The Class of 1846 Read online

  But a different kind of attitude set in by the end of February, along with a change again in the weather. On Washington’s birthday snow was on the ground and Raymond was writing home complaining of boredom: “Every day is so nearly alike to me that it has become rather dull business.”15

  There was no way around the weather, but there was a way around this last problem for those willing to take the risk, and many were. It was called Benny Havens.

  Benny Havens was a man—indeed an institution—a lovable, good-hearted raconteur who ran a tavern in nearby Buttermilk Falls. There he had been selling spirits and viands to cadets, and thus corrupting them, for more than two decades. Getting caught at his establishment was a dismissal offense. But there were said to be three compelling reasons for taking the chance and going anyhow.

  First was the character of the drinks Benny served, particularly a kicker called “hot flip,” which he knew just when to flip for perfect flavor. Then there was the quality of the food he offered at his board, particularly the buckwheat flapjacks, which Benny could also flip to perfection. Sometimes when they had no money and their mouths watered for Benny’s flapjacks, the cadets made out requisitions for Mackintosh blankets and smuggled them to the tavern as coin for supper. Benny knew just where to convert such contraband to currency.

  The third reason for going to Benny’s was Benny himself, a host of the old school, a friend and crony to cadets he favored, entertaining them with his ready smile, quick wit, and compelling stories. Though he had little formal schooling, he was inexplicably an able mathematician who also offered timely tutoring with his hot flip and flapjacks.

  As a cadet who regularly and illegally patronized his establishment in the 1830s, poet-to-be Edgar Allan Poe considered Benny “the only congenial soul in the entire God-forsaken place.”16

  Benny was a native of the Hudson River valley, who had fallen into his congenial calling as a sideline. He had served as a first lieutenant in the volunteer army in the War of 1812 and afterward returned to enter the business of cutting “hoop poles,” the young saplings from which barrel hoops were made. On the side he turned his cottage into a tavern of sorts and began filling and emptying a few barrels of his own.

  The main source of spirituous and contraband drink at West Point at that early time was an off-limits but close-in establishment run by another congenial soul named Gridley. But Old Grid became such a nuisance that the authorities simply bought him out and turned his place into the post hospital.

  “What was Gridley’s loss was a great gain to ‘Benny Havens, oh!’ ” said Professor Church, who occasionally noticed more than sines and cosines. To Benny’s tavern, after Gridley was bought out, “there was at once a rush, and for years after he had a monopoly of the business.”17

  A fine business it was. Even the Marquis de Lafayette, in his triumphant hero’s return to America in 1824, stopped in at Benny’s for a hot flip, paying his tab with two gold gilt buttons bearing his image.

  Benny’s most valued and faithful clientele, however, were not the rich and famous, but the thirsty, hungry cadets who slipped out nights under threat of academic execution if caught. Many of these would one day become famous if not rich in their own right, and would always have a place in their hearts for Benny.

  George Edward Pickett, a fellow-plebe whom William Gardner thought “a jolly good fellow with fine natural gifts sadly neglected,” was rapidly becoming devotedly addicted to Benny’s enticements.18 He was stealing away regularly now to lift his glass in good fellowship and his superb singing voice in Benny’s anthem, set to the music of “Wearin’ o’ the Green”:

  Come, fill your glasses fellows, and stand up in a row

  To singing sentimentally, we’re going for to go;

  In the Army there’s sobriety, promotion’s very slow,

  So we’ll sing our reminiscences of Benny Havens, oh!

  Oh, Benny Havens, oh! Oh, Benny Havens, oh!

  So we’ll sing our reminiscences of Benny Havens, oh!19

  Plebe A. P. Hill of Virginia was perhaps not debauching regularly at Benny Havens’s tavern in the spring of 1843, but he was basking in the intoxicating weather. The season had “just begun to put forth its budding beauties,” and the cloudless days and cool bracing air were sending the blood galloping through his veins.20 There was much for them to be grateful for this spring. As Samuel Raymond said, “I have not had any fighting to do yet and am not therefore as yet either hurt or killed.”21

  But they were soon to experience the next worst thing. The annual June examination, bigger even than the semiannual ordeal in January, was at hand. The Post Orders on the last of May confirmed it, and when Winfield Scott arrived four days later, it became a grim certainty.

