The Class of 1846 Read online

  Mahan was a unique presence. The academic board ran the academy, and Mahan, with Bartlett and Church to a lesser extent, ran the board. Consisting mainly of the professors and heads of departments, this omnipotent body designed the curriculum, selected and—in many cases—wrote the textbooks, examined the cadets, decided order of merit standings, dictated who was to stay and who was to leave, and recommended branches of service for the cadets who graduated.8

  If Mahan dominated the academic board, it is not difficult to imagine how thoroughly he ruled his classroom. When cadets entered his state-of-the-art recitation hall they knew they were in the presence of authority. All about him stood the reminders of his calling. There was a model of a perfect military fortification and a full representation of a perfect attack on a fortification. There were plaster models of the great engineering and architectural masterpieces of the ancient world—the Propylaea, the Parthenon, the Hypaethral Temple, and the “Lantern of Demosthenes.” There were models of modern-day bridges, canal locks, steam engines, water wheels, and arches. And there was Mahan, more formidable than any of these creations.9

  Aloof and relentlessly demanding, he detested sloppy thinking, sloppy posture, and a sloppy attitude toward duty. No cadet slouched in a Mahan classroom, for he would be bitingly rasped to attention by the professor’s high, reedy, nasally congested voice. The moment they entered his recitation room cadets involuntarily snapped to and sharpened every sense and faculty, for they would need them all. All backs went ramrod straight. (His entry in the room therefore probably had very little effect on Tom Jackson, who seemed fixed in that physical attitude at all times.) Never from the moment they entered was there any doubt who was inferior to whom. All the rigid requirements of military subordination were enforced, all points of etiquette and every demand of the regulations strictly followed. Mahan would demand that they not only learn engineering and tactics, but that every manner and habit that characterizes an officer—gentlemanly deportment, strict integrity, devotion to duty, chivalric honor, and genuine loyalty—be pounded into them. His aim was to “rear soldiers worthy of the Republic.”10

  He was a merciless cross-examiner with an eerie talent for finding the one unprepared cadet in the section and publicly exposing him. He had an almost intuitive feel for the exact amount of information in a cadet’s brain about the lesson at hand, and could quickly separate that kernel of knowledge from the chaff of unpreparedness. The ultimate horror at West Point was being caught unready by Professor Mahan.11

  This irritable, erudite, captious soldier-professor had never seen a battle—and it was said never went for a walk without an umbrella.12 Yet he was America’s foremost military mind. Nearly all of the textbooks in his engineering and science of war classes he wrote himself. And “woe betide the unfortunate who misunderstood any paragraph” in any one of them.13

  Mahan believed with Theophile D’Oremieulx that there was nothing new to be learned after Napoleon, that “the task of the present … has been to systematize, and imbody in the form of doctrine, what was then largely traced out.”14 Mahan’s interpretation of Napoleon was based mainly on the theories of Baron Henri Jomini, the Swiss military historian who had served under Bonaparte and was the leading interpreter of his campaigns.

  None of Mahan’s admiration for Napoleon, however, was ever meant to preclude an officer from thinking for himself on the battlefield. No two things in his military credo were more important than speed of movement—celerity, that secret of success—or the use of reason.15 Mahan preached these twin virtues so vehemently and so often through his chronic nasal infection that the cadets called him “Old Cobbon Sense.”16

  One of Professor Mahan’s most remarkable and feared weapons was his biting sarcasm, which Dabney Maury was to experience firsthand. On a good tall day Maury stood 5 feet 3 inches in his stocking feet. On one of those days, while the class was pondering the construction of fortifications, Mahan asked:

  “Mr. Maury, what is the height of the breast-height slope?”

  “Five feet, sir,” Maury replied.

