"West Point Bicentennial"
A Pictorial History of the First Two Hundred Years of the United States Military Academy
Preface | 1776-1817 | 1817-1833 | 1833-1848 | 1848-1865 | 1865-1890 | 1890-1919 | 1919-1939 | 1939-1950 | 1950-1970 | 1970-1980 | 1980-2002 | Bicentennial and Beyond

"Mid-century Time of Trial"

1848-1865

Despite its graduates' success in the Mexican War, the Military Academy curriculum remained a subject of continual debate, reflecting much larger questions about the academy's mission, the Army's purpose, and the relationships between military training, professional socialization, general education and officership. These debates were often reflected in Board of Visitors Reports. (These boards, composed of distinguished military, political and educational leaders, originated during Thayer’s Superintendency to provide vital federal oversight of the academy.) On the one hand was the argument that the Military Academy paid too little attention to the liberal arts and humanities. On the other hand was the argument that there was too little military training and that the existing training was too abstract or simplistic to be of practical value. Nevertheless, the Academic Board, filled with graduates trained in the Thayer system (many of whom remained in place until the 1860s and 1870s), believed in the need for the mental discipline gained through rigorous training in mathematics and engineering, and repeatedly rejected proposals for change. More than one-half of each cadet’s class rank, and 70 percent of class time, remained concentrated in mathematics, science and engineering. The chaplain (first appointed in 1813), who acted as professor of history, geography and ethics (or "moral philosophy") after 1814, was one of the few exceptions. However, in addition to that array of responsibilities, he was also temporarily given the responsibilities to teach English, rhetoric and law. Overall, the humanities, along with drawing and French, accounted for only one-seventh of the class time and class standings. (Conduct accounted for another one-seventh of class rank.)

Military instruction also accounted for one-seventh of the class time and standing. The vast majority of this time was spent drilling for parades, and many officers and graduates criticized its boredom and lack of realism. Yet many others applauded the discipline and precision of these drill formations, which successfully prepared junior officers for the sort of troop training, largely close-order drill, standard in all 19th Century armies. Indeed, by 1845, American officers believed their troops the best drilled in the world, a discipline that distinguished the Regular Army troops who assaulted fortified positions in Mexico. Thus, though he found drill boring as a cadet, Ulysses S. Grant, Class of 1843, recognized its training and disciplinary value in his memoirs, proclaiming, "a better army, man for man, probably never faced an enemy." Drill also reinforced an attention to duty, regardless of personal inconvenience, that the Military Academy still seeks to instill. Indeed, Superintendent DeRussy observed in 1836 that "whatever benefit the country at large, and the Army in particular, may have derived from this institution...may be traced to its discipline." This discipline, whether physically in troop training or mentally in the attention to detail instilled by the Thayer system, proved invaluable both in Mexico and during the Civil War, enabling a small officer corps to manage and supply mobilizations of unprecedented scale and scope in order to achieve national objectives.

The capstone of cadet military education was engineering professor Dennis Hart Mahan's "Art of War" course. But only nine hours out of this semester-long class were actually devoted to the history, art and science of war, as distinct from fortification and military engineering. Only a single lecture in the course addressed warfare against the Native Americans who were most often the Army's opponents. More interested in potential conflicts with European armies, few officers complained of this disparity. Many cadets remembered these lessons as the most interesting part of the curriculum and regretted their brevity. Mahan himself labeled this "the most defective" section of his course. But the consensus of academy officials, including Mahan, was to retain the course's concentration on engineering for fear of diluting the practical skills and habits of mental discipline they believed that it instilled.

Mahan shared his extensive knowledge with the faculty in a postgraduate course begun in 1842. Six years later, it was supplemented by a seminar group called the Napoleon Club that provided opportunities for officers to present papers to each other and to cadets on the campaigns of Napoleon. The club gained the sponsorship of Superintendent Robert E. Lee during the early 1850s.

Military training at the academy improved in the period with the addition of a company of engineers in 1843, which enabled cadets to practice field fortification, and with the addition of cavalry tactics in 1849, 17 years after its reintroduction into the Army. A Department of Tactics was finally created in 1858, largely due to a growing concern with the effects of the rifled muskets then coming into use.

As had been the case since the 1820s, boards of general officers and junior specialists also met at West Point to test new systems of drill using the cadets, and veteran junior officers were encouraged to use the Military Academy as a home base for developing new systems of ordnance and artillery. Despite the limits of the curriculum, the interest stirred by victories in Mexico and technological changes in warfare made West Point the Army's intellectual center during the 1850s.

