The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  So they left for home, many of them passing through Union lines. But there was not heard a taunting cry or rude remark as the two armies turned their backs upon each other for the first time in four long bloody years. “The truth was,” Gibbon said, “that these men had won our admiration and consideration by their conduct in battle and we could well afford now that we were the victors, to treat them with respect.”44

  When Lee left Appomattox on the twelfth, as the last of his army was surrendering, Gibbon sent his own escort to accompany him for twelve miles on the road to Richmond.45 Gibbon himself left when his work was done, carrying with him the surrendered flags from Lee’s army. With two staff officers and a number of enlisted men who had especially distinguished themselves in the closing campaign, he traveled to the war department in Washington and turned the colors over to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.46

  The war for him was over.

  The Wind That

  Shook the Corn

  On their honeymoon trip in the summer of 1857, Tom and Anna Jackson visited West Point.

  Anna watched as her new husband reveled in his return to the past. “His delight was unbounded,” she remembered. He met old professors and brother officers, and they talked and laughed and relived the days on the blackboards and on the plain. With the dawn he was off to climb to Fort Putnam, and once more to watch the river wind past the Highlands and to remember old joys and agonies. There was scarcely a spot, Anna said, that he didn’t visit.1

  It would be the last time Jackson would ever see West Point, the last time he would shake the hand of many of these brother officers. It would be the last they would see of him. How could they know then how large Old Jack would write his name in the military pantheon? How could he himself know?

  George McClellan returned to West Point seven years later in the summer of 1864. By then he knew. He had seen it all happen; he had been at the center of much of it. Now he was returning to deliver the principal oration at the dedication of the site of a battle monument to all the Union officers and enlisted men of the regular army who had fallen in the war. He had never been recalled to duty after Lincoln sacked him in those days of disillusionment after Antietam. But neither had he dropped out of sight. He was this summer the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination to oppose the president who had fired him. Since it was a summer of more discontent and disillusionment—the Union armies seemed stalled everywhere and war weariness had seized the nation—thousands had turned up at West Point to see and hear him. It seemed probable that this member of the class of 1846 would be the next president of the United States.

  Spectators lined the route to the monument site at Trophy Point on the northern brow of the plain. The speaker’s stand was festooned with flags and flowers. At about half past noon, thirty-five guns thundered a salute, and the procession of dignitaries, moving to the music of more than half a dozen military bands and led by the battalion of cadets, started the slow march to the site. With McClellan were the academic board, the board of visitors, the academic staff—all honoring him who little more than twenty years before had been but a homesick plebe. At about one o’clock he stepped from the carriage with a man nearly as celebrated as himself—Robert Anderson of Fort Sumter, now a brigadier general. They marched together down an avenue lined with people saluting them with cheers on both sides. McClellan replied with a military salute, and to the continuing acclaim, took his seat on the decorated dais.

  The academy band played “Hail Columbia,” and at the end of the benedictions Anderson rose to introduce his fellow officer.

  “Fellow-citizens, members of the corps of cadets, and brother soldiers,” he said, “I have the pleasure of going through the form of introducing to you one who is better known to you than I who introduce him.”2

  McClellan stood by the speaker’s table and was saluted with three loud and prolonged cheers. When he began to speak, it was in a clear, calm voice, audible across the plain and echoing down the years.

  “God knows,” he said, among many other things, “that David’s love for Jonathan was no more deep than mine for the tried friends of many long and eventful years, whose names are to be recorded upon the structure that is to rise upon this spot.… Such an occasion as this should call forth the deepest and noblest emotions of our nature—pride, sorrow, and prayer; pride that our country has possessed such sons; sorrow that she has lost them; prayer that she may have others like them.” He spoke of West Point, “with her large heart,” who “adopts us all—graduates and those appointed from civil life, officers and privates. In her eyes we are all her children.… Such are the ties which unite us, the most endearing which exist among men; such the relations which bind us together, the closest of the sacred brotherhood of arms.…”3

  What McClellan was saying then, his classmate Tom Jackson must have also felt seven years before when he had returned to this plain with his young bride. His name would not appear on the battle monument, because he was in rebellion against the country he had forsworn. Even so, these two classmates were both mystically bound by that “sacred brotherhood of arms” of which McClellan spoke, and by the mother institution that had made them brothers.

  Like them, West Point had been tried in the crucible of the Civil War, and like them it had been both exalted and diminished. Only one of these two classmates was still alive to ask whether in any way the academy had failed them, or if they had failed it. The answer to both questions—and McClellan must have known it—was yes and no.

  John Calhoun was secretary of war in early 1818, when the academy had just fallen under the guiding hand of Sylvanus Thayer, the man who was to shape its direction for decades to come. In a message to Thayer, Calhoun wrote: “In future wars the Nation must look to the Academy for the skill to conduct valor to victory.”4

  In the time between then and the Civil War, West Pointers had gradually taken over command of the army. It had been a slow process, for officers moved up through the echelons in the years between the wars as molasses pours from a bottle. But gradually they had replaced the older generation that had risen to prominence in the War of 1812 and to high command in the Mexican War. By as early as 1833, over half of the officers in the regular army were West Pointers. A monopoly was building, and as it grew, outsiders found it harder and harder to break in and move up.

