by John Waugh
Early one evening that summer, Maury, Fry, and Hill—three Virginians—were stretched out on their lanolin-saturated camp bedding. Maury was reading a yellow-back novel.
As he casually glanced out the tent door, he saw Tom Jackson working about, a member of the day’s police detail. The police detail was a miserable job that fell to plebes. It wasn’t difficult work, but it was petty and disagreeable and took out of a cadet whatever conceit might still be left.
Ah, thought Maury, this would be an excellent time to make another attempt at being sociable with Cadet Jackson. He is a Virginian after all.
As Jackson passed by, bagging rubbish, Maury lifted the tent flap and, with a mock air of authority, commanded him to pay more attention to his work, pick up those cigar butts, and otherwise put a sharper show on things.
Too late Maury realized he had done the wrong thing again. Jackson stared back balefully, thin-lipped and without humor. Maury let the tent flap drop and became suddenly intensely interested again in his yellow-back novel.
When police was over, Maury miserably confessed to his tent mates that he had made Jackson angry and must at once humble himself and explain that he had not really been in command of that detail.
He found Jackson at the guard tent and called him out.
“Mr. Jackson,” he confessed, “I find that I made a mistake just now in speaking to you in a playful manner—not justified by our slight acquaintance. I regret that I did so.”
Jackson gazed at him for a moment with his intent, humorless eyes.
“That is perfectly satisfactory, sir,” he said finally in his rapid, jerky, stiff manner.
Maury returned to his tent and said to Fry and Hill, “Cadet Jackson, from Virginia, is a jackass.”
His two tent mates emphatically agreed. None of them would try again soon to befriend such a humorless specimen.43
Jackson was stretched that summer as tight as the drums that beat the changes of the day. Unlike McClellan, who was confident now of staying at West Point the full four years and of doing well, Jackson was not confident of staying under any conditions. Not until after the first academic examinations in January, the next major weeding-out time, would he know if he was to stay or go. That cursed coming examination, widely and with good reason denounced as the “dreaded thing,” the “agony,” and the “inquisition,” was in the back of everybody’s mind.44
Jackson was depressed, as Gibson Butcher had been, by stories of the amount of study necessary to survive, and of the large number of cadets who would surely fail. He couldn’t bear to think of the mortification of being sent home, which seemed a clear probability. He had rehearsed what he would say to his friends if that happened.
If they had been there, and found it as hard as he did, they would have failed too. He would tell them that.45
To escape from these mental agonies, Jackson began visiting Fort Putnam on Saturday afternoons. It was possible with the superintendent’s permission to go out on the public lands adjacent to the academy grounds on Saturdays, and the hike up Mount Independence to the old fort was one of the first outings the plebes took. Jackson loved the ramshackle relic of a fort, as many before him had. To four decades of cadets it was “Old Put.”
Of course, everything and everybody was “old” to these cadets, even the things they didn’t love. Jackson himself was now called by his classmates “Old Jack.”
Old Put was a haven to Old Jack. It was a wreck of a place, named for the high-ranking general officer of the revolutionary army who had played a key role in fortifying West Point against the British in the War for Independence. Now it was battered by passing time and the merciless elements. Its west side was built on a steep precipice and its stone walls all around jutted ten to thirty feet high. It was begun in 1778, partly rebuilt in 1794, and never completed. Since then it had progressively gone to ruin. But Jackson could still make out the ghosts of casemates that had held guns, supported chimneys, or served as storerooms.
The site soothed Jackson. He found peace of mind there that he couldn’t find in the encampment below. The view, as Harriet Martineau had found a decade before, was breathtaking. Jackson could see below him the white tents that brightly dotted the plain, in sharp contrast to the gloomy savins standing like sentinels behind. He could see the flags snapping distantly in the breeze. Beyond and below curled the tranquil Hudson, flowing on past the Highlands to New York and the sea.
