Jefferson Returns:

In the decades that followed, however, many people forgot another notable achievement, one remembered by Superintendent Sylvanus Thayer and his West Point colleagues: Jefferson founded the United States Military Academy. Writing in 1821 in behalf of Thayer, the faculty, and cadets, Professor Jared Mansfield asked Jefferson to stand for a portrait to be painted by Thomas Sully, the famed Philadelphia artist. Portraits of George Washington, the nation's first President, and Jonathan Williams, the Academy's first Superintendent, already hung in the Academy's library. People at West Point, Mansfield told Jefferson, thought that his should be "added to the number, as being alike the founder and patron of both" the nation and the Academy. Jefferson was happy to oblige. He had always believed, he responded, that West Point was "of major importance to our country." The portrait, which has hung in the library ever since, would be the Academy's last major memorial to its founder.

Until, that is, the Department of History's November 1-3 conference on "Thomas Jefferson's Military Academy." The official Bicentennial event, which received financial and creative support from A. Ross Wollen ('65), featured ten top scholars from West Point and other institutions and attracted audience members from as far away as Olympia, Washington. It focused attention on Jefferson's creation--on March 16, 1802--of the United States Military Academy.

"For most of our history we ignored Jefferson," says West Point Professor Robert McDonald, who organized the conference. "He rallied support for the Academy, signed it into law, watched over its early development, and in 1808 even called for its dramatic enlargement," McDonald says. Among the facts sometimes left out of conventional accounts are that Jefferson suggested books for West Point's library and corresponded with members of the faculty. "For a very busy President," McDonald notes, "he played a pretty active role."

The history department's visiting professor, Theodore Crackel of East Stroudsburg University, began the debate about Jefferson's founding of the Academy with a 1981 article. He expanded his thesis in a 1987 book, Mr. Jefferson's Army, by casting the founding of the military school in the broader context of Jeffersonian reform of the whole military establishment. Jefferson worked, said Crackel, "to mold an army that would threaten neither the new Republican regime, nor the republic itself." This included "the creation of a military academy in which to train otherwise poorly prepared (but politically acceptable) sons of the Republican faithful."

At the conference Crackel repeated this thesis, then broadened it to argue that Jefferson's reformation of the military establishment was but one element of a broader effort to reform the whole executive establishment--military and civil. Said Crackel, "All of the instruments of government that Jefferson inherited as president in March 1801 had so absolute a Federalist character that any loyalty to the new Republican regime was problematic…. With both [the civil and military] he employed a carefully modulated program of reform that would ultimately bring them into line with the broad aspirations and goals of the new Republican regime."

Conference participants Jennings Wagoner and Christine Coalwell did not dispute Crackel's argument. They did, however, seek to supplement it. Professor Wagoner, who teaches at the University of Virginia, and Ms. Coalwell, a researcher at Monticello's International Center for Jefferson Studies, believe that Jefferson also had educational ambitions for the Academy. "He viewed it, we think, as phase one of a national university," says Coalwell. While other possible components--schools of medicine, geography, social science and legislation--lacked Congressional support in 1802, Jefferson knew that he could win approval of a military school devoted to mathematics and engineering. Afterwards, Wagoner and Coalwell note, Jefferson backed Superintendent Williams's U.S. Military Philosophical Society, a West Point group that encouraged scientific research, and appointed at least a few cadets with impressive academic records. One of them--who left Dartmouth College to enroll at the new Academy--was young Sylvanus Thayer, Class of 1808.

If Wagoner and Coalwell are right, Jefferson was not the first head of state to envision both political and educational functions for his military school. So suggests Professor Don Higginbotham of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who presented a paper that analyzed military education before 1802. European monarchs, said the noted George Washington scholar and former Pulitzer Prize nominee, intended much the same for their own academies. "Political loyalty," he said, "mattered no less than scholarly rigor."

Professor Elizabeth Samet, who teaches English at West Point, helped explain why Jefferson and other founding fathers fixated on the fidelity of their troops. "History," she says, "provided them with many examples of popular military strongmen who had seized power." Jefferson's 1800 election, she explains, was especially close; the Army, meanwhile, was generally Federalist in its sympathies. Like John Adams, his presidential predecessor, Jefferson wanted to ensure that the Army would not subvert civilian authority; founding the Academy advanced his aims.

Jefferson's recognition of a military academy's potential influence--for good or ill--is suggested by his earlier efforts to prevent Hamilton from establishing one. That's the contention of David Mayer, a Capital University historian and law professor. Mayer doubts the sincerity of Jefferson's claim, made at a 1793 cabinet meeting, that such an institution might be unconstitutional. At the conference his presentation was titled "Necessary and Proper"--a reference to the clause of the Constitution within which Jefferson, he says, in 1802 found clear authority to provide for the training and education of future officers.

Other conference highlights included history Professor Samuel Watson's remarks on the efforts of the first generation of West Pointers to advance Jeffersonian principles and a keynote address by Jean Yarbrough, the Bowdoin College political theory professor who wrote American Virtues: Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People (1998). Yarbrough, who suggested that Jefferson founded the Academy to make the Army more like America, contended that today Jefferson might wish to make America more like West Point. The conference closed with remarks by Peter Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor at the University of Virginia, who led a roundtable discussion of the conference participants' findings. Onuf concluded that the over-achieving founder, 200 years after the fact, finally seemed poised to assume a place near the top of West Point's honor roll.

"In the past, Washington and Thayer have been seen as the founders of the Academy," says Colonel Robert A. Doughty ('65), Head of the Department of History. "We need to honor both men, but their contributions don't tell the whole story." For one thing, Jefferson's leading role in the establishment of the Academy 200 years ago is a fact that cannot be ignored. For another, he says, the Academy needs Jefferson.

Washington, he says, exemplifies the best qualities of a citizen-soldier. The Continental Congress gave him a great deal of power yet, at the end of the American Revolution, he resigned as the Army's commander-in-chief and, unlike England's Cromwell or France's Napoleon, gave his power back to the people. "He was the consummate professional," explains Doughty, "the best man for the job by far." Thayer, he says, is West Point's hometown hero. "He institutionalized Washington's understanding of the professional military ethic--the imperative of selfless service, and he combined it with a stubborn insistence that cadets develop habits of the mind that best can be described as Jeffersonian."

How so? "Jefferson was a scholar as well as a leader," answers Doughty. "He read widely, sought thoughtful answers to tough questions, and tackled subjects as diverse as economics and physics, literature and chemistry." The ideal cadet, Doughty believes, possesses Washington's sense of service, Jefferson's intellect, and the sort of vision displayed by Thayer when he sought to make these qualities cornerstones of education at West Point. "As institutional heroes," Doughty says, "they make a very impressive trinity."

See the Jan/Feb 2002 "Assembly" for coverage of this event