The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  “Oh! I wish you could just hear Prof. Bailey,” Dutton wrote Lucy. “Ask him what question you will, he is fully prepared to answer you & you would think he had examined the very subject but a short time since.”42 They loved him for who he was and for the magical world he was showing them through his microscopes.

  They were also discovering arresting new worlds far away through the long eyes of Professor Bartlett’s telescopes. The class could now calculate eclipses and the phases of the moon and the transits of Mercury. It wasn’t easy work. Derby found it “about the hardest stuff I have studied.” And the still harder stuff, optics, magnetism, and galvanism, were still ahead.43

  Even McClellan was finding the going stiff. He studied so hard before the semiannual examination in January that he could “scarcely see.”44 It was galling to him after all that work that he still stood only second in the class. He couldn’t seem to overtake Charles Seaforth Stewart, who had come literally from the sea, having been born on a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. A crack preparatory school in New Jersey had prepared Stewart, the only son of a navy chaplain and missionary, to excel at West Point, and he was leading everybody.

  McClellan complained about this to his mother. “Toiling up hill is not what it is cracked up to be!” he wrote her. “I do not get marked as well for as good (or a better) recitation, as the man above me.… if I were already above him, I could distance him, I think.” Getting above him is what he vowed to do by next June.45

  Tom Jackson, unceasingly toiling to be what he resolved to be, was also bent on moving up. When he wrote Laura the results of the January examinations he said modestly that he had risen in each department of his studies.46

  In truth, he was on a roll. Gardner noticed it, for “in his upward flight [he] landed in the section to which I belonged and tarried a while with us.” In this brief stopover, the cometlike Jackson sat on Gardner’s left in the recitation room. Called to the blackboard one day, he rose in his abrupt manner and shambled to the front, and the class had to repress a snicker. “General Jackson”—one of his nicknames, after General Andrew Jackson—was chalked across his back in large letters. Gardner was mistakenly believed to have done it and was ordered to brush it off. It didn’t matter much to Jackson who had done it or that it had been done at all. Whatever was scrawled on his back, the section would get but a brief view of it, for he was soon on his way up to the next stop.47 He had finally gotten the hang of West Point.

  West Point, however, had entirely failed to get the hang of his classmate, George Derby, who marched to a drum nobody else seemed to hear and had a nickname that didn’t seem to make any sense either—Squibob. Derby was a brilliant student, in the first section in everything, and considered one of the best draftsmen ever to step into the academy drawing rooms.48 It was what he chose to do with his pen and pencil that was causing the uproar. His quirky behavior was making him a legend at West Point. Not only was John Quincy Adams’s cadet the best draftsman the academy had ever seen, he was the most outrageous prankster and hoaxer anybody could remember.

  Theophile D’Oremieulx knew this perhaps better than anybody. The French instructor had already started the lesson for the day when he stopped suddenly, remembering.

  “Ah! it is the first of the month, I see. Gentlemen, hand me your textbooks.”

  All of the cadets passed their textbooks willingly to the front except Derby, who was intent on slipping his into his desk drawer instead.

  “Mr. Derby,” said D’Oremieulx sternly, “hand me your textbook, sir.”

  “Could I be excused just this once, sir?” said Derby falteringly.

  “Certainly not, sir,” said the Frenchman severely. “Do you not remember that you are the principal cause of this regulation? It is your textbook I particularly want to see, Mr. Derby. Bring it to me at once, Sir.”

  It was true, of course. All this was because of Derby. There was a stern prohibition against disfiguring textbooks, punishable by demerit or worse. So Derby had transformed all the pictures of the bones and fossils from primeval ages in his geology text into strange and grotesque monsters. The evidence was seized one day and placed indignantly before the academic board, who stared at it for as long as they could stand it, before breaking into delighted whoops. It had been worth the laugh, so there was no punishment—Derby’s pranks were never dismissal offenses. But since then, on the first of each month, textbooks had to be called to the front and inspected, particularly Derby’s.

