The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  It was a nuisance, but it failed to dim the joy of the day. Immediately after parade there was a happy clamoring of the furlough men to the steamboat landing. Tom Jackson was about to have all he wanted to be happy now on earth—the sight of Laura and his native land.

  Death

  in the

  Family

  In the fall of 1844 the roommate now watching Tom Jackson pile his grate with anthracite coal every night was doe-eyed George Stoneman of New York.

  The two shared what may have been the most becalmed quarters in West Point history, a noiseless room on the first floor of the south barracks. Nobody ever heard from them. Their neighbor in the next room said he “scarcely knew they were there.”1

  They were much alike. Stoneman was the oldest of ten children, and nearly as taciturn as Jackson. Both were unobtrusive in the extreme, with meditative dispositions. Neither put himself forward in any way. Darius Couch, one of their classmates, thought them thinkers rather than talkers.

  Stoneman wasn’t as ascetic—“or, perhaps, puritanical”—as his roommate, and unlike Jackson he had social graces that endeared him to others. Jackson neither sought the solace of companionship nor got much of it. There was that ready, sweet smile of recognition that he occasionally flashed, which Couch thought most redeeming, so gracious “that one’s heart went out to him.” More hearts, however, went out on a regular basis to Stoneman, who was seen as a more “generous-hearted, whole-souled companion.”2

  They were all second-classmen now, an exalted status that was exposing them to new adventures in learning. Behind them, successfully skirted, was the Scylla of mathematics; ahead lay the Charybdis of science, a treacherous academic whirlpool of natural philosophy (theoretical and experimental physics) and chemistry. They would continue with the second year of artillery and drawing as well, and they would learn the evolutions of the battalion and the duties of sergeants. But the sciences would now occupy seven of every ten of their academic hours, as mathematics had in their first two years. Now they were going to begin to learn to apply all the sines, cosines, conic sections, and calculus they had been learning.

  Waiting in the new natural philosophy building next to the cadet chapel were four particularly unholy subjects: mechanics, optics, astronomy, and electricity. And perched among the telescopes waiting to teach them this dreaded quartet was William H. C. Bartlett, who probably knew more about those subjects than anybody in the world.

  Bartlett was acknowledged as perhaps the most brilliant cadet to graduate from West Point in its forty-year history. He entered the academy in 1822 from Missouri with a backwoods background not unlike Tom Jackson’s. Four years later, in 1826, he graduated first in his class.

  By 1844 he was one of the world’s great scientists. What the class of 1846 saw there among the telescopes in the natural philosophy building was an elflike creature with a mane of unmanageable hair, equally out-of-control beard, sharp nose, and constantly darting eyes. The great man also had a bizarre and unsettling nervous habit of violently jerking his head from side to side as if snapping at his collar.3 It was said that his digestion was so temperamental that only the tenderest of birds would pass muster with his stomach.4 Not for him was the bill of fare at the mess hall.

  Some cadets found Bartlett a stimulating and unorthodox teacher as well as a great scientist, with a gift for making murky subjects understandable and interesting.5 Some thought him luminous, exact, suggestive, and inspiring. He was apt to become impatient with slow or fat-witted minds, but he was fundamentally just, fair, and kind to all.6

  Others, however, found him only a tolerable teacher, “more inclined to the dry mathematics of his subject than to the experimental.” One critic complained that he galloped through experiments with nervous impatience, often furnishing more amusement along the way than solid instruction: “If a cadet could only get his mathematical formulas correct, it mattered little whether he could tell … a telescope from a grindstone.”7

  The most dreaded of Bartlett’s dispensations was a bugbear called “optics,” particularly an inscrutable section of it called “optical images.” The subject was all about light, but each year it left whole sections of cadets entirely in the dark. The course and the text Bartlett had written to go with it had been terrorizing second-classmen since he introduced them into the curriculum in 1839.

