The American Future (6 page)

The first United States Military Academy was, then, built on a site heavy with patriotic memory; one which looked to the past to create a national future. Young Meigs could not help but be aware of that during his first year as a “plebe.” That was also the last year of the superintendence of Sylvanus Thayer (class of 1808), who had done more than anyone to give West Point its character as a forcing house of scientific and technical distinction. Between reveille and dusk, between the first
drill parade and lights out, the days of the cadets were remorselessly filled with instruction on mathematics, chemistry, engineering, mechanical drawing, and even a little geology and history. French was mandatory but not so the cadets could steep themselves in the Pléiade or Racine but to memorize the textbooks that Thayer had imported from the École Polytechnique in Paris.

“Duty, Honor, Country” was the college credo, and for the most part the cadets embraced all three, except when they escaped from the mess-hall fare of bread, potatoes, and fat-pork beans, to Benny Havens's establishment at Buttermilk Falls a mile south. There they could enjoy a tankard of hot flip and flirt with the country girls. Sometimes both were smuggled into the school, which led Thayer, in a rash moment after a wild 4 July celebration, to ban alcohol with the predictable result. On Christmas Eve 1826, an eggnog party in which a young Mississippian, Jefferson Davis, was the rowdiest ringleader, was broken up by the Officer of the Day. If he was serious, Davis and his bucks warned, they would have to shoot him.

Davis and his fraternity had violated the honor code, which exhorted the cadets to selfless virtue. By “Country” was meant the Union, even for the likes of Davis, who may already have felt his true country was the South. The college was often known as the “School of the Union” and its cadets the “Band of the Union.” But it was the first article of the oath that was most loaded with West Point's particular ethos. For “Duty” meant the duty to respect the Constitution of the United States, to which its graduating officers swore an oath of loyalty, which unlike that taken elsewhere was not to the person of a sovereign prince. That constitutional obligation to subordinate the military to the civilian guardians of the democracy was inculcated in each and every cadet, and it still is. It's why there may have been eggnog rebellions at West Point but never the hatching of military plots. Throughout much of the world—in Europe, Asia, and Latin America—military-school solidarity has led officers to believe in their collective superiority over civilian politicians. Not in the United States. Though there were plenty of American soldier-presidents in the nineteenth century, many of them West Pointers, they left their swords and their uniforms (though not their war stories) behind them when they went on the hustings. John McCain, an Annapolis naval cadet, would do the same. For two centuries West Point has been a sentinel
against, not on behalf of, martial power. But then that was exactly the intention of the man who founded it in 1802, and who in 1811 declared that “peace has been our principle, peace is our interest and peace has saved to the world this only plant of free and rational government now existing in it.”

 

That same man, tall, angular, and equipped with an elegant mind, stood in the spacious hall of his Virginia villa and challenged his guest, not quite so tall but equipped with an equally elegant mind, to a guessing game. Pointing to the three busts of Worthies that lined one wall, Thomas Jefferson asked Alexander Hamilton if he recognized the identity of “the trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced.” There was a long pause, during which one imagines Jefferson smiling as he often did when he felt superior. Preempting Hamilton's failure, the host then revealed that they were Bacon, Newton, and Locke, the patriarchs of the Enlightenment to which he had nailed his own intellectual colors. Asked who
he
thought was the greatest of the great, Hamilton took his time before replying, with pointed insouciance, “evidently…Julius Caesar.”

Jefferson's West Point was founded to deny the United States its Caesars (of whom, Jefferson suspected, Colonel Hamilton might aspire to be the first) and to ensure the permanent victory of liberalism over militarism. Only one of its greatest, Douglas MacArthur, superintendent after World War I, has ever flirted with martial power to the point of disregarding civilian orders, or so his president, Harry Truman, suspected. It was MacArthur who introduced systematic political discussions into the early morning curriculum at the academy, so he had only himself to blame if his students read well enough to know that a victorious general had to defer to the civilian commander in chief. Much more typical has been the other kind of West Point graduate, Dwight Eisenhower, commander of a liberation invasion, president of Columbia University before president of the United States, and who warned his country against the threat posed by the “military industrial complex” to the liberties enshrined in the Constitution. When I went to West Point to deliver a lecture not long after the beginning of the war in Iraq, the cadets and I talked about Thucydides'
History of the Peloponnesian War
. The intense debates that preceded the fatal expedition to Syracuse that mark the great cautionary climax
of the work had made a deep impression. No one in that classroom wanted to be Alcibiades, the vainglorious warrior who led the Athenian Empire into self-destruction. It struck me then that West Point was perhaps the only military academy in the world programmed to have such conflicted feelings about war. But its identity as a Jeffersonian enterprise of national education—the school that imprinted itself on the young and impressionable Meigs—only came about from a fierce battle between Hamilton's and Jefferson's contending notions of the role that military power ought to play in the life of the American nation.

