A prodigy of behind-the-lines warfare, Cushing fought with distinction at the Battle of Fort Fisher and led numerous audacious raids into Confederate-held territory, where he sank ships, freed slaves, and gathered intelligence. In his most famous exploit, a David-versus-Goliath tale made real in October 1864, the young lieutenant stood in an open boat directly under the guns of the Confederate ironclad ram Albemarle and, while exposed to a withering fire, detonated a torpedo under the lip of the ship’s armor, sinking the fearsome vessel. He then eluded Rebel posses and escaped eight miles to Union lines. Already the youngest man to be made lieutenant in the history of the Navy, Cushing was immediately promoted and became its youngest lieutenant commander; eventually he would become its youngest commander. His premature death in 1874 ended a career that had recognized no limits.
What makes Cushing’s career all the more astounding is that it might never have happened. In March 1861, mere weeks from graduation, Acting Midshipman Cushing was forced to resign from the Naval Academy. The reason: He had failed his Spanish midterm. As Academy Superintendent George Blake reported to the Navy Department: “Deficient at February semi-annual examination, 1861. Midshipman William B. Cushing. Deficient in Spanish. Aptitude for study: good. Habits of study: irregular. General conduct: bad. Aptitude for Naval Service: not good. Not recommended for continuance at the Academy.”
Whether or not Cushing knew he had flunked Spanish is not known, but he almost certainly had no inkling that his ouster was coming. Less than two weeks earlier, he had written a jocular note to his cousin Mary in which he said that he didn’t expect to be in Washington for Abraham Lincoln’s presidential inauguration on 4 March, but would visit soon after. He displayed no anxiety about the possibility of being dismissed for failing Spanish; midshipmen got dismissed for failing navigation or gunnery or seamanship, not Spanish. And he wasn’t worried about being close to accumulating the 200 demerits that would result in automatic dismissal. He’d been close before but always managed to straighten up in time to avert disaster.
This time, however, the administration didn’t wait to see if he could pull his fat from the fire; he flunked Spanish, and so it was adios. Cushing’s cousin, Commodore Joseph Smith, the head of the Bureau of Yards and Docks, was shocked that Cushing had been dismissed for reasons “scholastic rather than naval.”
He would not be the last person surprised by this explanation. Many observers have believed that with graduation approaching and the political situation deteriorating (at that time, seven seceded states had formed a government, and 222 of the Navy’s 1,554 officers had resigned), the severity of Cushing’s punishment seemed unreasonable—so unreasonable that historians stopped searching for an explanation rooted in reason. They began looking for a personal, emotional explanation. As Cushing biographer Charles W. Stewart wrote in the June 1912 U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings: “one is forced to conclude that some personal resentment entered largely into the motives for prompting summary action in this case.”
Personal resentment? Quite possibly. But the cases against the two men commonly suspected of forcing the ouster are decidedly weak.
The Spanish Don
The two possible culprits fingered for engineering Cushing’s ouster are Spanish professor Edward Roget and Superintendent George Blake. Writing in Proceedings, Stewart recounts this story:
The head of the Department of Modern Languages was Professor E. A. Roget, a man of distinguished and dignified bearing, generally called “The Don.” While the professor was crossing a street of Annapolis in January 1861, he walked in front of a vicious cart horse that severely bit him on the shoulder. Sometime afterward . . . he found his class laughing over a sketch on a fly-leaf of Cushing’s book. He demanded a look and found a clever drawing of himself biting the neck of a horse, and the inscription, “The poor old Don, he bit the hoss.” The professor excitedly shouted out “I deed not bite the hoss. The hoss he bit me,” and, when the class roared with laughter, the angry professor rushed over to the superintendent’s house and demanded Cushing’s immediate dismissal.
In Lincoln’s Commando, a 1959 biography of Cushing, Ralph J. Roske and Charles van Doren enrich the story with details:
The facts of the matter are that on the 14th of January [Roget] was severely bitten on the left shoulder by a horse. The next day he came into class, his shoulder swathed in bandages, to find his students laughing at a well-executed sketch on the flyleaf of Cushing’s textbook. The haughty little professor, his Latin blood boiling, demanded the book and found that the drawing depicted him in the act of biting the horse’s neck, with the inscription, in clear, bold capitals, “The poor old Don, he bit the hoss!” He began to wave his untethered arm in the air. “I did not bite the hoss!” he shouted angrily. “The hoss bit me!” The class was of course convulsed with merriment, and remained so throughout the hour; the teacher could find no way of quieting them. When he did get a measure of silence at one time he ended it himself by muttering that it was absurd that anyone should make the stupid mistake of assuming that he would have any interest whatever in biting the neck of a horse. The class was again convulsed.