  “But I had rather not, sir,” he protested to D’Oremieulx, all the color draining from his face.

  “Perhaps so, sir,” replied D’Oremieulx, “but you must.”

  Derby slowly, grudging every step, walked to the front through the profound silence now filling the room. With elaborate reluctance he handed D’Oremieulx his textbook.

  The Frenchman flipped through it rapidly, expecting the worst—French verbs with fanciful faces, perhaps. Maybe even ze gr-r-rand Napoleon, God forbid, with a moustache or worse. But what is this? Nothing? Everything in the text in order? No desecration of any kind? Then he found the two words in the blank space above the opening chapter. They said simply, APRIL FOOL.

  D’Oremieulx then remembered what first day of which month it was.49

  Derby’s trips to the blackboard always held potential for uproar, given his drafting skill. Ordered to the front to draw the model of a pump, Derby drew it flawlessly. But he also managed to make of it an unmistakable caricature of the professor, putting an almost unbearable strain on the class decorum.50

  He is remembered also for this exchange in artillery class:

  “Yes, Mr. Derby?” Captain Keyes asked. “Do you have a question?”

  “Yes, sir,” Derby said gravely—all of his outrages were delivered poker-faced. “What would be the effect,” he asked solemnly, “of confining a single grain of gunpowder in the centre of the earth and setting fire to it?”

  Keyes, equally grave—he had learned by experience to give like-for-like with Derby—confessed that he did not know, but would requisition the ordnance sergeant for a grain of powder and authorize the experiment.51

  And for this conversation:

  Professor: “Given: that a thousand men are besieging a fortress whose equipment of men, provisions, etc., are so and so—it is a military axiom that at the end of forty-five days the fort will surrender. Now, young men, if any of you were in command of such a fortress, how would you proceed? Yes, Mr. Derby, your hand is up?”

  Derby, triumphantly: “I would march out, let the enemy in, and at the end of forty-five days I would change places with him.”52

  So it went with Derby. These were not really demerit offenses. Nobody knew how to classify them. But neither did everybody laugh.

  Ambrose Burnside, a hellion in his own right from the class just behind, was arrested, courtmartialed, and nearly thrown out of West Point for one day aiding Thomas Lowe in a physical assault on Derby.53 Cadet William L. Crittenden also took violent exception to him.

  “What do you mean, Sir?” demanded Crittenden one Sunday morning as Derby was entering the north barracks following divine services.

  “Mean by what, Sir?” Derby asked.

  “By looking at me, Sir.”

  “Do you consider yourself too good to be looked at, Sir?”

  Crittenden drew back, his hand on his sword hilt. “Yes, Sir. I do. And if you give me any more of your words G—–d d——n you, I’ll run you through.”

  “You must be a miserable coward, to threaten an unarmed man with a sword,” retorted Derby.

  Crittenden drew his weapon and thrust at Derby three times, cutting gashes in his chin, his right arm, and shoulder. Derby charged, but since Crittenden was now being restrained by other cadets, he pulled up. It would be cowardly now to retaliate. So instead, he “Wheatoned it” to the hospital and emerged three weeks later with a warlike scar along his chin and throat. Crittenden was courtmartialed and reduced in ranks, but to Derby’s utter disgust perm
itted to remain at West Point.

  Crittenden was a nephew of Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky. How else could he have gotten away with “clipping down a poor woman’s boy from Massachusetts without any provocation?” Derby demanded of his sympathetic mother.54

  Derby wrote his mother regularly. She was his main audience, his support in times of insult, injury, and depression, his cheering section, and his chief advisor on the subject of “spoons.” A spoon was a ladylove, a sweetheart, a girl.55 Like all young men much away from their company, the West Pointers thought often and favorably about spoons, and needed all the help they could get with them.