Caught in the middle of that debate, the first commander in chief was himself much conflicted about how a nation born in war should handle the matter in its future. Washington's baptism by fire as a young man had been in the British Army's campaigns against the French and their Indian allies, but there he had witnessed at close hand the habitual contempt that officers like General Braddock had shown for colonial militiamen and volunteers, many of whom had laid out their own money for equipment to defend the British Empire. Washington's disdain, on the contrary, had been for the mercenary regiments through whom British parliaments and governments meant to enforce unpopular laws and taxes in America. It was a commonplace among American Patriot politicians, inherited from seventeenth-century English Commonwealth writers, that “ministerial armies,” in the phrase of the time, were the tools of despots, servile to their masters and brutal to everyone else. To defeat them was to do good work, not only for America but for the liberties of the world. The opposite of the “ministerials” were grievously provoked citizen-volunteers who would only take to their muskets in defense of hearth and home. Such men, in their own minds, were always citizens first and soldiers second. Their fight was ultimately
against
soldiering, and only entered into for the express purpose of getting troops quartered on the citizenry out of their peaceable towns and villages. Once that had been accomplished, no further purpose was to be served by remaining in arms. But the trusty flintlock had always to be kept in working order so that the contemptible ministerials would never be tempted to try their luck again.

Hence the symbolic, rather than military, importance of the initial “shot heard round the world” on 19 April 1775, when hostilities began
in earnest in the small towns of Lexington and Concord west of Boston. There, the heroic tableau of locals—farmers, smiths, and innkeepers—mustering on the village green and at Concord Bridge to thwart ministerial attempts to seize munitions was literally enacted. It was that news that brought Return Jonathan Meigs among thousands of others riding hard to Boston in 1775. So it ought to have been natural for Washington to have celebrated the Massachusetts Minutemen or their Virginia counterparts, the Shirtmen, as the patriots who won the war. But much of his experience as commander during the Revolutionary War belied that myth. Militias had been notoriously hard to discipline; quick to mobilize but even quicker to disappear. Alexander Hamilton, who was a favorite member of Washington's personal staff, the group that he called his “family,” conceded in his “Federalist Paper 25” that “the American militia, in the course of the late war have by valor on numerous occasions erected eternal monuments to their fame.” But, he added, “the bravest of them feel and know that the liberty of their country could not have been established by their efforts alone.” Hamilton knew that Washington's strategic genius and the French alliance had ultimately counted for more than raw patriotic ardor. He had had close ties with many of the foreigners who had come to America. His admiration extended not just to the most famous of them, the marquis de Lafayette, but to figures schooled in European arms like the Prussian baron General Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben who had published the first manual of drill and exercises for American troops. At Yorktown—the battle that ended the war—Hamilton knew from personal experience how much was owed to the excavation of mines and tunnels drawn straight from Old World texts and which had allowed American troops to move in close to the besieged British. “War,” he wrote in the same Federalist Paper, “is a science.” It would not be un-American to go to school to learn it.