Roske and Van Doren also include an account of an earlier prank Cushing supposedly played on Roget: “Cushing had often mimicked the professor, a dapper little man who the midshipmen considered an effeminate dandy. Once Roget had dressed in his best clothes to meet a young lady and Cushing had prepared a bucket of water at the top of a doorway.”
There is no good reason to believe that either the “bit the hoss” tale or the bucket tale is true; no sources are cited. More to the point, there are reasons to disbelieve the stories. First, at the Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library is a series of routine notes between Superintendent Blake and Navy Secretary Isaac Toucy that show that Cushing was absent from the Academy between 7 January and 2 February. This leaves a very narrow window during which Stewart’s version of events could have taken place, and shows that Roske and Van Doren were completely mistaken in placing this story on 14 January.
This, however, is just one of the colorful details added by Roske and Van Doren that impeach their account. The depiction of Roget as a comic figure is especially egregious. In The Spirited Years: A History of the Antebellum Naval Academy, Charles Todorich describes Roget as “distinguished,” “dignified,” “a gentleman,” and “a protégé of Arsene Girault,” one of the most respected and beloved figures in the early days of the Academy. In the hands of Roske and Van Doren, Roget is described as haughty, little, effeminate, with boiling Latin blood. In the bucket incident, Roske and Van Doren tell us that Roget was on his way to meet a young lady. And so he might have been. But one might then wonder where the 59-year-old Roget had stowed Eugenie, his wife of some two decades.
The most compelling reason to doubt the whole horse anecdote can be found in a letter from Lieutenant Christopher R. P. Rodgers, the commandant of midshipmen, written to Superintendent Blake on 17 October 1860. This letter, not previously cited by Cushing biographers, describes in detail a joke that the midshipman pulled on Roget. “Two days ago,” wrote Rodgers, “Professor Roget observed him drawing in his Spanish book, looking at his instructor from time to time, as if employed in taking his likeness. Mr. Roget examined the book and found upon one of the blank pages a drawing of a Jackass with the words ‘drawn from life.’ Mr. Cushing represents in his defense that he had had no reference to Mr. Roget in the drawing, and that his object in looking at him so frequently was to observe if he was watching him.”
This story is certainly true. That there would be two incidents involving the same people, a drawing, and an equine mammal, is not impossible, but an incredible coincidence. Most likely, in the bored wardrooms of blockade ships and raucous alehouses of Washington and New York and Boston, the jackass tale evolved. Details were added, facts changed, voices mimicked, the chomping hoss introduced, and the distinguished Don reduced to a cartoon cliché. It’s quite possible that the foremost author of the enlarged tale was Will Cushing. In his letters home, he chronically embroidered detail, heightening the drama of situations, and embellishing his part. It’s easy to believe that one day he tired of explaining why he got tossed out of Annapolis, and chose to entertain his companions with the tale of a witty lad who deflated a pompous teacher and paid a harsh price.
The Superintendent’s Role
The second person suspected of triggering Cushing’s surprising termination is Superintendent Blake. In January 1861, Blake granted the midshipman a week’s leave to tend to an “ill and lonely” aunt in Washington. That leave was twice extended, once when Cushing claimed that the aunt was still sick, and a second time when he claimed that he had been infected. According to Stewart, at some point Blake encountered Commodore Smith, Cushing’s cousin; Blake, assuming that Smith’s wife was the sick aunt, asked about her health, and was surprised to learn that she was well. When Cushing returned to Annapolis, Blake accused him of making a false statement regarding his aunt’s health. Cushing, his honor impugned, hotly accused Blake of belonging to “the Ananias class,” a reference to a liar mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles.
Like the Roget tale, this story has problems. First, acting out of resentment seems highly out of character for the avuncular Blake. The 59-year-old superintendent had the habit of placing his hand on his round belly and saying “I can lay my hand upon my heart, and say I have never wronged a midshipman.” The Academy by itself, with its academic grind and terrible food and rules upon rules, ruthlessly weeded out the boys who weren’t officer material. If a young gentleman didn’t measure up, Blake had no difficulty bidding him goodbye, but if a student was surviving, Blake wasn’t the sort to turn up the pressure.
Cushing may have spoken harshly to Blake, but Blake harbored no grudge. We know this because during the same period that the midshipman supposedly insulted Blake, the superintendent was writing a letter to the Academy’s surgeon, James Palmer in which he points out that Cushing’s absence “unfortunately” took place at a period of the academic year “of great importance”—just before midterms. Blake requested that Palmer examine Cushing and “state, whether in your judgment, he is entitled to special consideration if found deficient in his studies.”
