Last in Their Class

Custer, Pickett and the Goats of West Point

James Robbins

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781594039249
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

Today’s Goat, the celebrated West Point cadet finishing at the bottom of his class, carries on a long and storied tradition. George Custer’s contemporaries at the Academy believed that the same spirit of adventure that led him to "blow post” at night to carouse at local taverns also motivated his dramatic cavalry attacks in the Civil War and afterwards. And the same willingness to stoically accept punishment for his hijinks at the Academy also sent George Pickett marching into the teeth of the Union guns at Gettysburg. The story James S. Robbins tells goes from the beginnings of West Point through the carnage of the Civil War to the grassy bluffs over the Little Big Horn. The Goats he profiles tell us much about the soul of the American solider, his daring, imagination and desire to prove himself against high odds.

NOTES

Introduction: The Spirit of the Goat

¹ The Letters of Major General James E. B. Stuart, ed. Adele H. Mitchell (Stuart-Mosby Historical Society, 1990), p. 43.

² 1910 Howitzer, p. 50. Beach graduated next to last in the Class of 1910 and later fought in the Verdun sector in the First World War. He retired as a colonel in 1945.

³ The 1900 Howitzer defines a Goat as “a Cadet in the lowest section,” and at an 1898 furlough dinner for the Class of 1900, the second toast, offered by Cadet George B. Comly, was “The Goats!” “West Point Cadets Dine,” New York Times, June 10, 1898, p. 7. Comly graduated 51st of 54, and the Goat of his class, Richard Morgan Thomas, was awarded the Silver Star fighting Muslim insurgents in the Philippines.

⁴ The fact that a goat is the mascot of the Naval Academy probably helped solidify the expression, but did not originate it. The first Navy goat, El Cid (the Chief), the mascot of the USS New York, was on hand for the 1893 Army/Navy football game. The Midshipmen defeated West Point 6–3, and lucky El Cid was offered shore duty at Annapolis, where he became the Navy’s mascot. The last graduate in each class at Annapolis is called the more descriptive “Anchorman.” The Air Force Academy has no such term, though “Tailgunner” comes to mind.

⁵ “West Point Cadets Cheer War Veterans,” New York Times, June 13, 1912.

Nathaniel Wyche Hunter

¹ Francis Henney Smith, “West Point Fifty Years Ago,” an address delivered before the Association of Graduates of the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, June 12, 1879. Nathaniel Wyche Hunter letters and diaries from the Hitchcock-Coit Papers at the F. W. Olin Library, Mills College, Oakland, California, and the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia. For general information on West Point in this era see Cadet Life Before the Mexican War, ed. Sidney Forman (West Point, N.Y.: USMA Printing Office, 1945).

² Cf., T. J. Cram (USMA 1826), “Recollections As a Cadet and As an Officer,” typescript excerpts, USMA Archives; and Elizabeth Dey Jenkinson Waugh, West Point (New York: Macmillan Press, 1944).

³ Waugh, West Point, p. 41.

⁴ U.S. State Papers, 16th Congress, 1st Session, no. 176.

⁵ U.S. State Papers, 16th Congress, 1st Session, no. 194.

⁶ North American Review, January 1832, pp. 246–62.

⁷ Smith, “West Point Fifty Years Ago.”

⁸ Simon Magruder Levy is often mistakenly called the first Goat because he is listed second of two graduates in 1802. But prior to 1818, Academy graduates were listed in the order they completed their coursework and were commissioned, not by the General Order of Merit (GOM), a rank-order based on academic achievement and to a lesser extent on disciplinary records. Since the curriculum was not standardized before 1818, cadets might take months to finish, or years. So Levy cannot claim the title of the first Goat, though cadets at the West Point Jewish Chapel are fond of noting that the first USMA graduating class was “50 percent Jewish.” Only after 1818 did the expression “first (or last) in his class” have any particular meaning. There were also the “turnbacks,” who had to repeat a year; and the “washouts,” those who failed completely and were expelled. A “stay-back” is a newly commissioned officer who does not leave after graduation but stays awhile to help the new cadets.

⁹ USMA, Record of Delinquencies, vol. 1822–1828, p. 416.

¹⁰ Mason served two years and left the service. He was later a lawyer, newspaper editor, politician, and chief justice of the state of Iowa.

¹¹ Larnard was in the Fourth Infantry regiment and brevetted at Resaca de la Palma, and at Fort Steilacoom, Washington, 1853–54, and fought against the Sno-ho-mish Indians in Washington, 1854. He drowned March 27, 1854, in Puget Sound on his return from the expedition when the small boat he was in capsized in a storm. He was forty-five.

¹² Letter of October...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Introduction
• Nathaniel Wyche Hunter
• Benny Havens’
• Ephraim Kirby Smith
• The Seminole War
• Henry Heth
• Flirtation Walk
• Zeb Inge
• Churubusco
• Chapultepec
• James McNeill Whistler
• William Logan Crittenden
• The Battle of Blue Waters
• Solomon’s Fork
• The Pig War
• George Armstrong Custer
• Absent Friends
• James McQueen McIntosh
• Charles Nelson Warner
• Gettysburg
• Pickett’s Charge
• Laurence Simmons Baker
• Five Forks
• Appomattox
• The Reunion
• Charles Dempsey
• John Jordan Crittenden
• Hurrah for Custer
• Washita
• The Boy President
• The Sioux Campaign
• Little Bighorn
• My Every Thought Was Ambition
• The Immortals
• Whither the Goat?
• A Note on Sources
• Endnotes
• Index