Sylvanus Thayer

American educator

• Born: June 9, 1785
• Birthplace: Braintree, Massachusetts
• Died: September 7, 1872
• Place of death: Braintree, Massachusetts

Known as the founder of West Point, Thayer is remembered for reorganizing the administration and curriculum of the U.S. Military Academy and for firmly establishing a scientific and theory-based system of engineering education in the United States.

Early Life

The son of a wealthy Massachusetts farmer, Sylvanus Thayer (thahr) initially embarked on a classical education at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, which he attended from 1803 to 1807. While at Dartmouth, however, Thayer became an avid student of Napoleon Bonaparte and his campaigns and developed such a strong interest in a military vocation that he sought and obtained an appointment as a cadet to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, in 1807. Graduated from the academy in 1808 after only one year of attendance, he was commissioned a second lieutenant of the Army Corps of Engineers. Although the threat of war with England after the Chesapeake affair undoubtedly accelerated his graduation, Thayer had impressed his instructors as being a capable student who took his chosen profession of military engineering seriously.

Still stationed at West Point upon graduation, Thayer spent the next four years engineering coastal fortifications in New York and New England, a reflection of the poor condition of U.S. coastal defenses and of the sudden importance of the academy and its engineer graduates to the defense of the nation. While at West Point during this period, Thayer was additionally assigned as an instructor of mathematics at the academy, an indication of his interest in education. He also continued his professional development as a military engineer through active membership in the U.S. Military Philosophical Society, demonstrating what would become a lifelong commitment to military engineering and engineering education.

With the advent of the War of 1812, Thayer, now a first lieutenant, left West Point and began active campaigning first as chief engineer to General Henry Dearborn on the Niagara frontier in 1812 and then as engineer to General Wade Hampton along Lake Champlain in 1813. Promoted to captain of engineers in October, 1813, Thayer was assigned to improve the harbor defenses of Norfolk, Virginia, during 1814 under the command of General Moses Porter. From his wartime service, Thayer gained an appreciation of the U.S. Army’s great need for professionally educated and disciplined officers.

At the war’s end, Thayer, holding the rank of brevet major for his service at Norfolk, again found himself stationed at West Point and once again able to pursue his study of military and civil engineering. With Napoleon’s escape from Elba and the beginning of the Hundred Days, the final campaign of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, Thayer requested a furlough in order to study military developments in France. However, Brigadier General Gardner Swift, chief of engineers, instead ordered Thayer to Europe on active duty on a trip that historian Todd Shallat has termed “a crucial event in American engineering.”

Life’s Work

Recognizing in the aftermath of the War of 1812 that it was imperative for the U.S. Army and its academy to stay abreast of contemporary European military theory and practice, Thayer and Colonel William McRee, a fellow West Point graduate and engineer, left for France in the spring of 1815. They spent the next two years observing allied military operations, studying French fortifications, studying procedures at the French artillery school at Metz, and, most important, conferring with instructors at France’s premier military engineering school, the École Polytechnique. When Thayer and McRee were recalled to the United States in early 1817 to assume other duties, they brought with them campaign maps, engineering charts, scientific instruments, and nearly one thousand military, scientific, and engineering texts for use at the academy.

On July 17, 1817, Major Thayer became the U.S. Military Academy’s third superintendent, a post that he would hold for sixteen years and one for which he would become known as the “Father of West Point.” Although the academy had formally been in existence since 1802, there were still no definitive systems of administration or instruction in place, deficiencies recognized by both the civilian and the military leadership.

With poor discipline rampant in the corps of cadets, a lack of consistent academic instruction and supervision, and meager technical facilities, little had actually changed at West Point since Thayer had been a cadet. Thayer, who had a thorough knowledge and an appreciation of French engineering and methods of instruction and who was highly regarded for his keen analytical mind and organizing abilities, was the perfect choice for superintendent. With a strong commitment to the Army and to military engineering, and with the complete support of both Brigadier General Swift and the new secretary of war, John C. Calhoun, Thayer began an institutional reform of the U.S. Military Academy that has endured essentially unchanged to the present day.

Thayer’s comprehensive reforms of the academy were both administrative and curricular in nature. With regard to the former, the “Thayer System,” as it came to be known, bore the strong imprint of the French École Polytechnique and embodied a reorganization of academy life that included weekly examinations, weekly recitations, the ranking of cadets according to their academic performance, the institution of small-group instruction in sections composed of students with similar academic rankings, and the assignment of cadets to branches of the service according to their academic performance. The rigor of the new curriculum became renowned among American educators. George Ticknor, a Dartmouth College classmate of Thayer and a future president of Harvard University, was not alone when he voiced the opinion that the cadets at the academy were

a body of Students, constantly devoted to an intellectual discipline much more severe than their military discipline—who are much more thoroughly taught… than any of the young men, who are sent to any of our colleges.

