America’s Civil War Comes to West Point

On April 12, 1861, at Charleston, South Carolina, General P. G. T. Beauregard, Confederate States of America, West Point graduate and one-time superintendent of the Academy, ordered his gunners to open fire on Fort Sumter. One of those to pull a lanyard was Wade Hampton Gibbes, who had graduated less than a year before. The Union commander at Fort Sumter was Major Robert Anderson, an Academy graduate who had been Beauregard’s artillery instructor at West Point.

The United States Military Academy, like every other institution in America, was torn apart by civil war. It was the last to divide. After the Democratic Convention of 1860, the Academy remained as the only truly national institution left in the United States. It was not surprising that this was so, for as the ‘National Academy’ it had consistently tried to eliminate sectional prejudice and foster national sentiments. As early as 1824 the Board of Visitors had reported that ‘cadets coming from every section of the country contribute much … to the extirpation of local prejudices and sectional antipathies.’ Five years later Secretary of War John H. Eaton advised President Jackson that the Academy ‘may be looked to as one of the strong bonds of our union.’ The cadets felt a sense of obligation to the Federal Government for their education; as first classman Joseph Ritner put it in a Fourth of July address in 1829, ‘We are the children of the Union … and should ever faction raise the fire-brand of sedition, and spread conflagration, turmoil, and confusion through our devoted land, then let it also be recorded, that from her army, at least, our country received a firm, devoted support.’

At the Academy the common experience of all cadets, regardless of social or sectional background, combined with a feeling of solidarity they shared as future members of a neglected and even despised profession to strengthen the ordinary bonds of college classmates. West Point was small enough to allow everyone else and to know the name and reputation of those who had preceded them in the Academy. In the Army, and even more so at West Point, the cadet or graduate was isolated from the rest of the world, and his friends and acquaintances were men who had shared the same experiences. The result was a feeling of comradeship, stronger than that in most college fraternities, and it overcame nearly all social, religious, and political differences. Even during the Civil War friendships born at West Point remained; one thinks of Grant sending congratulations across Petersburg’s trenches to George Pickett on the birth of his child. And one remembers also the time when during a truce after Fredericksburg, Custer wrote his classmate, Pelham, ‘I rejoice, dear Pelham, in your success.’ It was, of course, at Fredericksburg that Pelham’s guns did such good work that Lee called him the ‘gallant Pelham.’

The authorities did all they could to prevent politics from dividing the Corps. In the forties, Superintendent Richard Delafield dissolved the Dialectic Society for a year because it was debating subjects such as ‘Has a State under any circumstances the right to nullify an act of Congress?’ When he allowed it to reorganize, he limited it to noncontroversial topics. The Corps of Cadets, however, represented all sections of the country, and in the fifties, as political passions rose, divisions did begin to appear. Fights, especially during election periods, became more frequent. In the aftermath of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859 there were many heated arguments and at least one duel. A Georgia Cadet, Pierce M.B. Young, hanged Brown’s body in effigy from one of the windows at the barracks. In a Fourth of July address the next year first classman William W. McCreery condemned the outbreaks, maintained that the ‘noble Union’ would not dissolve, and concluded, ‘Let us put from us the seeds of sectional strife and draw closer and closer the bonds of this glorious union.’ Two years later Lieutenant McCreery resigned from the army and joined the forces of his native Virginia. He died in action at the Battle of Gettysburg.

In September 1860 an unknown group of cadets held a mock election in the Corps for President. Some 214 of the 278 cadets voted, 99 of them for the Southern Democrat candidate John C. Breckinridge, 47 for the Northern Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, 44 for the Constitutional Union candidate John Bell, and 24 for Republican Abraham Lincoln. Southerners were jubilant, but Yankee cadets were furious. Second classmen Emory Upton of New York claimed that Southerners had prevented Northerners form voting, there was talk that all the tellers were Southerners, and the Yankees dismissed the whole thing as a Southern project.

The final break began just two months later, when the first Southern cadet resigned to join the forces of his native state. Henry S. Farley, a political fire-eater with appropriate red hair, left the Academy on November 19, a month and a day before his state, South Carolina, seceded. Four days after Farley’s departure, another South Carolina cadet, James Hamilton, resigned. In December the remainder of the South Carolina contingent, along with three Mississippians and two Alabamians, also left. One of the Alabama cadets was second classman Charles P. Ball, first sergeant of Company A and heir to the captaincy of the Corps. Ball was one of the most popular cadets. When he was about to leave he revived an old custom, calling the cadets to attention in the mess hall and saying some parting words. A classmate remembered that his voice was clear and strong as he called out, ‘Battalion, attention! Good-bye, boys! God Bless you all!’ Thereupon the members of his class hoisted him onto their shoulders and carried him to the wharf.

Resignation came hard to most Southern cadets, even those who had no qualms about secession. Pierce Young, first classman from Georgia, after his state seceded told his parents ‘you and others down there don’t realize the sacrifice resigning means.’ He reminded them that ‘it is a hard thing to throw up a diploma from the greatest institution in the world when that diploma is in my very grasp and you know that diploma would give me preeminence over the other men in any profession.’ He was hurt because Georgia had offered him only a second lieutenancy in her state forces. ‘The idea of giving me a second lieutenant when in a year I would have been offered the same position in the most aristocratic and highly educated army in the world is indeed hard.’ His father advised him to stay on at West Point and graduate, then resign his commission and join the Confederate forces. Young was going to do so, but when the war began decided he could not wait no longer and resigned.

For a brief period during the secession crisis the superintendent was a Southerner, Captain P.G.T. Beauregard. He relieved Delafield on January 23, 1861. A day or so later a cadet from his state of Louisiana called on Beauregard and asked him whether or not he should resign. The Superintendent replied, ‘Watch me: and when I jump, you jump. What’s the use of jumping too soon?’ As soon as the Secretary of War, Joseph Holt, heard rumors that Beauregard intended to resign when Louisiana left the Union, he relieved him and on January 28 Delafield once again assumed the duties of superintendent, this being his third term. He served for six weeks until a replacement, Alexander H. Bowman, could relieve him.

Until the second week in April, most of the attention at West Point centered on Southern officers and cadets, as everyone speculated on which ones would resign and which would not. Perhaps to hide their own doubts and misgivings, the Southerners tended to proclaim their views often loudly, and they assumed that most if not all the officers and cadets agreed with them. The idea that the Army and West Point were pro-slavery was popular throughout much of the South. In February 1861 Lieutenant Oliver O. Howard, an instructor at the Academy, received an offer of a professorship in North Carolina, with the final words, ‘As an officer of the army, I presume, of course, that you entertain no views on the peculiar institution which would be objectionable to a Southern Community.’ And when Lieutenant Alexander McCook accepted the colonelcy of an Ohio regiment, a Kentucky officer at the Academy said in McCook’s hearing, ‘A West Point man who goes into the volunteers to fight against the South forgets every sentiment of honor!’