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before delivering an even stronger war vote of 40 to 2.
    W hen Grant was nine years old a French aristocrat namedAlexis de Tocqueville toured America to discover the meaning of democracy and perhaps, if democracy caught on, the direction of the world. When Grant was thirteen Tocqueville published the first volume of Democracy in America , which focused on the domestic institutions of the Americans; when Grant was eighteen Tocqueville released the second volume, which treated, among other subjects, the way American democracy waged war. The author contended that the Americans were a peaceful people, in part from the luck of their location. “Fortune, which has showered so many peculiar favors on the inhabitants of the United States, has placed them in the midst of a wilderness where one can almost say that they have no neighbors,” Tocqueville wrote. “For them a few thousand soldiers are enough.”
    No less important was the pacific influence of the social equality and opportunity that characterized American life, Tocqueville said. Under aristocratic regimes the army afforded a means of advancement denied to commoners in civilian life; in democratic systems ordinary men could get ahead in other fields, and for this reason and others, the culture of the warrior weakened. “The ever-increasing number of men of property devoted to peace, the growth of personal property which war so rapidly devours, mildness of mores, gentleness of heart, that inclination to pity which equality inspires, that cold and calculating spirit which leaves little room for sensitivity to the poetic and violent emotions of wartime—all these causes act together to damp down warlike fervor.” Tocqueville proposeda general rule: “Among civilized nations, warlike passions become rarer and less active as social conditions get nearer to equality.” And a corollary: “Men living in times of democracy seldom choose a soldier’s life.”
    Time would test Tocqueville’s predictions, but his characterization of America as a nation almost without an army was accurate enough during the first half of the nineteenth century. Whether because of the absence of threatening neighbors, because of the presence of preferable career alternatives, or because of a distrust of standing armies like those that supported despots elsewhere, Americans refused to fund more than the skeleton of an army between wars. Grant and his fellow West Point graduates were the backbone of that skeleton; for the muscle and flesh the nation looked to volunteers summoned once war was declared. The result was a predictable lag between the events that triggered a war and the onset of sustained fighting.
    In the case of the war with Mexico, the enlistment, training and transport of volunteers filled most of the summer of 1846. Grant spent the time encamped at Matamoros, which Taylor’s force occupied shortly after the American victory at Resaca de la Palma. Grant found the Mexican town most curious. “Matamoros contains probably about 7,000 inhabitants, a great majority of them of the lower order,” he wrote an Ohio friend. “It is not a place of as much business importance as our little towns of 1,000.” Mexican society was no less strange. “The people of Mexico are a very different race of people from ours. The better class are very proud and tyrannize over the lower and much more numerous class as much as a hard master does over his negroes, and they submit to it quite as humbly. The great majority are either pure or more than half blooded Indians, and show but little more signs of neatness or comfort in their miserable dwellings than the uncivilized Indian.” To Julia he described the typical Mexican home: “Low with a flat or thatched roof, with a dirt or brick floor, with but little furniture and in many cases the fire in the middle of the house as if it was a wigwam.”
    When the summer rains arrived the Mexican houses began to look better—at least better than the American