West Point ... Civil War ...

[5fish]

Here is a massive book:

Simon & Schuster, 2014, 448 pages

https://www.amazon.com/West-Point-H...point+civil+war&qid=1565040434&s=books&sr=1-1

A summary:

Product Description
The definitive military history of the Civil War, featuring the same exclusive images, tactical maps, and expert analysis commissioned by The United States Military Academy to teach the history of the art of war to West Point cadets.

The United States Military Academy at West Point is the gold standard for military history and the operational art of war. West Point has created military history texts for its cadets since 1836. For the first time in over forty years, the United States Military Academy has authorized a new military history series that will bear the name West Point. That text has been updated repeatedly, but now it has been completely rewritten and The West Point History of the Civil War is the first volume to result in a new series of military histories authorized by West Point.

The West Point History of the Civil Warcombines the expertise of preeminent historians commissioned by West Point, hundreds of maps uniquely created by cartographers under West Point’s direction, and hundreds of images, many created for this volume or selected from West Point archives. Offering careful analysis of the political context of military decisions, The West Point History of the Civil War is singularly brilliant at introducing the generals and officer corps of both Union and Confederacy, while explaining the tactics, decisions, and consequences of individual battles and the ebb and flow of the war. For two years it has been beta-tested, vetted, and polished by cadets, West Point faculty, and West Point graduates and the results are clear: This is the best military history of its kind available anywhere.

 

[5fish]

Here is an excerpt: from the book:

THE CIVIL WAR AT WEST POINT

The Civil War was the most traumatic event in the United States Military Academy’s history. During the 1850s, the Academy had changed from an institution that promoted nationalism to a bitterly divided school. In the early 1850s, James Ewell Brown “J. E. B.” Stuart praised the nationalizing effect of West Point, claiming that there was “no North or South” among the cadets. That soon changed, however. Peter Michie, who would later spend three decades teaching at West Point, arrived at the Military Academy as a cadet in 1859. He described how the corps of cadets split “into two parties, hostile in sentiment and even divided in barracks.”2 By November 1859, when abolitionist John Brown raided the arsenal at Harpers Ferry hoping to begin a massive slave uprising, the corps of cadets was no longer a unified body. Cadet Pierce Young from Georgia told several cadets, “By God, I wish I had a sword as long as from here to Newburgh, and the Yankees were all in a row. I’d like to cut off the head of every damn one of them.”3

Southern cadets became even more vocal before the 1860 presidential election, cowing cadets who supported Abraham Lincoln’s Republican ticket. Cadet George Custer reported that after the election in 1860, southern cadets burned the presidentelect in effigy as they looked to assail “Republican Abolitionists in the Corps.” One 1862 graduate who later fought at Gettysburg wrote that it took more courage to vote for Lincoln at West Point than it did to face Pickett’s Charge.4

West Point in 1860 was more violent and ill disciplined than at any other time in its history. Although few cadets were openly Republican, their number included Emory Upton, who would later become influential at the Academy and in the army. Upton was involved in one of the most famous brawls of that era, with Wade Hampton Gibbes from South Carolina. Gibbes resigned a few months later and fired one of the first shots of the Civil War at Fort Sumter. Gibbes accused Upton of “intimate association with negroes” while he was a student at Oberlin College, the first college in the country to admit African Americans. Upton was an avowed abolitionist, but nonetheless he found that assertion so offensive that he challenged the much larger Gibbes to a duel. Despite a deep cut on his face caused by a bayonet, the feisty Upton held his own during the brawl as southern cadets hurled abuse.5

EMORY UPTON

One of the few openly abolitionist cadets, Upton fought with Wade Hampton Gibbes on the eve of the Civil War. He later became one of the best tactical commanders of the Civil War and among the most influential officers of the postwar era.

Henry C. Farley of South Carolina was the first cadet to leave West Point following Lincoln’s election, on November 19, 1860.6 By the summer of 1861, sixty-five of the eighty-six southern cadets had departed, often for high rank in the Confederate army.7 Louisiana-born and avowed secessionist Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard arrived at the Academy to assume duties as superintendent on January 23, 1861. He never decamped from the West Point Hotel; the new secretary of war, Joseph Holt, ordered the previous superintendent, Richard Delafield, to relieve Beauregard of his post after only five days. Holt rightly questioned Beauregard’s loyalty and did not want him to assume the superintendency and then resign his commission, taking cadets with him.8 Among the faculty, no senior professor resigned. Dennis Hart Mahan, the longest-serving member, stayed at West Point despite his Virginia roots.9 Although only 23 of the 155 officers assigned to the West Point faculty from 1833 to 1861 joined the Confederacy, the resignation of high-profile officers such as former superintendent Robert E. Lee left the Academy open to criticism.10


CADET REVIEW PARADE

Prior to the mid-1850s, West Point had a nationalizing effect on the country. After 1855, cadets took control of the assignment process for the companies. Southerners went into two, and northerners went into the other two. Even on parade, the two sides began to separate.

