The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  On September 24 a small detachment rode out with Spokane and Coeur d’Alene guides to the Steptoe battlefield, arriving about noon. They found it “as silent and deserted as a city of the dead.” The bleached bones of the soldiers who could not be recovered and buried before the night retreat still lay scattered on the field. Two of Steptoe’s surviving officers rode slowly through the grass describing the battle, all the sound and fury of that terrible day sweeping back through their memories.

  The graves of Taylor and Gaston were found, the scattered bones of the dead were gathered up, and the two howitzers were unearthed. The soldiers fashioned a rude cross from a pair of shafts from one of the guns and planted it in the middle of the battlefield.8

  Colonel Wright clapped the Palouse chief and two of his braves in irons and told the others to bring in the rest of the tribe—men, women, and children. If they didn’t come he would hang the three he had.

  They came. And on September 30 at 10:00 in the morning, Wright emerged from his tent and spoke to them plainly.

  “Tell them they are a set of rascals,” he told his interpreter, “and deserve to be hung; that if I should hang them all, I should not do wrong. Tell them I have made a written treaty with the Coeur d’Alenes and the Spokanes, but I will not make a written treaty with them; and if I catch one of them on the other side of Snake River, I will hang him. Tell them they shall not go into the Coeur d’Alene country, nor into the Spokane country, nor shall they allow the Walla Walla Indians to come into their country. If they behave themselves and do all that I direct them, I will make a written treaty with them next spring. If I do, there will be no more war between us. If they do not submit to these terms, I will make war on them; and if I come here again to war, I will hang them all, men, women, and children.”9

  In the report Wright sent to the adjutant of the Department of the Pacific later that day, he said, “I have treated these Indians severely, but they justly deserved it all. They will remember it.”10

  The avenging command returned to Fort Walla Walla on October 5. On October 7, all of the thirty-nine officers and eight hundred men on the post followed the caissons bearing the remains of Taylor and Gaston to the burial ground half a mile away. The horses of the dead, draped in black, their saddles empty but for swords and boots, followed the coffins. Three volleys were fired over the officers’ remains and they were lowered into their graves.11

  Nor does the story end there.

  It ends where it all began for Oliver H. P. Taylor—at West Point.

  A year later his body was disinterred once again, with Gaston’s, and their remains were returned to the banks of the Hudson. It was autumn, the leaves of the chestnut trees were falling, and the haze of October was full on the Highlands. The caisson carrying the two coffins, covered with the stars of the flag, rolled slowly toward the cemetery, “that peaceful, silent spot, so pathetic with the names of the dead.”12 The drums beat a muffled cadence, the music wailed, and the corps with reversed arms marched slowly in columns of platoons to the graveside.

  “Ready! Aim!” The command pierced the silent air. A nervous plebe, anticipating “Fire!” shot off his piece before the word could be uttered, and a general ragged discharge of shots followed.

  “Report that man in B Company for gross carelessness!” the commandant of cadets barked.

  Taylor would have smiled. It was business as usual at West Point. The next two rounds were perfect. Crow’s Nest echoed each volley, smoke from the rifle barrels rose and dissipated without further censure, and the corps marched away in quick step to cheering music.13

  Taylor once said of Dominie Wilson, that he had never known anyone so apparently unconscious of danger under all circumstances.14 The same could have been said of Dominie’s classmate and friend now left lying in that new-dug grave by the Hudson.

  He had died living his own words.

  The

  Courtship

  of Miss Nelly

  Mary Ellen Marcy was a stunner. She had blue eyes and blonde hair and a gentle sweet smile. She was sprightly, intelligent, and tender. But she had strength of character, and when she said no, hearts were broken.

  The boys called her Miss Nelly, and they loved her, or wished they could. More than one officer in the U.S. Army who was not in exile on the frontier in the 1850s was losing his heart to her on the eastern seaboard.1

  She was just turning eleven the summer the class of 1846 graduated from West Point. And her father, an army officer, already saw in her the potential for widespread devastation. “You can make almost any one love you if you choose,” he wrote her on May 20, 1846, three days after her birthday. “With your high and honorable sense of morality and right combined with your powers of pleasing … you will always have a host of friends.”2 It was an understatement.

