But here the parallel ends.  In Jackson, even as a cadet, self was subordinate to duty.  Pride was foreign to his nature.  He was incapable of pretence, and his simplicity was inspired by that disdain of all meanness which had been his characteristic from a child.  His brain was disturbed by no wild visions; no intemperate ambition confused his sense of right and wrong.  “The essence of his mind,” as has been said of another of like mould, “was clearness, healthy purity, incompatibility with fraud in any of its forms.”  It was his instinct to be true and straightforward as it was Napoleon’s to be false and subtle.  And, if, as a youth, he showed no trace of marked intellectual power; if his instructors saw no sign of masterful resolution and a genius for command, it was because at West Point, as elsewhere, his great qualities lay dormant, awaiting the emergency that should call them forth.

CHAPTER 1.2.  MEXICO. 1846-47.

1846.

On June 30, 1846, Jackson received the brevet rank of second lieutenant of artillery.  He was fortunate from the very outset of his military career.  The officers of the United States army, thanks to the thorough education and Spartan discipline of West Point, were fine soldiers; but their scope was limited.  On the western frontier, far beyond the confines of civilisation, stood a long line of forts, often hundreds of miles apart, garrisoned by a few troops of cavalry or companies of infantry.  It is true that there was little chance of soldierly capacity rusting in these solitary posts.  From the borders of Canada to the banks of the Rio Grande swarmed thousands of savage warriors, ever watchful for an opportunity to pay back with bloody interest the aggression of the whites.  Murder, robbery, and massacre followed each other in rapid succession, and the troops were allowed few intervals of rest.  But the warfare was inglorious—­a mere series of petty incidents, the punishment of a raid, or the crushing of an isolated revolt.  The scanty butcher’s bills of the so-called battles made small appeal to the popular imagination, and the deeds of the soldiers in the western wilderness, gallant as they might be, aroused less interest in the States than the conflicts of the police with the New York mob.  But although pursuits which carried the adversaries half across the continent, forays which were of longer duration than a European war, and fights against overwhelming odds, where no quarter was asked or given, kept the American officers constantly employed, their training was hardly sufficient for the needs of a great campaign.  In the running fights against Apache or Blackfoot the rules of strategy and tactics were of small account.  The soldier was constrained to acknowledge the brave and the trapper as his teachers; and Moltke himself, with all his lore, would have been utterly baffled by the cunning of the Indian.  Before the war of 1845-6 the strength