  Major General Scott, the hero of wars past and wars yet to come, came every year as chairman of the board of visitors to bear witness to this apotheosis of cadet agony. The prestigious board, never less than five in number, men distinguished for their military and scientific knowledge, was appointed annually by the secretary of war. Its members came in June to attend the examination, judge cadet progress, review the state of the institution in general, and report to the secretary of war.22 Scott loved doing it. West Point was one of his favorite places and the annual examination of cadets was one of his favorite diversions.

  For these plebes this would be their first close-up exposure to the larger-than-life soldier who commanded the army to which they now belonged. Frightening in size, 6 feet 5 inches tall with the bulk to match, Scott was a giant in any age and by any standards. He was “magnificent in physical proportions and swelling with graceful hauteur.”23 He filled not just space, but every cadet with a reverential awe. He brought into their harried daily lives “some of the splendor that attaches to bravery and achievement.”24

  The day the examinations began, the plebes marched to the recitation hall where Scott and the other members of the board of visitors waited, with about twenty uniformed officers and a gathering of guests, including ladies. William Dutton thought the room was splendid. It was newly built at a cost of twelve thousand dollars, and the class filed into it with trembling fingers and fluttering hearts.25

  Some of them, those who didn’t survive the ordeal, were still being “found” and sent home by late June. Dutton was expecting as many as fifty casualties, some of them “talented fellows … & all would rather be shot!!”26 When it was over, seventy-two were still left in the plebe class. A dozen had been lost. McClellan had slipped to third in the rankings. Thomas J. Lowe, William Gardner’s rustic roommate, anchored the other end, with Gardner himself within hailing distance. Tom Jackson was still present, and surprisingly, sitting in fifty-first place. He was putting space between himself and the ledge. Dabney Maury as usual was situated almost precisely in the middle.27

  A score of the plebes were promoted from private to corporal for the coming year, when they would all be third-classmen learning the duties of corporals. They were “yearlings” now, and as smug and contemptuous of the incoming class of plebes as the third-classmen had been of them the summer before. Promotion to corporal was a distinction going to the most admirable and soldierlike among them. McClellan was on the list, with Raymond and Derby. Maury would be added later in the summer. Jackson would remain a private. Not to be promoted was not a stain, however. Not everybody could be, and two-thirds of them were not. There would be other chances. In Jackson’s case, promotion was too much to ask. Survival was still sufficient.28

  So they all turned toward their second summer encampment, not remembering how dreary their first had been. In contrast to the ten-month study grind they had just been through, the encampment had been sublimated, at least in Raymond’s mind, into “by far the pleasantest part of a cadet’s life.”29 McClellan thought so too, for he was sitting pretty. He had become a permanent fixture in the firmament of class rankings, and one of only four picked to tutor the new plebe class in arithmetic—a bonus distinction.

  He sat back in self-sati
sfaction and contemplated the coming months with pleasure. He would have a new roommate in this third-class year, his favorite Southerner, James Stuart of South Carolina. He liked the dashing Carolinian; they got on well. It was going to be a good year.

  Somehow McClellan preferred Southerners generally. “I am sorry to say that the manners, feelings & opinions of the Southerners are far, far preferable to those of the majority of the Northerners at this place,” he confessed to his brother, John. “I may be mistaken, but I like them better.”30 The slavery issue was not yet dividing the country as it one day would. Nor was it dividing the cadets in 1843; it was not yet a line drawn on the plain at West Point.

