Page:The War with Mexico, Vol 2.djvu/94

76 February the tenth, and received Polk's approval the next day; and as a loan bill had been worried through Congress at the end of January, something was apparently to be done. Since, however, the officers were liable to be discharged on the conclusion of peace, it was not believed that many already in the service could be induced by a slight advance in rank to enter the new establishment, and for this and probably other reasons few of the more than five hundred places were offered to the army. The field was therefore clear for civilian warriors, and their campaign opened at once. Not limiting their operations to Capitol Hill, applicants for commissions besieged and assaulted the White House. "I have pushed them off and fought them with both hands like a man fighting fire," wrote Polk in his diary, but "it has all been in vain." "Loafers without merit"? came, and equally meritorious Congressmen supported them. Not one in ten of the appointees was known to the President, and their degree of unfitness was precisely what might have been expected. A considerable number of them had actually been run out of the service — in some cases for bad conduct before the enemy — and many were found less teachable than privates.

During February this beautiful exhibition continued, and such were the only immediate fruits of the much debated law, for it empowered no one to organize the new troops into brigades and divisions or to appoint general officers, and the military appropriations had not yet been made. Further Congressional exertions, therefore, had to be put forth; but at last on the second and third of March, after a loss of almost three months at this crisis of the war, the deficiencies were supplied, and enlistment shortly began. Vigorous efforts were made by the administration to set the new regulars in motion, company by company, and even squad by squad; and finally on the nineteenth of April, since little more could be expected from the November calls, requisitions for six and a half new regiments of volunteer infantry and twelve companies of horse — all to serve until the conclusion of peace — were issued.

On the fourth of June, then, about six hundred new troops, commanded by Brevet Colonel McIntosh, left Vera Cruz for the interior, escorting a long train of loaded mules and wagons and two or three hundred thousand dollars in specie. Mexican