  Nelly was Captain and Mrs. Randolph B. Marcy’s first-born and her father’s pride, his “precious child.” He doted on her, and as she was growing up he wrote her long letters of fatherly advice from frontier posts around the West. Marcy had ambitious plans for his daughter. When the time came he wished her to marry well—happily, of course, if that could be arranged, but more to the point, as high up as possible on the social scale. He wanted for her a high station worthy of her charms.3

  Marcy was himself a considerable presence in the U.S. Army, a nationally acclaimed soldier-explorer who occupied a place in the public eye only a notch below the romantic Colonel John C. Frémont, the famed Pathfinder. Like Frémont, Marcy led pathfinding expeditions on the unexplored frontier. But no matter where he was or what he was doing, he regularly wrote his young daughter, striving without stint to shape and mold and prepare her from half a continent away.

  There was only one trait of character which he found lacking in his daughter, and that was sufficient ambition. Ambition, he wrote her, is all right, “perfectly in accordance with Christianity and we find it among the best people.” He wanted his beautiful little daughter, who tended to devoutness, to understand that ambition was not only all right, but a duty. We have a duty to ourselves and our friends, he told her, to maintain a position in society as exalted as possible.4

  It was also a duty, to Marcy’s way of thinking, for a daughter to consult her parents in the important business of picking a husband. Indeed, he would go farther than that. He intended, if it ever became necessary, to exercise a veto.

  By the time Ellen was fourteen going on fifteen and nearing the danger point, Marcy was shoveling advice of every sort her way, expecting it to be followed. Few details were overlooked, down to not neglecting exercise in the open air, learning to walk like a lady, and improving her penmanship.5

  Thus relentlessly counseled through the years, Miss Nelly came of age—and eligible—in the mid 1850s. She had matured by then into a most desirable and delectable prize, to be seized by the suitor who could not only win her heart, but her old man’s approval. The first requirement might be easier met than the second.

  George McClellan was twenty-seven when this young thing first came into his line of vision. He was a first lieutenant of engineers and one of the brightest young subalterns in the army. When he saw her, rockets went off. He wrote her mother immediately, vowing that he intended “to win her if I can.”6

  Ambrose Powell Hill, McClellan’s dear friend and one-time West Point roommate, was twenty-nine and a first lieutenant in the artillery when he saw her for the first time. He experienced generally the same emotion, ending in the same vow, although he had the good sense not to put his intentions in writing to the girl’s mother.

  Ellen’s courtships tended naturally to rouse very strong reactions in Randolph Marcy. In the welter of advice he had given her over the years were repeated specific warnings against marrying an army officer of any kind, but especially an officer of the line, such as himself, who would wed her and be gone to the frontier for months—perhaps years—on end. Or worse, who would marry her and take her with him. In Marcy’s view there were few army officers who could give his
Ellen the high social position and comfortable life he so desperately coveted for her. None of them could give it to her on the frontier.

  It happened that George McClellan was one of those few exceptions on Marcy’s very short list. McClellan had served under Marcy in an expedition on the Red River in the early 1850s and the older officer had been impressed, not only with his abilities and his promise, but even more with his lofty station in Philadelphia society. Here was a young man worthy of his daughter, even though he was in the army. Marcy had even gone so far as to tout her to his young subaltern. It could be a match made in heaven. He believed McClellan ought to meet her.

  McClellan’s mother in Philadelphia thought so too. She wrote her son a note, which was in his stack of correspondence when he returned from a railroad survey in the Pacific Northwest in the spring of 1854. Mrs. McClellan had met Ellen Marcy, who was then eighteen, several times.

  “She is beautiful,” she wrote McClellan, and she has heard so much about you from her father that “she was just ready to fall in love with you.”7

  McClellan was very much open to the idea, and in the first week in April 1854, he finally met her. He was instantly deranged. But then, who wasn’t? The difference in McClellan’s case was that he had an inside track, and knew it. But he also knew protocol. The first thing he did was to write Mary Marcy and state his intentions.

