Heading: (Mexican-American War)
Author: William Marcy, Secretary of War
Title: Marcy's draft of a letter, during the Mexican-American War, about a future, ill-fated Civil War General
Place Published: Washington, D.C.
Publisher:
Date Published: 1847
Description:

Retained draft of an Autograph Letter, unsigned. Washington, D.C., May 29, 1847. 3pp. To Robert McLane, then a US Congressman, later Governor of Maryland and ambassador to Mexico and China.

In this "private" letter, Marcy notes McLane's complaint to President Polk of "chagrin...general regret and disappointment" that Colonel Dixon Miles of Maryland - a future, ill-fated Civil War General - was not to be appointed to the Board that oversaw the West Point Military Academy. He "appreciated" Colonel Miles' "merits as a soldier", but Congress had expressly provided that no Army officer should be appointed to the Board, so neither he nor the President had the power to give that honor to Miles.

At that time, Dixon Miles was serving as military commandant of Veracruz, after "gallant and meritorious conduct" in capturing that city from the Mexicans. Fourteen years later, when the Civil War began, while a brigade commander, he was found to be drunk during the battle of Bull Run and was sidelined to command the Federal Arsenal at Harper's Ferry, once the prewar target of John Brown. When Miles' garrison unexpectedly stood in the path of a rebel invasion, the General, drunk once again, made strategic blunders that forced him to surrender his 12,000 men to Stonewall Jackson. But before the white flag could be raised, he was mortally wounded by an exploding shell - fired, some suspected, by his own men, who were reluctant even to carry him to the hospital, where he died the next day. His surrender was the largest in US military history for nearly a century and he was posthumously denounced for "incapacity, amounting to almost imbecility."

Marcy's letter, written while the war in Mexico still raged, and laboriously edited by the Secretary to tone down his apparent irritation at McClane's complaint, suggests that he had some advance premonition that Dixon Miles was not destined for military glory.

Very good.