in the Civil War wore the Union blue, Confederate President Jefferson Davis was of the class of 1828, and the Confederate generalship was dominated by products of this school for soldiers. Senate Republicans took up where Crockett had left off: Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan demanded abolition of this viper’s nest that had produced more traitors “within the last fifty years than all the institutions of learning and education that have existed since Judas Iscariot’s time.” Moreover, Northern West Point generals like George McClellan (1846) seemed shy of carnage; one Republican politician charged that the Union army was riddled with “scores of luke warm, half secession [West Point] officers in command who cannot bear to strike a vigorous blow lest it hurt their rebel friends or jeopardize the precious protectors of slavery.” (Bloodthirsty politicos chastising military men for their caution is not uncommon; recall Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s immortal—immoral?—question to General Colin Powell: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”)
The bitterness of Union veterans over their treatment by haughty West Pointers made the Academy’s very existence an issue until the last of the vets had died off. (“What’s the meanest kind of dog?” went a joke told by Civil War soliders. “A Pointer.” “What’s the meanest kind of Pointer?” “A West Pointer.”) Illinois Senator John Logan, Republican candidate for vice president in 1884, wrote The Volunteer Soldier of America, a defense of “citizen-soldiers” against the “hostility of West Point,” which exists “to crush . . . the volunteer and his aspirations for recognition.” (Try to imagine a major political figure today calling for the abolition of West Point. This sacred cow took about a century to raise.)
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