Horace Porter Addresses West Point Graduates

West Point’s commencement exercises this past weekend came to mind as I was doing some research on Horace Porter, the indispensable aide to Ulysses S. Grant who eventually wrote the excellent memoir Campaigning with Grant.

On June 12, 1909, Porter delivered the West Point commencement address. Porter had been a member of the West Point class of 1860.

Secretary of War Jacob M. Dickinson delivered the diplomas at the event while President William Howard Taft looked on from the speakers’ platform. The Library of Congress even had a picture:

According to The New York Times, “One hundred and one young Americans were graduated into the United States Army and two young Chinamen into the Imperial Army of China.” The paper went on to report, “It was one of the largest, and, according to the older officers, one of the best looking classes that West Point has yet turned out.”

The Times did not provide a transcript of Porter’s speech, but offered only a summary:

“Gen. Porter called the army the great civilizer of the country, and in referring to those people who favor the establishment of peace by the abolition of armies and navies, asked if they believed that good order could be preserved and burglaries, murder, and riots stopped by disbanding the police organizations of the great cities.”

Dickinson followed, following up on Porter’s note about anti-military sentiment in the country:

“Whatever distrust, on account of military establishments that may have existed or yet exists in the minds of some of our citizens, West Point is secure in the overwhelming general confidence of our people, and West Point will have their continued support for the fulfillment of its great purposes as designed by Washington, who advocated its establishment as an object of primary importance and one that should be ‘permanent.’ The lessons learned at so much cost in actual war by Washington and Hamilton of the inadequacy of an untrained soldiery, however brave and patriotic, led to its establishment as essential to the life of the Nation.”

(I include this because it brought to mind Cecily Zander’s excellent book The Army Under Fire: The Politics of Antimilitarism in the Civil War Era.)

Porter is a fascinating guy. After serving on Grant’s staff during the during the war, he served as Grant’s personal secretary in the White House, resigning in December 1873 to take a position with the Pullman Car Company. In 1897, he began an eight-year stint as the U.S. Ambassador to France. He served on the West Point Board of Visitors and served as president of the Sons of the American Revolution.

If you’ve never read Campaigning with Grant (one of three books Porter wrote), I highly recommend it.