On the opposite bank of the river he could see the village of Cold Spring, and below it the busy West Point foundry pouring out clouds of smoke and supplying the entire northeast with “everything iron.” He could see the graceful sloops that teemed on the Hudson’s glassy surface. And looming over Fort Putnam, looming over everything, was that frowning cone, Crow’s Nest, the highest point on the Highlands, casting its dark shadow on the opposite bank.46
It was perhaps from the heights of Old Put that Jackson first began putting down the list of maxims—rules he proposed to live by—which he entered that year into a personal notebook.
One of those maxims had special meaning for him now. It comforted him and buoyed his spirits. Perhaps it was in his thoughts, casting a beam of hope over an otherwise dreary prospect, as he returned late on a Saturday afternoon from the sanctity of Old Put. Perhaps he repeated it on his way down.
“You may be whatever you resolve to be,” it said.47
As
Intelligible
as Sanskrit
On Sunday, the tenth of September, it looked like rain, and George McClellan was feeling the cold.
The plebes were still wearing their lightweight summer trousers and there were no fires in their grates and no prospect of changing into winter uniforms until October. McClellan’s room was in the south barracks on the second balcony, exposed to the north wind that whistled down the river. It was cold even though there was plenty of body heat in his quarters that day. Sunday morning inspection had just ended and his room was crowded with “visitors of all classes from the Lt. to the plebes.”1
The fact that reveille came every morning at 5:00, in a fanfare of throbbing drums when it was still dark, added to the lack of warmth the cadets were feeling. And the thought of the noon meal in the mess hall generated the wrong kind of heat. McClellan wrote his sister that he was planning to skip dinner altogether that day, as it was certain to be “ ‘bull-beef’ & potatoes” again.2
Summer encampment had been over for nearly two weeks. At 11:30 in the morning on the last day of August, the corps of cadets broke camp. The plain was swarming with spectators and the drums were pounding. At the third beat the tents all collapsed in one grand concord, a last tribute to precision and a final farewell to summer.3
They had thought it would never end. Many of the new plebes felt as Sam Grant of Ohio, now a first-classman, had after his first summer encampment—sick of it, “as though I had been at West Point always.”4 They usually felt that way about their first one.5
Captain J. Addison Thomas, the commandant of cadets, took the plebes aside on the plain at the end of the encampment for a few words. Thomas, called “Ethical Tom” by the cadets, was a towering Tennessean whose credo was “Keep up the strut.” He had been drilling that doctrine into them all summer long without letup.6 His intention on this morning was to remind them of their obligations as officers and gentlemen now that they were leaving the drill field for the recitation rooms.
“You are not common soldiers!” he shouted at them. “You are Gentlemen—Gentlemen of manners, of politeness & of education. The U.S. looks to you! The Country looks to you! The Army looks to you and—and—ahemm! ahemmm!” It was a short list and it was already exhausted. So Thomas fell back on what he knew best—keeping up the strut.
“By company right wheel!” he barked. “Head of column to the left—guide right! Quick March!!!”7
So off they went. “The tug of war,” as Derby put it, was about to begin.8
All the cadets who had been appointed to the new class had arr
ived, if they were coming at all. Even the “seps,” the September arrivals,9 were there by now. The class was scattered in rooms throughout the two barracks buildings and “living more like students than soldiers.”10
However, the living was unlike anything most of them had ever known. Their quarters, even their belongings, were regimented. An order posted in each room read like a close-order drill on the plain. Everything must be in its place or risk the ever-present demerit: bedsteads against wall farthest from door; tables against same wall; trunks under bedsteads; lamps clean and on mantel; dress caps neatly arranged on shelf nearest door; shoes blacked and neatly arranged behind door; washstand clean and in corner nearest to door; looking glass between washstand and door; books neatly arranged on shelf farthest from door; broom stowed behind door; drawings and books under shelf farthest from door; muskets in gun rack with locks sprung; bayonets in scabbards; accouterments, sabers, cutlasses, and swords hanging over muskets; candle and box for scrubbing utensils against wall under shelf nearest door and fireplace; clothes hanging neatly on pegs over bedsteads (for the first time since they arrived they now had beds); mattress and blankets neatly folded; orderly board in position over mantel; chairs, when not in use, under tables; and all cadets—when not in use—presumably in bed with lights out.11
Since no curtains covered the shelves, their contents were equally exposed to dust and the critical eye of the inspecting officer—one more source of potential demerit, as if another were needed. The fish-oil lamps gave off a dim, yellow glow and a penetratingly offensive odor. The cadets sympathized with Jonah. This must have been the way it was in the belly of the whale.12
On the first day of class after encampment, they were marched to the long stone academic building that bulked on West Point’s south end. This fine structure, the biggest on the plain, was 275 feet long, 75 feet wide, three stories high with a basement, and less than four years old. Its predecessor had burned to the ground in 1838. It was called the Academy, and it was the heart of West Point, its crucible of learning, its recitation emporium, a building they would come to know all too well.13
Dabney Maury found himself seated next to that precocious Philadelphia teenager, George McClellan. It was purely by the logic of the alphabet, and it would be for all too brief a time to suit Maury.
