After the War of 1812, Thayer, himself an early West Point graduate, son of a Massachusetts farmer, was sent to Europe to study the military schools of France, where he shaped his views of what a military academy ought to be. He was reserved, austere, and handsome, though he was a lifelong bachelor who appeared to love only the academy. His promptness was legendary, his appearance meticulous, his knowledge prodigious. He seemed omniscient, knowing everything about every cadet.

When he resigned in 1833 after what seemed to him unwarranted political interference in academy affairs by President Jackson, he strolled to the dock, shook hands all around, and abruptly and without prior announcement, boarded a steamship and left. He remained in the army for another 25 years, but never returned to West Point until the day he was buried.

The middle and late antebellum years at West Point belonged to Richard Delafield, who served two hitches as superintendent, from 1838 to 1845 and from 1856 to 1861. Delafield was a distinguished military engineer who had graduated first in his class of 1818. He was also a master of the pun, which inspired cadets to coin the nickname Dicky the Punster. Pudgy and sandy-haired, he had a nose like an eagle's beak, on top of which was perched a pair of small Benjamin Franklin glasses through which he saw everything that went on. He was an omnipresent, ironhanded, and tireless seeker of petty infractions.

Delafield took pride in making changes. One of the things he changed was the cadet uniform. He transferred the buttons from the sides of the trousers and ran them up the front, fly-fashion. The alteration pleased the cadets but scandalized his wife and the other women of the post. In the end, Delafield was a gifted administrator who was generally unpopular with cadets and with much of the faculty. The day he left in 1845, the Irish janitor observed, 'When the Major went down to the wharf to leave the Pint he was followed by many a dry eye.'

The third standout administrator of the antebellum era was Robert E. Lee, a member of the class of 1829. He was the best-behaved cadet in West Point history and went on to become easily the school's most popular superintendent. Under his watch from 1852 to 1855, the academy added greatly to its already considerable lustre.

These three premier antebellum superintendents were endowed with a faculty assembled mainly by Thayer. The cream of the crop was a quartet of academic giants known and respected worldwide in the disciplines of engineering, science, and mathematics. West Point graduates themselves, they were the heart and soul of the academy.

Dennis Hart Mahan of the class of 1824 — the professor of engineering and tactics, and the guru of fortifications and the science of war — dominated the academic board. He ruled his classrooms wielding an intimidating accumulation of knowledge and a biting sarcasm. A disciple of Napoleon, he constantly preached the virtue of common sense in battle, though in his reedy, nasally congested voice, the term came out as something like 'cobbon sense.' The cadets pounced on the opportunity to coin another derisive nickname: Old Cobbon Sense. Mahan authored his own textbooks and would lash out at any unfortunate cadet who admitted not understanding what he had written. He never experienced battle firsthand, but he possessed the most acute theoretical military mind of his time. Only Winfield Scott influenced the West Point-trained generals of the Civil War more than he.

Like Mahan, William H.C. Bartlett, who taught mechanics, optics, astronomy, and electricity, also wrote his own textbooks. He was considered by many to be the most brilliant cadet of the antebellum years. Graduating in 1826, he was first in his class from start to finish, and like Robert E. Lee, he never received a demerit. An elf-like creature with a mane of unmanageable hair, an out-of-control beard, and a nervous habit of jerking his head from side to side, he happened to be one of the world's foremost astronomers, the first American scientist to use photography in astronomical measurements.

Jacob Bailey of the class of 1832 was a professor of chemistry, mineralogy, and geology. He pioneered the development of the microscope in the field of botany, and scientists all over the world consulted him on the most difficult points of analysis and general physics. He had a sensitive side that loved poetry and hated to flunk students. Naturally, the cadets liked him.

Albert E. Church, who graduated at the top of his class in 1828, the same year Jefferson Davis graduated toward the back of the pack, was one of the foremost mathematical minds of his time and the author of the seminal textbook on calculus. He was short, stocky, brown-eyed, and balding with only a ring of wild hair surviving on the sides and back of his head. Except for the hair, he was as precise as a theorem, and some said just as dry — 'an old mathematical cinder, bereft of all natural feeling,' one cadet complained. As the mathematics professor, he was, by definition, the academy's preeminent flunker of cadets. He had no sense of humor. When one cadet explained in recitation that the reason the plus sign (+) became a minus sign (-) on passing zero was that the vertical cross-piece got knocked off in passage, Church had him arrested.

Just as inspired as that cadet's hypothesis was a concoction by cadet James McNeill Whistler, who eventually dropped out of the class of 1854. Asked to describe the properties of silicon, a nonmetallic chemical element, Whistler labeled it a gas. Church immediately halted him. 'Had silicon been a gas,' Whistler later wrote, 'I would have been a major general.' Instead, he went on to become merely one of the world's preeminent artists.

There were infinite ways to court trouble, demerit, and dismissal at antebellum West Point, and Whistler and cadets of his kind had good command of most of them. One of the most dangerous, but most desirable and rewarding, if successfully executed, was making a nighttime run to Benny Havens's tavern in nearby Buttermilk Falls.

Benny Havens, the proprietor of the establishment, was a genial host, amusing raconteur, and friend of cadets who was gifted at flipping buckwheat flapjacks and mixing a coveted contraband drink called 'hot flip.' The poet Edgar Allan Poe, a highly unsuccessful cadet in the early 1830s who was hopelessly swamped in demerits, considered Benny 'the only congenial soul in the entire god-forsaken place.'

Sneaking off the post in the dead of night for Benny's place was asking for dismissal, but many cadets believed the excursion was worth the risk. Future political and military luminaries were virtually addicted to making the run. These young practitioners of cliff-hanging escapes and late-night returns to quarters included the likes of Jefferson Davis; future Union general Ambrose Burnside; his roommate, future Confederate general Henry Heth; and future Confederate generals Braxton Bragg and George E. Pickett, the latter of whom perennially courted dismissal.

Perhaps the strongest testament to the enduring lure of Benny Havens's tavern was that it had its own anthem. An army doctor visiting a cadet in 1838 wrote the original words to the tune of 'Wearing of the Green.' Over the years, the song accumulated countless improvised verses that followed this first one:

Come, fill your glasses fellows,
and stand up in a row,
To singing 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!

Over the years, the song came to be something of West Point's anthem, too, an ode to a nostalgic time when young unheralded boys became men, officers, and brothers before squaring off to fight one another in a civil war and become household names. Many of them, like the irreverent song they sang, became immortal in our memory.

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This article was written by John C. Waugh and originally published in the May 2002 issue of Civil War Times Magazine.

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