  He told the mother that he had decided to “make a bold plunge, & relieve my conscience by a confidential & candid confession of my sins.” His sins were that though he hadn’t seen a great deal of the little lady, that little had been sufficient. He would win her if he could, and he believed, surely, that he could. Up to then he had been only a soldier who thought of nothing but his career, who entertained no aspirations but to excel in his profession. The “little Presbyterian”—as he called his dazzling intended—had changed all that.

  He forewarned Mrs. Marcy that he was about to storm the redoubt. If the mother had any objections, she should state them now in perfect candor. His desire was to “avoid sailing under false colours,” particularly since Captain Marcy was away on the frontier. Now that he had confessed and shown his flag, it remained only for her to give him permission to “carry on the war as best I may.” He had no doubt he would win this skirmish and that Miss Nelly would soon be his. But in closing he playfully asked the mother if she could tell him, confidentially, what her opinion was of his chances. “I hope there is no rascally interloper in advance of me that I’ll have to poison or shoot!”8

  Mary Marcy, who shared her husband’s high opinion of McClellan, hoped not, too. Captain Marcy, away on the frontier, believed there had better not be. He wrote his wife that he was gratified McClellan had been so pleased “with my dear Nelly.” He hoped she would like him as much, for he was talented, good-looking, agreeable, and in every respect preferable to another officer whom he didn’t care to mention.

  Marcy could not conceive that Ellen would not fall instantly in love with McClellan. As he assured his wife, “he is generally regarded as one of the most brilliant men of his rank in the Army and one that any young lady might justly be proud of. His family connections are unexceptionable and his staff position is such that his wife would always have a good and comfortable home.”9

  He was everything the Marcys had always hoped for. They loved him very much.

  Unfortunately, their daughter didn’t. To their horror and to McClellan’s utter astonishment and chagrin, Nelly turned him down when, soon afterward—much too soon—he proposed. McClellan was unaccustomed to failing at anything. That he should fail at something so important in his life as this, was—well—unthinkable.

  He was still reeling when he wrote Mrs. Marcy from Pensacola, Florida, where he had been sent on temporary duty. “I succeeded in making a very great blunder & doing a very foolish thing in the way of pushing too far & too quickly a certain little affair that you know of,” he confessed. He feared he had blown his chances and, if so, would regret it forever. But he intended to make the best of a bad situation. He would not give up, but try now to undo the unfavorable impression he believed he had made. As Shakespeare so long ago had said, “hope is a lover’s staff.” He implored Mrs. Marcy to write him if she knew anything of the matter or thought anything, anything at all. He was desperate. “Give Miss Nelly my warmest regards,” he wrote in anguished closing, “or anything warmer you please. You can’t make it too strong.”10

  McClellan now shifted to the only strategy left to him. He began courting Mrs. Marcy. At least here was a sympathetic backdoor to the intended target, a willing co-mourner with whom he could share his secret anguish, sorrow, and shame. Besides, it was the only way he knew to keep a spark of contact alive, however dead it seemed to be.

  In the many letters to Mrs. Marcy that followed, he kicked himself again and again, tending in his self-recrimination to be melodramatic. He said he wished not to remain in civilization under the circumstances. And, of course, in the army that could be arranged. But he didn’t really mean it. He would willingly rather devote “the rest of my life to making Nellie happy & contented (if she will ever entrust her happiness to me).” He told the mother he would “wait as long as there is the shadow of a hope.”11

  It promised to be a long and fruitless wait. Miss Nelly was not giving McClellan the time of day—no encouragement of any kind, no letters, none of her soft, sweet, gentle, devastating smiles. It wasn’t that she didn’t like him. It was just that despite his handsome face, charming manner, brilliant mind, promising future, and high social elevation, she simply didn’t love him. No matter how much Daddy liked him, she wasn’t going to marry him.

