They came as teenagers from every state in the Union, wearing every mode of dress from country homespun to tailored city surcoats. In their freshman were officially known as plebes (perhaps from plebeian, ‘a commoner’), though upperclassmen called them ‘things, ‘animals,’ ‘reptiles,’ and ‘beasts.’ Despite their differences, these young men were united by a shared distinction: each of them had passed stiff entrance requirements. Each had been appointed by a U.S. congressman, was no younger than 16 and no older than 21, measured at least five feet tall, had no deformities, and was fit for the rigors of military duty. Each one had demonstrated proficiency in fundamental arithmetic. And every one of them was single; even overtly having a girlfriend was grounds for dismissal.

They were the antebellum cadets of the United States Military Academy at West Point. And although these scrawny schoolboys could not foresee it, they would one day face each other in battle, leading rival American armies in a hard-fought civil war.

In 2002, West Point celebrated the 200th anniversary of its founding. But one period stands out as the golden age of the venerable academy along the Hudson River in southeastern New York. It is the period from the 1820s to 1861. Those years and the men they produced still color the way we look at West Point, and it was the legacy of this era that the Civil War’s professional officers embodied.

The future commanders of the Union and Confederacy came to the academy for all sorts of personal reasons. Some of them simply found the place irresistibly alluring. Teresa Vielé, the wife of a graduate of the class of 1847, described West Point in 1858 as ‘that mammoth trap…where the couleur de rose of army life serves as a bait for the unsophisticated, where reality wears the gloss of romance, and military glory appears in the brightest holiday dress, accompanied by all the poetry of war. Most delusive spot, where even the atmosphere seems heavily freighted with martial music and martial association.’

The cadets came, many of them, not looking much different from Tom Jackson, the country bumpkin from Virginia who would become the renowned Stonewall. In 1842, Jackson strode onto the north landing along the Hudson River, where the majestic river, flowing down the highlands, meets the foremost point of land on its west bank, elbows around it to the east, and continues southward to New York harbor and on to the Atlantic. The rough-cut Virginian threw his two worn saddlebags over his shoulders and toiled up the winding road that led to the Plain, the large patch of flat ground where cadets marched and camped. Four fellow Virginia plebes, future Confederate generals all, watched him coming, and one of them, Dabney Herndon Maury, saw the resolute look in his eye. Turning to the other three — Ambrose Powell Hill, George E. Pickett, and Birkett Davenport Fry — Maury said, ‘That fellow looks as if he had come to stay.’

West Point was a remote outpost on the river then, what the writer Henry Adams would one day call a ‘high green stage,’ isolated in its grandeur from most of the rest of America, an incubator of chronic homesickness. George Brinton McClellan, Jackson’s classmate, who would command all of the Union armies for a time and who had arrived at the academy earlier that same June, wrote home in dismay that he was ‘as much alone as if in a boat in the middle of the Atlantic. Not a soul here cares for, or thinks of me. Not one here would lift a finger to help me; I am entirely dependent on myself — must think for myself — direct myself, & take the blame of all my mistakes, without anyone to give me a word of advice.’

It did not get much easier anytime soon for the young plebes putting in at the West Point landing. They were thrust immediately into the academic and physical screening process. An empty blackboard at their front, a battery of frowning faculty at their rear, they were told to demonstrate ability in rudimentary arithmetic. For some the ordeal brought gut-wrenching terror. Fellow cadets watched with mixed amusement and sympathy as Jackson suffered through it. Single-mindedly intent on passing, but as much at sea in arithmetic as his classmate George McClellan wrote he was in the surroundings, Jackson labored at the board, sweat streaming down his face. As he labored he swiped at the perspiration with the cuff of his coat, first the right sleeve, then the left. Tension mounted in the room as he struggled to come to terms with vulgar and decimal fractions. His anguish, and the examining board’s, ended only when he was allowed at last to sit down. He thankfully did so, and the examiners turned aside to hide the smiles they could no longer suppress.

At the hospital, on its quiet knoll overlooking the Hudson, the would-be cadets ran the gauntlet of three doctors, where their limbs were probed for ringbone and spavin, chests thumped for soundness, teeth examined for decay, feet inspected for bunions, and apparent deformities clucked over. To test their vision, a dime was held up at the far end of the examining room, and the cadets were asked whether it was showing heads or tails.

The survivors marched immediately onto the Plain to the summer encampment, where they began to learn to be soldiers. The Plain on which they marched is the same as today’s Plain only in configuration. It is still a 40-acre terrace in a rock cradle high above the Hudson. But it was not pancake flat, grass-covered, sleekly manicured, and bordered by sidewalks as it is today. Rather, it was unlevel, dusty in summer, muddy or frozen in winter, and pitted in all seasons.

The plebes would march across it uncountable times on their way to becoming soldiers, though to call their movement marching was to stretch the definition of the word. As one of the young men later mused, they were a shuffling mob, ‘as unused to marching as sheep,’ halting irregularly, bunching up, tramping on one another’s heels. ‘What in the world is so awkward as a plebe?’ someone asked. The plebes contrasted utterly with the graduating class that marched onto the Plain every June in lock step with clockwork precision to cascading fireworks for their finest hour at West Point — the hour of leaving. One awed plebe wrote home that horse-drawn cannon boomed at graduation, ‘balls & bombs flew about like hail. It seemed as if the earth would open.’ The music began to build from the distance, and the band marched on playing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and ‘Home Sweet Home,’ leaving no dry eye on the Plain.

Through the summer, the encamping plebes manned bellowing artillery, standing in the melting sun, and were nearly deafened by the roar of the recoiling guns. It was a dirty business. ‘I have changed my pants 4 times in one day & had my boots blacked as many times,’ one plebe wrote home. ‘If you step out of our tent with your coat not buttoned with every button & hooked in the neck & with clean white gloves you are reported…. It never seems a reality to me.’

Every cadet soon learned that demerits dictated behavior at West Point and that they were parceled out with maddening liberality for a wide assortment of offenses. Two hundred demerits in one year bought irreversible dismissal. Many cadets nearing that fatal barrier found they had to ‘bone,’ or work at, behavior as hard as they boned mathematics. To go demerit-free for a year, as Jackson did once, was exemplary. To go demerit-free for the entire four years, as did Robert E. Lee, the great commander-to-be of the Army of Northern Virginia, was a miracle.

If demerits dictated behavior, drums dictated the passage of time. Drums pounded everywhere. Drums were the heartbeat of West Point, always throbbing, beating out the changes of the day. Drums were the first sounds that the sleeping cadets heard at each day’s beginning. Drums were the last sounds they heard at day’s end.

The end of summer encampment, the last day of August, was a public event. The Plain swarmed with spectators, men and women, and the drums hammered as all tents were struck at the same instant, in one final tribute to precision and farewell to summer. The academic year that began the next day was to be the plebes’ crucible. They would start living like students rather than soldiers. They all dreaded it.

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