Sic Semper Tyrannis



The Old Corps

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Detail of “The Charge of the Cadets”

“The healthful and pleasant abode of a crowd of honorable youths, pressing up the hill of science with noble emulation, fair specimens of citizen soldiers, attached to their native state, and ready in every time of deepest peril to vindicate her honor or defend her right.”

JTL Preston

The Virginia Military Institute was founded in 1839. It is the 3rd oldest college of engineering in the United States. The excuse given to the Commonwealth legislature for the creation of such a school was that state militia troops stationed in Lexington were increasingly a nuisance in the absence of an Indian menace and that the buildings could be used to educate engineers who would build roads, bridges, harbors, etc. This was at least in part an untruth.

In fact, the Society of the Cincinnati in Virginia, were the main actors in the effort to create VMI. Their hidden agenda was a desire to provide Virginia with a source of military leadership in a future conflict with the gathering forces of nationalism so evident in the North in the 1830s. The war they anticipated eventually came. It was catastrophic for the entire United States but even more for the South and for Virginia. In that war, VMI men fought to the death for their native states. Half the school’s alumni were killed, died of wounds or of disease and neglect in prisoner of war camps. Over 90% served in the Confederate forces.

Walter Laine made a deliberate choice to attend this school. Laine was accepted at several famous colleges and universities, and had been offered scholarship money at quite a few. The decision to attend VMI was made in the belief that his army family background and previous service as a sergeant in the National Guard would enable him to “coast” through a school full of boys who had little knowledge of the world outside their recent high school experience. He thought that VMI would be a pleasant place to spend four years before embarking on what he thought of as “real life.” He thought these would be four easy years. He was wrong.

VMI was and is a fine school in all its academic departments. Standards were high in Laine’s time, and there was very little grading “on the curve.” The faculty were well published but thought of themselves as teachers rather than researchers. At the same time, the long serving faculty fully supported the VMI ideal of “a sound mind in a sound body” and was committed to the tradition of the school.

Laine arrived in Lexington with the idea of majoring in physics, but a month or two in that curriculum convinced him that he did not belong there and he moved to the English department where he prospered. A mixed curriculum in literature, history, philosophy, and languages suited him well. There were enough core curriculum courses in science and mathematics to satisfy his minimum needs. The faculty to students ratio in the English Department was so favorable that advanced level courses were really tutorials. He was usually on the Dean’s List and in his last three years was declared to be distinguished in general merit. He liked wearing academic “stars” and went to a lot of trouble to be sure to qualify for them.

A VMI diploma was an excellent introduction to any graduate school in the United States. Graduates of VMI had well developed work habits and possessed the self-discipline needed to succeed in anything.

The school required all cadets to study military or air science for four years but most graduates did not make the military their life’s work. It was expected and required that graduates accept a military commission if it was offered but these commissions were usually in the National Guard or army reserve. Some few graduates avoided the commissioning requirement by accepting employment in the state government or public schools, but most graduates took a reserve commission, served a few years and then started their civilian careers.

Only a few men had any interest in the military as an occupation although the armed forces wanted as many graduates as they could attract. The great majority accepted the role of VMI as a college that featured a military format for daily life but was not an officer “factory” in the sense that the federal service academies were designed to be.

All students were cadets of the Virginia Militia who lived the life of a cadet all the time. Nearly all the permanent teachers were also officers of the militia. There was a handful of US Army and USAF staff on hand to provide ROTC instruction.

Those few cadets who knew that they wanted to follow a military career for life were thought by most of the corps of cadets to be a little odd. The staff, faculty and student body shared a deep seated almost Jungian understanding that VMI was an educational institution rather than a military training facility.

The cadet regiment lived together in the historic barracks and ate together in the cadet mess at one sitting. Two cadet rooms in the barracks had once been Stonewall Jackson’s classroom.

Laine lived for his last three years with two other men who were not native Virginians. All three were intent on military careers. Later in life Laine thought that they would have been happier in their time in barracks if they had found classmates who were more representative of the cadet corps.

Business, civil engineering, the law, medicine, and holy orders were much more popular destinations in life than a soldier’s career. There were always a few Episcopal bishops numbered among the alumni.

Cadet life was hard. There was a great deal of physicality in obligatory exercise, intramural sports, mandatory physical education classes, running in formation and the like. Cadets were confined to the VMI post unless given specific leave to be elsewhere.

The cadet corps ran the barracks without much interference or close supervision from the staff. The result was a process in which 1st year students were ruthlessly vetted and “weeded out” by upper class cadets. There was a lot of hazing, some of which was quite brutal. 1st year cadets were referred to as “rats.” Their lives were severely circumscribed. They could not walk about the barracks freely but were confined to a narrow path in which they marched at the position of attention, always silent in recognition of their status as probationary creatures unaccepted as yet. “Rats” ate in the cadet mess at a rigid position of attention with their eyes on their plates unless spoken to by an upper classman.