  By mid August boredom had returned. Samuel Raymond as usual had no news to send home to Connecticut, “this being the last place in the world for anything of that kind.” The weather had been rainy. In two more weeks the encampment would be over, “then for barracks study and the end of pleasure.”31

  At the end of pleasure, in that fall of 1843, waited the third-class curriculum and more mathematical Sanskrit—analytical geometry and calculus this year, “the most solid part.”32 But there would be some surveying fieldwork too, a diversion with romantic potential. As cadets before them had learned, survey instruments artfully fixed on nearby homes and buildings in Buttermilk Falls could often catch in the crosshairs members of the opposite sex—forms far more pleasing to the mind and eye than logarithms.33 The second half of French, English grammar, rhetoric, geography, history, and the first parts of artillery and drawing also awaited them. The last subject in particular promised more trouble for Tom Jackson.

  Perverse as it seemed, drawing, like French, had a purpose; an engineer must know how to draw, just as he must know how to read French. So the class filed into the drawing studios on the Academy building’s third floor in early September, and found there a distinguished American painter ready to teach them how to do it.

  Robert Weir was the second faculty member they would meet of international reputation. There would be others. West Point attracted men of world class stature to its faculty, or often gave it to them later if they arrived without it.

  When Weir produced his first painting at the age of nineteen, a rendering of Paul Preaching at Athens, friends saw raw talent there and arranged to send him to Europe to study. For four years he submerged himself in the masters—Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and others—and produced two notable works of his own, Christ and Nicodemus, and The Angel Releasing Peter. Back in New York his gifts brought him election as an associate of the National Academy, and in 1829, a member. The next year he became a professor of perspective there, a title full of honor, but with little pay. When President Jackson proposed to make him head of the department of drawing at West Point in 1834, much more gainful employment, he jumped at the offer.

  Weir continued to paint as he taught, and had become by 1843 one of the luminaries of the Hudson River school of American art. During the past summer, he had completed his masterpiece, The Embarkation of the Pilgrims, which was to hang in the rotunda of the capitol building in Washington. Now, in the fall of the year, the class of 1846 was filing into his studios for the first time.34

  Once again Weir’s forbearance and artistic sensitivities would be severely taxed, as they always were. “It may well be imagined,” said one cadet, “that the work of some was truly grotesque.” To those “Old Bob” gave wide berth, only occasionally inquiring which splotch was the house, and which the cow.35 Weir had introduced a decade of cadets to art and painting and had disciplined their hands to draw what their eyes could see.36 There was no reason he couldn’t do it with this class, Tom Jackson notwithstanding.

  On the Saturday evening before Christmas, the class’s second away from home, West Point celebrated the season with a yuletide soiree at the Academy building from 7:30 to taps. The fencing room was gaily lit and there was music for dancing. The band played, and the riding arena was set aside for athletic exercises and refreshments.

  Superintendent Delafield tempered the festivities with unrelenting supervision. Perhaps with Benny Havens in mind, he cautioned the corps sternly that they could be absent from quarters to attend the party in the Academy building and for no other reason. No irregularity of any kind would be tolerated. No contraband was to be smuggled from the riding room into the barracks. All violators would be arrested and strictly dealt with. At seven o’clock and at other such times as the commandant saw fit, there would be an inspection of barracks. Merry Christmas, cadets.

  A week later on the last day of the year, the superintendent announced that the semiannual examinations would begin the second day of the new year at 8:00 in the morning. The third class was to be prepared to recite mathematics, French, English grammar, and drawing. Happy New Year, cadets.37

  The January examinations were a turning point in Tom Jackson’s West Point experience. Not only did he survive another test of academic fire, but something gratifying happened. He climbed to the twenty-first ranking in mathematics, the subject that counted. He even improved in French, inching up from seventieth to sixty-first, and he was an acceptable fifty-eighth in English grammar. Only in drawing, now his biggest cross, did he still run with the immortals; he was ranked seventy-fourth.38

  All in all it was a striking improvement. Not given to boasting, he nonetheless wrote his sister, Laura, that the examination had gone “rather to my advantage, as I rose considerably in mathematics, and a few files in the French language, though in the same time I fell a few files in ethics and in drawing.”

  He then said something truly revolutionary. “I passed in all my studies, and I bid fair to continue to do the same for the future.” Jackson now believed he might get through this after all. Not only that, but he seemed to be reaching for the stars.

