by John Waugh
The new plebes had taken their physical examinations two days before, in the hospital overlooking the river. They had been marched before a medical board of three doctors, who had probed their limbs for ringbone and spavin; thumped their chests for soundness of wind; examined their teeth for decay; inspected their feet for bunions; measured them; weighed them; and clucked over such apparent irregularities as badly knit, once-broken bones. To test cadet eyesight, a dime was held up at the far end of the room and they were asked if it was heads or tails.4
Some of them already had been sifted out and sent home then. Now Derby, safely past the physical—the doctors had greatly admired his chest—was waiting his turn in the recitation room, watching his classmates struggle with the dreaded academic examination. He knew that still others would surely be lost when this part of “the fiery ordeal to see who should be of the chosen” was over.5 It was important to the academic board that the chosen be able to read and write and have enough knowledge of elementary arithmetic to do reduction, proportion, and fractions. Those lacking such rudimental skills would have no future at West Point.
Derby’s classmates would soon learn that he had a quaint way of looking at things. As he sat waiting and watching in the recitation room, he mused that there were actually two boards up there, “the black board and the Board of 13 Army officers,” with the hapless plebes trapped between.6 As he considered this, he heard his own name called. He was about to go before the double boards himself.
He strode to the front, a picture of confidence. If they thought his chest had been fine, then wait until they saw his mathematics. He deftly worked his assigned problem, on proportion involving fractions, on the blackboard. There was no hesitating, no stopping. When finished, he turned resolutely to that second of the two boards and boldly rattled it all off as if it were a story—no mistakes, no uncertainty.
Albert Ensign Church, West Point’s renowned professor of mathematics, who preferred things done with no mistakes, bowed and said, “That’s sufficient, sir.”7
Some of the cadets waiting their turn watched with fascination as Tom Jackson went between the two boards. There had been no Lieutenant Kinsley to tell him what a fine mathematical head he had. There had been no classical academies to speak of in the mountains where he came from that might have prepared him for this ordeal. Perhaps he had mastered a little grammar and could add up a column of figures, but as to vulgar or decimal fractions, it is doubtful if he had ever heard of them.8
Jackson was so single-mindedly bent on passing that it was painful to watch. Sweat streamed down his face. He swiped at the pouring perspiration with the cuffs of his coat, first the right sleeve then the left, as he labored at the blackboard. Tension gripped the room as he strove to come to terms with fractions. His anguish, and the examining board’s, ended only when he was told at last that he could sit down. As he thankfully did so, every member of the panel turned aside to hide the smiles they could no longer suppress.9
On the following Friday afternoon, June 24, the academic board listed those it had found “duly qualified.” The very last name on the list, hanging by a slim thread, narrowly escaping the scythe, was Tom Jackson.10
The class lost thirty members in the physical and mental examination rooms within the week and shrank to ninety-two survivors. Derby, one of the ninety-two, spoke with compassion of those who were not. “It is not thought a disgrace to be dismissed from here,” he wrote his mother, “for the studies and discipline are very hard, and a man who succeeds should be thought uncommonly talented, and one found deficient should not be blamed, for I verily believe that not one half of those appointed can possibly graduate.”11
George McClellan, whom the scythe never came near, was now feeling better—even exuberant—about everything, particularly about his shoes. He had found a more comfortable pair of boots and had just had his first good outing on the plain. He was riding high.
In his joy he wrote his sister, Frederica: “You can’t imagine how much more inspired I feel since I have acquitted myself handsomely at this morning’s drill.” He mused over how strange it was, “how some little circumstance like that can make so great a difference in our feelings. Before drill I felt low in spirits—homesick—& in doubt as to my competency to go through here with credit, but now, how different. I feel in high spirits.… I know I can do as well as anyone in both my studies & my military duties. If this state of mind continues I will be able to stay here for four years.…”12
That is more than Jackson was certain of. Not only had the academic entrance examination been a torment, but the drill McClellan was talking about was also for him a dubious experience. They were drilled twice a day now and marched everywhere besides. They were a shuffling mob, “as unused to marching as sheep,” halting irregularly, bunching up, and tramping on one another’s heels.13 Jackson in his brogans must have been particularly stiff and memorable.
