The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  Neither did a day pass when these cadets were not reciting. It was West Point’s teaching method, its modus operandi, and a frightening new fact of life. It penetrated cadet ignorance at the academy as incisively as Socrates had disrobed sloppy reasoning in Athens. The professor or one of his assistants explained the problem at hand. (Virtually every professor had at least one assistant instructor under him—academy graduates generally, who had returned for a tour of duty to teach a subject they knew particularly well.) The cadets went away at the end of the class with the explanation swarming in their heads. Overnight they “boned” it and reappeared the next day ready to recite it.

  At that point it became a case of Russian roulette. The professor or the assistant called on victims at random. The designated cadet rose, armed himself with a piece of chalk and sponge, and went to the front. As he stood at attention, a problem was put to him, and he wheeled about to the blackboard and began to work it out. As he chalked and sponged, others worked and recited and came and went beside him. When he was finished he wheeled about to face the professor again, and when called on, explained what he had just done.31

  Nobody was long overlooked, however much he might like to be. Each of the new plebes had an opportunity to recite every day. No matter how hard they sought “to bugle it” (to keep from reciting until the bugle blew),32 there was nowhere to hide and it caught up with them sooner rather than later. They quickly found that recitations were very serious business, all sedate earnestness, to be conducted with the utmost precision and decorum. The work and the questions were clear-cut and definite. They must confine themselves directly to the point. There was no circumlocution or vagueness allowed, no back talk, disputation, buffoonery, or witticisms.33

  Regrettably things did not always work out as hoped. With sometimes distressing regularity, some of them simply didn’t know the material and had to admit it. That was called a “fess,” which was followed by a “found” (delinquent), followed by serious ramifications. Happily, a lapse didn’t necessarily mean dismissal. There was latitude for error. Tom Jackson was coming to class in these first weeks often still trying to puzzle out a lesson from the day or several days before. Through no lack of diligence or hard work on his part, he was simply behind, and since he didn’t like to get ahead of himself, he said so. The professors seemed willing to take this into account.34

  In early October, the shivering corps was ordered at last into winter uniforms.35 The Highlands also changed into something different as fall moved toward winter. The trees lost their greenery and became leafless and slate gray on the surrounding hills, and the river went to a dreary olive drab. With the changing season came a mid-October malaise. It was a vulnerable time, when most of the plebes were beginning to be disgusted with West Point. Some who now expected they would surely be dismissed in January became entirely disheartened and stopped trying.

  Samuel Raymond, the farm boy from Connecticut, commiserated with them. “They feel keenly the disgrace of being obliged to leave any place on account of inferiority of talent and wish from the bottom of their heart that they had never seen the place.”36

  For those still in the running, life had become nonstop studying.

  “We are obliged to be in our rooms about ten hours each day as study hours,” Raymond complained. “It is not the hum drum of a village academy which is here recited.” William Dutton, Raymond’s fellow plebe from Connecticut, found himself studying every spare moment from reveille to taps. He hadn’t found time to do anything else. It couldn’t be helped, he said, “if one thinks of staying.”37

  Everywhere there were drums to remind them of where they were, the “most startling beat of drums,” pounding out changes in the daily schedule, beginning each morning before the sun was up. In cadence with cannon, fife, and bugle, the drumbeat hammered over the plain and through the barracks, to the mess hall, and the academic buildings. They rumbled everywhere; they were the heartbeat of West Point, always throbbing.