  Mahan turned that exceedingly cold eye on him and said, “If it were five feet, Mr. Maury, you could not shoot over it.”17

  Old Cobbon Sense was the son of Irish immigrants, born in New York City and raised in Norfolk, Virginia. It was from Virginia that he came to the military academy as a cadet in 1820. It was not out of any martial fervor, or even for engineering, that he came. He was studying medicine in Richmond when he heard that drawing was taught at West Point; he loved drawing. He came, graduated at the top of his class in 1824, and went to the engineers. He was so brilliant that he was appointed an acting assistant professor of mathematics while only a third-classman. The army was so impressed with his mind that it sent him to Europe to study engineering and tactics in France. There Lafayette himself took the young officer into his own family and introduced him everywhere. When Mahan returned home in early September 1832 it was to take charge of the department of civil and military engineering at West Point.18

  Now, fourteen Septembers later, he was subjecting the cadets of the class of 1846 to his unparalleled knowledge and acid disposition. He put them to work on permanent fortifications with recitations every day. It was hard, grinding duty. “But ‘Nihil Desperandum’ is my motto,” said George Derby; “there is an end to everything and if I live I do believe I shall graduate one of these days.”19

  Mild weather heralded the entry of the year 1846. But it lasted only until the middle of January, when it turned around and gave them “a little taste of Spitzenbergen.” By February everybody seemed to be down with either a cold, influenza, sore throats, stiff necks, aching faces, or rheumatism. “I think there is more coughing, sneezing, expectorating and flourishing of handkerchiefs on this post than I ever had the pleasure of witnessing before,” Derby said.20

  But who cared. It was 1846, and they were being molded into engineers and officers by Professor Mahan. They now knew the trip hammer theory of the steam engine and were learning all about field fortifications. Soon there was to be the week of military tactics, which would seem all too short considering that this was a military academy. In only nine hours of class time they would learn all that West Point intended to teach them about army organization, order of battle, laying out a military camp, reconnaissance, outpost duties, attack and defense, and the principles of strategy.21 If they were to learn anything else it would have to be somewhere else some other time, very likely on the battlefield. But they had to remember that they were being trained not primarily as warriors, but as engineers.

  By the middle of March, the snow had very nearly disappeared and McClellan was hoping he had seen the last of it. He ached to see the last of everything. “I have become pretty well tired of my four years slavery, & long to be free once more,” he wrote home.22

  Then it was May and the end at last came shimmering into view. “You have no idea in what a state of excitement we have been here,” McClellan now wrote home. “Everything is topsy-turvy in our heads.”23

  A final improbable sign that the “long agony” was about over came on May 23, when Professor Mahan, he of the cold eye and unsympathetic ways, told them they would recite for him no more. He told them that they had done well, the first section in particular, and that “he returned us thanks for the very handsome manner in which we had uniformly conducted ourselves toward him.” Their conduct, he said, “had been all that an instructor could wish for or expect from his pupils.” He had made them into soldiers worthy of the Republic. Derby noticed that the great professor seemed “very much affected and could hardly speak as he bade us goodbye forever—as a section.”24

  So they were about through, the largest class in West Point’s forty-four-year history. Fifty-nine of them had survived to see the end, bracketed on the final merit roll by Charles Seaforth Stewart at the top and demerit-ridden George Edward Pickett at the bottom.

  McClellan had wanted to finish first, as he had vowed he would, but he fell short one fil
e. He would have to settle for second. George Derby had finished seventh, despite his legendary pranks. Dabney Maury had finished in the back side of the middle in thirty-seventh place. William Gardner had finished within sight of George Pickett in fifty-fifth. William Dutton had placed fifteenth, a finish that would make his fiancée proud. George Stoneman, Jackson’s quiet roommate, had finished thirty-third.25

  There was no doubt in this class’s mind who their real star had been. It had not been Stewart, despite the final rankings. It had been the born and bred little gentleman from Philadelphia. Gardner spoke for most of them when he said that McClellan was thought to be “the ablest man in the class.… We expected him to make a great record in the army, and if opportunity presented, we predicted real military fame for him.”26

