indefinitely, which will bring the British Foreign Office into active opposition before Scott has cleared the beaches.'

Polk looked at him. Not the flat look of before, but something more considered — the look of a man measuring the distance between an inconvenient argument and an inconvenient man.

'I am sensible of the Foreign Office's disposition,' Polk said. 'I am also sensible that premature disclosure of our peace terms invites Mexico to delay until European pressure produces a settlement more favourable to their position than to ours. We will not telegraph our hand.'

'Then we telegraph nothing, and Palmerston fills the silence.'

'Mr. Buchanan.' The name alone, at that register, was the close of the subject. 'The dispatch to Taylor will go before Friday. The Scott appointment will be communicated to the Senate in due course. The diplomatic question is, as I have said, deferred.'

It was not a refusal. It was a postponement that contained within it the assumption that by the time the moment arrived, the channel's architect would be someone other than the man now standing before the fire, feeling the heat work at the back of his neck.

Marcy did not look up from his memorandum book.

The fire gave off its unreasonable warmth, and Polk reached for the next dispatch.

---

III.

Marcy caught him at the turn of the corridor, where the passage narrowed between a row of dispatch boxes and the wall's cold plaster. The sound of the anteroom — the low, patient murmur of office-seekers rehearsing their petitions — fell away behind them.

'A word, Mr. Secretary.'

Buchanan stopped at the corridor window. Below, on the avenue, a dray horse stood in the October light with the absolute stillness of an animal that has ceased to expect relief. He drew his gloves from his coat pocket and began to pull them on.

'Secretary Marcy.'

Marcy came alongside him and dropped his voice. He was a large man, not soft exactly, but with the kind of bulk that accumulates in men who have spent two decades in rooms where the decisions are made. He had the Secretary of War's habitual expression — watchful, aggrieved, faintly put-upon — and today it carried something more: the particular unease of a witness to something he cannot publicly describe.

'The general,' Marcy said. 'Scott.'

'Yes.'

'The President's decision. Settled, you think.'

'It appeared so.'

Marcy exhaled through his nose. A short silence. Then: 'I have administered two wars' worth of requisitions from that office without once being consulted on the selection of the instrument.' He was not quite complaining. He was, Buchanan recognised, composing a record of his own.

'The President commands the armies of this republic.'

'He does.' A pause. 'As he commands its diplomacy, apparently. Through whatever channels he finds convenient.'

Something in the air between them changed — not dramatically, not with any outward sign, but in the manner of a room when a door opens somewhere distant and the pressure shifts. Buchanan's right forefinger tapped once against his palm, inside the glove.

'I confess I am uncertain of your meaning.'

Marcy glanced toward the anteroom. A clerk dropped a stack of bound documents on the stone floor with a crack that split the quiet and sent both men's attention snapping toward the sound. The clerk gathered the volumes with the frantic efficiency of a man hoping his clumsiness had not been witnessed. Neither spoke until the corridor was still again.

'The President's correspondent in the Caribbean.' Marcy's tone was that of a man confirming what he takes to be common knowledge. 'I had assumed you were kept apprised of that channel.'

The gloves were fully on. Buchanan clasped his hands before him and kept his eyes on the avenue below, where the dray horse had not moved. He was aware of Marcy's attention on his profile — reading it — and he gave the man nothing to read.

'The Caribbean,' he said.

'The arrangements through Havana. Given the implications for the naval disposition — Bancroft's department, of course, but one would have thought—' Marcy stopped. 'You are apprised.'

Buchanan turned from the window. He faced Marcy directly, which he had not done since the corridor began, and kept his voice at the same register it had held throughout the meeting — measured, slightly formal, committing to nothing. 'What I require from the War Department at present is clarity on how the General-in-Chief's communications will be routed to this administration once the Vera Cruz operation commences. The President indicated he wants the matter advanced before the new year. I should like to understand the proposed arrangement before it becomes an established fact.'

Marcy accepted the redirection. 'Scott will require considerable latitude in the selection of his staff.'

'He will require whatever latitude the President sees fit to extend, and no more.' Buchanan held Marcy's gaze a moment longer than was comfortable, then turned back to the window.

Below, someone came to take the dray horse by the bridle, and the animal went without protest, its great head dropping as it turned from the light.

