The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  Late spring had come at last to western Virginia in 1842, the trees were green again on the mountains, and Gibson Butcher was going to West Point. But Thomas J. Jackson couldn’t generate much enthusiasm for his friend’s good fortune. He wished he were going instead. He had wanted that appointment himself.

  Earlier in the spring, four of them had taken an informal examination at the Bailey House in Weston. It had seemed the only fair way to see who was best qualified. Jackson had done all right, considering his education, but not good enough. Butcher was better at arithmetic, and everybody knew mathematics was the most important subject taught at West Point. So it was Butcher’s name that Samuel L. Hays, the district’s first-term Democratic congressman, sent to the secretary of war. It was Hays’s first appointment to the military academy, and he wanted it to be right.

  Butcher left in late May and arrived at the steamboat landing on the Hudson River on June 3. He was a young man of good character, well thought of and well connected in the district. He had a quick mind, and he was ambitious. It was believed he would do well at West Point.

  But the academy wasn’t what Butcher thought it would be—not at all. When he saw what awaited him on the plain above the landing, he paled. When he learned of all of the duties, the discipline, the marching and studying he would have to do, he started back toward the landing. He was soon gone, telling nobody he was leaving.

  At home again and glad to be back, he stopped at Jackson’s Mill on the West Fork River between Weston and Clarksburg, where Tom lived with his uncle Cummins, one of the district’s numerous and prominent Jacksons. Tom’s father had died when he was only two years old, and he had come eventually under the care of this strapping, good-hearted uncle. Butcher knew how badly Tom had wanted that appointment. He could have it now if he still wanted it, because Butcher could never consent to live that kind of life.

  Jackson’s blue-gray eyes must have glowed as Butcher explained what had happened. Here was a second chance. He might not be as good as Butcher at arithmetic, but the examination at the Bailey House hadn’t tested for doggedness. Nobody could outdo Tom Jackson for doggedness. In Butcher’s place he never would have left West Point voluntarily once he arrived, no matter how much it distressed him. They would have had to throw him out. That’s the way he was.1

  Jackson was a constable in Lewis County, one of the youngest, at eighteen, in that part of the country. But his prospects were not promising. He was as ambitious as Butcher, perhaps more so. He wanted to make something of himself in the world, and that required a better education than he had or was likely to get there in the mountains. He didn’t necessarily want to be a soldier. Soldiers were as rare in those parts as educations. Tom had perhaps never seen a soldier in his life.

  But at the military academy educations were free, and the best you could get. Nearly twenty years before, President Andrew Jackson had called West Point “the best school in the world.”2 The academy still set the standard among institutions of higher learning in the country for engineering and science. West Point graduates were not only going on to become soldiers, but also engineers—among the finest in the world. Its graduates were designing and building the nation’s most dramatic new internal improvements—its major roads, dams, canals, harbors, and railroads. An education like that was worth having, and now he might have it after all.3

  The way seemed clear. Still, many of Jackson’s friends and neighbors were uneasy. There might be a problem in his obvious lack of academic preparation. He had virtually none. There was no doubt about his character, integrity, perseverance, or common sense. He had plenty of all that, and those who knew him were well disposed to his appointment. But he had little formal schooling. Could he stand up to the tough academic and disciplinary demands that had repelled Butcher?

  Jackson answered this question in his abrupt, forthright manner. “I am very ignorant,” he told one friend who asked it, “but I can make it up in study. I know I have the energy and I think I have the intellect.”4

  At least he was frank, as always. So with the blessings of his neighbors and friends, he packed his belongings and letters and petitions of support into two travel-stained saddlebags. Wearing his gray homespun, his wagoner’s hat, and his outsized brogans, he mounted a borrowed horse and, with a young black slave as his companion, rode to Clarksburg to catch the stage on the first leg of the journey to Washington. Since time was short, he would have to present himself in person to Hays, win his support, and if appointed go on immediately from there to West Point.

