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.

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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!

For young army officers of the time, the Mexican War was not only the road to glory, it was the road to promotion. Advancement in the peacetime army was maddeningly slow. An officer could stagnate in the same low grade year after year until those above him were promoted, resigned, or died, making room for his own advancement. When war came, everything speeded up. Armies expanded and fought, the unfortunate were killed, and the fortunate were promoted. Most young subalterns welcomed the war for that reason.

What they didn’t know was that the war would be their rite of passage, their crucible, their proving ground. They would learn how to endure hardship, how to inspire the loyalty of troops, how to fight and win battles. In that reasonably tidy little foreign war of 1846-1848, they would be tempered for command in an incomprehensibly larger and messier domestic war to come: the American Civil War.

Compared to the Civil War, the Mexican War was small. Of the 17,000 or so Americans who became casualties during the conflict, only about 1,700 were killed in battle. The Union Army suffered a larger number of casualties in just three days of fighting at the Battle of Gettysburg in the Civil War. Despite this difference in scale, the Mexican War was by no means insignificant. It would add half a million square miles of territory to the United States, territory that would become the modern states of Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and part of Colorado. Indeed, it was the desire for westward expansion that sparked the war.

When the United States admitted the Republic of Texas as a state in December 1846, the Mexican government still considered Texas a rebellious Mexican province. Tension between the two countries prompted U.S. President James K. Polk to dispatch Brigadier General Zachary Taylor to Texas with a force of 3,000 men to defend the Rio Grande.

Anti-American Mexicans viewed this as an act of war. Many Americans felt the same, seeing the move as a case of blatant aggression against a weaker nation, designed to satisfy the United States’ lust for territory. Congressman Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was one of the most vocal critics of the war. Army Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant, who would eventually command all Union armies in the Civil War, called the conflict in Mexico one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.

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