Chapter 15: The Mountain Pass

Scene 1

The coal fire had no business burning in April, yet it burned. He had not ordered it lit, and he would not order it extinguished, because the alternative was to admit that the room was cold in some way that had nothing to do with temperature. He sat at his desk in the grey before full light, his coat already on, the dispatches before him arranged with the geometric precision his household staff maintained whether or not he asked it of them — a small, faithful order imposed upon the disorder of the world.

He opened the topmost packet.

Taylor's position at Saltillo. Confirmed. As of the twenty-second of March.

He set it aside. Taylor was a concluded chapter. The question was Scott — what Scott was doing now, on whatever morning this was in the highlands of Mexico — and that question had no answer in any document on his desk. He rose without deciding to, crossed to the map board, and stood before it with his arms at his sides. Three maps of varying scale, pinned against the plaster, their edges curling where the April damp had found them. He had redrawn Scott's probable position in pencil twice since Monday. Both marks were already wrong. He took the pencil from the tray and held it without applying it to the paper, studying the road from Veracruz through the tierra caliente toward Jalapa — the fever country, the lowlands where yellow jack had killed more men than any Mexican musket. A competent general would drive through that ground fast and consolidate at elevation. Scott was, whatever else he was, competent.

He pressed the pencil's tip to the map just east of Plan del Río, drew a short line toward the heights, then stopped.

The fire shifted behind him — a collapse of coals, a brief surge of heat against his back, and the dry smell of ash lifting before settling again. From somewhere in the house's lower regions came the sound of a water pump working, the rhythmic creak and suck of it, then silence. The city was not yet awake. He was, as he was most mornings, alone with what he knew and what he did not.

He returned to the desk. The War Department memorandum from Marcy occupied the third position in the pile. He had read it the previous evening without pausing on one line in the second paragraph, and it was that line which had driven him here before the household stirred. He found it now.

General Scott has requested the assignment of two additional engineering officers with specific experience in the reduction of fortified heights, to be forwarded at the earliest practicable opportunity.

Fortified heights.

He set the memorandum beside the map. Scott had not named the position — had named nothing — but the request itself was the inference. A man did not ask for engineers schooled in the reduction of fortified heights unless a fortified height stood before him. Polk took up a blank sheet, wrote Cerro Gordo at the top, and underscored it once.

What he could not write was the thing he could not yet calculate: whether Scott had already fought at that pass, or was fighting now, or had not yet arrived. Whether the engineers were requested in anticipation or in consequence. Whether the silence of the last ten days was the silence of an army in motion or the silence of an army in catastrophe. He pressed his thumb against the bridge of his nose — the ache behind his eye had been building since before dawn — and held it there.

A sharp contraction moved through his lower bowel. He stood, paced the length of the room — six steps to the window, six steps back — until it eased. The window glass was cold against his palm when he touched it; outside, Pennsylvania Avenue lay in the early-morning grey, unpeopled, the mud of the street catching the first colourless light. He stood there a moment longer than he needed to, looking at nothing in particular.

He had governed this republic for two years by information already three weeks dead. Every dispatch that arrived was a record of a world that had moved on without him. He had made his peace with this — or believed he had — until mornings like this one, when the gap between what he knew and what was happening felt less like a condition of governance and more like a sentence.

He returned to the desk. The Whig delegation would arrive at two o'clock with their resolution and their lawyerly patience, and he had not yet decided how much to give them.

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Scene 2

The Cabinet Room smelled of old paper and the mustiness of upholstered chairs that had absorbed too many anxious seasons. The weak spring light through the tall windows fell across the long table without warmth, a grey and uncommitted illumination. Somewhere in the anteroom a clerk's pen scratched steadily against paper — the sound of the republic's ordinary business continuing regardless. The smell of tallow from a recently extinguished candle drifted through the open door, faint and waxy, coating the back of the throat.

Buchanan sat with his coat buttoned and his hands folded before him. He had brought a leather portfolio and placed it to his right without opening it. The posture of a man arrived with something held in reserve.

