Anyone who hears about the United States Military Academy at West Point today will identify its name with the place from which the most important soldiers of the country's army have come and with a symbol of the stricter and harsher military discipline.
However, this was not always the case, as the incident that gives rise to this entry shows, which occurred at West Point in 1826. The academy had been founded in 1802 and the criteria selection of students were not at first as strict as now; for example, an officer candidate could join the academy at any time and not at the start of a class of future officers.
Another of West Point's early customs that would shock today was the general admission of alcohol consumption by academy students. Thus, it was traditional for aspiring officers to celebrate the holidays by consuming large amounts of eggnog.
But in 1826 the new superintendent of the officers' school, Colonel Sylvanus Thayer, decided to make a clean break with these lax customs and prohibited the purchase, storage and consumption of alcohol in all West Point. The new measure seemed to work until Christmas came around.
A group of cadets, among them the future president of the Confederate States of the South Jefferson Davis, decided to skip the rules imposed by Thayer and celebrate Christmas the way traditional in the academy:consuming alcohol. They managed to smuggle in several barrels of whiskey purchased from a local tavern, and the two officers on duty were unsuspecting when they retired to rest at midnight.
It was not until four in the morning that Captain Hitchcock was alerted to the racket coming from the lower floors of the residence. When he went to investigate, he found six cadets in a room in a clearly intoxicated state and sent them each to their bedroom, only to hear noises coming from another room where three other cadets clumsily tried to hide their faces so as not to be recognized. and refused to obey the officer.
After a heated argument and while Hitchcock was leaving the room, the cadets, clouded by alcohol, began shouting slogans at their comrades to arm themselves with pistols and bayonets and go to look for the captain.
In the blink of an eye between seventy and ninety cadets began to beat everything that was put within their reach, whether they were people or furniture; also escaped the occasional shot. The officers' decision to call in members of the regular army to control the situation did just the opposite. The rivalry between cadets and regular soldiers was very bitter and the former barricaded themselves in their barracks to protect them from the "invaders".
By morning the residence's north bunkhouse was shattered, windows shattered, railings flung down the stairs, and two officers had been injured. Fortunately, there were no deaths to mourn
When things cooled down, Colonel Thayer was faced with a difficult decision; properly punishing the "punch riot" (as it soon became known) meant expelling a third of the academy's cadets and burdening it with a reputation as an undisciplined and unreliable institution for training United States Army officers . For this reason, he chose to focus on sanctioning the main leaders of the Christmas party and the number of those on file was limited to nineteen, of which only eleven were expelled. Buildings that had been most damaged during the riot were also demolished.
Despite being one of the instigators of the drinking spree, Jefferson Davis escaped punishment and both he and Robert E. Lee (who was also a cadet at the time) attended to testify in favor of several of his colleagues in subsequent investigations.
When the collapsed buildings were rebuilt in 1840, it was done in such a way that access from one room to another was more complicated and it was necessary to leave the building, so that it was more difficult to move inadvertently by residence. Also, although the consumption of alcohol ended up being allowed on certain dates, the amount of drink that was allowed to be introduced was regulated.
In later years, many famous US Army soldiers passed through West Point, some with more pain than glory… but that's another story.
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