'I shall call upon you this week regarding the supply estimates,' Marcy offered — almost gently, as though closing a door he had not meant to open.

'I shall be at the department.'

Marcy's footsteps diminished down the corridor. Buchanan remained at the window, his gloved hands clasped, until the sound was entirely gone.

The Caribbean.

Bancroft's department, of course.

He turned and walked toward the public rooms.

---

IV.

The Madeira was running low, which Buchanan noted without remarking upon it. He had poured with a liberal hand all evening — for Allen, whose capacity was considerable and whose goodwill he required, and for Atocha, whose capacity was unknown and whose goodwill he did not trust in the least. His own glass he had nursed with the careful attention of someone who understands that the evening's work is not yet finished.

Senator Allen had grown expansive after the roast, holding forth on the Foreign Relations Committee's prerogatives with the comfortable authority of a man accustomed to having the table's attention. Buchanan had encouraged him with well-timed questions, letting the Senator's voice fill the room — the candlelight catching the Madeira's deep amber, the fire in the hearth throwing warmth against the left side of his face while the window at his back admitted the October chill in a thin, persistent draught. The candles smelled of beeswax, a small extravagance he permitted himself on evenings when the conversation was likely to cost him something. Allen was, at present, explaining why the Committee on Foreign Relations would require fuller disclosure of the administration's peace terms before the next session opened.

Atocha said very little. He had the quality, common to those who trade in information, of appearing to be elsewhere in his mind while in fact attending to everything. He was a compact man, Spanish by birth and American by naturalised convenience, his English precise without being quite natural, his eyes moving between his hosts with an assessment he did not trouble to disguise. He had arrived with an introduction from a mutual acquaintance in Philadelphia whose name Buchanan had filed in the relevant category of his memory — useful, unreliable, motivated — and he had eaten his dinner with the unhurried appetite of someone who has something to offer and intends to choose his moment.

When Allen paused to refill his glass — the Senator had the habit of serving himself rather than waiting, a frontier informality Buchanan had long since ceased to notice — Atocha reached inside his coat.

'I have something which may be of interest to the Secretary,' he said, and placed a letter on the mahogany table between the candelabra and Buchanan's half-finished plate. He set it there with the deliberation of a man presenting evidence at a hearing, and then he waited, watching.

The letter bore a Havana postmark. The seal had been broken and pressed back, imperfectly.

Buchanan lifted it without haste, broke the seal fully, and unfolded the pages. Three sheets, closely written in a hand he did not recognise, in English with occasional passages in Spanish that he read without pause. He consumed it the way he consumed all documents of consequence — paragraph by paragraph, each clause parsed before the next was admitted — and behind his reading his mind was already sorting what he knew from what he had not known until this moment, and the distance between the two categories was vast and widening.

The candle nearest his hand guttered in the draught and spilled a ribbon of hot wax onto the tablecloth. He pressed his thumb into it, holding the letter steady, and the wax cooled around his thumbprint.

Santa Anna. The naval blockade. A channel through Bancroft's office. August.

August. Two months past. The general was already in Mexico.

He placed the letter on the table, smoothed its edges against the surface, and looked at Atocha.

'The correspondent in Havana,' he said. 'Was his intelligence current as of September, or does this represent his position in July?'

Atocha's expression shifted — a fraction of surprise, smoothed over immediately. 'September, I believe. His sources within the exile community are reliable.'

'And the terms communicated to the general — were they conveyed in writing, or through verbal intermediary?'

'Through an intermediary, as I understand it. A naval officer of some discretion.'

Buchanan nodded once, folded the letter along its original creases, and slid it inside his coat. Allen, who had been following this exchange with the alert expression of someone who suspects he is witnessing something he has not been meant to witness, set down his glass.

Buchanan refilled his own Madeira, raised it to his lips, and replaced it on the table without drinking. Then, after a silence in which the fire shifted and the window's draught moved the nearest candle flame in a slow arc, he drank it in a single draught and set the glass down hard enough that Allen looked at him.

'Senator,' he said, turning to Allen with a warmth he did not feel, 'you were speaking of the committee's position on disclosure. I am very much of the view that this question will require our joint attention before December. The administration's capacity to manage the peace — when peace comes — will depend in no small measure on whether the Committee on Foreign Relations is prepared to act with expedition rather than deliberation. I should like to discuss its present composition.'

