FRANCIS HENNEY SMITH, United States Military Academy Class of 1833 and founder of the Virginia Military Institute, said that his class “always prided themselves in the opinion that this was the golden era of West Point.” Smith was looking back through a tumultuous half century of war and reconstruction at the idealized Academy of his youth. It was a time when the Long Gray Line had not yet grown long, and had only recently turned gray, before the Mexican War made heroes of many West Point graduates and before the Civil War turned them from classmates to enemies. West Point, like the nation it served, was young, growing, and still finding its way. Smith’s classmate Nathaniel Wyche Hunter was perhaps more typical in the perspective he had after his first month at the Academy: “I never hated a place so bad in all my life.”1
Coming to West Point was a culture shock for many cadets, particularly those from the South. Hunter—or “Wyche,” as he was known to the Corps of Cadets—came from a well-to-do family in the town of Powelton, Hancock County, Georgia. He arrived at the West Point public landing in June 1829, to no particular fanfare. He was met by the post porter, a former soldier whose missing right arm had been replaced by a hook. The Corps had entered its summer encampment, and Wyche was immediately assigned a small dirt-floored tent on the Plain, where he would remain until the academic year began in August. Encampment was a rude introduction to life at the Academy. “It is a time of joy and merriment to the old cadets,” Wyche wrote his father, “but a time of trouble and fatigue to the new ones. The new cadets are compelled to clean the parade ground, before the tents, in the tent, make the beds, clean the ditches, bring water, while the old cadets fiddle, dance, sing, get drunk and be merry.”
The daily schedule was punishing: up by four in the morning, if not earlier, with drill until breakfast at seven. Cadets studied until 1 P.M., took an hour for lunch, continued studying until four, and then drilled until seven o’clock and dinner. In addition to the continuous schedule of study and drill, cadets had to stand their daily share of sentry duty. “Our duties while sentinel are enough to kill any man from the South in four years,” Wyche wrote. They stood watch for four hours during the day and another four at night; “It matters not if it is raining fire, we have to stand and carry our guns upon our arms. I’ve nearly worn out my coat sleeve.” When he did have time to study, there was so much noise he found it difficult to concentrate, and nighttime storytelling lubricated by drink was endemic (if against regulations) among the cadets. “Not a day has passed since I’ve been here but someone had been drunk.” They slept on the ground inside their tents, with no mattresses or cushions. “I have slept upon a blanket and covered with my cloak every night since I’ve been here,” Wyche wrote. “What sleeping!”
Albert E. Church, who graduated first in his class in 1828, wrote fifty years later that the food at the time was “excellent plain fare . . . surely we never had on West Point so excellent bread and butter.” It lacked variety, but “everything was neat, wholesome and well cooked.” Wyche had a much different take: “rye bread, rancid butter and oak leaf tea” for breakfast; dinner was “boiled beef (such as you never heard of in your life), Irish potatoes, the meanest I ever saw,” and a pudding made from the leftover breakfast bread.
Encampment lasted from June until the end of August. Cadets who had completed two years at West Point were granted a furlough for the summer, but in those days traveling home was so expensive that many remained at the Academy for the entire four years. At the end of his first encampment, Wyche wrote to his brother (addressed from “West Point—Hog Hole”): “Fatigued and disgusted beyond conception with the noise of camp I can with difficulty compose myself sufficiently to enable me to write. Could you but for one day see with your own eyes the labour and fatigue we have to undergo you would exclaim with me there is no place like home.”
Wyche’s first summer at West Point was difficult, but it was all according to plan. The trials the cadets faced were part of the vision of the Superintendent, Sylvanus Thayer.2 Thayer had been appointed to the Academy as a cadet by its founder, Thomas Jefferson, in 1807, having recently graduated from Dartmouth at the top of his class. He completed his course of studies the next year and returned in 1809 for a brief tour as a junior instructor. Thayer came to the Academy at a time when it was still struggling to establish its identity, and failing badly. There was no set curriculum, no age limits (cadets ranged in age from preteen to forty-one), and few rules, infrequently enforced. “All order and regulation, either moral or religious, gave way to idleness, dissipation and irreligion . . . ,” wrote John Lillie, a cadet who had entered at the age of ten and a half but departed after several years of fruitless effort. “[It was] well that I left that place of ruin.”3 Congress considered reforms in 1812, but with the onset of the war with Britain, its attention was diverted and the Academy almost expired.
Thayer served as a staff officer during the war and witnessed severe deficiencies throughout the military establishment that contributed to the poor performance of American arms. In 1815, then a brevet major, he was chosen to travel to Europe along with Colonel William McRee, a hero of the late war, to study military education in the more advanced nations. The French in particular had a long academic legacy: King Henry IV established a military prep school at La Fleche in 1604, and the Ecole Polytechnique was regarded as the leading center of scientific and military learning in the world. Thayer was an admirer of Napoleon, and given the recent war between the United States and Britain, he and McRee were not disposed to take lessons from the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. Passage to France was difficult; conflict was winding down on the Continent, and the officers were in port in England when word came of Waterloo. Nevertheless, Thayer and McRee managed to maneuver successfully through the postwar chaos. They learned a great deal about the French system and used this knowledge to devise a plan for reforming West Point.
President James Monroe ordered Thayer to the Academy in 1817 to assume the superintendency from Alden Partridge. Known as “Old Pewt” for the pewter gray uniforms he introduced, which have become emblematic of West Point, Partridge had been a disaster as Superintendent, but he was popular with the cadets because he resisted all attempts at imposing discipline. Partridge had not been informed of the change of command. He countermanded Thayer’s orders, and a controversy erupted that led to Partridge’s court martial. Though acquitted of serious wrongdoing, Partridge resigned his commission and moved to Vermont, where he founded the American Literary, Scientific and Military Academy, later renamed Norwich University.
Thayer’s mission was to bring order and intellectual rigor to the Academy, and he set about it with enthusiasm. He announced that henceforth cadets would be judged by merit alone, and subordination to the code of discipline was to be a defining value. Thayer devised entrance exams, established age limits and enforced the rules of behavior. Favoritism was dead. The worst disciplinary cases were hauled before courts of inquiry and expelled. Periodic and largely unaccounted-for vacations were replaced by strict leave requirements—no furlough for two years, and none after that until graduation. Recreational reading and board games were banned. Free time vanished. Days were filled with instruction, exercises and drill; evenings were given over to study. Thayer made West Point a difficult school to get into and a tougher place to remain.
Many cadets did not welcome Thayer’s reforms, particularly those who were asked to leave. Those who longed for a return to the laxity of the Partridge years attempted to sidestep the chain of command and brought various complaints against Thayer to higher authorities. However, the new Superintendent had the strong backing of former Superintendent General Joseph G. Swift (one of two USMA graduates in 1802), as well as the president and the secretary of war, and the initial