  When the two riders reached Clarksburg, they found that the Pioneer Stage Line’s eastbound coach had already departed. They galloped on, overtaking it outside of Grafton, about twenty miles to the east. Jackson climbed aboard and his companion turned back toward home, riding one horse and leading the other. The stage lurched on into Maryland, where at the Green Valley depot east of Cumberland, Jackson caught a Baltimore and Ohio passenger train.

  The cars pulled into the rail station in Washington on June 17. Just a few blocks away Jackson could see the shiny copper-sheathed dome of the capitol. He set out in that direction to find his congressman.5

  Hays knew nothing of Butcher’s defection from West Point, or that this rustic self-appointed replacement was about to stamp into his office. But the farmer-congressman from Lewis County, with his well-known flair for oratory, was a practical politician. He had been elected to his seat in the Twenty-seventh Congress only the year before, and he was heavily indebted to the political backing and good will of the Jacksons, so plentiful and powerful in his district—and many of them related in one way or another to Tom. He was certain to go along with this unexpected last-minute switch of cadets. It was the secretary of war who would have to be convinced.

  Still, Hays must have been surprised to see this particular Jackson walk into his office with the two saddlebags draped over his slim shoulders. It was not an unfamiliar sight. Cummins Jackson was Hays’s neighbor in Lewis County, and the congressman knew Tom well. But he had never expected to see him striding into his office in Washington.6

  Jackson began pulling papers and letters from the saddlebags and handing them to Hays.

  “It is with deep regret,” the letter from Butcher began, “that I have now to send you my resignation as ‘Cadet’ in the West Point Military Academy.”

  Hays must have scowled. His first appointment, and it had gone wrong.

  “My friends here think it would have been a decided advantage for me to have remained at West Point,” the letter said, “and I am of the same opinion if I could have remained there contented but this I could not do.”

  At the end of the letter Butcher endorsed Jackson as his replacement: “Mr. Jackson will deliver this letter to you, who is an applicant for the appointment.”7

  Jackson handed Hays a letter from Smith Gibson, a neighbor who had known him from childhood. “A meritorious young man …” Gibson said of Jackson, “quite a smart youth in every respect for his age and opportunity.” Evan Carmack in another letter of endorsement saluted Jackson’s “many noble facultys of soul and great moral worth.” He assured his friend Hays that taking everything into consideration, “a better selection could not be made, west of the mountains.…”8

  Two petitions pulled from the saddlebags praised the young man’s “good demeanor and upright Deportment,” his industry, perseverance, rectitude, and orphanhood. “Mr. Jacksons ancestry are mostly Dead … and he a destitute orphan,” one of the petitions said.9 Orphanhood was a trump card in a West Point application, to be played whenever possible.

  Hays was convinced. He wrote Secretary of War John C. Spencer that same day.

  After apologizing for Butcher’s errant behavior, he assured Spencer that he had a replacement ready and waiting, one whom he was “personally and intimately acquainted with … about 19 years of age—fine athletic form and of manly appearance.” Hays told Spencer how Jackson was “left an orphan at an early age—deprived of both father and mother and destit
ute of means,” and how he had relied entirely on his own exertions ever since, “sustaining as he does a good moral character—and an improvable mind.”10

  Spencer had no problem with the new replacement. He endorsed the recommendation the next day, and John Tyler, Jr., son and private secretary to the president, took the appointment papers for the “poor young man” in for his father to sign.11

  So it was done. Jackson had the appointment he had so much wanted and thought he couldn’t have, in the class that would graduate from West Point in 1846.

  Hays now suggested that he stop over in the capital a day or two to see the sights. Jackson, however, was anxious to push on. The deadline for reporting was now only two days away, and the appointment was still only conditional—all the appointments were. The academy hadn’t admitted him yet, and he was not certain it ever would. Entrance examinations had to be passed. So he hurried on to New York City.

