Last in Their Class. James Robbins
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was granted clemency as one of the Benny Havens’ Five but later fled the Academy. Jackson did not attempt to close the school, despite the political support he might have been able to muster for the move. West Point was useful, and America needed engineers. But he did begin to insinuate himself into the Academy’s administration, and Thayer soon found himself being frequently second-guessed by the president. Jackson was particularly active in overturning the Superintendent’s disciplinary decisions, which had the effect of humiliating Thayer and emboldening the cadets. As Wyche explained, “Servility is not a principle of their nature.”9
Thomas Gibson, Edgar Allan Poe’s former roommate, was a case in point. After the poet left West Point, his comrade’s pranks became less imaginative and more destructive. Gibson was a serial arsonist and managed to burn down a small building near the barracks. Thayer twice expelled Gibson, but both times Jackson overruled him and reinstated the cadet. After a third court martial, for attempted desertion, Jackson finally let the sentence stand. There were many other instances of conflict. During the 1832 election, for example, Jackson partisans encouraged supporters to plant hickory trees as a sign of support for the president. Thayer awoke one morning to find a pro-Jackson tree planted in the middle of the Plain. An investigation laid the blame on Cadet Ariel Norris, whom Thayer dismissed. Jackson overruled the decision. Norris, thinking himself untouchable, next came to Thayer’s attention by fashioning a makeshift scatter gun out of a candlestick and some brass buttons, and firing it at a Tac. Thayer expelled Norris, this time for good. After Jackson was elected to a second term in November, many in the Corps believed that drastic changes were soon coming. Wyche wrote his sister in December that Jackson “has long thought that the Cadets have been persecuted by the Superintendent and his tyrannical martinets and he is determined on effecting a radical reformation in the Institution or abolishing it altogether. The Superintendent has already the hatred of the Pres. for his conduct during the [Blackhawk] war and it is presumed that he will shortly feel the effects . . . a step which would meet with the unanimous approbation of the Corps.”10
Some cadets were bold enough to try to take their cases directly to the president. Francis Henney Smith and a group of a dozen prepared an appeal on behalf of one of their fellows who had been expelled for drinking at Benny Havens’. They wrote a letter to the president, “an earnest appeal to the old hero in behalf of a son of a gallant soldier of the war of 1812,” Smith said, “adroitly framed to touch the tender feelings of this great man.” Cadet Robert McLane, who had been appointed to West Point by Jackson personally, arranged for an audience with the president through his father, Louis McLane, who was the secretary of state at the time. Cadet Willoughby Anderson delivered the letter to the president at the White House. Jackson perused the appeal and then turned to the waiting cadet.11
“Who wrote this letter?” he asked.
“I don’t know sir,” Anderson said.
“Have you read it?”
“No sir.”
“Go back to West Point and report for duty,” Jackson said, “and tell the young man who wrote this letter, if he don’t look out, I will have his ears cut off.”12 The cadets had courted lèse majesté, and Old Hickory was not to be manipulated.
As the close of the 1833 academic year neared, Wyche remained characteristically pessimistic. He had survived four years of exams, maintained a reasonable disciplinary standing (far higher than he deserved, he admitted), and had only the final examination standing between him and his commission. Nevertheless, he feared the worst. He had become something of a procrastinator, a fact that he freely admitted. When his brother wrote him helpfully suggesting he could use his time better, Wyche wrote back, “As regards a misapplication of my time I admit the fact; and will only say that I cannot be compelled to study.”13 He also had an enduring suspicion that the “Yankee” faculty was out to get him. “Nearly all the instructors here are Yankees,” he had written, “and their so partial to the Yankees that it is almost impossible for a Southerner to stay here; if should he happen to stay it is almost impossible for him to have any standing.”14
When the exam was finally held, the entire class performed extremely well, and Wyche, to his amazement, passed. However, the fates had a final twist for Cadet Hunter. That evening at dinner, Joel Poinsett, the president of the Board of Visitors, a former congressman who would served as secretary of war under Martin Van Buren (and after whom the poinsettia is named) commented that the exams he observed were the best he had ever heard, and added innocently that he did not see how the class could have done so well without knowing the answers beforehand. Poinsett meant this as a compliment to the class, but Colonel Thayer took it as an indictment of the examination. Thayer suggested canceling the results of the exam and testing the cadets again. Poinsett said he did not think that was necessary, that he was really only trying to commend the cadets, not accuse them of cheating.15 However, Thayer was adamant. Wyche, despairing, faced the Yankee examiners a second time. But luck was with him. He passed, albeit barely, and in the final academic rankings he stood as the Goat of his class. “Noble hearted Hunter,” as Francis H. Smith later described him, had made a lasting impression on his classmates, and they called on him to give a valedictory oration on their leaving West Point. This honor, the recognition of his peers, was a greater tribute than any the institution could bestow. “I had much rather have this expression of their confidence in my ability to perform such a task,” Wyche wrote, “than to be head of the class.”16
For the Class of 1833, the years of preparation for their careers as officers were over. The night before graduation they went to an outcropping on the Plain known as “cremation rock” and built the traditional bonfire of every article they owned that could be consumed—drawing boards, books, furniture—anything they were not taking with them or handing down. They sang and danced around the fire until retreat, and secret celebrations continued long into the night. The next day they wore cadet gray for the last time. Of the 43 graduates that year, 8 were turnbacks from the previous year’s class, and 12 others graduated the following year. Of the original 120 hopefuls who came in with Cadet Hunter, only 47 received Army commissions, a graduation rate of 39 percent.
Neither Wyche, who disliked Colonel Thayer, nor Smith, who admired and would later emulate him, could have known four years earlier that theirs would be the last class of the Thayer era. Thayer had notified the faculty the previous February that this would be his final term as Superintendent. The political pressures had become too great for him. He had submitted his resignation, which had been accepted. The faculty were stunned. They suggested a ceremony, something to commemorate his leave-taking, but Thayer demurred. Partridge had been sent off to great demonstrations by the cadets; Thayer chose to leave in a more dignified fashion. The evening after commencement, he took his usual walk down to the dock to watch the last ship of the day depart, accompanied by several officers and a few cadets. Just before the gangplank was raised, Thayer turned. “Good-bye, gentlemen,” he said, and as the surprised men on the dock watched silently, Thayer boarded the ship and left West Point.17 He never returned. The golden age extolled by Smith—the years that had established West Point as an institution on par with any military academy in the world, and had produced Dennis Hart Mahan, who would become Thayer’s intellectual successor; Robert Parker Parrot, inventor of the Parrot Gun, the most effective cannon used in the Civil War; Henry DuPont, who would found an empire in munitions; and the Confederate trinity of Jefferson Davis, Joseph E. Johnston and Robert E. Lee—this age came abruptly to a close.
THE TACTICAL CURRICULUM AT WEST POINT was designed to produce Napoleonic warriors equipped to fight traditional, European-style wars. Critics of the Academy noted the unlikelihood of such conventional conflict and stated that what the country really needed were Indian fighters. Two decades of relative calm, however, made the debate academic. Most graduates of Thayer’s time saw neither conventional conflict nor frontier war, but instead applied their training to peacetime pursuits.
The most important effect of class rank