  By the spring of 1855 McClellan himself seems to have despaired of all hope. He had been promoted to captain and company commander in the newly formed First Cavalry Regiment and was no longer an engineer—a fact that further creased Marcy’s already furrowed brow. This made him a line officer, and line officers tended to get sent to frontiers.

  “After carefully & coolly thinking over all that has passed,” McClellan wrote Mrs. Marcy in March, “I could only come to the conclusion that there is no hope of a successful termination, & that it would be extreme folly to sacrifice my professional prospects to a contingency so remote as to be next to impossible.” He confessed sadly that he could not look back upon the winter just passed with any satisfaction—“would that that chapter in my history could be erased.” As that was impossible, he must bear up and try not to make the same mistake again. It has had one good effect, he told his sympathetic correspondent, “in giving my vanity so good a lesson.” He intended now to leave for faraway places. “It will, I doubt not,” he mused, “be a relief to the young lady to know that I will soon be out of the way—& not persecute her any more.”12

  Very soon he was out of the way—but not to the frontier as he expected. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis had taken a liking to this brilliant young officer and had named him to a special commission to study European military systems. The senior member of the three-officer panel was to be Major Richard Delafield, Dicky the Punster of palmier days. It was a plum assignment, and McClellan, lucky in life, unlucky in love, sailed to the Crimea and out of Ellen Marcy’s picture on April 11, 1855.

  A. P. Hill loved his younger sister, Lucy. He called her Lute, and they had been close since childhood. But then, Hill loved women generally. He had loved them when they were Latin beauties cannonading him with those angry flashing eyes from the balconies in Puebla. He loved them when they were Washington girls casting coquettish glances across the crowded public rooms at Willard’s Hotel. He loved them under all circumstances.

  He had once written Lute: “You know I am so constituted that to be in love with some one is as necessary to me as my dinner.”13 From Mexico City he had written his father, “ ’Tis a fact that the ladies of Mexico are beautiful,—and, oh, how beautiful—but very few of them have ever read Wayland’s ‘Moral Science.’ ” That only endeared them the more to Hill. “You know my failing,”
he wrote his father. “ ’Tis an inheritance of the family, this partiality for the women.”14 “How would you relish a Mexican daughter-in-law?” he had queried his parents from Puebla.15

  This partiality for the women had gotten him in deep trouble in his furlough summer at West Point. Contrary to Superintendent Delafield’s warnings against stopping in New York City, he had done so on his way back through. His reward was a dose of gonorrhea, followed by complications, which were followed by lingering prostatitis that finally took him out of the class of 1846 and put him into the class of 1847. His brief night of passion would dog him for the rest of his life.16

  But it had done nothing to bank the fires of his desire to be in love. By the fall of 1848, Lute was at the Patapsco Female Academy at Ellicott City, Maryland, and Hill was back from Mexico and stationed in nearby Washington City. One of Lute’s classmates was a dazzling brunette named Emma Wilson, just the thing for his constitution, and Hill began courting her. At first Emma’s parents didn’t mind their daughter being escorted by the dashing young army officer, as long as it went no farther than that. But Hill was too dashing. Their daughter fell in love with him, and when that happened the Wilsons, who considered Hill below them socially, cut it off.17

  Six winters later, in November 1855, Hill was again in Washington City assigned to the coast survey. Also in Washington, in from Hartford and staying with her mother at Willard’s Hotel, was Ellen Marcy. Her father, as usual, was away in Texas. It was a particularly gay winter socially in the capital city, and it was inevitable that Hill should meet Miss Nelly. McClellan was now nine months in Europe and suitors were swarming about the Marcys like moths to the flame.

  It was not long before Nelly was seeing a lot of Lieutenant Hill. Captain Marcy, home on a temporary assignment early in the winter, noted this with an uneasy eye. Rather like the Wilsons, he didn’t object to his daughter going about on the arm of the handsome young officer, but this wasn’t going to get serious was it? Oh, no, Daddy, Ellen assured him, you mustn’t worry. But Marcy returned to Laredo not fully convinced.18