  Hand in hand with this creeping academization came a new professionalization of the army that American arms had never known, and it was disturbing to many. Citizen-soldiers had always fought the wars of the young nation, and commanded its armies. Now the educated military professional, trained at West Point, was taking over. It was a quiet revolution, but by the beginning of the Civil War it was a fixed fact of life. By 1860, nearly eight of every ten officers in the army were West Pointers. Until then not a one of them was a general. But when the Civil War came, the floodgate to higher command simply broke; West Pointers became generals wholesale, in both the Union and Confederate armies.5

  It could be argued that this revolutionary transformation didn’t necessarily make for a better army—indeed it was argued violently during the Civil War. In some cases West Point training turned out to be a liability. To the small extent that West Point taught them to wage war on a large scale at all, it was as Napoleon had waged it. But when the war came, those tactics and strategies had either gone out of date or required drastic amendment in the face of more powerful weaponry and the peculiar requirements of the geography and the times.

  It was a war that could not be fought from textbooks. Tactics had to be changed on the spot. The war had to be improvised and victory had to be learned on the job. Some learned it and some didn’t.

  U. S. Grant, one of those who did, would one day say:

  Some of our generals failed because they worked out everything by rule. They knew what Frederick did at one place, and Napoleon at another. They were always thinking about what Napoleon would do. Unfortunately for their plans, the rebels would be thinking about something else. I don�
��t underrate the value of military knowledge, but if men make war in slavish observances of rules, they will fail.… Consequently, while our generals were working out problems of an ideal character, problems that would have looked well on a blackboard, practical facts were neglected. To that extent I consider remembrances of old campaigns a disadvantage. Even Napoleon showed that, for my impression is that his first success came because he made war in his own way, and not in imitation of others.… The only eyes a general can trust are his own. He must be able to see and know the country, the streams, the passes, the hills.… The conditions of war in Europe and America are so unlike that there can be no comparison.6

  Richard Taylor, who became a Confederate lieutenant general without benefit of a West Point education, wouldn’t have had one had it been offered.

  “Take a boy sixteen from his mother’s apron-strings,” he told Dabney Maury, “shut him up under constant surveillance for four years at West Point, send him out to a two-company post upon the frontier where he does little but play seven-up and drink whiskey at the sutler’s, and by the time he is forty-five years old he will furnish the most complete illustration of suppressed mental development of which human nature is capable, and many such specimens were made generals on both sides when the war began.”7

  Attacks on West Point and West Pointers were as old as the institution. In 1821, when it was well on its way to becoming the country’s preeminent school of engineering, a motion was made in the House of Representatives to discontinue pay and rations for the cadets and discharge them—in short, abolish the institution. The motion was voted down.

  During the democratic revolution of the Jacksonian era—the 1830s and 1840s—West Point had to fight repeatedly for its life. The Tennessee Legislature in 1833 urged that it be abolished. The Ohio Legislature followed a year later with a similar resolution. A House committee issued a virulent attack on the academy in 1837.

  West Point was undemocratic, the Jacksonians argued. Worse, it was aristocratic. In the egalitarian America of the times it was considered inconsistent with republican institutions, with its free education for the favored few at the public expense. It was freezing out the common man, the citizen-soldier who was equally deserving but less favored. It was a seedbed of special privilege and political favoritism. Moreover, it was turning out too many officers, far more than were needed. Part of the problem was the basic American distrust of a standing army of any kind, and alarm over the creeping professionalism of arms. Wars were things that ought to be dealt with when they came, and by patriot-soldiers from civil life who were apt to have more common sense than these coddled products of West Point.

  In 1844, about the time the class of 1846 was anticipating its furlough, another House committee investigated charges that it was aristocratic, anti-republican, extravagant, expensive, unnecessary, and different from what it was intended to be. The committee found the charges were unsupported by the facts, and the academy lived on. Then the Mexican War came and West Pointers played such a visible role in winning it that the criticism faded.

  But in the Civil War it rose again, more virulent than ever. The old Jacksonian criticisms resurfaced, fueled in the North by early defeats on the battlefield of Union armies commanded by West Pointers. Its critics not only believed that West Point was elitist and undemocratic, but that it cranked out incompetents.

  Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, who got into the middle of nearly every disagreement that came along on any subject, got into this one. “The atmosphere, the fume of the bivouac,” he argued, not an academy education, is what produces military genius. Hannibal, Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon never went to West Point.8

  “War being an art, not a science,” Harper’s Weekly editorialized, “a man can no more be made a first-class general than a first-class painter, or a great poet, by professors and text-books; he must be born with the genius of war in his breast. Very few such men are born in a century, and the chances are rather that they will be found among the millions of the outside people than in the select circle who are educated at West Point.”9

  One critic wrote his senator in early 1862 that academy graduates were “invariably men of all theory and no execution of results,” capable of conducting defensive works, “but for active offensive and successful results—never.”10 He perhaps had been watching McClellan in Washington and had not noticed that the Confederate generals who had beaten the Union generals at Bull Run were also academy graduates. Nor had he yet seen Jackson in the Valley or Lee at Chancellorsville or Grant at Vicksburg or Sherman at Atlanta—graduates all.

