A Day in September: The Battle of Antietam and the World It Left Behind

by Stephen Budiansky

The West Point which Robert E. Lee arrived at in 1825 excelled at producing engineers. If none of them knew how to fight a war, that was as much by design as neglect. The same widely shared sentiment in the young republic that regarded a standing army as an invitation to adventurism abroad and oppression at home cast a beady eye on the national military academy, with the extra animus Jeffersonian and Jacksonian republicanism reserved for anything that smacked of elitism or social superiority. Populists derided cadets as dandies, fops, arrogant and pretentious “lily fingered” aristocrats, the privileged products of a “closed corporation,” and regularly called for the academy’s abolition. “Confident that the common man could master any profession in a short period,” noted Stephen Ambrose, Americans insisted that the militia was up to any military task the nation might legitimately require.