Christmas is a time of peace, love, and goodwill toward men; a quiet contemplative day spent at home with family and cherished friends, opening gifts, sharing meals, and getting cozy by the warmth of the fire.
It wasn't always like that. In fact, for centuries, Christmastime meant 12 straight nights of often raucous, drunken parties where entire villages would come together to celebrate. That tradition made its way to early America, and even military cadets got in on the action; getting so wild and raucous that they forever altered American history.
This is the forgotten history of the Eggnog Riot.
As Christmas 1826 rolled around, the cadets at the prestigious West Point Military Academy in New York were getting restless. Their commander, Colonel Sylvanus Thayer, had banned alcohol on campus in an effort to impose a stricter culture at the school . So strict was he that he wouldn't allow cadets to leave campus for any reason or even to cook food in their barracks.
On Christmas Eve, the cadets had had enough. Thayer's new rules meant that their traditional Christmas party--complete with heavily spiked eggnog--would be ruined. So they rebelled. A number of them smuggled in liquor from nearby taverns. Since they didn't have much money, they traded their blankets and even boots for alcohol for their party. Colonel Thayer wasn't about to ruin their fun.
The cadets paid 35 cents to buy the silence of an enlisted soldier who was standing guard at the entrance to West Point, and they snuck back into the barracks with upwards of four gallons of smuggled whiskey.
Colonel Thayer had been preparing for the possibility of a secret party, and he dispatched several enlisted men to the barracks to keep an eye on things. They saw nothing. As the midnight hour approached, it seemed, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
By 4 am, though, there arose such a clatter that the troops ran to the dorm above them where they heard what sounded like a party. They found a number of cadets visibly drunk and trying to hide under blankets. One of those soldiers, a man named Hitchcock, ordered the cadets to their feet.
Instead, they became defiant .
"Get your dirks and bayonets and pistols if you have them!" one of the cadets shouted. "Before this night is over, Hitchcock will be dead!"
Several floors below them, another cadet named Davis, was leading a rebellion of his own against soldiers who had come to check on his party. They smashed furniture and broke windows and prepared for a battle with the battalion they assumed was coming to the barracks.
The riot raged for hours, and roughly 260 cadets took part. No one was seriously hurt, but the damage they did to the barracks was extensive. As the dawn broke on Christmas morning, the rioters staggered back home--not because of the soldiers dispatched to stop them, but because of the news that circulated among the rioters that Colonel Thayer was coming.
He was so strict and so feared that his mere presence on campus was enough to stop the riot. Colonel Thayer spent Christmas investigating what had happened and discovered that he had a huge problem: Nearly every one of the 260 cadets who rioted could have and should have faced criminal charges. If they were arrested and charged with crimes, though, West Point would look terrible. All of the hard work he had done to build it up into America's premiere military academy would be lost.
He came up with a solution; he punished every cadet who took part with menial labor and expelled the 19 cadets whom he determined were the riot's ringleaders. Almost miraculously, Cadet Davis, who was clearly one of the leaders, escaped expulsion.
Years later, though, he put his experience in insurrection to good use by leading another revolt against the U.S. Military. In 1861, Cadet Jefferson Davis was elected president of Confederate States of America. His top general, Robert E. Lee, was also a cadet at West Point at the time, but in what was perhaps a bit of foreshadowing of his shrewd judgement in battle, he chose not to take part in what became known as the Eggnog Riot.
That night of Christmas Eve chaos even had a more long-lasting legacy. The City of New York realized that it didn't have a way to stop things like that which happened on the West Point campus. Had Colonel Thayer and his troops not been on the scene, the results could have been devastating.
That's why, as a direct result of the Eggnog Riot, the New York Police Department was created.