Allen's expression brightened. There was nothing a senator of his vintage enjoyed more than being consulted on the composition of a committee he already chaired.

Atocha watched Buchanan with the careful eyes of someone recalibrating his estimate of what he had just sold, and to whom.

The evening continued. The Madeira was finished. Allen departed at half past nine with the comfortable satisfaction of a man who believes he has learned more than he has given.

Atocha departed shortly after. At the door, he paused.

'The Secretary will find,' he said, 'that the correspondent in Havana has further materials, should the Secretary wish to receive them.'

'I shall bear that in mind,' Buchanan said.

He closed the door himself.

---

V.

He returned to where the candles were burning low, the beeswax smell gone rancid now with the heat of hours, and the wax print on the tablecloth had hardened to white. He pressed his thumb into the cold impression, finding it did not yield.

He had not been told. That was the fact he turned over now, in the silence of the room, with the candles guttering and the fire settling into its last coals. Not the content of the gambit — he had suspected something of the kind since Marcy's words in the corridor, since Bancroft's curious reticence at the last cabinet meeting, since the naval disposition orders that had crossed his desk in August with a routing that made no strategic sense unless the blockade was to be selectively permeable. He had suspected, and he had not pressed, because pressing would have forced either a confirmation he was not ready to receive or a denial he would not have believed.

But Polk had not told him. Had not judged it necessary. Had routed the most consequential diplomatic initiative of the war — a negotiation with a foreign general, conducted through the Navy Department, with implications for every treaty obligation this republic had undertaken — through Bancroft's office, as though the State Department were a clerical function and its Secretary a man whose signature was useful but whose counsel was not.

Bancroft, who regarded diplomacy as a species of naval logistics. Bancroft, who had never read Vattel with any care.

He sat with that knowledge in the near-dark, turning it the way one turns an unfamiliar coin — finding neither face acceptable, unable to put it aside.

And there was the other matter, which he had not permitted himself to examine directly since reading the Havana letter, but which now, in the quiet, presented itself with the cold insistence of a debt come due.

Santa Anna was not negotiating. Every dispatch from the interior, every rumour that reached the State Department through its legitimate channels, said the same thing: the general was raising an army at San Luis Potosí — twenty thousand men, by some accounts — and the direction of march, when it came, would be north. Toward Taylor's lines. Toward the position that Polk's overruling of the armistice had left exposed, stripped now of the buffer that eight weeks of Mexican exhaustion might have produced.

The gambit had purchased passage through an American blockade. It had purchased reconstitution by American forbearance. It had purchased, with American forbearance as its currency, the largest Mexican force yet assembled — now marshalling against soldiers who did not know what their government had arranged on their behalf.

Bancroft had been trusted with this. Buchanan had not.

A courier's knock came at the street door just before eleven. Sharp, official, the knock of someone who rides with government business and does not wait upon courtesy. His housekeeper's footsteps crossed the entrance hall. A brief exchange, too low to distinguish. Then her steps returning.

She appeared in the doorway with a sealed dispatch, the War Department's mark on the outer fold.

He broke the seal. Read.

Taylor's forward scouts had reported Mexican cavalry — not a patrol, not a skirmishing force, but the advance elements of a column of considerable size — moving north through the passes above Saltillo.

He placed the dispatch on the table beside the hardened wax and did not move for a long moment. The last candle flame bent in the draught from the doorway and then steadied.

Santa Anna was coming. And the soldiers in Taylor's camps, sleeping now in the cold above the Rio Grande, did not know what their government had done to bring him there. Buchanan knew. He had known for three hours, and he had spent those hours pouring Madeira for a senator and a Spanish intelligencer and saying nothing of consequence to either. That was the record. That was what the evening had made of him.

He rose. He folded the dispatch into his coat beside the Havana letter, the two documents pressed together against his chest as he crossed the entrance hall. He did not call for a lamp. He did not call for his housekeeper. He went to his study and sat down at the writing table in the dark, and after a moment he reached for the tinder box and struck a light, and the flame caught, and he pulled a sheet of paper toward him and uncapped the inkwell, and sat there with the pen in his hand and the blank page before him, because there was a letter that needed to be written before morning — to whom, and saying precisely what, he had not yet determined — but the alternative was to wait, and waiting was no longer a discipline he could afford.