"Chatham Roberdeau Wheat would one day lead a famous Louisiana battalion called "Wheat's Tigers" into battle for the Confederacy. He would fight and die in the Battle of Gaines' Mill, Virginia, in 1862. But that was still some 15 years in the future; right now, the young law student's attention was directed toward adventure in another conflict, the Mexican War of the 1840s. There, whether he lived or died, he would be a winner, a hero. In his own florid fashion, he wrote: "I would ask for no greater glory -- while our spirits should wing their flight to a brighter & a better world where we should enlist under the captaincy of Great Michael and mingle with the hosts of Heaven -- and…with Washington & the heroes that have gone before, hang out our banners from the battlements of Heaven & let the shout of our exulting voices ring from arch to arch of heaven's bright canopy."
In the best case, of course, Wheat and his comrades would live, be victorious, enter the city of Mexico, and stand in the halls of the Montezumas "covered with glory & with bright stars upon our breasts…." In either case, he concluded, "we are victorious, victorious even in death -- how sublime! How pleasing the thought!"
George Brinton McClellan, who would command the Union armies early in the Civil War, was a fire-new graduate of West Point when the Mexican War began. He couldn't wait to get to the front and fight "the crowd -- musquitoes & Mexicans &c." "Hip! Hip! Hurrah!" he wrote home. "War at last sure enough! Aint it glorious…"
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