  Only with tattoo at night, which called the cadets to their quarters and the day to an end, did the drums rattle to a stop. Even at that hour, 10:00 in the evening, they signaled anything but rest and repose. Up and down the beat resonated, in and around the barracks in a final farewell, “making the night sound … with soul-stirring strains.”38

  The plebes were also finding they had a magnetic attraction for demerits. The cursed things flew at them from every direction and stuck to them like lint. A code of regulations “more rigorous than those of Deuteronomy” ruled West Point.39 The don’ts were legion, six pages of them in the academy rule book under Article XII, titled: DISCIPLINE. Four more pages of them—afterthoughts, perhaps—followed later under a different heading, but which might just as well have read: MORE DISCIPLINE.40

  The opportunities to transgress the rules were endless. Any one of the scores of offenses described in those ten pages of the rule book could bring down the demerit, and some of the more sinister could bring peremptory dismissal. At one time or another virtually every one of the don’ts was practiced or attempted by somebody. But there was a limit. Two hundred demerits in a year was all the system would tolerate from any one cadet, and some of the plebes who had given up hope were obeying no regulations at all, staying only long enough to amass their two hundred demerits and leave.41

  The demerit was the great leveling agent of discipline and order, an ever-present force operating constantly.42 The plebes were piling them up at every turn, having to bone conduct, in some cases, as hard as they boned mathematics and French.43

  As 1842 ground toward a dismal end, one of the plebes, Sam Bell Maxey, the son of a Kentucky lawyer, defied paragraph 134 of the regulations forbidding physical assault. The defendant was another plebe, William Burns, who just before the attack had defied paragraph 133, the anti-defamation provision. Their resulting physical encounter bought both of them instant arrest and a prolonged public lecture in the Post Orders from Superintendent Richard Delafield. Even their later apologies and expressions of regret to one another couldn’t save them from demerits and yet another lecture.44

  When winter had fairly arrived and it became too cold to drill on the plain, the plebes did what forty classes of cadets had done before them. They took up hashmaking, a depravity profoundly frowned on in the regulations. “Hash” was defined as anything that could be smuggled out of the mess hall, mashed together, put in a pan with a slab of butter, seasoned to taste, cooked, and eaten surreptitiously.

  These “Chinook orgies” were generally scheduled for Saturday nights when there were no lessons and no recitations pending the next day. Implicated cadets bootlegged forbidden food from the mess hall wrapped in paper and stuffed under their caps. It was not unique to see crowns of caps so far elevated from the tops of heads that they had to be strapped down.

  The cooking was done sub rosa between inspection of rooms at call to quarters and taps, and it was a risky and complicated business. The sentinel on post had either to be duped or bought off with a helping of the hash. Even with his complicity the conspiracy had to be carried off with mouselike stealth. And often as not it came to grief in any case. An inspecting officer unexpectedly rapped at the door and the hash was quickly hustled out of sight. But since it continued to simmer loudly, nobody was deceived, the cooks were betrayed, and the tab paid all around was five demerits and two extra rounds of guard duty.45

  Superintendent Richard Delafield grieved over such wanton disregard of the regulations and often used the day’s Post Orders to lecture the cadets on good and evil. He knew the difference. When Sylvanus Thayer inaugurated order of merit numbers—a cadet’s academic ranking in his class and consequently in the corps—the very first one went to Delafield, who graduated at the head of his class in 1818.

  He had gone on to a distinguished career in the elite corps of engineers and become a specialist in the construction of permanent fortifications. For six years he was the superintending engineer in the construction of the Cumberland Road east of the Ohi
o River, and in 1838 he was named superintendent of the academy.

  Delafield had his quirks. Among them was a penchant for reeling off sarcastic puns, which caused the cadets to call him Dicky the Punster.46 But he was a superior administrator. Engineering Professor Dennis Hart Mahan admired him for his “clear sightedness, promptitude … and a determination to examine everything with his own eyes.”47

  Delafield examined everything through small steel-framed glasses set on “a pronounced eagle nose” that jutted out between sandy eyebrows under an abundant shock of sandy-gray hair.48 He had a nervous temperament that propelled his pudgy frame perpetually about the post, where he took pride in “having everything different from what it used to be.”49

  He was an omnipresent being, an ironhanded disciplinarian, tirelessly on the lookout for petty infractions and the troublemakers responsible for them. The cadets considered him a tyrant. He punished every violation of the regulations, deprived the corps of amusements and recreation wherever possible, scheduled fire drills on free time, withdrew permission to attend officers’ parties, and forced cadets to answer self-incriminating questions. The staff and faculty didn’t like him any better than the cadets did. He never let up insisting that all faculty must attend Sunday services in the chapel, the same as the cadets.