“Next week he went up till he became head,” Maury complained, “while I remained tutisimus in medio.” He was very sorry to lose “Mac” from his side, “especially during recitations, for he used to tell me things, and was a great help.”14
There would be only two subjects for the plebes to master this first year, mathematics and French. In each of these two subjects they were soon dividing into sections according to proficiency. They could all see that the first section would have “a glamor of sanctity shimmering about it,” which would likely turn its members into a sort of intellectual aristocracy. There would be a shabbier section at the other end of the spectrum to balance it out—a depository for the so-called “Immortals,” a dustbin for those hanging on the ragged edge of deficiency.15
After the first week, when Maury lost McClellan to the aristocracy, Tom Jackson left the alphabetical order to join the immortals at the other end. Maury and a host of others staked out the middle, where he already was situated alphabetically, “that easiest and safest of positions.”16
Running with the shimmering aristocracy required keeping consistently to the high road in the academy’s grading system—at a steady 2.6 to 3.0. That was the grade range for a “thorough” or “best” classroom recitation. A “perfect rag,” as George Derby called it, was a 3.0, and he was soon getting enough perfect rags in the course he had a head for—mathematics—to make McClellan and him permanent section mates. From a perfect 3.0, the grading system fell away progressively downward. A 2.1 to 2.5 was a “good” recitation; a 2.0 was a “fair” one; a 1.1 to 1.9 was “tolerable”; a 0.1 to 1.0 was “bad” or “very incomplete”; a 0 was a “complete failure”—sub-immortal—the road to oblivion.17
Much of the mathematics promised to be about as intelligible as Sanskrit. When McClellan was feeling the cold in his room on that Sunday morning in early September, the plebes had been grappling with mathematics for over a week. It would be algebra, geometry, and trigonometry this first year, progressing to ever more hideous forms in the second.18 Even a mind as mathematically fine-tuned as Derby’s was finding a lot of Sanskrit there. The lesson today, he wrote home on October 3, dealt in equations of the second degree. He studied them all one day, found he couldn’t do them, and gave up the idea altogether.19
There was no way around mathematics. It had to be taken head-on. It was the academic flywheel of West Point. It drove all the main pulleys. To not succeed in it was not to succeed at the academy. Seven of every ten hours of their curriculum time was now devoted to it. Seven of ten hours would be devoted to it or its offshoots, the sciences and engineering, for the entire four years. French was bunched into the mere three hours left over, and that would be so for every other nonmathematics, nonscience, nonengineering course still to come. Worse, mathematics would be the direct or the indirect cause of nearly nine of every ten dismissals; it was West Point’s grim reaper.20
Some found it ironic, therefore, that Albert E. Church, the kindly professor of mathematics and an otherwise humane man, should be the cause of all this heartache. A short, stocky, brown-eyed, balding, broad-faced genius, Church walked about West Point with his head bowed, his eyes fixed on the ground, and his hands clasped behind him under the tails of his dress coat. It was as if he was constantly mulling some dim, elusive mathematical theorem.21 What hair was left ringed the sides and back of his head in wild rebellion against the laws of mathematical order.