The rigors of this system were not evenly applied. Over half the cadets were from Virginia and inevitably many had attended the same high schools, were related in Virginia’s vast “cousinage,” or came from families long embedded in VMI’s history. This resulted in the existence of cliques that protected some “rats” while others were left to fend for themselves. There was a good deal of prejudice against “Yankee Rats,” and that bias was acted on in harassment by Southern cadets.

Laine was not really Northern. His background was too cosmopolitan for that kind of identity to have emerged but he sounded Northern and that was enough to cause him a lot of trouble on the basis of his speech.

There was a very developed and revered code of honor. Cadets did not “lie, cheat, steal nor tolerate those who did.” This code was rigorously enforced by the cadets themselves. It was commonplace for cadets to report themselves for infractions of the Institute’s regulations if they believed that not to do so would be dishonorable. A small number of cadets were expelled each year after conviction by the cadet honor court. These expulsions were made in the dead of night after an agonized ceremony conducted in the Old Barracks courtyard. For a cadet who was a native Virginian, to be expelled from VMI for failing to live honorably was a virtual sentence of social death. No VMI man would do business with him, speak his name or associate with him. The only escape from this shunning was to leave the state. When Laine taught at West Point many years after his time at VMI, he had a colleague who was also a VMI man and a native Virginian. This officer told Laine that he was haunted by a recurring dream in which he inadvertently broke the code at VMI and was “drummed out” of the corps. This captain said that in that case he believed he would have lost his family and his home.

This honor system created an explicit agreement between the cadets and the administration, an understanding that made life easier for all. Professors never supervised tests. Officers made status checks in the barracks in which a resident of a room who happened to be present answered “all right” to the inspectors knock on the door and then told his returning roommates of the exact time of the check so that each could determine if he was, in fact, “all right” for his location at that moment. If he was not in an authorized place the cadet had the responsibility for reporting himself to the cadet officer of the day. A failure to do so would be an honor code violation. This system obviated the need for numerous status checks in formation.

Doors in barracks were never locked. Money could be left in desk drawers for months without fear of pilfering.

If a cadet wrote the word “certified” on anything, the administration accepted without question that the document was a true statement.

Merchants in the town unhesitatingly sold any cadet anything he wanted on credit.

With one exception, cadets did not lie. That exception lay in the area of what was quaintly called “social honor.” An example of that would be a question from a hostess if a cadet liked what had been served. The answer was always yes followed by acceptance of another serving. Another example would occur in any matter that affected a woman’s reputation. For example, “you escorted my cousin Caroline to the Governor’s Cotillion, how was that?” In such a case the answer would always be something like, “your cousin is a lovely girl. I hope to see her again.”

This honor system belonged to the cadets, not to the Institute. Non-alumni officers assigned to the ROTC departments and doing extra duty in the office of the Commandant of Cadets did not always understand this. On one occasion when the commandant (an alumnus) was absent deer hunting, his deputy strayed far from the accepted limits. It was football season and a number of cadets “borrowed” a laundry truck from the Institute for a midnight expedition to the campus of VMI’s arch football rival, Virginia Tech. While there, they shined the bronze testicles of a statue depicting the founder of Virginia Tech and his mount. They then returned the truck to its parking space at the laundry. There was a great noise about this and the deputy commandant demanded the names of the malefactors at dinner. He was ignored. The next day, he summoned the First Class (seniors) to his office, lined them up alphabetically and asked each man in turn if he had been on the “raid” or knew anyone who had been. After the first fifty men declined to answer either question, the situation grew both threatening and dire because the deputy commandant put them all on report and said he would confine the class to barracks until graduation. At that point the presidents of the class and the Honor Court walked to headquarters and told the Superintendent what was happening and respectfully declared that they would find it necessary to release the corps from the honor system if the questioning continued. The deputy commandant was told that if he wanted to find the names of the members of the “expeditionary force” he would have to do it in some way other than to demand the names from cadets who were honor bound to tell him the truth.

This system reflected a 19th Century belief in the existence of creatures called “gentlemen.” Some have said this belief was really 18th Century because it was focused on manner of performance. Perhaps they are correct in that opinion. In accordance with that belief, the cadets lived in the barracks together in a shared atmosphere of ethical and moral certainty.

A disadvantage of the system was that they tended to forget what the outside world was like. On field trips or at “away games” cadets often lost caps and other property to people who stole and lied whenever they could.

The VMI corps of Laine’s time thought of themselves as gentlemen volunteers who cooperated with the administration but who were unwilling to be pushed beyond the limits of what they thought was reasonable regulation and discipline. The administration understood this and a careful balance was usually maintained. From the administration’s point of view the situation was something like having a thousand half tamed lions under “command.” Since these “lions” often came from the most powerful families in the Commonwealth of Virginia, the situation was especially delicate.

High standards of dress and military ceremony were maintained. Laine calculated after graduation that he had participated in nearly 500, parades, reviews, guard mounts and the like.