  Dabney Maury, who in 1844 was feeling himself slipping from the middle of things toward the immortals, seized on this menacing and unlikely course as his potential ticket to salvation. If he could just master optics, the toughest course of all, his situation might yet be redeemed. He had always considered himself pretty good at a spurt. So he began boning optics, trying, like Jackson before the grate, to burn it into his brain.

  When it mattered, Maury was ready. The day Professor Bartlett visited his section, Maury’s instructor, Lieutenant George Deshon of the ordnance corps, said, “Mr. Maury will go to the board, and demonstrate the ‘optical images.’ ”

  Maury rose with a knowing smile, took up the chalk and sponge, and executed the problem as if he had been born understanding it. He “maxed” it with a perfect recitation, soared seventeen files in his standing, and saved himself from the immortals. Professor Bartlett was impressed, Lieutenant Deshon was gratified, and Maury’s sectionmates were ecstatic.

  “Peri,” they cried after class, shouting his nickname and swarming joyously about him, “you are safe.”8

  It had been a curious winter, starting out cold in October, “a little of the coldest weather that ever I smelt at this season of the year,” Derby thought. But by Christmas Eve they had not yet seen a snowflake,9 and the superintendent in a warm gesture ordered up “as good a dinner as the nature of the case will permit” for Christmas Day.10

  They had already had a gift of sorts. Captain J. Addison Thomas, the commandant of cadets, had gotten married. This was good news, because “Ethical Tom” had been getting on everybody’s nerves. A wife might help. He could get on hers instead.

  “Old Tom is getting worse & worse every day,” John Adams of Tennessee had complained in September. “We have been expecting [him] to get married for some time, but so far we have been disappointed. I hope he will marry a woman who will whip him every day.”11

  What he finally did marry, a few weeks before Christmas, was what Derby described as “seventy thousand dollars, thirty-five years old, in New York.…” When the newlyweds returned to West Point from New York City, Derby was pleased to see that she had brought with her at the end of a leash, besides Thomas, “a little excessively ugly dog with a brass collar around his neck and a most abrupt termination to his tail.”12 Neither the bride nor her money nor her bobtail dog, however, had made Thomas any more ingratiating. He was as big a rascal as ever, Adams believed, but at least he no longer prowled about the barracks as he used to do.13

  Derby also saw a change for the better in Thomas. “The Captain whose mind vacillates in different directions, with every ‘creed of doctrine’ has again turned the current of his affections towards me,” Derby wrote home; “how long it will last however no one knows.”14

  Thomas was not life-threatening, no matter what the cadets might have thought. Not much was at West Point. It only seemed that way. Taking everything into account, the academy, while stressful in the extreme, was a safe place to be. A. P. Hill believed it might be “the healthiest institution in the world; there is generally about one death in two or three years, and even then proceeding from the bursting of a cannon, false stroke of a sword or some other casualty.” A great many die away at the examinations, Hill admitted, but “revive again in some distant corner of the union where they live ex-cadets, something like ex-presidents.”15

  Therefore, Samuel Raymond wasn’t worried, even though he wasn’t feeling well. It was nothing serious, he assured his sister Mary back in West Hartford. He wasn’t so sick he couldn’t attend to his studies, but he felt ill enough to see the doctor. Don’t give yourself any alarm, he reassured her, “for
if I am more unwell I shall let you know it soon.”16

  Raymond was quiet, studious, melancholy, and well liked. Even the reclusive Tom Jackson liked him and considered him “a friend and fellow classmate in whom were combined both shining talents and the characteristics of a gentleman.”17 He was the oldest cadet in the class and that meant they could call him “Dad.”18

  By mid January, Dad had checked into the hospital with a bad cold and a severe cough. It had become so severe that he had to “Wheaton it”—get excused from duty by the post physician, Dr. W. V. Wheaton.19 Wheaton diagnosed Raymond’s trouble as inflammation of the lungs. George McClellan, who took a sympathetic interest in the case, called it “galloping consumption.”20