While the internal trauma was terrible, the external attacks were even more dangerous to West Point. President Lincoln and Secretary of War Simon Cameron criticized West Point because so many of its graduates left the U.S. Army to fight for the Confederates. Radical Republican senators railed against the Academy and twice brought a vote to the floor of Congress to stop all funding to West Point and close the Military Academy. Senators argued that West Point was an incubator for secession and treason, and that it produced an aristocratic caste of officers to the detriment of volunteer citizen-soldiers. Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan declared that he “was prepared to abolish West Point Academy. I believe that but for this institution the rebellion would never have broken out.” Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio believed that a string of southern secretaries of war and Military Academy superintendents had so deeply molded the culture of the Academy that “you can hardly find a graduate of West Point who is not heartily now the supporter of southern institutions . . . the whole batch were imbued with the southern secession doctrine.” Not only did he denounce the “perjured traitors” who had resigned their commissions and gone to serve the Confederacy, he worried that hundreds of other graduates who had remained in Union blue were “treacherous and rotten at the heart, and . . . doing us infinitely more mischief than any number of them who have turned and resigned their commissions.” While most loyal officers thought such attacks were unfair, many did believe that the cadets and officers educated and nurtured at West Point who left for the Confederacy were traitors who brought shame to the Academy.

 

[Nitti]

Here is a massive book:

Simon & Schuster, 2014, 448 pages

https://www.amazon.com/West-Point-H...point+civil+war&qid=1565040434&s=books&sr=1-1

A summary:

Product Description
The definitive military history of the Civil War, featuring the same exclusive images, tactical maps, and expert analysis commissioned by The United States Military Academy to teach the history of the art of war to West Point cadets.

The United States Military Academy at West Point is the gold standard for military history and the operational art of war. West Point has created military history texts for its cadets since 1836. For the first time in over forty years, the United States Military Academy has authorized a new military history series that will bear the name West Point. That text has been updated repeatedly, but now it has been completely rewritten and The West Point History of the Civil War is the first volume to result in a new series of military histories authorized by West Point.

The West Point History of the Civil Warcombines the expertise of preeminent historians commissioned by West Point, hundreds of maps uniquely created by cartographers under West Point’s direction, and hundreds of images, many created for this volume or selected from West Point archives. Offering careful analysis of the political context of military decisions, The West Point History of the Civil War is singularly brilliant at introducing the generals and officer corps of both Union and Confederacy, while explaining the tactics, decisions, and consequences of individual battles and the ebb and flow of the war. For two years it has been beta-tested, vetted, and polished by cadets, West Point faculty, and West Point graduates and the results are clear: This is the best military history of its kind available anywhere.

I have this book.it is an interesting read as different section are written by different historians.

 

[O' Be Joyful]

Image from: The Smithsonian Museum of History
https://americanhistory.si.edu/exhibitions/west-point-making-america-1802–1918
​

On the eve of the Civil War differing loyalties sent some West Pointers north, others south, but their academy friendship survived the conflict.

To our comrades who have fallen,
one cup before we go;

They poured their life-blood freely out,
pro bono publico.

No marble points the stranger
to where they rest below—

They lie neglected far away
from Benny Havens Oh!
​

From American Heritage Magazine; February 1958 Vol. 9 Issue 2
Mary Elizabeth Sergent

(snip)
There is a strange and romantic haze resting on the high plain that overlooks the Hudson at West Point—that plain where so many of America’s greatest soldiers, living briefly in a world apart, learned the rudiments of their demanding profession. But there is an especially somber and haunting hue to the atmosphere of the late 1850s, for the country was breaking apart, and the line of fracture ran straight across the special world inhabited by young West Pointers.
Many things are learned at West Point; among them, the great fact of comradeship, the bond that ties together men dedicated to a common calling. And in the spring of 1861 the southern states were seceding from the Union, and war was upon the land, and so in a very short time many of the former West Point comrades were in opposition armies, fighting against one another. Some of them lived and some of them died, but all of them knew the strange, sad mixture of enmity and personal affection that was the peculiar heritage of the classes of 1861.