  McClellan’s shining potential was universally recognized, not only by his classmates, but among all the cadets of his time.27 “Prepossessing,” was how they described him.28 Yet with all his personal prepossession, he “bore every evidence of gentle nature and high culture, and his countenance was as charming as his demeanor was modest and winning.”29 “A pleasanter pupil,” said one of his instructors, “was never called to the blackboard.”30

  Tom Jackson, thought by his classmates to be as unprepossessing as McClellan was prepossessing,31 was still marching straight ahead in the end, just as if he had been caught again in the rain. He finished in seventeenth place and it was said by his classmates, only half in jest, that “if we stay here another year, old Jack will be head of the class.”32

  Jackson had earned their respect, if not their love. “Cold and undemonstrative as he was,” said Dabney Maury, who should know, “he was absolutely honest and kindly, intensely attending to his own business.”33 Parmenas Taylor Turnley, another of Jackson’s roommates, a fellow country boy from Tennessee, believed that “while there were many who seemed to surpass him in intellect, in geniality, and in good-fellowship, there was no one of our class who more absolutely possessed the respect and confidence of all.” In the end Old Jack with his desperate earnestness, his unflinching straightforwardness, and his high sense of honor came to be regarded by his classmates, almost despite himself, with something akin to affection.34

  It might have surprised them had they known that he had come to look upon them in the same way. “It grieves me,” he wrote his sister, “to think that in a short time I must be separated from amiable & meritorious friends whom an acquaintance of years has endeared to me by many ties.”35 Wistfully he had written in an earlier letter that gone “were the days of my youth; they have been succeeded by days of quite a different aspect; manhood with all its cares.”36

  The men of 1846 would now take their manhood and all its cares out into the United States Army—as brevet second lieutenants until openings in the regular service gave them real rank. In the old army promotion came only when someone above left the service, died, or was killed. Things, therefore, looked more promising, for Mexico was a powder keg. War was surely just ahead. Promotions might start coming more rapidly now.

  There was the matter of where they would next be assigned. That was why their final class standings were so important; they dictated where they could and could not go and would likely set the compass for the rest of their army careers. Most of them would have preferred the engineers, for prestige’s sake. But few were called, for engineers were “species of gods.” So rarified was that branch of the service that even top-ranked cadets in some classes were not recommended for it after graduation. But this class had been outstanding. The first four finishers had been recommended—Stewart, McClellan, Charles E. Blunt, and John G. Foster. Just below this sanctified quartet in the hierarchal order stood four more good enough to qualify as topographical engineers. The “topogs” were but “demigods” in the order of things, but they were god enough. Finishers ranked five (Edmund Lafayette Hardcastle) to eight (Jesse L. Reno) qualified. They included George Derby.

  In the order of rankings below these divines came ordnance, the “connecting link between the deities and ordinary mortals.” And behind ordnance came the ordinary mortals themselves, the graduates who by their final rankings qualified for the artillery, infantry, mounted rifles, or dragoons. All of the class ranked between numbers nine (Clarendon J. L. Wilson) and twenty-seven (Henry N. Ehninger) theoretically qualified for any of those branches from ordnance down if they could wrangle the assignment. They included Jackson. Everybody below them, from number twenty-eight (Thomas F. Castor) to Pickett had only three branches to choose from—the mounted rifles, infantry, or dragoons. It was said of the dragoons, that bottom-most peg in the hierarchy, that “a good, square seat in the saddle was deemed of more importance than brains.”37

  Jackson preferred the artillery, but first, he would go dancing. Maury would go home to see a famous uncle. And Rufus Bacon would die.

  Jackson would go home the way he had come, through Washington. Traveling with him would be the popular Cadmus Wilcox of Tennessee, who before the end of their plebe year had made friends of every member of the class. It was said that no cadet of his time had so many friends and was so universally esteemed.38 Also in the party would be Archibald Blair Botts, called Archie, a Virginian who had finished third from the bottom of the class and nearly matched George Pickett demerit for demerit. The fourth member of the quartet would be Clarendon J. L. (Dominie) Wilson, a bright but liquor-loving Virginian who had finished ninth, but who would choose a square seat in the saddle with the dragoons.