Polk stood at his end of the table. He did not sit.

"The contingency instructions," he said. "I want them drafted before the delegation arrives."

"I have given the matter considerable thought." Buchanan's voice carried the measured cadence of a diplomat navigating toward a destination he did not intend to announce directly. "It must be acknowledged that the question of what we commit to paper at this juncture is not separable from what the congressional committees may eventually seek to compel."

"Compel."

Buchanan opened the portfolio. He withdrew a single folded sheet — the kind of paper that passed between private correspondents rather than departments of government — and placed it on the table between them. "I received this two days ago. I have verified the intelligence through my own channels."

Polk looked at the letter. He did not move toward it.

"A senator — whose name I need not record in this room — has communicated that the Whig members of the Judiciary Committee have conferred with their counsel on the question of subpoena authority." Buchanan kept his voice low, the register of a man sharing intelligence that must not become public through carelessness. "The instrument under discussion would compel production of State Department correspondence relating to the Slidell mission — and, by extension, any subsequent diplomatic instructions issued in connection with the present campaign. Any written contingency instructions prepared today, covering the possibility of military reversal, would become documentary evidence that this administration anticipated failure." He paused. The clerk's pen continued in the anteroom. "The Whig press would require approximately four hours to construct the argument that we never believed in the campaign."

Polk crossed to the window, his back to Buchanan, and stood looking at the pale rectangle of sky above the garden wall. A pigeon moved along the coping and was still. When he turned, his voice was level.

"You have held this letter two days."

Buchanan's chin drew back a quarter-inch.

"Two days," Polk said, "during which you have composed no contingency instructions and provided this government no diplomatic guidance for the scenario of Scott's defeat." He returned to the table but did not sit; he stood beside his chair, one hand resting on its back. "If the Whigs subpoena the State Department's records, what will they find? A Secretary who produced nothing. No evidence of preparation. No evidence of foresight." He let the sentence stand. "That is the record that destroys you, Mr. Buchanan. Not the contingency instructions. Their absence."

"You are asking me," Buchanan said, quietly, "to create a paper trail that leads directly to my own neck, should Scott fail."

"I am asking you to do your duty. The paper trail is the duty." Polk pulled the chair out and sat, which changed the geometry of the room — Buchanan now the taller figure, yet somehow the lesser. "A Secretary of State who prepared for every contingency, who documented his diligence in service to this administration — that man is protected. His judgment is on the page. His loyalty is on the page." He folded his hands on the table. "A man who left no record because he was already calculating his distance from the outcome — that man is not protected. He is merely absent. And absence, Mr. Buchanan, reads as one thing to a congressional committee, and one thing only."

The fire in the anteroom grate — audible now through the open door, a low, steady draw of air — shifted and settled. The clerk's pen had stopped.

Buchanan looked at the letter on the table for a long moment. Then he opened the portfolio and drew out a sheet of foolscap.

"I will require clarification," he said, "on the minimum territorial terms."

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Scene 3

The chairs had been arranged in a semicircle, which Polk had not requested. He stood when the delegation entered — courtesy required it — and the three Whig congressmen crossed the East Room with the measured pace of men who understood that hurry was concession.

The senior member from Ohio led them: a large man, grey at the temples, with the broad hands and deliberate carriage of a circuit lawyer who had learned that juries responded to patience. His two companions arranged themselves at his flanks and said nothing.

"Mr. President." He inclined his head.

"Congressman." Polk indicated the chairs. "I am grateful for your willingness to call."

They sat. Polk did not. He remained near the mantelpiece, which placed the afternoon light at his back and the delegation's faces in the full glare of the westward windows. The room held the day's accumulated warmth poorly; the air near the draperies carried the faint smell of heated dust and old fabric sizing, and from somewhere below came the distant concussion of a door closing in the service passage.

