Although it's common for students to dislike their professors, Naval Academy midshipmen took their antipathy for one instructor a little too far in 1848 when the academy was known as the Naval School. March 22 marks the 175th anniversary of this episode, which few, if any, at the academy today would care to celebrate.
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| Henry H. Lockwood, 1861 |
The target of the midshipmen's ire was Professor Henry Hayes Lockwood, a civilian but a West Point graduate, who taught physical sciences. When the school's Academic Board decided infantry and artillery drills should be added to the curriculum, much to the midshipmen's displeasure, Lockwood was tapped to lead this instruction and became recipient of a number of epithets and pranks from his students.
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| Lockwood's horse painted as a ship of the line in another midshipman prank on the professor, from the 1934 Lucky Bag. |
In the late afternoon of March 21, the academy's executive officer discovered a gathering of midshipmen chanting “down with gunnery” outside Fort Severn, rebuked them, and dispersed the crowd. Thinking the issue resolved, the executive officer awoke early the next morning to the midshipman officer of the day's report of “the effigy of a man, in naval uniform and wearing tin spectacles, suspended by the ensign halyards to the flag staff some 40 feet above the surface and plainly visible over the walls to those in the city.” Furthermore, the watch reported, “to the arm of the effigy a neat model gun (ordnance of wood and prepared for instruction) was attached.”
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| The flagstaff between the Lyceum and Recitation Hall where the effigy appeared, 1846 |
Having already dealt with numerous discipline problems during his first year as superintendent, Commander George P. Upshur reached his boiling point. “With the exception of open mutiny,” he wrote to the secretary of the Navy, “I consider this the greatest outrage I have ever known committed under naval or military rule.” After spending the morning feverishly investigating the affair, Upshur assembled the entire school at noon and denounced the act. At the conclusion of his speech, Upshur remarked “that according to the code in which I had been instructed, the active agents in the proceeding of honorable men, had no alternative but to come forward, assume their own proper responsibilities, and remove their unoffending brethren from the odium and other serious consequences which would attach to the whole class.”
Midshipman John M. Murphy was the first to step forward and publicly apologize. Although Murphy disavowed any intended disrespect, he went on to offer to duel Lockwood or, as Upshur termed it, to "give to the professor such satisfaction as he might desire, or such as was usual among gentlemen."
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| Commander George P. Upshur, ca 1847 |
Murphy and the two other midshipmen who stepped forward after him put up a long legal fight in a court martial on the basis that civilian professors lacked the authority over the students that commissioned officers enjoyed. Ultimately, the secretary of the Navy dismissed the guilty midshipmen in mid-May 1848. The incident led to Naval School professors receiving commissions to grant them authority over the midshipmen and a $400-per-year raise in pay. One of Lockwood’s colleagues humorously remarked that the offended professor could “afford to be hung in effigy every year for a like increase of pay.”
Though this incident was quickly put to rest, the discipline problems continued, which added to the impetus for wide-ranging reforms of the Naval School. These reforms resulted in the familiar four-year academic program, and renaming the institution the Naval Academy.
Sources
Benjamin, Park. The United States Naval Academy. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1900.
Lockwood, Henry H. “Henry Hayes Lockwood's Notes Concerning the Founding of the Naval Academy and His Early Years at the Naval School in Annapolis.” Digital Collection. Special Collections and Archives Department, Nimitz Library, United States Naval Academy. https://usna.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/delivery/01USNA_INST:01USNA/12101715520006751.
Mahan, Alfred T. “Old Times at the Naval Academy,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 115 (June-December 1907), 375.
Upshur, George P., Letter to Secretary of the Navy John Y. Mason, “Reporting Professor Lockwood hanged in effigy,” March 24, 1848, vol. 2, Entry 1: “Letters Sent by the Superintendent, 1845-1865.”
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