The United States Naval Academy was established in 1845, nearly half a century after the founding of the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1802. Originally known as the Naval School, it was located at Fort Severn in Annapolis, Maryland. Franklin Buchanan was appointed its first commandant, and in its first year the institution had seven faculty members and 200 students, most of whom had already served in the navy for five years or more. The original curriculum at the Naval School was modeled after that of West Point and included philosophy, mathematics, chemistry, ordnance, and navigation.
The school evolved a great deal in the 1850s when it was rechristened the U. S. Naval Academy and the curriculum was expanded. All students were required to wear uniforms, and a system of demerits for midshipmen who misbehaved was established. The academy’s campus was enlarged, and the faculty was expanded by adding both civilian and military instructors. By the late 1850s, the Naval Academy was one of the world’s finest institutions for training naval officers.
When the CiViL War broke out, the Naval Academy was only 15 years old, so it did not have nearly as much of an influence on the Civil War as its army counterpart at West Point. While most of the high-ranking Union and Confederate generals were trained at West Point, most of the war’s prominent naval officers started their careers long before the U. S.Naval Academy had been established, and so they were not educated at the institution. The war did have a pronounced influence on the academy, however. With the outbreak of hostilities, a number of the academy’s students and faculty, including its commandant Franklin Buchanan, resigned to join the Confederate navy. Shortly thereafter, fears that the Confederacy might attack the location at Annapolis prompted the academy to relocate to Newport, Rhode Island, for the duration of the war.
When the Civil War ended, the academy returned to Annapolis, and Rear Adm. David Dixon Porter was named commandant. Porter continued to expand and modernize the academy’s facilities and curriculum. In the 1870s, the school experimented briefly with desegregation, but not one of the three African Americans admitted was able to graduate. By the 1890s the Naval Academy had become the sole training ground for all of the United States’s high-ranking naval officers.
Further reading: Jack Sweetman, The U. S. Naval Academy: An Illustrated History (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1979).
—Christopher Bates
World History
