BIRTH OF THE NAVAL ACADEMY

In spite of calls from such notables as John Paul Jones, our early Navy resisted establishing a shoreside teaching academy in favor of hands-on midshipman training under actual operating conditions at sea.  In 1799, Alexander Hamilton proposed a joint Army-Navy “fundamental school” at West Point, however when the US Military Academy was established in 1802 naval science was not in the curriculum.  Alternatively in that year, President Adams’ new Naval Regulations called for chaplains to perform the additional duty of seagoing “schoolmasters.”  The training of a chaplain hardly qualified him to teach such subjects as navigation or mathematics, and “Professors of Mathematics,” paid a lieutenant’s salary, had to be commissioned to augment midshipman training afloat.  Later, in 1838, an eight-month cram school for officers was established in a wing of the Naval Asylum (retired sailors home) in Philadelphia.  But these measures fell short of providing US Naval officers a theoretical and basic science background.

Two factors in the early 1840s accentuated the need for a naval academy and illustrated the shortcomings of the established training system: the developing complexity of steam technology; and a well publicized and tragic near mutiny aboard the brig SOMERS by a malcontent midshipman.  Renewed calls for a shoreside naval training school fell happily on the ears of President Polk’s newly appointed Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft.

But Bancroft had only $60,000 budgeted for “instruction,” and to approach Congress for more would risk re-opening the basic debate on whether or not to establish an academy.  The inspired Bancroft then learned from Secretary of War William L. Marcy, whose son was a Passed Midshipman assisting at the Naval Asylum, that the Army wanted to unload Ft. Severn, an installation near Annapolis that had outlived its value as a military outpost.  Encouraged, after Congress adjourned for the summer Bancroft gleaned the best professors from the Naval Asylum and placed them all in “awaiting orders” status.  This status, normally used for officers in transit between ships, temporarily suspended the member’s salary.  With Secretary Marcy briefly out of Washington as well, oversight of the War Department defaulted to Bancroft, who quietly (and without cost) transferred Ft. Severn to the Navy.  Using the suspended salary money he structured the skeletal elements of the US Naval Academy, which officially opened this day, Superintendent CDR Franklin Buchanan presiding.  Up and running when Congress re-convened, the establishment debate was rendered moot.  And shortly Bancroft secured an appropriation to flesh out the Academy staff and return its professors to active pay status.

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CAPT James Bloom, Ret.

Rehabilitation Medicine

Lovette, Leland P.  School of the Sea:  The Annapolis Tradition in American Life.  New York, NY: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1941, pp. 48-55.

Potter, E.B. and Chester W. Nimitz.  Sea Power:  A Naval History.  Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1960, p. 228.

Sweetman, Jack.  The U.S. Naval Academy:  An Illustrated History.  Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 1979, pp. 3-17.

ADDITIONAL NOTES:  The respect credited Franklin Buchanan at this stage of his career is evident in his selection as the first Superintendent of the Academy.  But with the outbreak of the Civil War 16 years later, Buchanan resigned his commission believing his native Maryland would secede with the other southern states.  But Maryland voted to remain in the Union, and Buchanan attempted, unsuccessfully, to retrieve his commission.  He then joined the Confederate States Navy, eventually rising to its most senior officer rank.  He commanded CSS VIRGINIA in the first battle of ironclads in Hampton Roads in March 1862.  Despite his southern leanings, Buchanan was not a slave owner.  He was the son of a Baltimore physician, and his maternal grandfather had signed the Declaration of Independence.  Three US Navy destroyers honor Buchanan, DD-131, DD-484, and DDG-14.

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