The word “classes” is used advisedly, for West Point sent forth two groups in that tragic spring of fire and conflict. The War Department had briefly tried the experiment of a five-year course in place of the normal four years; so the men who had become cadets in 1856 were due to graduate in the month of May, 1861, just ahead of the men who had entered in 1857 and would get their diplomas in June. Of the latter group, twenty-three men left when their states seceded, and thirty-four were graduated—of whom four immediately resigned to “go south.” Of the five-year men, five resigned when their states left the Union, and eight more resigned immediately after their graduation in May. (More correctly, they tried to resign; the war was on by then, and the War Department ordered these men dismissed for “tendering resignation in the face of the enemy.”) In any case, thirty-seven of the May graduates went to Washington, were commissioned in the U.S. Army, and set to work turning new recruits into soldiers.
All in all, of these two 1861 classes forty-five young officers fought, on one side or the other, at the first Battle of Bull Run, which came in mid-July.

The balance of the article may be found at the link.

https://www.americanheritage.com/classmates-divided​

 

[5fish]

from Benny Havens Oh!

I found an image of the place...

Summary: https://www.flickr.com/photos/37270547@N08/12733268713

Benny Havens - Highland Falls, NY
South of Buttermilk Falls and fronting directly on the river, this is the tavern purchased by Benny and Letitia Havens in 1843 and the location of much merriment and consumption of hot flip. This view shows the treacherous nature of the rugged stone steps that lead up through the cliffs to the village.

In his memoirs of West Point, B.H. Latrobe Jr., whose father had designed the US Capitol, described the house of Benny Havens, but it differs so much from what I've seen that I think he may have been talking about an entirely different building.

"The road to Buttermilk Falls was a rough one, turning aside somewhat in one place, to avoid what had been a small battery intended to command an approach to the main fortifications at the Point. Beyond the battery the road descended, and there was level ground on the left, in which stood, in a cornfield at that time, the Kinsley house, to which the cadets gave the name of "Stony Lonesome." Continuing down the road, which was, in fact, the prolongation of that by which I had come from Gee's Point on the evening of my arrival, we reached the few houses that then formed the village of "Buttermilk Falls." The only house that I can now recall was a low, one-storied frame building, painted red, with white door and window tirmmings, that overhung the river on the east, and, on the south, the ravine of the mountain stream, which, when there was water enough, fell in foam down the white-faced, sloping rock into the Hudson, producing the appearance that gave to the spot its name. That this red house was "Benny's" I have little doubt; although I have no recollection of any such "goings on" there as could have justified the reputation that it afterwards acquired."

Here is the orgin of your song... http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM47P7_Benny_Havens_Highland_Falls_New_York

Tavern owner of USMA Cadet fame buried at this site. Marker inscribed with song title tribute 1789-1877. - text of marker
I was not able to locate the gravestone on my look around.
The song title referred to is Benny Havens, Oh!
From my copy of Bugle Notes, issued in 1976 on entering the Academy:

"The most popular, and oldest, of all West Point Songs still being sung is "Benny Havens, Oh!" Benny Havens himself was a very real person about whom many traditions have entwined themselves. Benny was here on and off in many capacities from 1804 to 1812, returning permanently in the early 1820's. He opened a small tavern and his business was so flourishing that the Superintendent barred him from the reservation. Benny then opened a slightly larger establishment in Highland Falls and it was here that the song "Benny Havens, Oh!" was born. Under the influence of Benny's famous flip, Lieutenant O'Brien composed the first few stanzas of this song to the tune of "The Wearin's o' the Green." Anecdotes concerning Benny's tavern are numberless and became tradition when Benny passed away in 1877. Innumerable stanzas have been added to the song and the most popular are below.

Here is what Benny Haven's is today...

https://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=20016

 

[O' Be Joyful]

https://www.americanheritage.com/classmates-divided

 

[O' Be Joyful]

Benny Havens

Jefferson Davis once fell and tumbled down a ridge on his way back to the barracks after an illegal visit to Benny's.

 

[O' Be Joyful]

Seeing this pic now

I can fully understand why Ol' Jeff... err... uhh stumbled.

 

[jgoodguy]

Seeing this pic now

I can fully understand why Ol' Jeff... err... uhh stumbled.

Yes