Last in Their Class. James Robbins
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production in the Civil War. The tavern was accessible by boat or over ice in the winter, though one was liable to be spotted crossing the barren ice, and furthermore, if the ice broke while a cadet was on the wrong side, he might find himself stranded. A man named Avery opened a tavern between West Point and Benny Havens’, which was also convenient to the prep school established just south of the Academy by former Tac Zebina J. D. Kinsley (whom Edgar Allan Poe’s roommate had pretended to decapitate). Another liquor merchant known as “the Pirate” would periodically appear on the river shore below the hospital (at a spot aptly known as “Pirate’s Cove”) to trade in whiskey, tobacco and other necessities. Tidball noted that “dealings with this individual were considered of a sneaking, low down order as compared with the rollicksome recklessness attending upon running it to Benny Havens.”
Benny’s remained the preferred cadet retreat, a tavern that was enshrined in myth and even in song. In the winter of 1839–40, an assistant surgeon named Lucius O’Brien visited some friends at West Point, who decided to show O’Brien where they used to while away the hours back in their cadet days.20 O’Brien was so taken with Benny Havens’ (or so under the influence) that he penned a drinking song to the tune of the Irish standard, “The Wearing o’ the Green,” which he called, “Benny Havens’ Oh!”
Come, fill your glasses, fellows, and stand up in a row,
To sing 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!
We’ll sing our reminiscences of Benny Havens’, oh!
O’Brien’s song became an instant hit among the cadets, and his original few stanzas were supplemented in the scores by succeeding classes. Today the verses read as a compact history of West Point and the Army. One early and tragic addition commemorates O’Brien’s own death in Florida during the Seminole War:
From the courts of death and danger, from Tampa’s deadly shore,
There comes a wail of manly grief, “O’Brien is no more!”
In the land of sun and flowers his head lies pillowed low,
No more he’ll sing “Petite Coquette” or “Benny Havens’, oh!”
Benny remained popular with the cadets, a friendly purveyor of good cheer in many forms. Henry Heth was a regular, along with Pickett and another member of their clique, Heth’s roommate, a tall, handsome cadet from Indiana named Ambrose Everett Burnside. Heth’s first roommate was Augustus H. Seward, son of William H. Seward, recently governor of New York, later a senator and secretary of state under Presidents Lincoln and Johnson (in the latter capacity negotiating the purchase of Alaska from Russia, known then as “Seward’s Folly”). Gus Seward, like Heth, began to accumulate demerits, and the Superintendent decided to separate them and place them with well-behaved cadets so they might learn from their example.21 Heth was matched up with the respectable Burnside, but the Supe’s plan backfired. Rather than Burnside reforming Heth, the fun-loving Virginian found “a very ready pupil” in the charismatic midwesterner.
“Burnside had but a few demerits when he came to live with me,” Heth recalled, “in a few months he had over a hundred.”22 Burnside’s total record of delinquencies covered two and a half pages. He stayed very close to the edge; he had 198 his first year and 190 his last. Most were for visiting after hours and being late.23 In the fall of 1844, he was sentenced to seven days in prison for feuding, allegedly for assisting another cadet, Tom Lowe, in assaulting the unfortunate Derby (who at that point was only days away from his bloody encounter with Crittenden). The Superintendent hoped that the sentence “afforded a favorable time for Cadet Burnside to reflect in the solitude of his prison walls upon the errors and improprieties of his past conduct.”24
Whether Burnside’s imprisonment had any salutary effect is arguable, but it certainly did not end his forays to Benny Havens’. Heth said they would go on a spree at least twice a week. Burnside, with his rich, resonant singing voice, would entertain regularly at the tavern. Benny declared Burnside and Andrew Jackson to be “the two greatest men that ever trod God’s foot-stool.”25 Burnside had a habit of socializing when returning to barracks under the influence, and Heth had to get him back to the room before he was discovered and expelled. “I would put him to bed and frequently stood at my door with my musket clubbed,” Heth said, “threatening to knock him down if he attempted to leave the room.”
During his final encampment, Heth found a means to augment his opportunities for revelry. He was sent to the hospital with swollen glands, and the doctor wanted him to be treated in a ward the entire summer. Heth asked that he at least be allowed to attend military drills, riding and artillery practice, and the doctor consented. “By this arrangement,” Henry wrote, “if the doctor came to my ward and found me absent, I was supposed to be attending some of these duties and nothing was said. I was thus enabled to visit New York and Newburg, and go pretty much where fancy and inclination prompted; of course I was running a great risk, but I was so in the habit of taking risks, that I presume I became callous.”26 Heth was never caught. Burnside, on the other hand, got five demerits that summer for visiting Henry at the hospital without permission.27 Burnside was not the only one to fall victim to Henry’s frolicsome influences. During his hospital stay, Heth made friends with a Scottish steward named Stoddard who became his regular drinking buddy. Stoddard was fired for missing a morning appointment with the doctor after a night of adventures with Heth. But Henry would not expose his friends to risks he would not take himself. One late night during the 1846 encampment, returning from a round of drinking with Stoddard, Heth happened on a horse and decided to charge the encampment. He dashed through the tents on his mount, exited the Plain and concealed himself in Fort Clinton. Patrols were sent out, but Heth was not discovered. When the camp settled, he charged through again. The search process repeated, again with no result, and Henry made a third charge before he decided that he was tempting fate and headed back to the hospital.
The greatest change in cadet life in this period was in the social sphere. The Academy was no longer the martial monastery it used to be. West Point was well on its way to becoming one of America’s leading resorts. This peculiar development was the product of various circumstances, one of them being the proximity to New York City, less than a day’s trip by riverboat. With the advent of steamboats, the number of passenger vessels making the journey to Albany and back increased, and many made stops at West Point. This was also the heyday of the Hudson River school of painting, with its emphasis on nature and particularly the Hudson Valley, the Catskills and the Berkshires. Works of literature, such as The Last of the Mohicans, also raised awareness of the region.
Visitors were discovering what cadets had always known—that West Point is a place of great natural beauty. Nathaniel Wyche Hunter had described it as “the most beautiful place in the world” in one of the same letters in which he begged his father to be allowed to come home. Cadet Grant described the setting eloquently, saying it was “decidedly the most beautiful place I have ever seen . . . it seems as though I could live here forever, if only my friends could come too.”28 Henry Heth wrote, “I have crossed and hunted in the Rocky Mountains, the mountains of Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina but to me no view equals the view from the back porch of Roe’s Hotel on a moonlit night.”29 The hotel was located at the north edge of the Plain, above the bend in the river, with sweeping views of the valley. It was built in 1829 using proceeds from wood cut on the public lands of the post. The “old north stoop” was also a favored place to escort young ladies, a fact that may have enhanced Heth’s memory.
Traditionally, cadets had their greatest opportunities for social interactions during the furlough after their second year. Furlough was universally praised; as Grant said, “This I enjoyed beyond any other period of my life.” Tidball described it as “that ticket-of-leave period of a cadet’s life when, for the period of two months, he walks the earth a free man, astonishes every beholder with the glitter of his much bebuttoned