  However, Delafield was improving and upgrading the academy constantly with new roads and structures, and doing it on a shoestring. “He had the credit,” Erasmus Keyes admitted, “of doing more with a dollar than any other man in the army.”50

  Despite their disapproval of him, the new cadets found Delafield approachable and accessible. He held regular audience hours between 7:00 A.M. and 8:00 A.M. daily, except Sundays, and any cadet who wished to see him then could.51 He was open to reasonable suggestions, and willing to institute reforms where he saw a need, no matter how the need came to his attention or from whom.

  One controversial need he had seen and acted on was a different way for cadets to button their trousers. The buttons ran up the side—always had. He ordered them changed to run up the front instead, fly-fashion. It was more practical and it pleased the cadets. However, it scandalized Mrs. Delafield and the other ladies of the post, who protested heatedly that the reform drew unseemly attention to a sensitive region of cadet anatomy. But buttons up the front was clearly having something different from what it was, and the reform stuck.52

  But now it was January 1843, and where the buttons ran on the trousers mattered little to the plebes. There was a more pressing consideration at hand. George McClellan wrote home of “a continual state of excitement.”53 He meant panic. Their first semiannual examination, in mathematics and French, was to begin on January 3, at 8:00 A.M. in the library.54

  The fearful thing was upon them, the hour of agony, the inquisition. Tom Jackson had come to another dangerous crossing.

  Oh,

  for the Sight

  of Our Native Land

  When Jackson marched rigidly to the library on January 3 to see if he could possibly survive, he was only a face in the crowd.

  He was so modest and shy in his ways that he had been little noticed by his classmates in the first six months. Dabney Maury, in their two stiff unsuccessful social encounters, had probably gotten to know him as well as anybody. If there was any hail-fellow-well-met in Jackson at all, Maury had failed to find it.

  In less than three weeks Jackson would turn nineteen. He was not unattractive. His features were strong, with a long thin nose and a broad, angular forehead. However, his face was round and red, Georgia’s William Gardner remembered, “and without a single grace of manner or appearance.” His blue-gray eyes were inset against a somewhat sallow complexion that colored deeply when he blushed, which was whenever he was spoken to. When he spoke to anybody, which was only when necessary, Gardner thought his voice soft and gentle. Others swore, however, that it was thin and reedy, almost squeaky. What he said came out in quick, jerky, stiff sentences, never to be repeated or amended in any form and framed in such a way as to discourage further conversation. He said only what he had to say in the most economic way possible, and that was that. Take it or leave it.

  Jackson was taller than average, at 5 feet 10 inches, but appeared shorter because of a habit of carrying his head downcast in thoughtful abstraction. There was a lot to think about at West Point. But he had a sweet smile, which he occasionally flashed on the world when something humorous or pleasing was said. He was never known, however, to say any such thing himself. It was believed that, when alone with one or two intimates, if indeed he had any, he was capable of animated conversation and intellectual combat. But in a larger circle he was always the silent interested listener, hanging on the edge of the conversation, rarely participating.1

  A closer look at this nondescript cadet, however, yielded rewards for those with an appreciation for the slightly off-center. Jackson brought with him to West Point an obscure malady of the stomach and other internal organs that dictated the way he believed he must sit and stand. While studying, he never bent his body for fear of compressing some important inner organs and aggravating his condition. This produced an uncompromising bolt-upright posture, stiff as a stick. No chair he ever sat on appeared to need a back.2

