The 1850s were a time a change and growth in of "Old West Point" - a time of improvements in living conditions for cadets, expanding activities, and innovation and reform in academic training and military thought. Boards of general officers and junior specialists met at West Point to test new systems of drill using the cadets, and veteran junior officers were encouraged to use the Military Academy as a home base for developing new systems of ordnance and artillery. Despite curriculum focused more on mathematics and engineering than on military science, the interest stirred by victories in Mexico and technological changes in warfare made West Point the Army's intellectual center during the 1850s.

The Academic Board believed in the need for rigorous training in mathematics and engineering. More than half of each cadet's class rank, and 70 percent of class time, remained concentrated in mathematics, science and engineering. 

Overall, the humanities, along with drawing and French, accounted for only one-seventh of the class time and class standings.  Conduct accounted for another one-seventh of class rank.

Mathematics training was rigorous. The fourth class, for example, would take calculus from around February 5th through April 15th, meeting six days per week for three hours per day - a total of 180 hours. 

Albert Ensign Church, West Point professor and author of Elements of the Differential and Integral Calculus, noted that "From three and a half to four hours should be given daily by the cadet to render him thoroughly proficient in the prescribed lessons of the mathematical course."

Military instruction also accounted for one-seventh of the class time and standing. The vast majority of this time was spent drilling for parades, and many officers and graduates criticized its boredom and lack of realism. 

Yet others applauded the discipline and precision of these drill formations, which successfully prepared junior officers for the sort of troop training, largely close-order drill, standard in all 19th Century armies. 

The capstone of cadet military education was engineering professor Dennis Hart Mahan's "Art of War" course. But only nine hours out of this semester-long class were actually devoted to the history, art and science of war.  Most of Mahan’s instruction, as will his writings, focused on fortification and military engineering.  

Members of the Class of 1860, U.S. Military Academy, at Harrison's Landing, VA, August 1862.

Texts in use in 1861 included:  Mahan’s Treatise of Field Fortification; Mahan’s Lithographic Notes on Permanent Fortification, Attack and Defence, Mines and other Accessories; Mahan’s Course of Civil Engineering and Mahan’s Lithographic Notes on Stone Cutting. 

Military training at the academy improved in the period with the addition of a company of engineers in 1843, which enabled cadets to practice field fortification, and with the addition of cavalry tactics in 1849, 17 years after its reintroduction into the Army. 

A Department of Tactics was finally created in 1858, largely due to a growing concern with the effects of the rifled muskets then coming into use.  Lt. Col. Hardee led instruction in infantry, artillery and cavalry tactics, using his new Rifle & Light Infantry Tactics. 

In 1861, Bvt. Lt Col. J. F. Reynolds took over instruction of tactics, with the revised U.S. infantry tactics as the core text, along with Tactics for Garrison, Siege and Field Artillery, Mahan’s Treatise on Advanced Guards and Out Posts, &c., Jomini’s Art of War, Thackeray’s Army Organization, and Administration, the U.S.Army Regulations, and extracts from McClellan’s Military Commission to Europe. 

A five-year curriculum was introduced in 1854, expanding tactical training (which increased to make up 30 percent of the cadets' class rank, double its previous proportion) and introduced classes in Spanish for an officer corps expected to serve on the nation's southwestern border. The addition also increased the existing English course and brought law, history and geography back into the curriculum. The five-year curriculum was short-lived however, as the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 led to the graduation of the Class of 1862 a year early, after which the five-year plan was abandoned.

The Class of 1861 was graduated from West Point in two waves, forty-five of them in May 1861, and thirty-four more in June, as the war was beginning.  A handful left early to join the seceding states.  The Class of 1861 included George Armstrong Custer, Thomas L. Rosser, Judson Kilpatrick, Emory Upton, Adelbert Ames, John Herbert Kelly, Edmund Kirby, John Pelham, Alonzo Cushing, Patrick O'Rorke, Charles Hazlett, and Justin Dimick.

Choosing sides in the Civil War was an agonizing decision for many West Point graduates. Most remained loyal to their home states. Of 977 graduates of the classes of 1833–1861 alive when war began, 259 joined the Confederacy (including 32 Northerners), while 638 fought for the Union (including 39 Southerners).  By 1860, three-fourths of the Army's commissioned officers were academy graduates -- only 25 percent of the officers who had graduated from West Point resigned to join the Confederacy, although 37 percent of the prewar officer corps came from the South.

294 graduates served as generals for the Union and 151 for the Confederacy. One hundred and five graduates, more than 10 percent of those who served, were killed in action, and 141 (about 15 percent) were wounded, while 19 won the Medal of Honor (which was created during the war).

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