Crucible of Command

by William C. Davis

  2

  SCHOOL OF THE SOLDIER

  IF LEE WAS a shadow through his childhood, at West Point he was a cipher. Almost nothing about him personally has survived beyond examination rankings, class standings, and records of special assignments. Yet there is a hint of his approach to learning. “I understand the principle,” he said a few years later, “& when that is the case am never at a loss.”1 No wonder that first (or fourth class) year he finished fourth in math and fifth in French in a class of eighty-seven. Adding personal conduct, Lee emerged overall third in his class and sixth in the Academy.2 The school operated on a demerit system for cadets who broke rules on uniform dress, church attendance, and behavior. Too many demerits and a cadet could be dismissed, but the demerits could be erased by an acceptable excuse or extra guard duty on Saturdays. Lee garnered not a single demerit during the year.3

  It was an outstanding performance. His name appeared in the annual army register, then in June instructors promoted him to cadet staff sergeant.4 Following a summer encampment full of infantry and artillery drill, he began his third classman year with more mathematics and geometry, French again, and drawing, while the infantry and artillery drill continued. He spent free time in the post library reading about Napoleon’s campaigns, eschewing the novels his father condemned, though he imbibed enough of Shakespeare to quote from memory Falstaff’s friends Nym and Bardolph from Henry IV.5 He befriended a few fellow cadets like Joseph E. Johnston, another Virginian, though his closest friend surely was John “Jack” Mackay of Georgia. He won another honor with appointment as acting assistant professor of math—a tutor really.6 As the year approached its end he had thoroughly enjoyed the Academy experience, and with pardonable pride wrote his mother of his leading achievements: rapid advancement in rank, his still demerit-free record, his assistant professorship, and the $10 a month it paid in addition to his cadet’s monthly pay.7 At the June 1827 examinations he advanced to second in his class behind Charles Mason, and seventh overall.8

  The Academy allowed cadets one furlough after their third class year. Ann Lee had moved from Alexandria about the time Robert left for West Point, and now lived in a large house on Second Street in Georgetown built some years before by the developer Clement Smith.9 Her health was now such that she could barely take part in managing the house. Her daughter Ann had married the year before and was gone, and only Mildred and Carter, whom Robert always called “the Captain,” lived with her, and they spent most of their time reading and letting family business languish. No wonder she moaned that spring, “Alas! Alas! I wish I had my little boys, Smith and Robert, living with me again.”10 Robert’s return must have been a tonic for her, as he passed much of his leave taking her to see family and friends at Eastern View in Fauquier County, where the graduate made quite an impression.11 “He was dressed in the West Point uniform,” a visiting fifteen-year-old girl recalled years later: “grey, with white bullet buttons, and I heard his beauty, and fine manners constantly commented on.”12

  Lee hoped to make a bigger impression on another young woman, his nineteen-year-old distant cousin Mary Anna Randolph Custis of Arlington House. Possibly some romantic bond began to tie them at Arlington on Christmas 1824, or even earlier.13 Yet if his heart attached itself to her from his teen years, practical impediments kept it in check. His responsibility for his mother and sister Mildred added to his drive to find a profession, impelled him to rank duty over romance, and Lee accustomed his heart to the expectation that he might never marry.14 Commenting on “that all-admiring & admired one Mr Lee” after he visited that August, Mary Custis told a friend that “he is so much occupied in the duties of his profession that he has but little time for the frivolous affairs of the heart,” such things being “always light with him you know.”15

  Staff Sergeant Lee returned to the Academy and entered on chemistry and the physical sciences like mechanics, optics, electricity, astronomy, and geology. On the parade his class concentrated especially on artillery tactics. At examinations in January 1828, he finished second in natural philosophy, third in chemistry, and fourth in drawing, and improved on that in the spring term. Meanwhile, he expanded his reading to writings more recreational, among them a rather sensational self-laudatory autobiography by John Paul Jones, and Major General Charles de Warnery’s Thoughts and Anecdotes Military and Historical on European wars of the previous century.16 He finished the year as one of fifteen demerit-free cadets, ranked fifth in the entire school for conduct, while in his class he still stood second behind Mason, who seemed always one step ahead.17