But in the classroom the plebes found him as precise as his mathematics. He was punctual to the minute, always in his seat to hear them recite. To those who had mastered the day’s lesson, he was as friendly as a lap dog—all smiles—perhaps sharing with them his merry laugh. To the unprepared or the imprecise, however, woe betide. If the failure to master the material was owing to the complexity of the subject, not an unusual circumstance, Church spared no pains to clear things up, explaining without stint until he was convinced that the cadet either comprehended or was hopelessly obtuse, in which case he flunked him.
He regretted having to do that, but mathematics was a serious business. It had been a serious business with Church for all the years he had been teaching it at West Point—virtually since the day he graduated at the top of his class from the academy in 1828. By the fall of 1842, he was a giant in his discipline, one of the foremost mathematical minds in the world, the author of a seminal textbook on calculus, a full professor, and head of the department.22
To him, calculus was the “very poetry of mathematics,” the only respectable way to solve a problem.23 Nobody questioned his standing as a great man of numbers. As a teacher, however, some found him less than poetic. Dry as dust, grumped one cadet, “an old mathematical cinder, bereft of all natural feeling.”24 Others found him “ever-kind and considerate.”25 Captain Erasmus Keyes, the artillery instructor who thought West Point the perfect republic, believed him God-sent. “When the Omnipotent created ‘all things for men’s delightful use,’ ” Keyes said, “he made Albert E. Church to teach cadets algebra, geometry, trigonometry, conic sections, and calculus, and to find out all that candidates for admission know of vulgar and decimal fractions.”26
When they didn’t know these things, when they couldn’t grasp conic sections or calculus, he had to flunk them, often at a fearful rate. There were members of this new class of plebes who would soon feel his relentless scythe. It saddened him. He was sorry so many cadets failed his beloved mathematics and had to be sent away. He wished it could be different. But that’s the way it was.27
French was as unavoidable in its fashion as mathematics—not as important, but just as unavoidable. When Sylvanus Thayer, the superintendent of the academy from 1818 to 1833, set this math- and scienc
e-based curriculum in place at West Point, he found French an inescapable component. It was the language of the books he had bought for the academy library when he was in France. Indeed, it was the language of war, “the sole repository of Military science.” Officers didn’t necessarily need to know how to speak it, but they must know how to read it. Since Thayer believed it to have been inadequately taught at the academy before he arrived, one of the first things he did was add two new French instructors to the one already on the faculty.28
Some of the new plebes—Tom Jackson among them—were finding the French as much Sanskrit as the mathematics. But Claudius Berard, the head of the department, and his two Gallic associates were doing their best.
Berard was bland, detached, moderate, unobtrusive, and scholarly. Not even the French Revolution had stirred in him any passion for military glory. When he was drafted into Napoleon’s army, his father hired a substitute. When the substitute was killed, making him eligible again for service, Berard simply migrated to America. With his excellent classical education, he got a job teaching Latin and Greek at Dickinson College, until he was appointed first teacher of French at West Point in 1815. He had been there ever since, teaching French with “invincible patience.” No degree of dullness in a cadet seemed to disturb or discourage him. He was “always the kind and courteous Frenchman.”29
Theophile D’Oremieulx, one of Berard’s two associates, was his temperamental opposite. D’Oremieulx had enough passion for both of them, and most of it was for Bonaparte, whom he called “ze gr-r-rand Napoleon.” The class soon learned that the way into D’Oremieulx’s affections and to a high mark in his classes was to get in a favorable daily lick about Napoleon, in either French or English. Little of the stately decorum that obtained in Church’s recitation rooms held in D’Oremieulx’s. This was partly because, while fluent in his native tongue, the Frenchman made sad havoc of English. Scarcely a day passed in his classroom without an absurd semantic incident of some kind.30