  In Washington the four would take a room together at Brown’s Hotel, right under the roof where the hot air collected on warm summer nights. On reaching the capital Wilcox would go out for the evening and not return until about one o’clock in the morning. When he did return he would find the door locked and the sounds of a boisterous revelry roaring within. Pounding on the door for several futile moments and admitted at last, he would see an astonishing sight. Botts, deadened to the revelry and still dressed in his fine new uniform, would be asleep on the bed. But very much up and about would be Dominie and Old Jack arm-in-arm, dressed in but one garment apiece and singing with stunning effect the Benny Havens drinking song, blasting out original verses of their own composition and executing a barefoot back-step. The racket would spill out into the street and the innkeeper would be obliged to send up his compliments with a request that they hold it down.39

  Dabney Maury would go home to Fredericksburg, happy to be free at last from his “four years of incarceration,” those “four weary, profitless years,” made livable only by the fast friendships and “the love of the truest people,” which he had found there.40

  Maury issued from naval stock. His father, John Minor Maury, had been a flag captain in Commodore David Porter’s fleet and had died of yellow fever on the long voyage home from the West Indies, where the fleet had been fighting pirates. Fatherless at the age of two, young Dabney had become the ward of his father’s brother, Matthew Fontaine Maury, a celebrated oceanic scientist who was charting the oceans and would one day win worldwide acclaim as the “Pathfinder of the Seas.” Uncle Matt was a gentle man whom the ocean, despite his great knowledge of it, always made seasick.41

  “Well, Dab, how did you come out?” the kindly uncle would ask.

  “Very poorly, Uncle Matt. I graduated thirty-fifth [an exaggeration—he finished thirty-seventh].”

  The great man would consider his nephew sadly for a moment, then brighten.

  “How many were in the class?” he would ask.

  “There were sixty of us.”

  “That was first rate. You beat me all hollow,” the gracious uncle would say. “I was twenty-seventh and there were only forty in my class.”42

  Rufus Bacon, of Maine, had finished fourteen files ahead of Maury at West Point. He had been a leader in the class, a cadet lieutenant in his final year. He would be granted an authorized leave of absence on the first of July and return home. On August 12 he would be found dead. On the last day of that month his classmate Truman Seym
our, of Vermont, would write a letter to William Dutton, home at last in Connecticut with his sweetheart, Lucy Matthews.

  “Bacon is dead,” Seymour would write. “Cut his throat in a fit of derangement—brought on by brain fever.” The first of the class of 1846 had entered the bivouac of the dead. “Whose time will it [be] to go next,” Seymour would wonder. “Heaven help us all—for we all sadly need help!”43

  But all of that was yet to come. First they had to shut the door on their past four years.

  Their last annual examination came and went, raising little of the terror in their hearts that the first one had three summers before. The board of surgeons saw them one more time, and suddenly it was over. There was nothing more to do, no more books to read, no more lessons to recite. They marched in their final dress parade—smartly now, no longer the clumsy plebes they had once been—before the throng of officials and summer visitors.

  The Post Orders on June 18 directed that they be relieved from military duty with the battalion of cadets, to be carried on the rolls pending further orders. Two days later the orders came. They were relieved from duty at the military academy and directed to repair to their homes, there to await their assignments.44

  Thousands of miles away war had erupted with Mexico. When they said their last farewells at the steamboat landing they were certain they would be summoned together soon again to the seat of war and to the wellspring of glory. There would be plenty of laurels for everybody if they could just get there in time.

  PART 2

  GONE

  FOR A

  SOLDIER

  War

  at

  Last

  When George McClellan heard the news, he was exultant. Graduation had come with a gratifying bonus. Relations with Mexico had gone completely to pot. “Hip! Hip! Hurrah!” he wrote home. “War at last sure enough! Aint it glorious!”