West Point Best Point

Are you ready for this?

At approximately 0800 hours I left the Culinary Institute of America with my significant other who was so incredibly good to drive me to West Point.

Approx. 0900 hours we got to West Point and we both had to go through background checks and get IDs, even though said significant other was only driving me to the Library (which I later found is no easy feat). But my ID said “Volunteer” whereas his only said “Visitor” so I was extremely proud. If anything tells you how petty I am when it comes to West Point, there it is.

I went to the Library which is absolutely gorgeous, even the statue of Jefferson looked beautiful. It was everything that I had seen in the pictures and everything I dreamed it would be. I had to wait around 10-15 minutes for someone from Special Collections to fetch me and take me up to the holiest of holy places for an American Military Historian.

I was started out with Staff Records but quickly realized that I wouldn’t go very far if I did not know who exactly was in my class. So I asked to see the Casualties of Cadets, which is a record of the cadets who resigned, died, or were dismissed from West Point. This was important for me because I got to see who exactly pulled out to join the Confederacy.

Beside name, they had class number. In the year 1860, my class were considered number 2, which was easily identifiable in the records. Looking at the Casualties of Cadets was actually quite humorous because you get to a point around December 1860 where cadets stop being dismissed and start resigning to join the Confederacy. It was here where I found the most deciding factor in making this project my Senior Capstone.

I found twenty more cadets in my class.

20 unaccounted men with no information other than their name and maybe their state. These twenty don’t have nice put together records like Cullum’s Register.

My map on my site is out of date and uneditable because it’s StoryMapJS and you cannot insert slides which frustrates me beyond belief. Which is also a part of the reason why I am working on a FabulaMap for my site.

But let me put twenty more cadets into perspective.

I started the summer with 34, well-documented, well-known, graduates. Which means I had a cohesive record of where each graduate went during the war and after if they lived, through Cullum’s Register. The Class of 1861: Custer, Ames, and Their Classmates After West Point gave me John Kelly, Felix Robertson, and Pierce Manning Butler Young. And I speculated that James Dearing was also in the class. All four are extremely well-documented officers, most who became generals. So I had 38 men to research, I only fully got through one in the summer.

So.

Five more cadets would have meant that I probably would have worked on this for another couple years.

Ten more cadets would have meant that I have enough to do post-grad research.

Twenty more cadets means that this will be my life’s work and I will live and die still doing research on them.

However, I was too excited at the time I found this out that I wasn’t thinking about the consequence of having 20 more. I was literally so excited to get to the Book of Demerits that I hit my head on the table trying to plug in my laptop.

Most cadets had two pages, Custer of course had four. Looking through the reasons for the demerits was extremely rewarding. When looking at these men through an objective lens, they can often seem like cold and distant figures defined by heroic deeds like Alonzo Cushing. But then you look through his demerits and find that he got one for laughing during reveille, it makes them seem closer, more like people that once were rather than statutes on a pedestal.

I sadly had to cut my time in the archives short since West Point is like the Hotel California. Because if you don’t have a car YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE. Also because I didn’t have a car I had to walk the two miles from the Library to the Visitor’s Center and was again reminded why I did not join the military. But all the taxi services were full, the bus from New York City to West Point is one way, and Uber wouldn’t go that far. So I spent a good hour or so freaking out until one extremely generous and gracious tour guide, out of the goodness of her heart told me that she could drive me to the nearest train station. Her name is Gerry and I’m still in contact with her and I plan on taking her out to a very nice lunch when I go back for future research.

So besides my little scare of not being able to get home after five days, I would say my trip to West Point was pretty eventful and I’m definitely going back, but only when I have the extended amount of time to fully appreciate and submerge myself in research.

-Julia