Their ragged line of march was no more appalling than their smell. Each of them had been issued two blankets, one to sleep on, the other to sleep under, and both reeked of the villainous odor of rancid lanolin left from the cleaning process. The aroma clung to every plebe, branding him for what he was. It would take weeks for it to work out of the blankets and out of themselves. Until then everybody would simply have to adjust and endure.14
The upperclassmen, many of them cadet officers and therefore superior beings in the academy hierarchy and bound to be obeyed, were now making life miserable for them. Deviling the plebes was as much a part of the process as the lanolin in the blankets and the ragged drill on the plain. However, William Montgomery Gardner, a wildly handsome plebe from Georgia, soon learned that a new cadet with a powerful pair of fists and the disposition to use them if provoked was generally left alone.
He could cite his own roommate as a case in point. Gardner arrived late at West Point and had drawn “a very rough Western specimen” named Thomas J. Lowe as a “bunkie.” Quite early the rough-hewn Lowe had a two-fisted encounter with cadet authority. It happened in the mess hall.15
The dining hall was a zone of profound disquiet at best. Three times a day the new cadets were marched there in their ragged ranks and in rigid silence. Once there, the command “take seats” was followed by a scramble such as William Dutton, the plebe from Connecticut, had never experienced. “We have to eat as fast as we can,” he explained in a letter home, “& before we get enough the command is given—‘squad rise.’ ” He estimated that not more than two thirds of them managed under these circumstances to get a bite of any kind.16
“Such a 20 minutes of clawing jawing cursing calling masticating and hauling,” another plebe from Connecticut, Samuel H. Raymond, agreed, “is rarely seen.”17
William Gardner’s bunkie, Thomas Lowe, was trying to get his bite when an upperclassman shouted down to him from the other end of the table.
“Plebe, pass up the bread.”
Lowe neither replied nor passed the bread.
The upperclassman repeated the order, this time with qualifying adjectives.
“Did you address that remark to me, sir?” Lowe asked. There were some startled looks, for Lowe said it in an unhumble manner unbecoming a miserable fourth-classman. Oh, oh, they thought, a “rabid beast.”18
“Yes, you d——d plebe!” said the upperclassman.
Lowe rose slowly, strode to the head of the table—without bringing the bread—and to the horror of every plebe in the room—and the stifled amusement of every upperclassman—sent his tormenter reeling from the bench with a blow from his powerful pair of fists.
He returned casually to his seat as if inwardly contemplating the philosophy of Thomas Moore, whom he admired and copiously quoted, and continued eating as placidly as if nothing had happened. A good deal had happened, however, and Lowe was marched to the guardhouse later with great pomp and indignation. But since he didn’t scare at all and clearly had that powerful pair of fists, as well as the proven disposition to use them, he was little bothered after th
at.19
The food itself, when one did get some of it, was scarcely worth fighting for. “Trash,” said Raymond, a farm boy who had been raised on tastier fare.20
It was bread and butter in the morning for breakfast, with a substance called hash—a mishmash of peeled potatoes cut and boiled in a large iron kettle with leathery chunks of meat left over from dinner the day before. To this combination was added something—Raymond knew not what—to make the gravy. The ingredients were stirred “with a kind of hoe” and when done, brought to the table with some “hard” coffee. For dinner it was roast beef with more boiled potatoes and sometimes boiled beef and rice. For supper it was bread, butter, and tea.
