‘To Check . . . the Very Worst and Meanest of Our Passions’: Common Sense, ‘Cobbon Sense’, and the Socialization of Cadets at Antebellum West Point

Abstract

This essay adds to a growing body of scholarship that challenges the image of the United States Military Academy at West Point and US Army officer corps as institutions that were isolated in the nineteenth century from developments in civilian society. It does so by calling attention to parallels between the ideas that shaped the antebellum military academy‘s approach to cadet education and socialization and those of the Scottish-American ‘common sense’ school of moral philosophy that was popular among members of America’s emerging middle class before the Civil War. It describes these parallels, how they reflected a common cultural milieu that shaped the outlook of the common sense philosophers, their adherents and education theorists in antebellum America, and the authorities at West Point, and identifies traits that distinguished how many West Point graduates conducted themselves during the American Civil War that are suggestive of these parallels.