"I will not lengthen this occasion unnecessarily," the Ohio congressman said. He produced from his coat a folded document and opened it across his knee. "The committee has prepared a resolution. I will read the operative clause." He did so, in the flat, carrying voice of a man accustomed to courtrooms: Resolved, that the President be, and he hereby is, requested to cause to be laid before the House of Representatives all correspondence between the Department of State and the late envoy John Slidell, including his instructions, his official communications to the Mexican government, and any replies or communications received in response thereto, within thirty days of the passage of this resolution. He refolded the document. "The language is plain."

"It is," Polk said.

"The committee intends to introduce it. Unless the President can satisfy its concerns by other means."

Polk crossed to the side table where a pitcher and several glasses had been arranged. He poured water — unhurried, his back to the delegation for a measured interval — and turned. He did not return to the mantelpiece. He carried the glass to the centre of the room and stood there, equidistant from every wall, which forced the delegation to turn slightly in their chairs to face him.

"The Slidell correspondence," he said, "cannot be produced without material risk to operations now underway in the field. General Scott's column is engaged in active manoeuvre on the road to Jalapa. The Mexican Republic retains agents in this city and in every port through which communication passes. To release diplomatic correspondence that illuminates the precise terms upon which this republic was prepared to negotiate — while our army advances toward the enemy's capital — is to hand the enemy a map of our intentions."

"The resolution specifies thirty days," the congressman said. "Not immediate production."

"Thirty days in which the Whig press publishes the resolution's passage, the enemy's government notes it, and every agent in New Orleans and Havana understands precisely what it portends." Polk's voice did not rise. "The thirty days is the exposure, Congressman, not the remedy."

Silence. The younger of the two flanking men — sharper about the eyes, his patience evidently of a shorter supply — leaned forward.

"Then the President proposes what, precisely?" His voice had an edge the senior man's did not. "That Congress surrender its inquiring authority to executive discretion? That we accept your assurance of good faith in place of the documents themselves?"

Polk looked at him directly. "I propose that this republic's Congress refrain from endangering its own soldiers. I propose that when the campaign concludes its active operations, this administration will provide to the committee a selection of the Slidell correspondence sufficient to address its stated concerns — complete with respect to the instructions' essential character, and excluding only material whose production would place men still in the field at hazard." He held the younger man's gaze a moment longer than was comfortable. "I regard that as my constitutional duty. You may regard it as you please."

The young congressman's jaw tightened. He looked at his senior colleague.

The congressman from Ohio tapped the folded resolution once against his knee — a dry, brief sound in the large room. He was weighing something, and he was not in a hurry about it, and Polk let him weigh it.

"The committee will consider the President's proposal," he said at last. He rose, and his companions rose with him. "We will expect the correspondence when operations conclude. That expectation is now a matter of record."

"It is witnessed," Polk said, and looked toward the aide by the door.

He watched them go. The younger man did not look back, which meant he was not satisfied. That would require managing.

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Scene 4

The courier had been gone perhaps ten minutes when Polk read the dispatch a second time.

He read it slowly. Scott's prose had a way of demanding that — not from any elegance but from its peculiar density, the sentences so encumbered with the general's own presence that a reader had to work around him to find the facts beneath. I directed. I reconnoitred. I ordered. I determined. He moved his lips slightly on the third paragraph, not from difficulty with the words but from the act of counting.

Eleven.

Eleven times in six hundred words. He set the dispatch face-down on the desk.

The lamp had been declining for some minutes without his noticing. The flame shrank to a blue thread and the study contracted around him — the maps, the stacked papers, the cold grate — all of it suddenly closer and darker than he had reckoned. He rose and trimmed the wick, the brief near-darkness catching him somewhere behind the sternum before the flame climbed back to its proper height. He stood with the scissors in his hand, smelling the char of the trimmed wick, the faint acrid bite of it mixing with the coal dust that had worked its way into the curtain fabric over the winter. Then he set the scissors down.

He turned back to the desk.