Even some of those personally cool to Hamilton agreed with him about this. As early as 1776, a more unlikely warrior, John Adams—who, however, could see in his native Massachusetts how tough a fight the war for independence would be—made a proposal to establish a military academy, meant to train officers who might be called on in times of emergency. No one—at least no one in Congress in a position to fund the idea—paid much attention, and some attacked
it as incompatible with American liberties. After the war was over, in 1783, Hamilton chaired a committee to study the new republic's military establishment in peacetime but knew that he would always run up against solid congressional opposition for anything ambitious. The volunteer army was stripped back to barely a thousand. But President Washington and more his brigadier general of artillery and first Secretary of War, the sometime Boston bookstore owner Henry Knox, continued to brood darkly on what the country might need for future preparedness. And much as they hated to admit it, American security began to face domestic as well as foreign challenges. The next five years put the reality of American federal government to the test by attacking its tax collectors and arsenals—in Daniel Shays's 1786 rebellion in western Massachusetts, and in 1791 in the Whiskey Rebellion west of the Alleghenies where excisemen attempting to collect taxes on spirits were the target. Washington called out the militia to put them down but was not very confident about the loyalty of troops from the disaffected regions. It took militia from other states to deal decisively with the rebels. The president gloomily recognized the ironic parallel with what had happened before the revolution, with his bluecoats now playing the role of oppressor. The difference, he assured himself and the country, was that this time the taxes were being levied in the name of an elected government. (But of course the same thing was being said by British parliaments in the 1760s and 1770s.)

Washington had no intention of using American soldiers against their own fellow citizens unless they had cast off their allegiance to the elected government of the United States. And he was sufficiently exercised about the threat to liberty posed by “standing armies” to hope that the foreign policy of the United States would stay aloof from Europe's wars, so that the temptation to create a large army would forever be avoided. This instinct was Jeffersonian: the belief that if somehow Americans could turn west and mind their own farms, they would forever enjoy uninterrupted blessings of peace and liberty. But the pragmatic, Hamiltonian side of Washington knew this was just a pious hope, for the Machiavellianism of the European powers was unlikely to abate just because the United States had grandly declared a Novus Ordo Seclorum (a New Order of the Centuries) on the Great Seal. Nor were the Europeans likely
to confine their machinations to the old continent since there was too much at stake in the way of money in the new, where they were firmly lodged in Canada, Mexico, Florida, and Louisiana, not to mention the sugar-rich Caribbean. Even supposing the United States remained for a while in a purely defensive posture (and there were many, including Henry Knox, who felt that, ultimately, British and American co-occupancy of the land mass was unrealistic), the natural demographic increase of the country was bound to provoke friction with the other powers on the continent. Sizable French and British armies were already invested in their West Indies, attempting to put down slave rebellions and Creole discontent; their navies were still formidable presences on the oceans, capable of locking down American trade and blockading harbors should they choose.

Though financially shackled by Congress, Henry Knox was all in favor of military readiness, starting with a school that would make future generations of skilled artillerymen, engineers, and officers of horse and foot. The two colonels—Hamilton and Knox—indulged in petty rows about ranking order, but they both thought that their personal military experience made them better judges of what was needed for America's survival than the penny-pinchers of Congress. Hamilton and Washington worked together on the last speech that the president delivered to Congress in December 1796, which included his wish that both a national university and a national military academy be established. Privately Washington doubted Congress would ever fund it.

He was right. But the idea didn't vanish altogether. Already, in the early 1790s, West Point was being mentioned as a possible site for such a school. Knox had commanded the artillery bastion there, and Alexander Hamilton had actually been at the fort when Benedict Arnold's conspiracy had been thwarted. For Hamilton, then, it was entirely right that this should be the place where generations of American cadets would be instilled with the imperative of vigilance. Where better to professionalize the need for military readiness, the virtue without which Hamilton feared the republic's independence would be little more than a paper declaration? Should Congress ban the establishment and training of a peacetime army, Hamilton wrote, the United States “would then exhibit the most extraordinary spectacle
the world has yet seen, that of a nation incapacitated by its Constitution to prepare for defense before it was actually invaded.” He had a point, but it's also true that temperamentally Hamilton was trigger-happy. As a boy in the West Indies, he had dreamed of soldiering for the empire and throughout his life had the impulsive streak that made his eventual death in a duel not altogether surprising. The avuncular Washington was not blind to Hamilton's tripwire devilry, but it was hard for him to take against the lieutenant colonel who, bayonet in hand, had led the storming of the British redoubt at Yorktown, a maneuver that arguably ended the war.