Date
4-26-2024
Department
College of Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD)
Chair
Steven Woodworth
Keywords
United States Naval Academy, United States. Navy--History, Honor System
Disciplines
History
Recommended Citation
Limneos, Samuel J., ""More Nobility of Soul": Honor at the United States Naval Academy, 1845-1875" (2024). Doctoral Dissertations and Projects. 5446.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/5446
Abstract
An import from the old European world, the new United States and its incipient national navy inherited a fierce honor culture that valued aggressiveness, impetuousness, defiance, boldness, and courage. In 1845, the Navy brought the education of midshipmen, the service’s youngest corps of junior officers to Annapolis, where it established the United States Naval School. There, the institution’s strict discipline, organization and order inculcated the midshipmen in the expectations of an officer and gentleman and subjected them to unprecedented restraint as a matter of duty. The midshipmen reacted to this restraint and all impugnation to their vulnerable sense of honor by recourse to aggressive protest, targeted ostracization, and even ritualized violence, including formal duels with pistols. While the Naval School’s reorganization into the Naval Academy in 1850 mirrored service-wide disciplinary reform, the midshipmen balked at new punishments, resisted regulations, and grew indignant toward any construable comparison of their status as students to sailors, and their association with African American slaves and servants. The midshipmen drank alcohol to excess, prevaricated their way out of trouble, construed regulatory supervision as dishonorable espionage, refused to conform, advocated for their delinquent friends, and ostracized those they considered disreputable, even as the school attempted to inculcate notions of self-responsibility. The Civil War and resignation crisis rocked the Naval Academy, where the same friction between personal indignance and duty informed the decisions of those officers that turned their back on the strained nation and those that remained loyal to the constitution. After the war, the new academy leadership implemented a formal honor system and codified ostracization as a formal punishment for misconduct while encouraging the midshipmen to aggressively enforce it. The coming of the first three African American midshipmen to Annapolis beginning in 1872 disrupted this system with dramatic irony, threatened the midshipmen’s conception of honor, and strained the limits of their indignance, even as the minority students’ experience reflected the social and political tumult of legislative Reconstruction. The antagonism between moral courage, longsuffering, and loyal performance of duty on the one hand, and indignance, offense, and hatred on the other inform this story of the development of an unwritten honor concept at Annapolis across three earth-shaking decades of national history.