“It will stand chewing well,” Raymond advised.21
He was soon writing home to West Hartford for his father to send him a barrel of apples.22 Pleas were, in fact, going out wholesale through the mails for “a piece of cheese & some cake”—anything to augment, replace, offset, or counteract the daily disaster served at the mess hall.23
“I would like to see Mecklenburg,” William Dutton wrote wistfully home to Connecticut, “& a field of corn—or wheat or some such thing & would above all things like to get into Aunt Dorcas’s cupboard a moment.”24
“I am thinking at this instant of my hen yard,” George Derby wrote his mother, grandmother, and two maiden aunts, the four husbandless women who had raised him in Medfield. “How does that do,” he asked plaintively, his hunger mixing with his homesickness, “and how is the garden, the grape vine, and all those things which keep fresh a remembrance of my performances in your minds.”25
The longing to be anywhere but where they were and the yearning to hear from home were agonizing. “Answer immediately!” they demanded at the end of their letters or at the head or in the margins. They would be making such demands for the next four years. Letters would never come fast enough or often enough.
As A. P. Hill would complain in a letter home to Culpeper, Virginia, “I have been living on vain expectancy, which they say like love, is rather a poor sustenance.” He viewed his letters from home as “somewhat like an Angel’s visits, few and far between.” He had no doubt that if King, the family dog, could write he would gladly do so. But those from home who were literate and should be writing, were not doing it.26
In these first weeks the plebes were therefore eagerly embracing anything and anybody that could solace them in their misery. The slightest suggestion of the familiar brought joy. A complete stranger only a month, a week, a day—even an hour—before, was clasped to the homesick breast if he hailed from anywhere near home.
“We even look on those from the same state as almost connected by the tie of consanguinity,” Dutton said.27
One thing most of these new cadets had brought with them from home and would have liked to keep was their hair. Most of them came with more than they required or that West Point desired. Some of them wore their curls in the fashion of the times—long, in soap-locks, and reeking with bear’s grease and Macassar oil. That would not do at West Point.28
“Have your hair cut, sir!” the frowning inspecting officer barked, giving the offending lock a sharp twitch as he passed along behind the file of stiff-standing plebes.
When the ranks broke, the “thing” with the hair stared about in bewilderment. What to do now? Where must he go to obey that order?29 Maury knew. He had come to West Point early and could point the place out. It was in a tent where a barber named Joe “could cut hair quicker and shorter than any living man.”30
The annual examinations ended for the upperclassmen in June, and the fact was celebrated by merrymaking and a spectacular display of fireworks on the plain. Horse-drawn cannon boomed, “& the way the … balls & bombs flew about was like hail,” William Dutton marveled. “It seemed as if the earth would open.…”31
The graduating class left soon after, and its final parade put lumps in throats. The music, faint at first, gathered and swelled and throbbed as the band approached on the plain. The graduating cadets marched smartly in under the academy colors, and filed into their places in the ranks with clockwork cadence. They did not march at all in the disheveled lurching style of the gawky plebes. The band struck up “Old Lang Syne,” and George Derby nearly burst with pent-up emotion. He knew what must be going through the minds of those fortunate cadets whose four-year trial was behind them and who were about to leave covered with honor. They were thinking of the miseries and hardships they had endured and the friendships they had made. As the band played that ultimate song of the heart, “Home, Sweet Home,” they were remembering the homes they had left and would soon be seeing again. Derby believed there was not a dry eye among them.32
It was a feeling that four years from now they, too, might know.