  His mental posture was just as rigid. When his section was caught in a drenching rainstorm and everybody else sensibly broke for cover, Jackson continued to march resolutely on at the prescribed pace and direction, veering neither left nor right, oblivious of the downpour and getting soaked. From the cover of the barracks the others looked back in wonder and said, “See old Jackson!” Some saw this and other eccentricities often enough to conclude that there must be some design to them. But nobody had the faintest notion what it might be.3

  There was never a need for Jackson to bone concentration. “No one I have ever known,” one of his roommates said, “could so perfectly withdraw his mind from surrounding objects or influences, and so thoroughly involve his whole being in the subject under consideration.”4

  His roommates were privy not only to this attribute, but to his nighttime study habits. Before taps he piled the grate high with anthracite coal. By the time the lamps went out, the coal was glowing, and Jackson was stretched out flat on the bare floor in front of the grate with his books—being careful not to compress the organs. There he boned the lesson for the next day late into the night, “until it was literally burned into his brain.”5

  Sam Grant, the first-classman from Ohio whose real first name wasn’t Sam at all, but Ulysses, took Jackson for a fanatic. Grant looked at the awkward plebe from the west Virginia mountains and saw a manly but weird character who seemed to be in the clutches of some strange religious hypochondria. Despite appearances, however, Jackson came to command respect, including Grant’s. “He had so much courage and energy, worked so hard, and governed his life by a discipline so stern,” Grant admitted, that they all had to respect him. He lived by his maxims.6

  He made no large impression otherwise. Grave, reticent, physically awkward, socially ungraceful, intense, unbending, disciplined, diffident, tenacious, and unnoticed. That was Jackson. Nobody saw in him any suggestion of genius or gift for command, nothing at all that promised a career out of the ordinary. It just wasn’t there.7 It might not even be in him to survive this first critical semiannual examination in the library.

  Indeed, when it was all over, sixteen more of the class were “obliged to pack up and be off,” as Samuel Raymond put it. “I pitied the poor fellows from the bottom of my heart—their hopes destroyed, their friends disappointed, themselves disgraced.”8 Jackson had survived, finishing sixty-second in mathematics and eighty-eighth in French.9 He was still with them, hanging by his fingertips from the bottom ledge. But he was there.

  George McClellan was still very much there, astride the uppermost rung, and full of himself. “They put me head of my class in mathematics!” he boasted in a letter to Frederica. “Are you contented with that, sister?”10

  “Every day I am more ple
ased at my having come here—instead of doing nothing at home,” he wrote his brother. “I am head of my class at West Point, a distinction well worth having—rather different from that of ‘taking first honors’ at college.” The past, he boasted, had been child’s play. This was the real thing. “I suppose those who stood above me at ‘the infant school’ I used to go to ‘when I was a little boy’ will say that they might easily do the same thing here.” Hah! “No such thing,” he said, “they could not do it to save their lives—I never studied at all at home, now I do study a little (not much I must confess). I am older too, my head is clearer & I take more pains than formerly.”11

  Dutton was closer to speaking for everybody when he groaned, “Thought! thought!! thought!!! continual.” It wears the flesh, he wrote Lucy Matthews, his cousin and the girl he planned to marry. “I do hope from the bottom of my heart that you will never touch another book to study. I have enough for both.”12

  On February 20 they at last became true cadets, although still fourth-classmen. In the cadet chapel that afternoon at 3:30 they took their oaths, signed their engagements, received their warrants, and the word “conditional” was dropped from their status.13 The upperclassmen, however, would continue to call them beasts, animals, reptiles, and things.

  The weather soared temporarily with their status, as weather will, passing from arctic cold at the beginning of the examinations to springlike at the end. The philosophical McClellan saw in this letup in the weather a lesson about life. “What a change in the appearance of the country two or three short weeks can make,” he marvelled. “So it is with everything else on this earth—things which in one week are looked upon as extravagant, imaginary, & impossible may in the next, be common occurrences—someone who was poor & obscure may in as short a time take his place among the ‘princes of the earth.’ ”14