He had read the dispatch twice. He knew what it contained and what it intended. Scott had outflanked Santa Anna's fortified position through a ravine the Mexicans had supposed impassable — Lee's reconnaissance, Twiggs's assault on the heights, Shields closing the Jalapa road — and the dispatch described all of this in language so carefully constructed that the subordinate officers appeared as instruments of the general's vision rather than as men who had done the work themselves. The army had won a brilliant victory at Cerro Gordo.

Winfield Scott had won it eleven times over.

Polk drew a sheet toward him and uncapped the inkwell. The memorandum to Marcy wanted to be ready before morning, before the War Department clerks who had already handled the dispatch began talking to their cousins in the newspaper offices. He wrote without hesitation, in the clipped declarative he used when precision mattered more than appearance: The victory at Cerro Gordo is the direct consequence of this administration's determination to open the Veracruz front in the spring of this year, against the counsel of those who favoured a protracted northern campaign. The army has vindicated the strategic judgment of the executive. The General-in-Chief and the officers under his command have executed their orders with commendable energy. He paused at the officers under his command. That would stand.

He set the memorandum aside and began a second sheet — addressed to no one, or rather to the editor of the Washington Union, who understood that certain communications arrived without a name attached and were to be treated accordingly. The language here wanted a different register: not the executive's declarative but the republic's pride, warm and carefully distributed. The forces of this republic have demonstrated, at the mountain pass of Cerro Gordo, the supreme quality of American arms and American training. The victory belongs to every regiment that has served in this campaign, to every officer who has discharged his duty, to the sovereign republic whose strategic vision placed its forces upon this ground. He wrote sovereign republic and did not cross it out.

He was midway through the second sheet when the detail he had read and moved past returned to him.

Santa Anna had escaped.

Not captured, not killed, not surrendered. The commander of the Mexican forces had gone north toward the capital with his personal escort intact, leaving behind his carriage, his papers, and — the dispatch noted this with a faint air of trophy — his artificial leg. The Mexican forces were shattered. Santa Anna was not. He would reach the capital. He would reconstitute. He always found men, because desperation is an inexhaustible resource, and Scott would march toward him, and every mile of that march was another fortnight of dispatches Polk had not yet received, another engagement decided in the field that no instruction from Washington could reach in time to shape.

He took a third sheet and wrote, in his own hand, for no reader but himself: The war must conclude before Mexico City falls. After that, nothing can be managed from this office.

He folded the sheet once and placed it beneath the memoranda stack. His fingers were steady. He noted this without satisfaction.

The room was very quiet. The fire had gone out without his noticing — a second failure of attention in one evening, which was unlike him. Cold was coming in at the window seams; he could feel it against his ankles, a thin current moving along the floor. He did not move to address it.

Somewhere beyond the Cordillera — at Scott's headquarters, or still en route, or God knew where — Trist carried the only instrument that could accomplish what the army could not. Whether Trist had arrived. Whether Scott had received him. Whether the two men had found any ground between them after their quarrel, or whether the peace mission had already broken apart before it had properly begun.

The dispatch told him nothing of Trist.

He picked up the pen and continued drafting the Union letter, choosing each word with the care of a man who knows the structure he is building will be examined for weakness before the mortar has set. Outside, Washington lay quiet in the spring dark. Scott was already moving — past Jalapa, past Perote, toward the valley that held the capital — and with every mile the distance between them lengthened, and the decisions multiplied, and the figure at the centre of those decisions grew larger and less governable, and the peace Polk required to conclude before that figure became too great to contain grew more remote, more contingent, more dependent on a clerk whose loyalty he had never fully tested and a general whose ambition he had never fully trusted. He wrote. The lamp burned.

Somewhere across the city, a rider was already preparing to carry the morning's newspapers to the telegraph offices. By noon, the name Cerro Gordo would be in every parlour in the republic. By evening, the toasts would begin. And the man whose name would not appear in any of them — whose memoranda had made the campaign possible, whose strategic insistence had opened the Veracruz road over the objections of his own cabinet — would sit at this desk and read the dispatches that told him how much further beyond his reach the war had moved.

He dipped the pen. He wrote on.