At the same time, these were not “parade ground” soldiers. They liked to fight and would do so if given an excuse. Laine always remembered a football game played against George Washington University. The game was in Washington. A fleet of buses hauled the corps to an area near the stadium and then foolishly turned them loose for two hours before the game. During the contest, the well “lubricated” corps watched as GW University cheer leaders crept across the field and “stole” a small, brass saluting cannon with which VMI celebrated scoring. As the white clad civilian students ran back across the field with their prize, the VMI Corps stood as one, flowed down the banked seats and out onto the grass in hot pursuit. The cheerleaders abandoned the gun and fled into the stands pursued by a mass of cadets. Somewhere up among the seats, Laine saw a George Washington student raise his hands to resist the onslaught. A cadet carefully pushed the man’s date to one side with the words “excuse me, miss” and then hit the student hard enough to knock him into the next row. On the field itself the VMI football team heard the noise, stopped, turned, dropped the ball and raced back to join the action.

Such things happened from time to time. It was generally understood in the collegiate world of the era that these “beasts” should not be provoked.

The alumni encouraged the “beasts.”

It would be fair to say that college girls liked the cadets.

In the course of his army career Laine was, for a time, a professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. West Point and VMI look very much the same except that West Point is much larger. Laine, then a major, had not sought the assignment. It had sought him with an insistence that could not be refused. During his service at USMA he grew more and more puzzled by the differences that existed between the VMI of his college days and the West Point at which he taught.

VMI was a hard place. Punishments for violation of the Institute’s regulations were swift and severe. Nevertheless, there was a kind on insouciance, a gaiety, and enjoyment of life in its richness that he did not find at West Point where every “sin” was treated as evidence of moral defect. There was a solemnity about West Point that had been absent from the genteel but rough world of the Virginia Military Institute. In studying the history of the two schools, he was puzzled to learn that before the War Between the States, the first superintendent at VMI had been president of the Board of Visitors at West Point for several years. After the war there was no contact, none, between the two institutions until 1900.

“Let Virginia Choose”

(Motto inscribed on the ring of the Class of 1859)

In the end he decided that the war itself and its aftermath had caused the VMI system to emerge as he had known it. The chain of events and circumstance leading to that system was not hard to understand.

The contesting parties in the Civil War were hugely mismatched in terms of available industrial resources, population and most especially potential military manpower.

After three years of attempts on both sides to achieve decisive battles of annihilation on the Napoleonic model, the war became a matter of attrition in which there could really be only one outcome however brilliant and gallant Southern efforts might be. In the end the Confederacy was reduced to such desperate measures as the commitment of the VMI cadet battalion to decisive combat at New Market, Virginia on 15 May, 1864. Their performance was a glory to be treasured, but one can only repeat, the words of their commander that day. This was Major General John Breckinridge. He bowed his head and said “Put the boys in, and may God forgive me.” VMI was burned and closed by the US Army that year.

The school re-opened soon after peace returned. The military governor of what had been Virginia, but was then the “1st Military District” intervened directly to make that happen. This was George H. Thomas, a native Virginian. He ordered that the cadets be given their rifles and the four artillery pieces of the cadet battery.

The reborn school was rebuilt on the ashes of its past. The faculty was recreated. Confederate veterans inevitably made up the hard core of that faculty. These tended to be very young men. They lived long lives. Some of them lived well into the 20th Century. There was no contact with the federal armed forces for many years and the beliefs and attitudes of these men were pervasive and unchallenged for a long time. The Confederate past and the life and death struggle that they had waged were ever with them and the cadets under their care.

Forrest Pogue once told Laine the story of an occasion in which Cadet George C. Marshall, asked the Commandant of Cadets if anything could be done about a disreputable character who sat daily in the Sally Port entrance to the barracks whittling, chewing and spitting on the pavement. According to Pogue, the Commandant rose behind his desk to say, “Young man, he was a sergeant in the 4th Virginia Cavalry Regiment. You are all he has left, and if he wishes he may sit there until he dies. Good day.”

The Commandant was representative of his colleagues and contemporaries. Their army had never known peace. It had never known garrison life and the politics of appropriations struggles in Congress. It had nearly always fought outnumbered and often had won against much stronger forces. These were not professionals in the sense that long-service US Army Regulars were professionals. These were citizen –soldiers whose instinctive goal was to maximize leaders and men for combat and to create leaders who were unflinching, flexible and indefatigable. Their notion of military service was a Platonic ideal of war without compromise and leaders who would possess the “will to win or die.”

In retirement Laine was asked at a social event by a US Marine general if he were a West Point man. When told the truth, the general turned to another marine and said. “These are the real fighters. They don’t know how to do anything else.”

That heritage was born in fire, blood and desperation. In the Old Corps of Laine’s time at VMI it was still very much alive.

The End

As Stonewall looked around him on the Brock Road at Chancellorsville, he saw the faces of his colleagues and former students, “Ah,” he said, “the Institute will be heard from today.”

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