I’ll admit. I was a little disappointed with how not-that-interesting the Eggnog Riot turned out to be. It has its great moments, but there is not as much absurdity as I had hoped. Maybe I just have yet to read the best account of it. But to me, it seems it peaks when you hear the following:
- Over Christmas 1826, a group of cadets smuggled whiskey and rum into West Point to mix with their eggnog for a party. Some rowing across the Hudson was done.
- That party led to a riot.
- Jefferson Davis was involved.
But the details of that party, which you can read about in greater detail on its Wikipedia page, aren’t as exciting as I want them to be. Nor was the riot particularly forceful (it did not, say, engulf the entirety of the United States Military Academy). Basically, some cadets got drunk and got mad at one of their superiors for telling them to stop being so drunk. They then began breaking things and fighting people. There was, of course, confusion, and arms were taken up.
The whole ordeal (which was technically a mutiny) took about nine hours. Seventy cadets were involved, and twenty were eventually court-martialed because of it, with most of those twenty expelled from West Point. Davis was not court-martialed, but there’s a historic record of a conversation at a different, allowed party between West Point’s superintendent and the commandant of the cadets regarding Davis’ disciplinary problems. At one point, a group of cadets told someone they were looking for drums and a fife when they were actually trying to find a captain with whom they were upset. At another point, that captain literally read a group of cadets the Riot Act.
I do not know how common these sorts of events are in our nation’s history, but I can say with some confidence that no other mutiny has as cool a name as the Eggnog Riot. Which makes it interesting that this name hasn’t been used, as, say, the name of a band, the name of a band’s Christmas album, or the title of a project by a dairy-loving blogger.
In other words, stay tuned.