  Lee commenced his first classman year well when the commandant appointed him corps adjutant, the highest position a cadet could hold. The honor recognized Lee’s surpassing soldierly deportment. Part of being a good officer was looking the part, and no one in the Academy excelled Lee in bearing.18 Only in the first class year did cadets actually study the science of war: artillery tactics, grand strategy and field tactics, composition of armies and their movements, writing orders, and more, much of it with examples from military history. Lee read a translation of the military doctrine of Antoine-Henri, Baron Jomini, who argued that war was an art, not a science, and that while strategy might be reduced to some scientific principles, warfare itself could not. Rather he stressed that war’s outcome, and even the result of its component battles, were influenced by popular passion, will, and motivation, the personalities of commanders, national martial heritage and pride, “and a thousand other things”—what he called “the poetry and metaphysics of war.” Lee also read the Federalist Papers and other writings consonant with his father’s views on the nature of government and the Whiggish sentiments of the Lees in general. It was an appropriate moment, for as Lee commenced his final year South Carolina pushed a doctrine of nullification whereby states could declare federal statutes null and void, with secession a possible alternative.19

  In January Lee performed admirably and at the end of the final term emerged at the top in artillery and tactics, and close to the top in everything else. In a class now down to 46 cadets, he finished second, still behind Mason. Out of the 206 in the Academy, he tied with 5 others for top honors in conduct with not a demerit.20 Lee’s name appeared on the monthly list of those “distinguished for correct conduct” from the outset, and never went off.21 For the fourth year in a row his name appeared in the army register. Better yet, given his choice of service, he selected the elite Corps of Engineers.

  He had made himself a Lee to be proud of, and family in Virginia looked every day for his return from West Point, boasting to friends that “he graduates with much éclat.” Letters from home dampened his spirits with the news that Ann Lee was sinking, now too ill to travel at all.22 “I never calculate on living longer than from one season to another,” she had told her sons two years before. “My disease is an unconquerable one.”23 By the time he reached Ravensworth, where her sister Anna Fitzhugh cared for her, she had just days to live. Lee became again nurse and companion, mixed her medicines, and stood at her bed night and day. If he left the room, she fixed her eyes on the door waiting for him to return. On July 10 her breathing stopped and her son found himself almost prostrated with grief.24 Unable to control his feelings, he could not attend her funeral, and stayed in her room for hours pacing beside the bed.25 Ever after, Lee attributed whatever in himself that was good to his mother.26

  It was a scene far different from one almost exactly ten years later when another young man said farewell to his mother. Young Hiram Grant likely felt no pangs at leaving when he departed for West Point in the summer of 1839. He expressed some of his anticipation, and apprehension, in an acrostic poem for his friend Mary King:

  My country calls and I obey,

  And shortly I’ll be on my way

  Removed from Home, far in the west,

  Yet you with home and friends are blest

  Kindly then remember me,

  (I’ll also often think of thee)

  Nor forget the soldier story


  Gone to gain the field of glory.27

  The soldier-to-be looked forward to two things when he boarded a paddle-wheeler for Pittsburgh on the first leg of his journey, and neither of them was the Military Academy. He wanted to see Philadelphia and New York, the largest cities in America.28 Having done that he would have been content to turn around and go home. He transposed his name to Ulysses Hiram Grant when he reached West Point on May 31, 1839, hoping to avoid unnecessary teasing for his initials being H. U. G. The Academy somehow lost the Hiram and persisted in using Hamer’s erroneous “S.,” however, making him Ulysses S. Grant. The government in the end had its way, though it took him years to yield. He never used the “Simpson” represented by the new initial, and four years later comically observed, “I have an ‘S’ in my name and dont know what it stand for.”29