  At the docks in New York he paid his fifty-cent fare and caught the steamboat up the Hudson, arriving at the landing below West Point on June 20. He threw the saddlebags over his shoulder one more time and started up the steep path that wound toward the flat dusty plain above.12

  The Highlands that held the forty-acre plain in its rock cradle high over the Hudson hadn’t changed in the forty years that cadets had been coming to West Point. It hadn’t changed in human memory. Its western bank still ascended sharply from the water’s edge; the same cliffs still overhung the river with a wild and awful sublimity. Everywhere the eye looked the aspect was high, rocky, savage, majestic, and somber. The sight of it had reminded one Revolutionary War officer many years before of “universal death.” As the sun declined across it, the clouds gave the Highland a misty, shrouded appearance that darkened its face “with a melancholy sadness,” and lent “a kind of funereal aspect” to every object within the horizon. The river itself, all brown and gloomy, rolled slowly past the cliffs below the plain, underscoring the sense of grandeur and tragedy.13

  But it was also stunningly beautiful. The English writer and social critic Harriet Martineau had gazed down on the plain and river from the heights in the 1830s. She looked at the “woods climbing above woods, to the clouds and stretching to the horizon,” and found the view from old Fort Putnam “really oppressive to the sense.… [an] awful radiance.”14

  About the time Jackson was arriving at the landing in 1842, another famous English writer, the celebrated novelist Charles Dickens, also visited the academy. Dickens was America’s favorite author, touring the New World to wildly cheering acclaim. When he saw West Point for the first time he himself cheered, saying the academy “could not stand on more appropriate ground, and any ground more beautiful can hardly be.”15 There was no question about it, nature had worked on a grand scale there on the Hudson River.

  But it might have been the lifeless Sahara for all George Brinton McClellan cared. That aspiring cadet, arriving earlier in the month, had never been more depressed in his young life. It was not the scenery that ruled his emotions at the moment; it was the dismal situation. He felt alone, homesick, and abandoned, “as much alone as if in a boat in the middle of the Atlantic.” Not a soul here, he sadly wrote home to Philadelphia, “cares for, or thinks of me. Not one here would lift a finger to help me; I am entirely dependent on myself—must think for myself—direct myself, & take the blame of all my mistakes, without anyone to give me a word of advice.”16

  McClellan was an unusual conditional cadet, the kind that comes along only now and again. He was legally too young for West Point, so young that his fellow cadets would probably call him “Babe,” the name they always gave the youngest man in the class. But the academic board waived the age requirement in his case. This gifted son of a prominent Philadelphia physician was precocious, bordering on genius. Despite his youth, he already had passed two years at the University of Pennsylvania, and had an impressive command of languages, the classics, and modern literature. He was even better at mathematics, and since the age of ten he had dreamed of going to West Point and becoming a soldier. He hadn’t counted on being homesick.17

  Dabney Herndon Maury, a prospective classmate, arrived at West Point from Fredericksburg, Virginia, at about the same time. Look at that, Maury thought when he met McClellan, such a little born and bred gentleman. And only fifteen years and seven months old, while he, Maury—God save the mark—was twenty.18

  Otherwise Maury was little impressed with what he saw. He believed that few men in the new class had either social or educational advantages out of the ordinary.19 William Dutton, a newcomer from Connecticut, was more impressed. He was in fact awed by the competition, counting “about a dozen or 15 of splendid talent.” There was even one graduate of Yale College. Dutton figured he would have to exert himself to the limit if he hoped to place anywhere near the head of this class.20

  Whatever one believed about their intellect, they were a motley collection, coming from every part of the country and representing, as all new classes did, “every degree of provincialism.”21 The upperclassmen saw nothing impressive in any of them. They thought them a bunch of nobodies, mere plebes, and called them “things,” “animals,” “reptiles,” and “beasts.”22 And still they kept coming, 122 of them by one count, the largest class to enter the academy in its forty-year history.23

  Maury watched as they continued to arrive. He loitered about in the south barracks with three fellow Virginians and saw them come in from the steamboat landing, up the path into the receiving area. By the twentieth of June he and his three companions, Ambrose Powell Hill, George Edward Pickett, and Birkett Davenport Fry, had seen nearly everybody. It was now the last day for reporting, and the last of them were making the long winding climb from the landing to the plain.