The voices for reform of the academic program did experience a limited success in this period when a five-year curriculum was introduced in 1854. This change permitted the retention of all existing classes and expanded tactical training (which increased to comprise 30 percent of the cadets' class rank, double its previous proportion) and introduced classes in Spanish for an officer corps expected to serve on the nation's southwestern border. The addition also increased the existing English course and brought law, history and geography back into the curriculum. The five-year curriculum was short-lived however, as the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 led to the graduation of the Class of 1862 a year early, after which the five-year plan was abandoned.

The 1850s are most often remembered as the heyday of "Old West Point," an era of sentiment and romance forever enshrined in the memories of those who fought in the Civil War. With the advent of the steamboat and the railroad, the academy had gradually become less isolated than in its early years. Living conditions became less Spartan as new barracks, completed in 1850, brought improved heating, while gas lighting was installed in 1857. (There was still no indoor running water, but a bathhouse was built for winter use.) The character of the curriculum changed little, even under the five-year course, but discipline was gradually moderated, as a balance was crafted between the need to instill habits of order and the desire to encourage the growth of personal initiative and responsibility among future officers. Indeed, the Military Academy became a national showplace and a school for aspiring gentlemen, with frequent dances (called "hops" by the cadets) and visits by prominent Europeans. "Flirtation Walk," a pedestrian path along the Hudson River restricted to cadets and their dates, became the subject of popular art and song. During the same period, cadet classes began composing their own songs to commemorate graduation and the transition from their cadet gray to "Army Blue" uniforms.

The academy's flexible adaptations proved a success. Although cadets continued to sneak off post to visit Benny Havens' tavern, their violations of regulations tended more toward making "hashes" of food smuggled into the barracks, and their recreation consisted more of walks in the wilds of the Hudson Highlands and skating on the frozen river in winter than of the drunken binges and gambling then common in most of the nation’s colleges and universities. (Cadets also played baseball, and a version of soccer or rugby, on an informal basis.) Encouraging this balance, cadets with good conduct records were permitted to go home for Christmas, beginning in 1855, and off-post privileges on Saturdays after inspection began in 1858. Formal commencement, first tried by Superintendent Robert E. Lee in 1853, became a tradition from 1857 onward, and the first graduating class photo album, the ancestor of today's Howitzer, appeared in the latter year. Hazing, common by the 1830s, remained largely a matter of practical jokes and embarrassing pranks directed at plebes (cadets in their first year) during the summer encampment, but this comradeship was challenged by a new sectionalism. Cadets increasingly brought their political beliefs with them in an era of growing polarization between North and South, sometimes leading to disputes and even duels. Attempting to maintain their camaraderie as a band of brothers, many cadets tried to avoid political discussions, taking refuge in sentiment, a response to the growing tension found throughout the nation during the decade before the Civil War.

Like all national institutions, the Military Academy was divided when southern states seceded from the Union. Northern cadets joined southern ones, as officers did throughout the Army, in sentimental farewells. Yet only 25 percent of the officers who had graduated from West Point resigned to join the Confederacy, although 37 percent of the prewar officer corps came from the South. Indeed, the proportion of southern-born civilian officials and graduates of northern colleges and universities who returned south was considerably higher than that of West Point graduates or the officer corps as a whole. Whatever the individual case, officers and cadets believed that they were being faithful to the "country" of their birth, and most who departed did so with profound sorrow. In the end, 89 percent of the graduates living in 1860 served on one side or the other during the Civil War, dominating the leadership of the warring armies. Only one academy graduate, Joseph E. Johnston, Class of 1829, was a Regular Army general before the war, but 294 graduates served as generals for the Union and 151 for the Confederacy. One hundred and five graduates, more than 10 percent of those who served, were killed in action, and 141 (about 15 percent) were wounded, while 19 won the Medal of Honor (which was created during the war). Despite frequent attack by those who distrusted their prewar associations with the generals of the Confederacy, graduates such as Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, Phil Sheridan, George H. Thomas (the "Rock of Chickamauga," a Virginian who remained in U.S. service) and John Schofield (later superintendent, and commanding general of the Army) led the nation's citizen-soldiers to victory and reunion in its most deadly war. They also would lead the Army for the remainder of the century.