Palmer responded with an oddly uninformative letter. He told Blake that he had seen Cushing, who said that he had been sick for ten days:
This is not unusual period of absence from class by reason of illness: we have at this moment, in Hospital, an Acting Midshipman who has been cut off from his studies for the last ten days, and who tells us that he apprehends no difficulty on that account at his examination, because this is only a period of review of studies supposed to have been completed in December last. This, as I understand, is exactly the case with Mr. Cushing also: he has not appealed to me to recommend him to “special consideration,” and I am unaware of any reason sufficient to justify me in volunteering to do so.
Why Palmer sidestepped Blake’s request is a mystery, but the superintendent’s reason for asking is not. He was anticipating that Cushing would be facing difficulties, and for whatever reason, he was trying to create a medical out for any academic shortcomings on the midshipman’s part.
But why? Was this a normal intervention by the head man? Or did he fear that somebody intended to make trouble for Cushing?
The Midshipman and the Commandant
Tall, elegant, and handsome, Lieutenant Rodgers, the 41-year-old commandant of midshipmen, was a scion of America’s naval royal family. Men on both sides of his lineage captained warships during the Revolution and the War of 1812. His uncles were Matthew and Oliver Perry. The very embodiment of the naval establishment, Rodgers was a proponent of modernization in the Navy and professionalism among its officers. He wanted to rid the service of lazy and incompetent officers and replace them with men of learning, energy, and ambition. He did not think Cushing was promising material.
In the same report Rodgers sent to Blake about the Roget incident, the commandant discussed his course of action. “I remonstrated gravely and kindly with Mr. Cushing, but it seems that the warning I gave Mr. Cushing made no impression on his mind or change in his conduct. . . . It is desirable that this misconduct should be checked for this young gentleman’s talent for buffoonery renders him a source of trouble at recitations.” Written just two weeks into the start of the school year—the first class had just returned from its summer cruise across the Atlantic—the letter shows that right from the start, Rodgers was keeping a close eye on Cushing, and what he saw was a troublemaker and a clown.
But Will Cushing was no clown. From a very young age, he had been active, spirited, physically adventuresome, and not particularly respectful of authority. He was not naturally suited to an Academy experience that George Dewey described as “one endless grind of acquiring knowledge,” where there was no physical exercise program or gymnasium. Cushing had a unique experience for a midshipman of his era, having spent a year as a congressional page. Although he didn’t like the job, he had a privileged view of government and the leaders of the day. He had just spent four months on the Atlantic cruise, during which he fulfilled his responsibilities with energy and enthusiasm. After that adventure, his eagerness to begin his naval career was never higher.
Unfortunately, his tolerance for the Annapolis routine was never lower. He was ready for war. He wanted to be at sea, not at school, and was about to pay the price. By the beginning of February, Blake was looking to create Cushing an out; by the end of the month, Cushing needed it.
On 13 March, Rodgers wrote a letter to Blake that was a response to at least one note from the superintendent, but more likely, it was part of a long discussion, one that possibly extended beyond the “talent for buffoonery” letter in October. Even-handed and lawyerly, the previously unpublished letter’s very carefulness makes it all the more lethal:
Sir:
In reply to your note this morning, I beg leave to send you a copy of the conduct roll of Acting Midshipman Cushing, by which you will perceive that upon his return from leave of absence of the 2nd of February, his conduct has greatly improved[.]
Your own thorough knowledge of the young gentleman’s character will enable you to judge far better than I as to the possible permanence of this improvement. A promise of improvement, given to me, by him, soon after I arrived, was not kept.
In October I had occasion to report Mr. Cushing to you for disorderly conduct in the recitation room. Since his return from leave of absence, I have mentioned to you an instance of similar misconduct, which has not been repeated, though at the time it gave me some concern lest it should lead to the renewal of the disorderly habits which I had complained.
In answer to your last question, whether if Mr. Cushing should graduate or enter the service, he would, in my opinion, prove to be an efficient or subordinate officer, . . . I would respectfully state that from what I have seen here, and from what I have heard of him from you, I do not think him likely to prove either efficient or subordinate. In my opinion, Mr Cushing has not given that promise of usefulness and correct conduct which would entitle him to go forth into the Navy, stamped with the approval of his school, which is one of probation as well as of instruction.