* * *
So it had been a hectic beginning, a frazzling month of June. Most of those in the class had found it all new and very strange. Samuel Raymond thought it pleasant enough, but somewhat lacking in the necessary conveniences. Sometimes, he admitted, when they were feeling a little troubled and uncomfortable, “we sigh for what we left behind”—and lived in anticipation of what was to come.33
West Point’s layout and lack of amenities didn’t ease their anxieties or soothe their sense of abandonment. There was no such thing on the entire grounds as a paved walkway. There was no gas, and their crowded rooms were lit only by malodorous whale-oil lamps. Their quarters were innocent of furnaces and bathrooms. In the summer the roads were dusty, and in the winter muddy. When the arctic wind came howling down the Hudson, they would be cut off from the world entirely. The river would be frozen then and unnavigable. The railroad had not yet come to the Highlands, and there was no telegraph. The only communication was by boat in summer and by stage over the mountains to a station on the Erie Railroad in winter. And the plain itself wasn’t really level. Water accumulated in its depressions in summer and froze into ice ponds in winter. They all had lived better in their short lifetimes.34
In early July they moved out of the barracks and onto the plain for their first summer encampment. They had been sleeping on floors in rooms in the north and south barracks buildings, scattered about as many as five to a room. Now for the next two months they would be lumped together three to a tent only ten feet square.
There they would find little rest.
Taps had just sounded on the first night of the encampment, and Derby had spread his blankets out on the tent floor, undressed, and blown out the candle.
Whap! Something pelted the sides of his tent. Pegs? Stones?
“Stop that noise in D Company!” a voice roared.
Someone struck the tent walls with a stick.
“Corporal of the Guard, Number Three!”
A patrol was heard arriving outside. Wang! The stick struck the canvas again.
“Halt!” a voice shouted.
An indignant head was thrust through the tent flap.
“Who is the orderly of this tent?” it demanded.
“DERBY!” Derby shouted.
“Turn out, Sir, we can’t have this noise! Turn out, Sir!”
Derby looked wryly about the tent, which since taps had been as quiet as a street in Pompeii.35 But it was useless to argue.
He was marched ignominiously to the guard tent, kept there a few minutes, and sent back. The patrol proceeded down the line to the next victim. Before the night was over every new cadet had been jerked out of his sleep and hustled away to make an accounting.
We shall do it next year to the next class of plebes, Derby vowed, if we are so lucky as to still be here.36
It was up every day now at 4:00 with the morning gun, on the drill field by 5:00, in the mess hall by 6:30, parade at 8:00, infantry or artillery drills through the rest of the morning, dinner at 1:00, more military exercises through the afternoon, parade at 6:00, stag dances without girls on the common until 9:00, in bed by 10:00.37
On the mornings of artillery drill, the plebes manned the bellowing guns for an hour and a half under
a melting sun. Rays darted off the glittering barrels of the brass cannon, nearly blinding them. William Dutton, standing but eighteen inches from the muzzle of the piece, reeled and recoiled from the roar of it. It was an ear-blasting and dirty business.
Encampment was a dirty business all around. Each plebe had a two-foot-square box into which all his belongings were crammed. Repeatedly through the day they rummaged in them for clean changes of clothing. It was providential that their laundry was done for them, a bargain at fifty cents a week.
“I have changed my pants 4 times in one day & had my boots blacked as many times,” Dutton complained. “If you step out of your tent with your coat not buttoned with every button & hooked in the neck, & with clean white gloves you are reported.” They drilled with their immaculate white gloves on their hands, dirtying them wholesale.
And everywhere there were visitors thronging the plain, and the dances without ladies in the night. The scene, Dutton sighed, “never seems a reality to me.”38
There was no study yet—that would begin in September—and the dancing was a rather dry business without ladies, as cadets had found through the years. But it was better than nothing.39 Candles were lit in two rows, and the cadets, to the time of fife, violin, and drum, danced in the flickering light, assuming ludicrous positions and executing “all manner of out-landish steps.” It satisfied George Derby’s sense of the ridiculous. He intended to contribute some choreography of his own before the summer was over.40
West Point was a summertime showcase. The plain teemed with visitors and dignitaries, including ladies—whom regrettably the marching plebes could see only if they had remarkable peripheral vision. Their attention was fixed by rigid discipline and unrelenting supervision on a point fifteen paces in front of them. Many had yet to speak to a woman since they arrived, much less dance with one. Few had any immediate prospect of doing so.41 Tom Jackson would not remember speaking to one during his entire four years at West Point.42
