Virginia Military Institute - Bomb Yearbook (Lexington, VA)

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THE MEXICAN WAR

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COLONEL W. M. HUNLEY It is with greatest pleasure that the Class of 1949 dedicates its Bomb to Colonel William Muse Hunley, a man who, throughout his thirty-three years at the Institute, has won the admiration, as a teacher and a friend, of the cadets he has taught. To have had Colonel Hunley for an instructor in economics has been an experience which each of us will remember with the same fondness that we shall always feel for the Colonel himself. He has made his own vast experiences a part of the education of every V. M. I. cadet. COLLEGE BILL '

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It was on March 22, 1836, that an act, passed by the General Assembly of Virginia, was approved reorganizing the Lexington Arsenal as a military school, and less than a month later the Republic of Texas be- came an independent nation, immediately following the defeat of the Mexicans at the Battle of San Jacinto. The commander of the Texans in that battle was later President of the Republic and he, General Samuel Houston (1793-1863), was born about seven miles north of the site of the Virginia Military Institute. Boundary disputes and the proj- ect to acguire California and lands eastward to Texas brought on about a decade later, or in May, 1846, the war between the United States and Mexico. Only four classes had been graduated at that time, but twenty- nine men who had been V. M. I. cadets took part in the war. Looking backward over the century which has elapsed, we can envisage the military careers of these citizen-soldiers and examine the use to which their experience in war was put in another war which began thirteen years later. These men were in eight classes and only ten of them were graduates, but expressed in terms of rank, their service in the Mexican War was: 1 major, 3 captains, 15 lieutenants, 1 assistant surgeon (Army), 1 assistant paymaster (Navy), 1 sergeant major, 1 sergeant, 1 corporal and 5 privates. Three of these men died in Mexico and seven others died before 1861 — on the other hand, one of the last survivors of the Aztec Club was one of these graduates and he lived until a few months after the armistice was signed which suspended hostilities in World War I. Four of the nineteen veterans who were living in 1861 took no part in the War Between the States, and the service of the others may be grouped as follows: One was a brigadier general in the Union Army and fourteen served in the Confederate Army — 2 brigadier generals, 5 colonels, 4 lieutenant colonels, 1 major, and 2 captains. (Of these, a colonel was killed in action at Chancellorsville and a captain was killed in action at Seven Pines.) One of the captains in the Mexican War fought a duel in Mexico and his second was Lieutenant T. L Jackson — later known as Stonewall. Housed in one of the wings of the Castle of Chapultepec, which is on a rocky eminence rising about two hundred feet above the plateau a mile southwest of the City of Mexico, was the Colegio Militar. From the point of view of the V. M. I. cadet, the presence of more than one hundred of the cadets who attended this institution, the national military college, during the assault on Chapultepec was one of the features of the campaign. These cadets were from fifteen to eighteen years of age and they had been ordered by Santa Anna, shortly before the assault, to withdraw, but they unanimously decided to ignore the order and to remain and defend their college. Some were later withdrawn; forty of them were made prisoners when the castle fell, and five were killed in action fighting with gallantry which has brought praise from all who saw them and from succeeding generations. The names of those who died are inscribed on one of the two monuments erected to their memory in the Park of Chapultepec. Remembering these, let no man think too highly of himself or meanly of mankind. BOOK ONE t titute