  When Grant stepped onto the Hudson River wharf at West Point, little had changed in the decade since Lee left. It was “the most beautiful place I have ever seen,” Grant declared. “I do love the place.” Inspiring sights reminded him of their revolutionary forefathers, as did the onetime headquarters of “that base and heartless traitor to his country and his God,” Benedict Arnold. Even at seventeen Grant had a well-formed notion of treason’s just deserts. After two months of summer encampment sleeping in a tent with only a single pair of blankets, he was still delighted. Once in barracks he spent free time on Sundays looking out his window on the scores of white sails dotting the Hudson, and despite predictions, was not the least homesick. He told friends that “I would not go home on any account whatever.”30

  That resolve did not waver even when he began to grasp the rigor of his studies. Fourth classmen like Grant spent their first year at French and mathematics, chiefly algebra. He found the classes long and hard, but halfway through the term he felt no great fear for the coming examinations in January. In fact the concentrated study made the time pass quickly, and the young cadet felt optimistic. “I mean to study hard and stay if it be possible,” he told a cousin, for the army promised a good and secure career. “If a man graduates here he [is] safe fer life,” Grant believed in September 1839. Should he not pass his exams, “very well,” he mused. “The world is wide.”

  Regulations required cadets to attend chapel every Sunday or risk demerits, which Grant thought “not exactly republican.” Those “black marks” as he called them were a sword over their heads.31 Get more than two hundred and a man faced dismissal. The conduct system had changed little since Lee’s time. Demerits received were only removed by presenting a valid excuse to the superintendent, or by demonstrating error in awarding them. Grant’s conduct his first month was perfect, but he got his first two in August, and twenty-six more by year end.32 He saw his share of what he called “big bugs” when they visited, men like President Martin Van Buren, General Winfield Scott, and even one of his favorite writers, Washington Irving. Scott inspired awe. “I thought him the finest specimen of manhood my eyes had ever beheld,” Grant later recalled.33

  He would rather have seen a few women. After four months he had not spoken to a single lady. “I wish some of the pretty girles of Bethel were here just so I might look at them,” he complained that fall, but then dismissed his own complaint with “fudge! Confound the girles.” Besides, he hardly welcomed the idea of a pretty woman seeing him as he saw himself at the moment. He felt laughable in his uniform, his skin-tight pants threatening to split seams with a crack “as loud as a pistol” anytime he bent over. His gray coat with its big buttons fastened up to the chin made him feel “very singulir,” and he feared that on seeing him friends would wonder if he were fish or a mammal, telling one “I hope you wont take me for a Babboon.”

  Withal he reported home that “I am happy, alive and kicking,” and hoped to last at least his first two years.34 He passed his first term’s examinations well enough, below the median in French but above in math. The next term challenged him more with algebra, plane geometry, trigonometry, and more, and he found his June 1840 examinations difficult, especially after months of recurrent colds and sore throats.35 In a class of 60 he finished 49th in French and 16th in math. Despite three demerit-free months, he finished the year with 51 and five-sixths demerits, ranking him 27th in his class, and 147th of 233 in the school.36

  With exams mercifully past, he went into summer encampment, with some time to relax and enjoy a series of parties and balls, but soon got an object lesson of another kind. At morning parade one day a cadet officer reprimanded another for sloth at obeying an order. That evening the offender dallied again and became insubordinate and threatening when challenged. Arrested, he refused to remain in the guard tent and sent the superintendent a dare to dismiss him, which the superintendent obliged.37 For all of those present, including Grant, it was an object lesson in discipline and the hazard of unchecked temper. Required to file a statement as a witness, Grant reluctantly obeyed. “Of all things I dont like to have to speak ill of a third person,” he remarked a few years later, “and if I do have to speak so I would like as few as possible to know it.”38

  Grant advanced to the third class and commenced a new set of studies that summer, adding drawing and ethics to French and math, and applied himself a bit more successfully, though still he rarely read a lesson more than once. The post library drew him, but to shelves not visited by Lee. He loved novels like Alain René Le Sage’s Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane, but preferred his fiction in English. He read most of James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Walter Scott, Frederick Marryat, and Charles Lever, devoting more time to them than to his texts.39 Other distractions drew him, and in January 1841 for the first time he committed an offense resulting in punishment when he got two extra tours of Saturday guard duty for being caught absent from his quarters visiting with Cadet Franklin Zantzinger of Virginia.40 Still, in June 1841 he finished 44th of 53 in French, 23d in drawing, 46th in ethics, and an excellent 10th in math. At 24th overall, he stayed just above the midline in his third class, but was 144th of 219 in the Academy overall. Again he had three demerit-free months, but finished with 63 for the year, most for housekeeping and dress infractions.41