  “I feel very confident that unless fortune frowns on me more than it has yet,” he confided to the sister he adored, “I shall graduate in the upper half of my class.…”

  His health was also better, “far better than it was when I parted with you, and indeed more flattering than it has been for the last two years; and I think by the time I graduate, if that should ever be, my health will be as good as ever.”

  He was content in other surprising ways this winter. “My friends here are numerous apparently,” he confessed, “and all that I want to render myself happy on earth is the sight of you and my native land.”39

  Richard Delafield was far less sanguine this new year, in part because of the suspect behavior of some of Jackson’s less well-adjusted classmates. The superintendent opened 1844 by evoking the name of General Washington in reprimanding the devilish Thomas Lowe and a plebe prankster named Henry Heth for taking the name of the Supreme Being in vain. He pointed out that Washington himself had issued direct strictures to his revolutionary army against such blasphemy sixty-five years ago when West Point was a fort in the War for Independence. The Founding Father would have been ashamed of Lowe and Heth—Delafield was certain of it. Henry Ehninger, a New Yorker and one of George Derby’s roommates, was hit with twelve extra turns of Saturday guard duty and confined to limits for six months for some unspecified but apparently heinous offense. John Adams of Tennessee was awarded three extra turns of Saturday guard duty and confined to quarters for a week for violence against an unoffending servant and indecorous conduct at the mess table. Cadets Thomas Rush McConnell of Georgia and Clermont Livingston Best of New York, both Jackson’s classmates, were ordered to pay for scrubbing the floor of the drawing academy in the aftermath of some undisclosed calamity.40

  Derby, on the other hand, was having better luck. “You will be inexpressibly gratified to hear,” he wrote his mother on Christmas Day, “that my good friend the commandant is making exertions to have the 2 demerits taken off, (there remaining some doubt of their legality and a great doubt of their necessity).”41

  On Washington’s birthday in 1844, it was Greenland cold when the band turned out on the plain to play the national airs. But not even the cold this wi
nter dampened spirits as it might once have, for this was to be a benchmark year for the class of 1846; it was to be the summer of their midcourse furlough, two months at home away from West Point. Every class had its furlough in the summer following its second year. Members of this class had been aching for theirs since the day they arrived. Now, by the middle of May, it was less than two months away, glittering there just beyond the annual examinations in June.

  But their plans were already hitting snags. The tailor the class had been counting on to come down from Boston to outfit them in furlough clothes had been forbidden to set foot on the landing.

  “Dicky [Delafield] won’t let our Tailor land,” Derby complained, “as he says he deceived him once and he shall not appear again.”42

  Then the secretary of war interfered. He was a new man, “that old demented [William] Wilkins,” who had replaced James Madison Porter in February, who had replaced John Spencer in March, the year before. Wilkins ordered their furlough delayed because he wanted personally to review the entire corps of cadets. Derby fumed, cursing Wilkins as that “vile old locofoco lawyer whom Tyler has cursed us with.” He didn’t believe Spencer would have acted so.43

  The June examination came inexorably and Tom Jackson leaped another twenty-one files forward and now rested in thirtieth place in general merit, near the middle of the class. McClellan held fast to third place, unhappy about not being in first. Thomas Lowe smashed the demerit barrier with 280 for the year, putting him dead last in the entire corps of cadets for conduct and earning him a permanent return home to Kentucky.44 Promotions to cadet sergeant also came through as the class awaited its furlough. Among those on the list were McClellan, Maury—and this time, Tom Jackson.45

  At last, on Tuesday morning, June 25, the Post Orders told them what they had all been longing to hear. Their furloughs would begin immediately following parade that day, to last until two o’clock on August 28. There was only one thing. They could not stop in New York City on the way home, unless they lived there. Last year’s furlough class had behaved shamefully in the city, and Delafield wasn’t going to have it again. He announced he was sending Lieutenant Robert S. Granger, an assistant instructor of tactics, down the river with them to see that this edict was strictly enforced. Any cadet found lingering in the city or who was guilty of any other gross irregularity would be arrested and returned to West Point at once.46