  Mrs. Derby had tried some abortive matchmaking on her son’s behalf in his first summer at West Point, sending him as a visitor the daughter of a friend, touting her to him as both pretty and genteel. She turned out to be neither. Derby was on his best behavior for the event—“have not made use of a cigar or a profane expression since I was here,” he assured his mother. But the young lady was a letdown. “I never saw such a savage, grim looking woman,” he reported later, “and she spoke to me as though she was speaking to some Irishman.”56

  Since then Derby had been in love many times, with little to show for it. “I am thinking I rather did the ridiculous while at home by Lizzy Jewall,” he confessed to his mother around Washington’s birthday in 1845. He would be more general in his attentions if he ever saw that spoon again. But, “Kate is too old, Mother,” he protested in the same letter. “If I wanted a wife as old as myself I would go and pick up Mary Olmstead again (if I could) as I believe she is one of the best girls afloat except Miss Whiting, who wouldn’t have me, or little Lizzy Allen who I believe I wouldn’t have.”57

  The year before, another prospect, if she ever was that, also went aglimmering, lost to what appeared a hasty wedlock. “You have written to me two or three times about Mary Ann Grant’s marriage, maternity etc,” Derby complained to his mother, “and yet it is a singular fact, you have never told me who on earth she took.… Isn’t 4 months and 19 days after marriage a very short time for children?”58

  But never mind, he would assure Mrs. Derby early in the coming fall, he had found the right spoon at last and was desperately in love. Her name was Elizabeth Orr of Bridgewater, the daughter of old Dr. Orr. She was seventeen and as lovely as an angel. No, he hadn’t met her yet, or even seen her. “But that’s a trifle. My roommate knows her very well and is going to introduce me next July.”59

  The juices were even rising in Tom Jackson by early 1845. His sister Laura had just written him of her marriage in September to Jonathan Arnold in Beverly, Virginia. “I think that if happiness exists in this world,” he wrote back wistfully, “matrimony is one of its principal factors.”60 Not exactly the words of a passionate romantic, but Jackson approached everything in stiff moderation, especially spoons.

  There were not only girls to think about in this season, there were horses. They had begun riding.

  “Jounce, jounce, jounce,” moaned William Dutton. “Some of the horses are the hardest I ever rode.”61 The “hardest of all possible saddles, strapped on the backs of the hardest of all possible horses, and without any stirrups,” Derby complained.62 In fact they were the post artillery horses doing double duty, and some of their riders were pitching from their backs into the thick layer of tanbark that covered the riding hall.

  Many in the class, particularly the southerners, had been raised in the saddle. Yet even one of these, Clarendon J. L. (Dominie) Wilson, of Virginia, was flung heavily from the same horse that had nearly unseated Dutton a few days before.63 The New Yorker Darius Couch, “one of the very noblest fellows” Dutton had ever met,64 was thrown from a horse named Pink, dashed violently against an iron pillar, and knocked insensible. For several days he hovered in a delirium at the hospital.65

  Tom Jackson made as lasting an impression in the riding hall as he did at the blackboard and on the drill field. Maury thought him singularly awkward and uncomfortable to look at on a horse. “We were painfully anxious as we watched him leaping the bar and cutting at heads,” Maury said. Although he had ridden much at Jackson’s mill, even racing some of Uncle Cummins’s horses, Jackson had a rough hand with the bridle and kept an ungainly seat. When he cut at a head on the ground with his sword, he tottered unsteadily, appearing about to plunge headlong. It was a mystery what kept him in the saddle—probably the same resolve that kept him in West Point.66

  The annual examinations came again in June 1845, and when they were done sixty of the original class were left. Only nineteen of them now stood ahead of Jackson in general merit. He had lapped the other forty. He now ranked twentieth overall, eleventh in natural philosophy and twenty-fifth in chemistry. If it had not been for drawing, in which he was next to last, he would have stood several files higher still.67

  The next level of promotions were announced, and many in the class became captains and lieutenants, the highest order of cadet officers. Jackson was not among them; he had reverted to a high private.68