  Raymond was no stranger to the malady. He had been prone to it through the years, and it appeared to be within the control of medical skill. But then it took a turn for the worse. By January 20, Dr. Wheaton reported him “more alarmingly ill” and moved him into his own quarters where he and his family could give him around-the-clock attention.21

  His worried classmates were standing vigil at his bedside, too, letting their classwork slide, doing all they could to comfort him. It may have been at about this time and on this occasion that some of them saw something they might not have noticed before about Tom Jackson. There was a tenderness beneath that abrupt, unsociable, unbending exterior that seemed to surface in situations such as this. Illness, bereavement, and misfortune to fellow cadets seemed to awaken the sympathetic Samaritan in him.22

  William Gardner had noticed it. While confined to his quarters under arrest at another time, Gardner was surprised to see Jackson, who had never visited him before, appear suddenly at the door of his room. Jackson was not Gardner’s intimate friend, but he wished to express his sympathy. It was the only visit Gardner ever had from him.23 It was likely now that he was one of the classmates standing often at Raymond’s bedside during these anxious days in late January.

  By 7:40 in the evening of the twentieth, Raymond seemed to be resting more comfortably. Superintendent Delafield was still concerned, however—so concerned that he was writing at that moment to Raymond’s brother, Josiah, in New York City, apprising him of his brother’s condition.24

  By the evening of the twenty-third, Raymond was suffering intensely, with his band of brothers rallying around him as best they could. His flesh and blood brothers were sent for and arrived later that night. At 2:10 P.M. the next day, he died.25

  Only hours earlier West Point had been rocked by even more devastating news. Louisa Weir, Professor Weir’s thirty-seven-year-old wife, was also dead. She had given birth ten days earlier to a baby girl and it had killed her.26

  Classes were suspended on the twenty-fifth to permit the corps of cadets and the faculty to attend Mrs. Weir’s funeral services in the cadet chapel at 11:00 A.M. Post Orders edged in black announced that Raymond would be buried in the cadet cemetery that coming Sunday morning.27

  For George Derby it was a time of utter gloom and sorrow. Raymond had been in his section in mathematics and ethics and Derby thought him “a very fine, good hearted fellow, of superior talents, studious, and of much promise.…” McClellan, another of Raymond’s section mates, called the two deaths “a melancholy thing,” and Tom Jackson considered that in Raymond he had lost a friend.28

  The Sunday of the funeral was bleak and cold, “cold as Greenland,” Derby thought. The corps of cadets, grouped by class, marched through the bitter morning to the cadet chapel at half past ten. A boxy, white-steepled building seventy feet deep and not yet ten years old, the chapel stood beside the Academy building, dwarfed by it only in size. Its location was a quiet reminder that faith was coequal with academics and that this was a place not only for engineers and soldiers, but Christians. From any of its five hundred seats, cadets could look above the chancel and see yet another reminder of Robert Weir’s preeminence as a painter: a work of his depicting war in the shape of a Roman soldier and peace as a female figure draped in creamy, flowing white. When the corps of cadets sat in chapel, as they must every Sunday, she was in all likelihood the only woman they had seen all week.

  Drawn up somberly inside on this Sunday morning was the cadet escort under arms and at parade rest. The band waited in the aisle opposite. After the cadets filed in and were seated, the front door was opened and Raymond’s coffin was carried in by his classmates. The band struck up “that wild and expressive melody,” the “Dead March in Saul,” and the chapel was plunged into “an inexpressibly sad and mournful” anguish.

  The post chaplain and professor of ethics, the Reverend Martin P. Parks, met Raymond’s casket at the door in his robes of office, and preceded it down the aisle past the mourners, intoning, “I am the resurrection and the life.…” The casket was placed at the front of the chapel under Professor Weir’s painting and draped in the national colors as Reverend Park recounted Raymond’s last agonizing hours of repentance, baptism, and hope of salvation.

