Last in Their Class. James Robbins
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D. Kinsley (USMA 1819), then an artillery instructor who was notorious for reporting cadets, and who was active in the temperance movement, which was perhaps a greater sin.
“Well, what of him?” asked Poe.
“He won’t stop me on the road any more!” Gibson growled, brandishing a large, bloodstained knife. “I have killed him!”
“Nonsense!” Poe retorted. “You are only trying one of your tricks on us.”
“I didn’t suppose you would believe me,” Gibson said, “so I cut off his head and brought it—here it is!” He reached out the door, grabbed the gander by the legs and swung it into the room over his head, knocking out the only candle and scuttling it across the floor. The room instantly went dark. Gibson was barely visible, holding aloft his ghastly prize. The visiting cadet panicked, leapt out the window into the slop tub below, and ran to North Barracks screaming that Kinsley was dead and his head was in Number 28. A general excitement began to spread outside, but soon subsided. After a few moments Poe relit the candle. He and Gibson found their roommate sitting in the corner, staring blankly, paralyzed in utter horror. “It was some time before we could restore him to reason,” Gibson said.
Poe’s humorous rhymes, mischievous nature and access to contraband made him a favorite among the Corps, but few took him very seriously as a student. David E. Hale, a yearling, wrote that Poe “is thought a fellow of talent here but he is too mad a poet to like mathematics.” Gibson recorded that Poe “utterly ignored” his studies. Cullum called Poe a “slovenly, heedless boy, very erratic, inclined to dissipation,” who “of course, preferred making verses to solving equations.” But Poe’s peers underrated him. He may have been eccentric, whimsical, and ill disciplined, but academically Poe was in the first section. At the board meeting of January 4, 1831, he placed 17th out of 87 cadets in mathematics, and third in his class in French. By contrast, twenty-seven plebes were “found” that January and sent home. Poe might have looked forward to a successful stay at the Academy. Yet one month later, he was brought up on multiple charges of “gross neglect of all duty” and “disobedience of orders.” He pleaded guilty to most of them and was dismissed. Poe left West Point on February 19 and headed for New York with a terrible cold, no overcoat, and twelve cents in his pocket.
The reason Poe departed remains a mystery. He later claimed to have left because his stepfather had died and not given him an inheritance. “The army does not suit a poor man,” he wrote, “so I left W. Point abruptly, and threw myself upon literature as a resource.” This was a fabrication. John Allan lived until March 1834, though it was true that Poe received no portion of Allan’s $750,000 estate and should not have expected any of it. Money had been an enduring source of friction between them, and Allan had grown to despise his ward. Poe sent an angry, self-pitying letter to Allan the day before his Academic Boards, asking for money and complaining about his poor treatment. “You sent me to W. Point like a beggar,” he wrote. “The same difficulties are threatening me as before at Charlottesville—and I must resign.” He pleaded with Allan to send a permission letter to the Superintendent. Allan wrote on the back of Poe’s missive, “I do not think the Boy has one good quality,” and he did nothing. Ironically, Poe could easily have attained separation from the Corps by purposely failing the first examination and confirming everyone’s expectations that he was a “January colt.”
Poe seems to have decided to leave West Point the previous October, when Allan remarried and dashed whatever lingering hopes Poe might have had of becoming his heir. He began to amass demerits and commit acts intended to court official retribution. One legend has it that he reported for drill by the letter of the regulation, “with cross belts and under arms,” wearing only white gloves and bandoliers, but not his uniform. The story is not true; but Poe did rack up an impressively poor disciplinary record in a brief time. The final blow was when he simply stopped reporting for formations for the whole month of January 1831. He skipped parades, reveille, classes, chapel and other mandatory gatherings. This brought on his court martial. Two days after he left the Academy, Poe sent a very bitter letter from New York to his stepfather, claiming that he had been dismissed because of illness. Allan described it as “a relic of the Blackest Heart & deepest ingratitude alike, destitute of honour & principle every day of his life.” The two never reconciled. Given the conflicting evidence, most of it from Poe himself, the truth behind why he sabotaged his West Point career may never be known.
That spring a second edition of Poe’s Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems was published in New York, dedicated “To the U.S. Corps of Cadets.” Colonel Thayer allowed the Corps to make an advance purchase at $1.25 per copy, and 135 cadets signed up. They expected to receive a collection of the satirical and humorous poems that Poe had issued in streams from Number 28 during his brief tenure at the Academy. When the books arrived, they were found to be poorly bound, crudely printed on cheap paper, and, to the disappointment and disgust of the Corps, filled with serious poetry. “For months afterward quotations from Poe formed the standing material for jests in the Corps, and his reputation for genius went down at once to zero,” Gibson wrote. “I doubt if even the ‘Raven’ of his after-years ever entirely effaced from the minds of his class the impression received from that volume.” This offense more than anything—willfully inflicting literature on his classmates—forever stained Edgar Allan Poe’s memory at the Academy.8
Years later, General Scott, who had met Poe at West Point and been favorably impressed, contributed to a collection for the poet, who was then very ill and in the care of a benefactress, Marie Louise Shew. Scott gave five dollars and stated that he wished he could make it five hundred. He dismissed Poe’s peculiar public persona, observing that he had “noble and generous traits that belonged to the old and better school. True-hearted America,” he added, “ought to take care of her poets as well as her soldiers.”
Noble Hearted Hunter
THE NOTORIETY OF BENNY HAVENS’ notwithstanding, by the 1830s West Point’s reputation as an academic institution was firmly established, particularly in engineering and mathematics. West Point graduates were building the nation’s infrastructure, overseeing the construction of roads, bridges, canals, railroads, lighthouses and harbors. They were surveying and mapping uncharted territories and opening the West to settlement. Graduates of West Point, as serving Army officers or civilians, were making a positive impact on the development of the United States in ways far greater than their numbers would suggest. But criticism of West Point had never abated. Opponents repeated the same arguments made since the Academy’s founding—that it was elitist, antidemocratic, and the potential source of a military class that could threaten constitutional government. Populist congressman Davy Crockett denounced the Academy as a haven for the “sons of the rich.” Alden Partridge, still nursing his grudge against Thayer, wrote an inflammatory pamphlet under the pseudonym “Americanus,” bluntly entitled, The Military Academy at West Point Unmasked: or, Corruption and Military Despotism Exposed.
Criticism coalesced when Andrew Jackson was elected president in 1828. Jackson’s election was a watershed in American politics. “Jacksonian Democracy” was the crystallization of the anti-elite sentiment and radical egalitarianism that typified popular conceptions of government on the frontier. Jackson himself was the embodiment of the idealized citizen-soldier, a Tennessee militia officer who rose to public prominence and the rank of major general by defeating the Creek Indians in 1814, and achieved bona fide hero status by defeating British regulars in the Battle of New Orleans the next year. His outnumbered and decidedly mixed band of western militiamen, Choctaw Indians, pirates, freedmen and local citizens, bested elite British forces led by the brother-in-law of the duke of Wellington, Lord Parkenham, who fell in the battle. To the proponents of militia forces this confirmed the superiority of the doughty backwoodsman over the trained professional. “Old Hickory’s” triumph reinvigorated the American martial myth that had its origins at Lexington and Concord, and capped the unfortunate conflict with an exceptional, if immaterial, U.S. victory.
Jackson had mixed opinions about West Point, and he disliked Thayer particularly. He had something of an expert on Academy life close at hand; his presidential private secretary and nephew, Andrew Jackson Donelson, had nearly been dismissed in the first wave of Thayer reforms. He graduated second in the Class of