  But there was something else—a new argument against West Pointers, more serious even than the question of competence.

  Senator Ben Wade of Ohio raised the issue on the Senate floor in 1861. “I cannot help thinking,” he growled, “that there is something wrong about this whole institution. I do not believe that in the history of the world you can find as many men who have proved themselves utterly faithless to their oaths, ungrateful to the Government that supported them, guilty of treason and a deliberate intention to overthrow that Government which has educated them and given them its support, as have emanated from this institution.… I believe that from the idleness of these military-educated gentlemen this great treason was hatched.”11

  It wasn’t just that many West Pointers had defected to the Confederacy that irked Wade and the other Republican Radicals. But many of them who hadn’t defected had done something almost as reprehensible: they had become Democrats who were soft on slavery and loath to fight—McClellan came to mind. Wade figured that political apostasy must have been taught at West Point as well, and he didn’t know which sin was worse—it or treason.12

  So now West Point was not only a breeding ground for incompetents and aristocrats, but for Democrats and traitors. Certainly many West Pointers had defected to the Confederacy—304 of them, one of every five of its graduates, including ten members of the class of 1846. And many of the generals holding high command in the North were West Pointers with pro-slavery sympathies. However, many West Pointers from the southern states—162 of them—had withstood the pull of birth and kin to remain with the Union. Wade didn’t mention them.13

  Secretary of War Simon Cameron labeled the defection of West Pointers to the Confederacy as “extraordinary treachery,” and called on Congress to find out what caused it and try to fix it.14

  Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, Wade’s fellow Radical and ally, called it worse than that. Like Wade he wanted Congress to fix the institution by getting rid of it. He insisted that but for West Point there would never have been a rebellion. The academy, he said, “has produced more traitors within the last fifty years than all the institutions of learning and education that have existed since Judas Iscariot’s time.”15

  Most senators, of course, didn’t agree with these Wade-Chandler theories of treason and incompetence. Maine Senator William Pitt Fessenden, although a fellow Radical, thought Wade had “his peculiar views about this institution. He thinks commanders are born, not made.”16 New Hampshire Senator Daniel Clark said: “Treason has resulted from a political education, obtained elsewhere. The Government itself, the Senate of these United States, has been more the school of treason than the academy at West Point.”17 Senator James Nesmith of Oregon said: “Treason was hatched and incubated at these very desks around me.”18

  West Pointers themselves weighed in on the argument. Dennis Hart Mahan, their stern professor of engineering and tactics, struck back at every opportunity in one letter to the New York Times after another. Mahan took any assault on the academy as if it were an attack on his own reputation. Well he might, for the two armies that had gone to war against one another were both in large measure his creation. He had taught virtually every one of the West Point generals, Confederate and Union, their military engineering and their science of war.19

  The news from the battlefields was sometimes hard on Mahan. A stern Unionist and patriot, he disliked seeing a
ny Confederate general succeed, even those he had taught. And Union generals who were once his prized cadets were disappointing him. Too often the wrong protégés were winning the battles. One of his former cadets said that Mahan had “a sovereign contempt for all knowledge that did not come through regular school channels.” That meant to a large degree through his own works. He graded the value of every officer by his class ranking, regarding such middle-of-the-pack former students as Grant, Sheridan, and Jackson as freaks of chance. When those of inferior academic standing rose to distinguished leadership, “the world was turned topsy-turvy.” In Mahan’s mind, it logically should be the McClellans who succeeded, not these others. But that was not the way it was working out.20

  The class of 1846’s own Truman Seymour, the hero of Sumter, lashed out publicly at West Point’s critics in a letter published in the Army and Navy Journal in 1864 and reprinted in a pamphlet. Every sensible American ought to be proud of the academy, Seymour argued. In his days at West Point, politics “were never even referred to. The discussion of slavery was unknown.” If any sentiments had been inculcated they would certainly have been “of Northern stamp.” He said, “the only ‘peculiarity’ they ever sought to impress was that devotion to duty and to country that has ever been considered, through all ages, the chief glory of a soldier’s life.” Seymour put the blame for the poor showing of northern generals on Union policymakers. “The South,” he said bluntly, “owes whatever of successful resistance it has made to her proper employment of her military education, and the North has failed in using its overpowering strength to insure quick success, because of its entire inappreciation of its military duties and its abusive or wilful perversion of its military skill. The best possible vindication of the Military Academy is to be found in the history of the Confederacy.” In short, the South had used its West Point-trained talent properly; the North hadn’t.21