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Alonzo H. Cushing
Patrick Henry O?Rorke
and so in a very short time many of the former West Point comrades were in opposition armies, fighting against one another. Some of them lived and some of them died, but all of them knew the strange, sad mixture of enmity and personal affection that was the peculiar heritage of the classes of 1861.
George A. Woodruff
he word ?classes? is used advisedly, for West Point sent forth two groups in that tragic spring of fire and conflict. The War Department had briefly tried the experiment of a five-year course in place of the normal four years; so the men who had become cadets in 1856 were due to graduate in the month of May, 1861, just ahead of the men who had entered in 1857 and would get their diplomas in June.
Of the latter group, twenty-three men left when their states seceded, and thirty-four were graduated?of whom four immediately resigned to ?go south.? Of the five-year men, five resigned when their states left the Union, and eight more resigned immediately after their graduation in May. (More correctly, they tried to resign; the war was on by then, and the War Department ordered these men dismissed for ?tendering resignation in the face of the enemy.?) In any case, thirty-seven of the May graduates went to Washington, were commissioned in the U.S. Army, and set to work turning new recruits into soldiers.
All in all, of these two 1861 classes forty-five young officers fought, on one side or the other, at the first Battle of Bull Run, which came in mid-July. One of the most distinguished of the May group, Adelbert Ames, was almost killed there.
In May Mr. Ames had been a cadet captain. In July he was a very green lieutenant of the old 5th Artillery, a Regular Army outfit. He was a serious young man with grave dark eyes and a straight nose in a round face. He had graduated fifth in his class, and he was anxious to do the right
thing in his first battle.
Although wounded, Ames refused to leave the field. The gunners propped him up on a caisson, obeyed his whispered orders diligently, and told themselves this lad, at least, had the makings of a good officer. Eventually he fainted, fell off the caisson, and was carried back to a hospital. He did not leave until September.
He survived; men from Rockland, Maine, are hard to kill. In fact Adelbert Ames reached the age of ninety-seven?the last survivor of his class. And in 1893 the government got around to giving him the Medal of Honor for his conduct on July 21, 1861. He was one of five from the May class to receive this award; the others were Eugene Beaumont, Samuel Benjamin, Henry Dupont, and Guy Henry.
Other soldiers got other awards, including that odd sort of promotion, in style then, known as brevet rank. This was, so to speak, a sort of unofficial promotion?a major might be given a brevet as a colonel, which meant that for the time being, and under certain circumstances, he could actually be a colonel, although his permanent rank was still that of a major. One of the good things about the award of a brevet promotion was that the next of kin of a man who died while holding brevet rank was supposed to receive a higher pension, based on the brevet rather than the permanent rank.
Thus little Edmund Kirby, dying of his wounds three weeks after the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863, was much cheered by a visit from the President of the United States. Mr. Lincoln made the young first lieutenant a brigadier general of volunteers on the spot. Kirby was twenty-three, the son of an army paymaster?s widow and the sole support of his mother and sisters.
He had been wounded while helping rescue some guns for a volunteer battery. The contract surgeon who dressed his wound bungled the job; after Kirby was sent to a hospital in Washington, infection set in and
6 CIVIL WAR CHRONICLES
AU- UNITED STATES MILITARY ACADEMY. WEST POINT, N Y.