  He went home on his eight-week furlough to find his family moved to nearby Bethel. He was fully grown now to about five feet seven inches tall, slimmed but still muscular, his hair a darkening sandy reddish-brown. He took little note of his appearance, but attracted the attention of others, especially among the boys of the town who listened to him tell stories of West Point in a rather diffident manner, with no evidence of brag or vanity. “He was shy with strangers, but among his friends he was always known as being a very good talker,” recalled Melancthon Burke, who first met him that summer. Many noted the contrast between the modest young man and his overbearing father, who flaunted the fact that he was the richest man in town, had a piano in his house, wore gold spectacles, and had a son at the Military Academy.42 When opportunity afforded Grant rode into the country to call on old friends like John W. Lowe of Batavia.43 Surely he also called on some of the “girles” he had missed while away at West Point. Years afterward claimants to have been his sweetheart in these days were legion, but as yet nothing suggests that he had to date experienced young love.44

  Soon enough the furlough ended and he was off once more to New York, arriving to find himself just barely chosen a cadet sergeant to help train a company at drill, the seventeenth of eighteen selected from his class.45 Meanwhile, he met a largely new curriculum of sciences, including chemistry, optics, mechanics, astronomy, and electricity, as well as more drawing.46 Now he numbered several other cadets as friends, both in his own and in other classes. A year ahead of him were William S. Rosecrans, John Pope, Daniel H. Hill, Gustavus W. Smith, Earl Van Dorn, and a Georgian named James Longstreet who became a close friend. Grant’s own class included William B. Franklin, Rufus Ingalls, and his roommate and close friend Frederick T. Dent, while a year behind him was Kentuckian Simon Bolivar Buckner.47

  Grant rose from the bottom third of his class
to the middle in all of his subjects: 22nd of 41 in chemistry, 19th in drawing, and 15th in sciences, though his overall class rank was only marginally in the top half at 20th. He studied no more now than before, still preferring fiction to his texts. The daily two-hour drawing classes revealed a genuine talent at least as a copyist, painting bucolic countryside scenes—some with horses at which he excelled—European city and rural settings, and works by American painter George Catlin.48 He showed a quick eye for detail and proportion, and a fine grasp of scale, all of which could serve a soldier well beyond the easel, but there were no demerit-free months this year, and twice more he would be punished. In February 1842 he did two extra Saturday guard tours for carelessness at drill, then in May was confined to his quarters for two weeks for “speaking in a disrespectful manner” to a superior.49 No wonder his tally of demerits rose to 127, though 29 of those were later remitted.50 In the corps as a whole he stayed in the upper edge of the bottom third at 157 of 213. Those demerits put an end to his cadet sergeant’s stripes. “The promotion was too much for me,” he later mused. He was to remain a cadet private to the end.51 Still, that summer he was appointed a corps lieutenant to assist when the Department of Tactics taught third classmen a course known as the School of the Company. Then he moved on to his final year as a first classman, and at last the Academy began exposing him to military science under the instruction of Professor Dennis Hart Mahan and Captain Charles F. Smith, as well as Lee’s classmate First Lieutenant Miner Knowlton.

  Like Lee before him, Grant studied engineering and the science of war, which included military and civil engineering, ethics, infantry tactics, artillery tactics, mineralogy, and geology. He had to master texts on field fortifications, permanent fortification, tactics of attack and defense, the nature and use of underground mines and other military “accessories,” the organization and composition of armies, military strategy, civil engineering, architecture, and even stonecutting and machinery since permanent forts were built of rock or masonry. There were also ethics and rhetoric, so-called moral philosophy on the nature of right and wrong, and army manuals like Scott’s Rules and Regulations for the Exercise and Manoeuvres of the United States Infantry.52