Fitzhugh Lee, General Lee

Again: “Mr. Gardner and Mr. Trist depart to-morrow. I had hoped that after the President had adopted Mr. Trist's treaty, and the Senate confirmed it, they would have paid him the poor compliment of allowing him to finish it, as some compensation for all the abuse they had heaped upon him; but, I presume, it is perfectly fair, having made use of his labors and taken from him all he had earned, that he should be kicked off as General Scott has been, whose skill and science, having crushed the enemy and conquered a peace, can now be dismissed and turned out as an old horse to die.”

In Scott's army in Mexico at that time were many subordinate officers fighting under a common flag, who were destined to become familiar to the public fourteen years afterward by the skill and courage with which they fought each other. Their swords, then drawn for victory against a common foe, were to be pointed against each other's breasts, and those who had slept beneath the same blanket, drank from the same canteen, and formed those ties of steel which are strongest when pledged amid common dangers around a common mess table, were to be marshaled under the banners of opposing armies. Ulysses S. Grant was then twenty-five years old, a lieutenant of the Fourth Infantry, self-reliant, brave, and fertile in resources. He fought with old “Zach” at Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, and at Monterey; was at Vera Cruz, and in all the battles which followed until the Mexican capital was entered. George Gordon Meade was an officer of topographical engineers, first on the staff of General Taylor and afterward on the staff of General Patterson at Vera Cruz. There too was George B. Mc-Clellan, twenty-one years old, as an engineer officer, who