  The four boys stared as Tom Jackson arrived. Of all they had seen, there had not been another quite like this one.

  Maury studied him carefully. He noted the odd apparition’s sturdy step, cold blue-gray eyes, and thin, firm lips clamped resolutely shut.

  “That fellow,” he whispered to Hill, Pickett, and Fry, “looks as if he had come to stay.”

  Maury approached the cadet sergeant who had just escorted the newcomer to his quarters. “Who was that?” he asked.

  “Cadet Jackson, of Virginia,” the sergeant said.

  Well now, thought Maury, what a coincidence. Then they must show some interest in him, welcome him properly—a fellow countryman after all. Maury climbed at once to Jackson’s room and affably offered his hand.

  Jackson glared back at him in frigid welcome, a rebuff of such chilling friendlessness that Maury regretted having made the effort. When someday they would call this dour character Stonewall, Maury would understand why. As he rejoined his three companions downstairs, he spoke sharply of the new cadet’s intellectual shortcomings.24

  There they were—122 of them, friendly and not so friendly, from Virginia and every other of the twenty-six states in the Union, representing every degree of provincialism, and wearing every mode of dress from rough country homespun to tailored city coats.

  But where were they?

  Captain Erasmus Keyes, who had been in their predicament more than a decade before and would one day be teaching them artillery and cavalry tactics, could have told them where they were. They were in “the only society of human beings that I have known in which the standing of an individual is dependent wholly on his own merits as far as they can be ascertained without influence. The son of the poorest and most obscure man, being admitted as cadet, has an equal chance to gain the honors of his class with the son of the most powerful and richest man in the country. All must submit to the same discipline, wear the same clothes, eat at the same table, come and go upon the same conditions. Birth, avarice, fashion and connections are without effect to determine promotion or punishment.” In short, the military academy was a “model republic in all things saving respect to constituted authority and obedience to orders, without which an army is impossible.”25

  That
is where they were.

  George McClellan had it right, then. They were as alone as if in a boat in the middle of the Atlantic. They would have to sink or float on their own merits.

  Sighing for

  What We

  Left Behind

  Almost immediately there came the moment of truth—the examinations to see who in this big class would stay and who would leave.

  In the last days of June, at about the summer solstice, the longest day of the year and perhaps one of the longest of their lives, the new plebes were marched to their first encounter with the blackboard. It was to be their baptism, their initial trial by recitation—the first of hundreds of such trials for those who would survive. There were few of them that day who didn’t dread it.

  Among the few who didn’t was George Horatio Derby; he had it all figured out.

  As he sat waiting his turn and watching others go “with trembling hearts” to the blackboard, Derby began to see a pattern. Those who hesitated or stopped as they tried to explain their solutions to the mathematics board were suspected of ignorance. He would remember that when his turn came.1

  Derby was from Medfield, Massachusetts, the only member of the new class who owed his appointment to an ex-president. His congressman was John Quincy Adams, “Old Man Eloquent” himself, the nation’s sixth president, a friend of the family. More than a hundred other friends from home had been recruited to sign petitions on Derby’s behalf, and they had praised his talent, energy, dedication to knowledge, agreeable disposition, correct moral habits, peculiar talent for drawing, and providential lack of a father. However, they failed to warn the authorities of the young man’s quirky sense of humor and addiction to pranks. That would become apparent soon enough.2

  To reduce his chances of not being ready when the testing time came, Derby had gone to West Point early and enrolled in Z.J.D. Kinsley’s classical and mathematical prep school adjacent to the academy grounds. There he had brushed up his algebra and French and heard Lieutenant Kinsley himself assure him that he had “an excellent mathematical head.”3