James S. Robbins, Last
in Their Class: Custer, Pickett and the Goats of
“Boys Will Be Boys:”
Confusing Dash with Leadership
Reviewer: Joe
Petrulionis
James S. Robbins’ Last in Their Class: Custer, Pickett and the Goats of West Point will thrill readers who have already embraced the notion of Civil War officers as “gods.” Robbins mined the Special Collections Library of the United States Military Academy and now presents a vivid description of how these “gods” got their various starts. The book’s premise is engaging. During the 19th Century, every graduating class at West Point had a group of under-achieving cadets known as the “Immortals.” For academic or disciplinary reasons (or more often, both), these immortals lived with the very real possibility of being drummed out, or in their own house jargon, to be “found.” At the very bottom of this group of immortals, the last of his class to graduate, was the one cadet known to his classmates as the “goat.” This is a book about the “goats.”
By following the careers of these “goats,” Robbins hopes to convince his readers that many of these underachievers made great names for themselves by exhibiting courage, energy, dash, and leadership traits.
This book does not masquerade as scholarly history. It was evidently written, not for historians, but for Army officers and those who pine to have been one. There are few attempts to uncover patterns of cultural interaction between the warrior class and the rest of society. And there are many missed opportunities for a historian’s critical treatment of sources. Instead, this book is a product of its archive. It contains the excitement, many of the biases, and much of the braggadocio that would be expected from the official correspondence, private letters, administrative papers and memorabilia of West Point. Precautionary label: undergraduate students who intend to use this book as a historical source should temper its conclusions and implications with alternative viewpoints.
My comments here are not intended to dissuade readers from the book, but to caution them. Robbins provides an entertaining and action-packed account of the escapades of the under-achievers of West Point. He rescues George Pickett from his traditional cartoon-like role of the pompous and sentimental dandy. Instead, the onus of Gettysburg lingers on James Longstreet, and his apparent indecisiveness during “Pickett’s Charge.” Beyond these pearls, the narrative treasure piece of Robbins’ book is George Custer’s military career, and Custer’s--perhaps--very timely end at the “tragedy” of Little Bighorn.
But we should never forget that wars have at least two sides, that they are not comprised of saber and flag dances by officers, that they instead should be remembered as evidence of a collective failure of leadership, a breakdown of intellectual efforts by diplomats. More important, we must remember that in a democracy we all share the blame when unnecessary wars occur. Today’s reader will not be surprised that the nineteenth-century version of a “C minus” student could end up at the vanguard of a tactical blunder, making costly mistakes that might have been avoided by a better strategist. We have seen similar students go further in our own time. Perhaps the biggest lesson from the Civil War and Reconstruction, a theme that Robbins ignores, is that wars, unlike baseball games, are never “won.”
Reviews by Joe
Petrulionis
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5. American Popular History B. Between 1750 and 1859