I am respectfully your servant,
CRP Rodgers,
Commandant of Midshipmen
A Decision Is Reached
The most important line in this remarkable letter is the one where Rodgers responds to a question Blake seems to have posed: If Cushing entered the Navy, do you think he would “prove to be an efficient and subordinate officer?” One wishes for more insight into the superintendent’s thinking. Rodgers was a disciplinarian; in his memoirs, Rear Admiral Robley Evans wrote that when he was at Annapolis in 1860, Rodgers locked him in a dark room for three days after some alleged infraction, yet the admiral said he owed Rodgers “everything” for his success. Blake, too, was a disciplinarian, but he knew how to look the other way. Perhaps he understood more than others how one jokester in a class might ease the pressure felt by 20 grinders, how the “middie” nervy enough to pull some pranks could turn out to be a good man to have on the quarterdeck when the enemy was engaged.
Blake’s question in the letter had to have been a loaded one. The standard for an “efficient and subordinate officer” couldn’t have been very high. The superintendent knew that Cushing, however immature, would be capable of leading a section of swabbies through their gun drills. No doubt Blake expected Rodgers to acknowledge that Cushing would meet the minimum standards.
Instead, Rodgers said no, making sure that his opinion was based not only his experiences but “from what he had heard from [Blake].” If it is true that Cushing did rudely erupt when Blake asked him a question in February, this might have been the point when the kindly old superintendent asked himself, “Do I really know this boy?”
Rodgers wrote the above letter on 13 March. That same day, Cushing tendered his resignation. He left the Academy and went to Washington to stay with Commodore Smith, who appealed the verdict to the new secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles. Twenty-one of Cushing’s classmates also protested the forced resignation.
While in Washington, Cushing spent time with Charles Flusser, his former gunnery instructor at the Academy, now a 28-year-old lieutenant. Flussser gave him a book titled Naval Enterprise, Illustrative of Heroism, Courage and Endurance, a 250-page volume jammed with stories of intrepid feats of arms and eye-catching color illustrations. Cushing drank them in. From the start, Flusser saw something that Rodgers did not: You couldn’t make Cushing do anything; you had to inspire him.
Welles met with the former midshipman on 23 March. Writing years later, Welles’ memory was sharp:
I first encountered Cushing soon after entering my duties as Secretary of the Navy. He had just been dismissed from the Naval Academy for reasons which his kinsman, Admiral [sic] Joseph Smith, pronounced . . . wholly insufficient to justify such treatment. But the Superintendent . . . declared it was not his first failure, that he was inattentive to certain studies, was boyish and wayward, was wanting in essential elements which were requisite to the make-up of a good naval officer, and that to reinstate him at the academy would be detrimental.
But the secretary just wasn’t buying Blake’s assessment. “The truth is,” wrote Welles, the father of three sons, “with [Cushing’s] exuberant spirit he had too little to do; his restless, active mind was filled with zeal to accomplish something.” Still, Welles felt obliged to support Blake’s decision. “I remember the expression of saddened disappointment and grief which shadowed his juvenile face when informed of the fact.”
Three weeks after that meeting, however, the Confederates did Cushing the favor of bombarding Fort Sumter. One of the first things Welles did was name the former midshipman an acting master’s mate, assigned to the screw frigate Minnesota: “His gratitude for the appointment was earnest. . . . [He said] I should never have cause to regret his re-instatement.” And Welles never did.
The first clue that there might be a clearer explanation for William Cushing’s departure from the U.S. Naval Academy came in the form of a letter found in the Navy Library in Washington, D.C. Dated 6 November 1951, it was written by Admiral John Heffernan, the director of Naval Records, to Granville Tilghman of Norfolk. The letter stated that there were 11 documents in the National Archives related to Cushing’s dismissal. Among them were the two letters from Commandant Christopher R. P. Rodgers to Superintendent George Blake, a petition calling for Cushing’s reinstatement signed by his classmates, a letter from Congressman Alfred Ely of New York, a letter to Blake from a mathematics professor, and a note from a Captain Magruder written on the back of Ely’s letter. None of these letters, however, were in the file at the Navy Library. Fortunately, the letters from Rodgers showed up in the National Archives in Washington, along with the very interesting letters between Blake and James Palmer, the Academy surgeon. The series of letters between Blake and Navy Secretary Toucy were found at the Academy’s Nimitz Library. The other letters mentioned by Admiral Heffernan were not located, but just knowing that Cushing’s dismissal was the subject of some argument and debate shows that it was an unusual and controversial event. With the help of such books as Mark C. Hunter’s A Society of Gentlemen: Midshipmen at the United States Navy Academy 1845–1861 (2010) and Charles Todorich’s The Spirited Years: A History of the Antebellum Naval Academy (1984), both published by the Naval Institute Press, one is able to get a sense of the larger agendas that were affecting the case of the high-spirited midshipman, and the personalities who were determining his fate.