Thomas Jefferson's Military Academy: Founding West Point.

Thomas Jefferson's Military Academy: Founding West Point. Edited by Robert M. S. McDonald. Jeffersonian America. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2004. Pp. xxii, 233. $35.00, ISBN 0-8139-2298-4.)

Historians have viewed Thomas Jefferson's decision to establish the United States Military Academy as an ironic contradiction, given the Virginian's desire for peace and liberty, not to mention Jefferson's general miserliness toward the military. During West Point's bicentennial year, a conference celebrating Jefferson's 1802 establishment of the institution generated this volume, edited by Robert M. S. McDonald, a West Point professor. The essay collection successfully restores Jefferson's position as the "Lost Founder" of one of the nation's most celebrated institutions through a consideration of the emergence and development of the academy in its "broader contexts" (pp. xvi, xii).

In 1982 Theodore J. Crackel cast West Point's establishment as a Republican reform effort, countering Federalist efforts to create a quasi-aristocratic military caste in the U.S. Army. Not only does Crackel, in the volume under consideration, place the decision to establish West Point as a military academy within a broader context of Jeffersonian political reform, but Peter S. Onuf, in his introduction to the collection, notes that Jefferson's idealism made him anathema to military leaders who embraced a more realistic view of the world. The result was Jefferson's relegation to the footnotes of the academy's history, as the school came into its own in an age of democracy "that failed to grasp or appreciate a need either for a truly professional army or for an effective, energetic federal government" (p. 7). Nonetheless, Onuf contends, Jefferson was the academy's founder, a point ably supported in seven subsequent essays that collectively encourage the consideration of the relationship between the academy's establishment and the creation of the American republic.

Don Higginbotham, David D. Mayer, and Elizabeth D. Samet examine West Point's founding in a larger historical context. Higginbotham suggests that George Washington's army, with its tradition of tutorial education, "lacked the freshness and creativity" to embrace a military academy (p. 43). Mayer rejects West Point's establishment as a Jeffersonian constitutional inconsistency. Whereas Jefferson's 1793 opposition to a military academy represented a "knee-jerk reaction against Hamiltonian Federalism," Jefferson's plan for the academy nine years later was "his mature interpretation of the necessary and proper clause" (p. 56). Samet contends that Jefferson, like John Adams, saw West Point as a source for more than great captains and yearned for republican leaders who embraced "wisdom, benevolence, equity, humanity, and justice" (p. 89).

The essays by Crackel and by Jennings L. Wagoner Jr. and Christine Coalwell McDonald explore motives for the academy's establishment. To Wagoner and McDonald, Jefferson's West Point was a product of his desire for an educated citizenry. His decision to name Jonathan Williams to superintend the academy, along with his support for the American Philosophical Society and his record of scientific discovery, provides evidence of a larger plan for a scientific branch of a national university, a plan that never reached fruition.

Essays by Samuel J. Watson, Robert M. S. McDonald, and an afterword by Jean M. Yarborough consider larger questions of a Jeffersonian legacy. Watson capably challenges early military "amateurism," explaining that academy graduates during the Williams era--Jonathan Swift, Alden Partridge, Sylvanus Thayer, and others--nurtured nascent seeds of military professionalism, helping to socialize a military that is subordinate to a constitutionally sanctioned civil power. McDonald explores history's treatment of Jefferson, explaining how Jacksonian democracy, the Civil War, and the neo-Hamiltonians contributed to forcing Jefferson into the academy's shadows. The emergence of Republican principles--limited government at home and the expansion of liberty abroad--have allowed Jefferson to step forward into a place of primacy among the academy's pantheon of personalities. Yarborough reinforces this perspective in an afterword that extols military virtues in preserving republican institutions but laments the course that the nation has taken since 1802. While Jefferson feared a military aristocracy of the "well born and well bred," today's elites eschew military service. Instead, "the 'trust fund babies' and children of America's civilian elites" are inculcated with the "anti-Americanism that thrives in the rarefied atmosphere of America's elite colleges and universities" (pp. 215, 214). The great irony is that the republican values that Jefferson cherished are today nurtured at the very institution he once opposed.

McDonald's edited volume goes far in restoring Jefferson's place as the formative founder of the West Point. Coupled with West Point: Two Centuries and Beyond (Abilene, Tex., 2004), edited by Lance Betros, it represents the most current scholarship on the lasting influences of Thomas Jefferson and the U.S. Military Academy and is recommended both for scholars of the early republic, military historians, and students of Thomas Jefferson.

ROBERT P. WETTEMANN JR.

McMurry University