  But more important than anybody’s rank or order of merit as the summer of their last year began was the fact that it was their last year. They were first-classmen, finally. Ahead lay 1846. Beyond a final summer encampment and a final year of engineering study, glimmered the finish line. Nothing else really mattered.69 When a cadet got to be a first-classman, when he had gone this far, it was unlikely he would be found deficient in his studies. If he behaved himself and stayed out of serious trouble, he was bound to graduate.70

  The worst was over. The hardest three years were behind them now and nothing much had changed. Every day was still depressingly like every other day. “There ‘ain’t no news’ and I can’t make any,” Derby wrote home. The food in the mess hall hadn’t improved. “India rubber boiled in Aqua forte could give no idea of the toughness of our roast beef,” he said, “and we are so accustomed to stale bread that the sight of a hot biscuit might occasion hysterics.”71

  But it would soon be 1846, the finest set of numbers they had seen in three years of nothing but numbers. They could make it now. The rest should be easy.

  Gone Are

  the Days

  of Our Youth

  William Dutton had tried to explain it to his fiancée in Connecticut. The whole idea of this place, he told her, was “to make efficient officers who are capable of performing any scientific task that may be imposed upon them.”1

  That is why they were grappling this summer—their last—with pyrotechny. It was believed that as army officers they might someday command artillery in battle, and they would need to know then how explosives work. Indeed, it might happen sooner rather than later if the continuing tension between the United States and Mexico erupted into war.

  So they were making cartridges, rockets, “& every species of infernal work” this last summer, covered from head to foot with perspiration and grime, working in pitch, paste, and brimstone “like so many Guy Fawkeses.” The work was as hard as digging a ditch and made them black as charcoal.2

  Two heart-warming departures marked the last months of 1845—one in the late summer, the other in the early fall, both morale boosters. Richard Delafield left in August. He decided that eight years of improving West Point, pinching pennies, and making things different, were enough. The corps saw him off and wished him well, but as West Point’s Irish janitor said, “When the Major went down to the wharf to leave the Pint he was followed by many a dhry eye.”3

  When at parade two months later it was announced that Commandant of Cadets J. Addison Thomas was also leaving, it was nearly more than the cadets could do to contain their gratitude. As soon as the ranks broke they took off their caps as a body and gave three tremendous cheers, then three more, and again three, retiring to their quarters brimming with good cheer. Every cadet that evening set a light in the window to “show old Tom how glad we are he is going.” The barracks “shone like a plebe’s waist plate.”4 When Thomas actually left around Christmas time, it was another case of many a
dry eye at the landing.

  It turned numbingly cold in November. The wind whistled around the old barracks buildings, and Derby reported that his ink was “congealing (almost) in my shivering pen.” With the pen he wrote his mother:

  Cold Winter’s icy days have come

  And bleak the northern snow storm pelts.

  We want good fires to keep us warm

  And we don’t want anything else.5

  Only the week before, the old pump that serviced the academy broke down and was replaced by a new one. Since then the water had carried such a strong component of tar that Derby thought it did not require much poetic license to say that “we have to chew it before it can be swallowed.”6

  But nothing was as cold, nothing so hard to swallow, as what they now were encountering daily in the recitation rooms on the Academy building’s second floor. There, in the long 75 feet by 22 feet alleyway called the engineering room,7 they had finally come face-to-face with Dennis Hart Mahan.

  This was the year they were to put it all together. Now they would combine all of the mathematics and science and drawing and French they had learned, with Professor Mahan’s doctrines of engineering, fortifications, and military tactics. Here is where they would become what it was intended they become when they entered West Point three years before. There would be other things to learn this last year—more artillery, mineralogy and geology, rhetoric, moral philosophy, and political science. They must master the evolutions of the line and the duties of commissioned officers, and learn the uses of the saber. But Mahan and the engineering, fortifications, and the science of war that he taught were what this last year was all about. Mahan was what West Point was all about. The hardest part might not be behind them after all.