Like the academy’s new administrative procedures, the technical curriculum that Thayer established borrowed a great deal from French military education. First and foremost, French became a mandatory subject at the academy because Thayer felt it to be the language of military science and engineering and because the majority of the academy’s textbooks were in French. In addition, four of the seven professors actually were French. However, the true substance of Thayer’s academic reforms lay in the science and mathematics courses that became the foundation of the academic curriculum.

By adding regular offerings of engineering, natural philosophy (science), and mathematics to the curriculum and then weighting them more than traditional subjects such as military tactics and French, Thayer established a science- and theory-based system of education at the academy. The technical education received by academy graduates was so comprehensive that it remained unmatched by any other college or university in North America until after the Civil War. The prominence of army engineers in civil engineering projects, particularly railroad and canal building, was so great that it is clear that academy-trained engineers were at least as important to the antebellum United States as the professional officer corps it provided to ensure the nation’s defense (the primary reason for the academy’s existence).

Although Thayer resigned as superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy in 1833 after a dispute with President Andrew Jackson over Jackson’s interference with Thayer’s disciplining of cadets, the academy continued to bear Thayer’s imprint long afterward. Part of Thayer’s success as superintendent was based on his being an able administrator and his talent for picking the right people for the right jobs. Several professors who were hand-picked by Thayer during the 1820’s and 1830’s continued their professorships well into the 1870’s, lending a definite continuity of Thayer’s vision of West Point and of military service to successive generations of army officers.

Thayer himself returned to field duty with the Army Corps of Engineers and was primarily responsible for the harbor defenses of Boston, Massachusetts. He later served as the president of the Army’s Board of Engineers. After taking a medical leave because of failing health in 1858, Thayer finally retired from the Army as a colonel of engineers and a brevet brigadier general in 1863. Even then, he continued his interests in education and engineering by endowing a private academy and founding a library in his hometown of Braintree, Massachusetts, and contributing to the establishment of a school of architecture and civil engineering (now known as the Thayer School of Engineering) at his first alma mater, Dartmouth College.

Significance

During the sixteen years that Sylvanus Thayer presided as superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he instituted reforms that caused the academy to graduate disciplined, well-educated officers for the U.S. Army. The small corps of West Point graduates performed well during the mass mobilizations of the Mexican and Civil Wars and in leading and administering a tiny peacetime army spread across a constantly expanding United States. Although the Army still had organizational problems throughout the nineteenth century, Thayer’s reforms at West Point helped prevent the military disasters of the War of 1812 from reoccurring. After 1817, academy graduates proved to be true professional soldiers, putting the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on an equal footing with its European counterparts.

Thayer’s establishment of a rigorous, scientific curriculum at the U.S. Military Academy also contributed to the creation of a technical institution that was unequaled during the antebellum period. West Point-trained civil, railroad, and mining engineers, on active duty and as civilians, were commonly regarded as the premier builders and technical advisors of the early republic and made substantial contributions to the economic growth and technological expansion of the United States during the nineteenth century. Academy graduates proved to have an impact on the social, cultural, and technical life of the United States in far greater proportion than their numbers would suggest. Ultimately, the “Thayer System” at West Point helped standardize engineering and scientific education in the United States by providing a model for other academic institutions to emulate.

Bibliography

Ambrose, Steven A. Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967. A history of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point that concentrates on the service of famous graduates. Thayer’s importance as the founder of West Point is emphasized.

Crackel, Theodore J. West Point: A Bicentennial History. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. This history includes a chapter entitled “Sylvanus Thayer, Father of the Military Academy, 1817-1833.”

Hill, Forest G. Roads, Rails, and Waterways: The Army Engineers and Early Transportation. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1957. Covers the importance of army civil engineers to the internal improvement of the antebellum United States. The first chapter covers the formation of U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the development of the “Thayer System.”

Morrison, James L., Jr. The Best School in the World: West Point: The Pre-Civil War Years, 1833-1866. Akron, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1986. Morrison covers the history of the U.S. Military Academy from Thayer’s resignation as superintendent in 1833 to the removal of the academy from the Army Corps of Engineers’ jurisdiction in 1866. Several chapters highlight the legacy of Thayer’s educational and administrative reforms.

Pappas, George S. To the Point: The United States Military Academy, 1802-1902. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1993. This history of the academy’s early years emphasizes Thayer’s efforts to make the institution a high-caliber military academy and engineering school.

Shallat, Todd A. Structures in the Stream: Water, Science, and the Rise of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Though intended as a broader social history of the Army Corps of Engineers and its management of water projects, chapters highlight the impact of European engineering traditions on the development of scientific engineering in the United States and Thayer’s persistent advocacy of the French system of education at the École Polytechnique.

Tyack, David. George Ticknor and the Boston Brahmins. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Tyack focuses on George Ticknor and his educational reforms at Harvard University but briefly describes Thayer’s reforms at the U.S. Military Academy from the perspective of a civilian and a humanist. Ticknor, a Dartmouth classmate of Thayer, regarded the academy at West Point under Thayer’s tutelage as a model for collegiate education in the United States.