If a cadet survived mathematics, he survived West Point, for in the antebellum years, the institution praised by President Andrew Jackson as 'the best school in the world' was exclusively dedicated to minting engineers and scientists, not just for the army, but for the country. One cadet wrote his fiancé — whom he intended to marry after graduation, when dismissal would no longer be his penalty — that the whole idea of the place was 'to make efficient officers who are capable of performing any scientific task that may be imposed upon them.'

Other subjects followed well behind math in importance. In the first two years, cadets took French, so they would be able to read, if not speak, the language of Napoleon, the world's great military exemplar. In the second year, drawing was added, because engineers must know how to render. Ethics — a catchall for English grammar, rhetoric, geography, ancient and modern history, moral philosophy, and political science — was taught by the chaplain and made mere cameo appearances in the last year. Infantry tactics, use of the sword, and horseback riding (the one thing that Ulysses S. Grant, thought to be the finest horseman ever to pass through West Point, excelled in) eventually found their way into the curriculum. In the third year the sciences kicked in. It was then time to apply all that mathematics. And in the fourth and final year, civil and military engineering — the arts of field and permanent fortifications — and the science of war climaxed the cadets' West Point years. It was what everything before had been leading up to, the end reason for it all.

Though rigid, demanding, and geared toward the long term, the West Point courses of study did present the young men with a few opportunities for instant gratification. Survey instruments, for example, could be fixed on the windows of homes and quarters on the post and in the nearby town of Buttermilk Falls (now Highland Falls). Cadets so inclined had the opportunity to peep at forms more compelling than logarithms. In the summer, there were the encampments, welcome respites where soldiering returned along with artillery training in its many guises: the art of moving guns, placing them, firing them, concocting cartridges, fuses, and gunpowder.

Academic subjects were jack-hammered into the cadets' heads by way of an instructional method called recitation. Cadets boned their subjects by lamplight and came prepared the next day to be randomly called on to solve a problem. The chosen cadet rose and advanced to the accursed blackboard. When finished, he about-faced and explained his handiwork to the professor. Grades were assigned according to the quality of the work from three, the highest, to zero, complete failure.

Each year there were final mass recitations, one in January and the big one in June. Called the 'Inquisition' and the 'Agony' by their victims, they would in large part dictate class standing. Cadets were called to blackboards before the entire faculty to demonstrate what they had learned and remembered. In June, the examiners included the Board of Visitors, generally headed by the general-in-chief of the army himself, Winfield Scott.

Scott loved West Point, so much that he would retire, die, and be buried there. The great general was one of history's most imposing military specimens — six feet, five inches tall and 300 pounds, 'magnificent in physical proportions & swelling with graceful hauteur,' one cadet wrote — and one of its brightest. His conquest of Mexico in 1847-1848 is considered a masterpiece of great battlefield generalship. Many of the West Point graduates who were to command armies in the Civil War learned the art of battle not at the academy, but at Scott's knee in the Mexican War.

When Grant first saw Scott at West Point, he thought he was 'the finest specimen of manhood my eyes have ever beheld & the most to be envied.' The sight of him caused Grant to dream that'some day I should occupy his place on review.' As the world now knows, Grant would occupy that place, command the Union armies, and rise even higher in rank than the great general himself.

Another imposing figure at the academy was superintendent Sylvanus Thayer, who dominated the academy's early antebellum years. Widely heralded as the 'Father of West Point,' Thayer seized the reins of the school in 1817 at age 32, and over the next 16 years, he firmed the curriculum, set the priorities and procedures, and built the academy into the preeminent engineering and military school in the world. He shaped its character for a century to come.

Pages: 1 2 3 4