  After the service the cortege marched the mournful mile through the cold to the cadet cemetery. The coffin rocked gently on its caisson as the band played the dead march. The mourners followed in slow, swaying cadence to the bleak music and the beating drums. At the cemetery the coffin was lowered into its open grave, three sad volleys were fired into the cheerless January day, and Raymond was “left … to his long, last slumber.”29

  “We mourn him as a brother,” a committee of classmates wrote Raymond’s parents four days later, “a brother bound to us by strong ties, the severing of which makes our hearts bleed.” His “many acts of kindness dictated by the warm impulses of a heart alive to every generous emotion,” they wrote, “have endeared him to us, and will be ever referred to with deep feeling and registered in our hearts,” though “we no longer grasp his hand and welcome him to our daily board.”30

  To these cadets death was still a novel and terrible thing. There was coming a day when it would be no less terrible, but no longer novel. More of them were yet to go prematurely and violently to open graves in the years of war and upheaval ahead, when they would be soldiers and death would be commonplace—even desirable, if the dead was the enemy.

  Washington’s birthday came a month after the funerals, bringing fair and welcomed weather. It hadn’t looked for a while as if the weather would ever change. It had gone from bad to worse; the Greenland cold had turned even colder. February blew in so cold that the cadets on watch had to abandon their posts or freeze to death. The river had iced over rock hard.31 On February 13 the cadets awoke to a temperature of ten degrees below zero; the thermometer had plunged thirty-eight degrees overnight.32

  But on the morning of Washington’s birthday the warm strains of martial music drifted in from the plain. The dreary cold had broken and given way to a fine springlike day. After promenades in the afternoon there was a dress parade in the evening. That night twenty-six guns bellowed salute to the Founding Father, reverberating through the Highlands. The band played and rockets streamed across the night sky. Heaps of brushwood and tar barrels piled against the ramparts of Old Put were put to the torch. It was “the grandest appearance of the kind” that William Dutton had ever seen.33 They had needed that to help lift the darkness of death that had lain like a blanket on their spirits.

  Life and study had to go on. There were daily demonstrations now in optics and magnetism, and the marvels of the magic lantern, camera obscura, and the solar microscope, which most of them were experiencing for the first time. They were seeing phenomena they had never seen before or dreamed existed—fleas under microscope “magnified to the size of a horse, and lice and other interesting creations on the same preposterous scale.”34

  They were also being exposed to the man who was opening many of the wonders of this new world to their vision, Jacob W. Bailey, the professor of chemistry, mineralogy, and geology. This kindly, warmhearted magician was showing them a miniature world that lived beyond their ordinary sight, and they were peering into it with awe and pleasure.


  Little things mattered a great deal to Professor Bailey. A graduate of the West Point class of 1832, he was on his way to becoming what a fellow scientist would one day describe as “the father, in this country, of those branches of Natural History which relate to the world of atoms.”35 He was pioneering the development of the microscope in the field of botany, and winning international acclaim for his original studies of freshwater algae. Scientists the world over were going out of their way to consult him on the most difficult points of analysis and general physics.36

  The professor was particularly well thought of by the cadets because he hated so to flunk them, not believing any boy otherwise qualified should be denied a commission simply because he could not comprehend the finer points of chemistry, mineralogy, or geology.37 William Dutton thought him “a perfect love of a man.”38 He was of fragile frame and nervous organization—“as sensitive as an Aeolian harp, which pulsated with every harmony of nature and was jarred by all its discords.” He had a passion for poetry, particularly for the old English bards, and indulged a delicate fancy of writing rhyming letters to friends.39 Like the kindly Duke Senior in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, he found “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.”40

  Despite being the son of a minister—or perhaps because of it—he rejected organized religion and refused to attend Sunday chapel in stubborn defiance of Superintendent Delafield’s standing edict. One can imagine the two discussing it, angrily staring at one another over the rims of their Ben Franklin eyeglasses. For Bailey, nature and not the chapel was “the mighty cathedral for his worship.…”41