regshoe

Oh yeah, American Civil War soldiers in general were just balls of emotion. They lose a battle and they cry! They win a battle and they hurrah! They get a letter from home after a long pause in the post and they're so happy that they cry! And then they write home to tell their family how they wept over the letter, confident that their family will consider this a loving display of tender feeling and not at all a distressing failure of stiff upper lip.

But as well as unrestrained grief and joy, there's also unrestrained anger - the 1826 Eggnog Riot at West Point sounds like an American counterpoint to the schoolboy uprisings you mention above, for instance.