The deception of this clause is in keeping up the old idea of these cadets being with their companies, and by the judgment of the President detached from their companies, and attached, as students, to the Military Academy. The President is to exercise a "discretion," by which the cadet is transferred for a while from his company to the school, to be there as a student; that is to say, like a student, but still retaining his original character of quasi officer in his company. This change from camp to school, upon the face of the act, was to be, as formerly, a question for the President to decide, dependent for its solution upon the military indications of the young man's character, and his capacity for the higher branches of the service; and this only permissive in the President. He "may" attach, &c. Now, all this is illusion. Cadets are not sent to companies, whether of artillery, infantry, cavalry, or riflemen. The President exercises no "discretion" about detaching them from their company and attaching them as students. They are appointed as students, and go right off to school, and get four years' education at the public expense, whether they have any taste for military life, or not. That is the first large deception under the act: others follow, until it is all deception. Another clause says, the cadet shall "sign articles, with the consent of his parent or guardian, to serve five years, unless sooner discharged." This is deceptive, suggesting a service which has no existence, and taking a bond for what is not to be performed. It is the language of a soldier's enlistment, where there is no enlistment; and was a fiction invented to constitutionalize the act. The language makes the cadet an enlisted soldier, bound to serve the United States the usual soldier's term, when this paper soldier—this apparent private in the ranks—is in reality a gentleman student, with the emoluments of an officer, obtaining education at public expense, instead of carrying a musket in the ranks. The whole clause is an illusion, to use no stronger term, and put in for a purpose which the legislative history of the day well explains; and that was, to make the act constitutional on its face, and enable it to get through the forms, and become a law. There were members who denied the constitutional right of Congress to establish this national eleemosynary university; and others who doubted the policy and expediency of officering the army in this manner. To get over these objections, the selection of the students took the form, in the statute, of a soldier's enlistment; and in fact they sign articles of enlistment, like recruits, but only to appease the constitution and satisfy scruples; and I have myself, in the early periods of my service in the Senate, seen the original articles brought into secret session and exhibited, to prove that the student was an enlisted soldier, and not a student, and therefore constitutionally in service. The term of five years being found to be no term of service at all, as the student might quit the service within a year after his education, which many of them did, it was extended to eight; but still without effect, except in procuring a few years of unwilling service from those who mean to quit; as the greater part do. I was told by an officer in the time of the Mexican war that, of thirty-six cadets who had graduated and been commissioned at the same time with himself, there were only about half a dozen then in service; so that this great national establishment is mainly a school for the gratuitous education of those who have influence to get there. The act provides that these students are to be instructed in the lower as well as the higher branches of the military art; they are to be "trained and taught all the duties incident to a regular camp." Now, all this training and teaching, and regular camp duty, was done in Washington's time in the regular camp itself, and about as much better done as substance is better than form, and reality better than imitation, with the advantage of training each officer to the particular arm of the service to which he was to belong, and in which he would be expected to excel.
Gratuitous instruction to the children of the living is a vicious principle, which has no foundation in reason or precedent. Such instruction, to the children of those who have died for their country, is as old as the first ages of the Grecian republics, as we learn from the oration which Thucydides puts into the mouth of Pericles at the funeral of the first slain of the Peloponnesian war: and as modern as the present British Military Royal Academy; which, although royal, makes the sons of the living nobility and gentry pay; and only gives gratuitous instruction and support to the sons of those who have died in the public service. And so, I believe, of other European military schools.
These are vital objections to the institution; but they do not include the high practical evil which the wisdom of Mr. Macon discerned, and with which this chapter opened—namely, a monopoly of the appointments. That is effected in the fourth section, not openly and in direct terms (for that would have rendered the act unconstitutional on its face), but by the use of words which admit the construction and the practice, and therefore make the law, which now is, the legal right of the cadet to receive a commission who has received the academical diploma for going through all the classes. This gives to these cadets a monopoly of the offices, to the exclusion of citizens and non-commissioned officers; and it deprives the Senate of its constitutional share in making these appointments. By a "regulation," the academic professors are to recommend at each annual examination, five cadets in each class, on account of their particular merit, whom the President is to attach to companies. This expunges the Senate, opens the door to that favoritism which natural parents find it hard to repress among their own children, and which is proverbial among teachers. By the constitution, and for a great public purpose, and not as a privilege of the body, the Senate is to have an advising and consenting power over the army appointments: by practice and construction it is not the President and Senate, but the President and the academy who appoint the officers. The President sends the student to the academy: the academy gives a diploma, and that gives him a right to the commission—the Senate's consent being an obligatory form. The President and the academy are the real appointing power, and the Senate nothing but an office for the registration of their appointments. And thus the Senate, by construction of a statute and its own acquiescence, has ceased to have control over these appointments: and the whole body of army officers is fast becoming the mere creation of the President and of the military academy. The effect of this mode of appointment will be to create a governmental, instead of a national army; and the effect of this exclusion of non-commissioned officers and privates from promotion, will be to degrade the regular soldier into a mercenary, serving for pay without affection for a country which dishonors him. Hence the desertions and the correlative evil of diminished enlistments on the part of native-born Americans.
Courts of law have invented many fictions to facilitate trials, but none to give jurisdiction. The jurisdiction must rest upon fact, and so should the constitutionality of an act of Congress; but this act of 1812 rests its constitutionality upon fictions. It is a fiction to suppose that the cadet is an enlisted soldier—a fiction to suppose that he is attached to a company and thence transferred, in the "discretion" of the President, to the academy—a fiction to suppose that he is constitutionally appointed in the army by the President and Senate. The very title of the act is fictitious, giving not the least hint, not even in the convenient formula of "other purposes" of the great school it was about to create.
It is entitled, "An act making further provision for the corps of engineers;" when five out of the six sections which it contains go to make further provision for two hundred and fifty students at a national military and civil university. As now constituted, our academy is an imitation of the European military schools, which create governmental and not national officers—which make routine officers, but cannot create military genius—and which block up the way against genius—especially barefooted genius—such as this country abounds in, and which the field alone can develope. "My children,"—the French generals were accustomed to say to the young conscripts during the Revolution—"My children, there are some captains among you, and the first campaign will show who they are, and they shall have their places." And such expressions, and the system in which they are founded, have brought out the military genius of the country in every age and nation, and produced such officers as the schools can never make.
The adequate remedy for these evils is to repeal the act of 1812, and remit the academy to condition in Washington's time, and as enlarged by several acts up to 1812. Then no one would wish to become a cadet but he that had the soldier in him, and meant to stick to his profession, and work his way up from the "pay, ration, and clothing of a sergeant," to the rank of field-officer or general. Struggles for West Point appointments would then cease, and the boys on the "Grampian Hills" would have their chance. This is the adequate remedy. If that repeal cannot be had, then a subordinate and half-way remedy may be found in giving to citizens and non-commissioned officers a share of the commissions, equal to what they get in the British service, and restoring the Senate to its constitutional right of rejecting as well as confirming cadet nominations.
These are no new views with me. I have kept aloof from the institution. During the almost twenty years that I was at the head of the Senate's Committee on Military Affairs, and would have been appropriately a "visitor" at West Point at some of the annual examinations, I never accepted the function, and have never even seen the place. I have been always against the institution as now established, and have long intended to bring my views of it before the country; and now fulfil that intention.