Specialists in military history and the history of engineering in the United States are generally aware that the country’s first engineering school was the West Point Military Academy. Located in the Hudson River Valley north of New York City, the academy was founded in 1802 under President Thomas Jefferson to train officers for the US Army, and it remains the army’s service academy today. It has never been a major center for research, but mathematics and engineering became its main pedagogical focus early in its history, because, at the time, these were considered to be the most important skills for officers to have. Fortification, in particular, was a high priority in the antebellum period.

Now, a new book by historian Sveinn Jóhannesson, The Scientific-Military State, brings new light to the training regimen at West Point, showing how it adopted a French model for officer education that stressed mathematical science as not just a skill, but also a foundation for military leadership. For example, it allowed officers to plan forts and other works to align with local topography and secure a maximum advantage, and, in battle, it increased their ability to decisively and effectively orchestrate movements of troops and artillery. Moreover, Jóhannesson compellingly argues, the concept of a purposefully educated officer corps was instrumental to an emerging US policy of maintaining a small standing army that, in times of war, would be expanded with inexperienced troops in need of strong direction.

The Military Enlightenment comes to America

Jóhannesson observes that during the 18th century, there were long-running debates about how best to cultivate military power. During the first half of the century, nations became locked into a competition to build increasingly large standing armies that they funded through their ability to finance debt. Scale trumped military skill. But military-driven debts could also put treasuries under severe strain that threatened nations with economic ruin. The Dutch Republic was an early victim of the dynamic, and even France was forced to reckon with its military and economic situation after its loss in the Seven Years War of 1756 to 1763.

In the 1760s and 1770s, French military reformers, most notably Jean-Antoine Hippolyte, comte de Guibert, sought to improve the quality of the country’s officer corps. Inspired by Enlightenment ideas, he and others elevated the importance of formal education for officers at schools such as the École royale du génie de Mézières, developing theory-grounded methods in military arts such as fortification, artillery, topography, and arms manufacturing. Guibert himself became internationally well known as the author of the 1772 work Essai général de tactique (General Essay on Tactics). This new model of training found an early application when France aided Britain’s colonies in the American Revolution.

While the revolution’s popular image is one of scrappy, undersupplied militias confronting disciplined British soldiers, Jóhannesson emphasizes that leaders such as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin understood early on their need for skilled engineers. But he ascribes particular significance to the war’s final battle, at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781. Directed by French engineers, the American and French armies methodically constructed zigzagging entrenchments, allowing troops and heavy artillery to move in on the British position and fire withering barrages at it. The French methods resulted in a quick and overwhelming victory that was critically important due to the scheduled departure of the French fleet and the approach of British reinforcements. Jóhannesson also notes it was the only successful siege action the American side executed during the war.

After the revolution, the US fell into a protracted period of indecisive military policy. The influential treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton, who had commanded a battalion at Yorktown, advocated for maintaining a large army echoing Britain’s, but the young republic’s tenuous finances and aversion to standing armies led instead to a deep reduction in forces. Thus, the US found itself unprepared for its second war against the British between 1812 and 1815, resulting in demoralizing developments such as the burning of the capital and a disastrous invasion of Canada. The US ultimately fought the war to an indecisive conclusion and conditions were ripe for a new approach.

By that time, France’s model had only grown in reputation as its military institutions further developed after the French Revolution and under Napoleon Bonaparte, who deployed their methods in his stunning conquest of Europe. One American reformist who looked to that model was Benjamin Franklin’s grandnephew Jonathan Williams. Williams had accompanied Franklin to Paris during the American Revolution, gaining first-hand experience of French military science. In 1801 Jefferson appointed him chief engineer of the army and first superintendent of West Point. Williams quickly established a US Military Philosophical Society to promote his ambitions in military science, but he was unable to build the new academy to match them. He ultimately died in 1815, and the task of reform was left to the likeminded but much younger Sylvanus Thayer.

The West Point influence in the antebellum period

Born in Massachusetts, Thayer graduated from Dartmouth College in 1807 at the top of his class, and he completed training at West Point only a year later. Following the war with the British, he departed for France to learn about its military methods and arrived just after Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in summer 1815. This turned out to be a boon as Thayer was able to return to the US with not only a full library of French scientific, mathematical, and military works but also two of Napoleon’s top planners: chief topographer Simon Bernard and Claudius Crozet, who was a disciple of Gaspard Monge, the doyen of French military science at the École polytechnique.

Thayer became West Point’s superintendent in 1817 and instituted an intense curriculum focused on science and engineering, giving pride of place to Monge’s “descriptive geometry.” Descriptive geometry was a methodology for accurately representing three-dimensional objects on paper and thus had direct applications in, for instance, topography, but it was also considered a more general basis for methodical thinking. Officers who studied it would, under pressure, be better able to execute a “coup d’oeil,” quickly ascertaining the tactical needs of their situation.

While Thayer’s approach had detractors, he had crucial support from, among others, John Calhoun. Most known today as a fierce advocate in Congress for slavery, Calhoun was also an avid military reformer who served as secretary of war from 1817 to 1825 under President James Monroe. Beyond Thayer’s reforms, he likewise backed related changes that included the organization of an army general staff—thereby implementing the model that West Point graduates trained for—as well as the establishment of the army’s Board of Engineers for Fortification in 1817, the Topographical Bureau in 1818, and the army’s Board of Engineers for Internal Improvements in 1824.

It is generally understood how, during this period, the army was instrumental in constructing chains of forts along the US coasts and frontier, as well as an extensive network of military roads, canals, railways, and lighthouses. Moreover, the Topographical Bureau was responsible for organizing the systematic mapping of the vast expanses of the country. These developments crucially facilitated the military’s forcing of Native Americans from their lands as well as the expansion of US settlements.

Jóhannesson argues it is less appreciated how the West Point model structured the way construction projects were carried out. Much as well-trained officers were expected to give strict directions to inexperienced troops, they were also able to give detailed instructions to construction contractors, rather than offering general direction and permitting independent refinement of designs as projects progressed. This approach was hostile to civilian builders, whom the army engineers regarded as less capable or even as charlatans. Skilled laborers also chafed at being overseen by junior military engineers, and, in many cases, much of the actual work ended up being carried out by enslaved and imprisoned workers.

As West Point produced new officers year after year, its influence extended across American society. Engineers retiring from military service took on positions in state, local, and private practice, many joining public works agencies and railroad companies, for instance. Some also became professors in new engineering schools at colleges and universities, and West Point professors produced instructional texts used in those schools. Jóhannesson notes there was an especially heavy West Point engineering influence in the South, which was well represented in the officer corps, notwithstanding the historical reputation of the North as being at the forefront of US economic development.

The military, meanwhile, continued to uphold the West Point model. Jóhannesson observes that the model was finally deployed as originally envisioned in the US war with Mexico from 1846 to 1848, putting officers in charge of an inexperienced volunteer force. He pointedly quotes from the memoirs of Ulysses Grant, who graduated from West Point in 1843 and offered the rosy recollection that “the volunteers were associated with so many disciplined men and professionally educated officers, that … they became soldiers themselves almost at once.”

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William Thomas
American Institute of Physics
wthomas@aip.org

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