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Great question! There's a little difficulty in pinning it down though, because American Civil War generals attended West Point at various times between like 1818 and 1863. A great many Confederate generals graduated between 1824 and 1861, the latter being an "accelerated" class that graduated a year early so the graduates could move to field commands early - George Custer, for instance, was among the accelerated class of 34 men who graduated to commissions that year.

So unless we go through year by year to find a curriculum and survey their classmates to see who was a prankster, who was the Goat, who was a model citizen and who was destined for great things, we have be a little general; it's certain that Custer's course of study was different than, say McLellan's 1846 graduation.

Nevertheless I'll take a crack at it. First I'll break down the course of study for each year, along with elements of the cadet culture that existed alongside studies.

First Year - Plebes

A cadet would start their course of study with what was termed "Plebe camp," a six-week encampment that functioned like an extended boot camp. Cadets would drill from 4 a.m. to 7 a.m., with wiggly lines around the reveille and chow calls. After breakfast, cadets would study until 1 p.m., study after lunch til 4, and then drill for another three hours.

Encampment of course included all students, not just the plebes - the general term for first-years - but the plebes had extra duties such as cleaning the very well used parade ground, clean the tents, make the beds, and fetch water and the like. The elder cadets had more leisure time, presumably because these "domestic" tasks were handed off to the plebes. This was in no way official, in fact the policing was done as a matter of rotation, with certain classes doing the cleaning at certain times of day, but a part of the ongoing and systemic hazing that was part of life at the Point. Henry O. Flipper, a West Point graduate of 1877 - and the first black cadet ever to graduate - put it succinctly:

[The plebe] marches into the company streets. He surveys them carefully and recognizes what is meant by "the plebes have to do all the policing," servants being an unknown luxury.

It should be understood that this was an institutional element of life at the academy, and even the bristling Flipper claimed that "it is indispensable as practised at the Academy." Regardless, the plebes would do hours of drill and hours of study each day, with additional loads of menial labor in policing and other servile tasks, and on top of that they still had the expectation that they would keep their uniforms and arms clean and servicable.

Drill and study time was of course broken up by official ceremonies and other duties. A drill parade was done after breakfast, and each phase of drill was broken up into manual, squad, or company drill, and at certain phases of plebe camp the whole class might drill together for the extended parades that ended the encampment.

At night, each class had a rotation of guard duty. One might assume, given that the camp is not under arms or embodied for combat at all, that guard duty's worst element would be cold or boredom, but of course that's not the case, because guard duty is another means by which senior cadets would go on "hazing tours" of the plebes. Flipper again describes:

After getting into camp they separate, and manage to come upon a sentinel simultaneously and from all points of the compass. If the sentinel isn't cool, he will challenge and advance one, and possibly let the others come upon him unchallenged and unseen even. Then woe be to him! He'll be "crawled over" for a certainty, and to make his crimes appear as bad as possible, will be reported for " neglect of duty while a sentinel, allowing the officers and non-commissioned officers of the guard to advance upon him, and to cross his post repeatedly without being challenged." He knows the report to be true, and if he submits an explanation for the offence his inexperience will be considered, and lie will probably get no demerits for his neglect of duty.

Plebes were not officially cadets until they graduated plebe camp. Afterward they were considered cadets and gentlemen. Though Flipper describes conditions in the 1870s, ostensibly for a peacetime army, he reflects that much of what he went through was easier than many others in his company - his visibility as the only black plebe may have had something to do with that - and also that conditions were likely worse in years and decades prior.

The First Year Course of Study or; A Peacetime Army’s Occupation

Nevertheless, the course of study officially began in July. For later classes, much is arranged according to class rank, but the first years - still unofficially plebes but full members of the school now - had no class rank established, and so their class assignments were handled alphabetically.

Flipper gives his first year course of study as engineering, law, and ordnance and gunnery. This is consistent with earlier descriptions of West Point study. In the peacetime antebellum army, the small size and limited scope of military actions in the United States necessarily valued engineering, especially, as a field of study. Officers vied for postings in up-and-coming cities across the continent in the "scientific corps," which is usually where the highest ranking cadets preferred to go on graduation. The military flavor and posting to forts and the like was obviously an expectation, but especially during the long periods of peace (note here that I mean "peace" in the sense that the United States was not involved in a conflict that required the expansion of the army, not that it was ever truly at peace, Indian wars even before the Civil War were persistent), many cadets expected a short military career followed by a lucrative switch to civil engineering positions. Quoting here from Terry Mort's Wrath of Cochise, which has an extended section on the West Point of the 1840s and 50s:

Cadet Adelbart Ames, class of 1848, said, “The effort to stand high is prompted almost wholly by the prospect it holds out of selecting one’s own corps, and being able to enter one of the scientific corps.”

He goes on, later to explain that the academy's academic schedule was heavily weighted toward mathematics and engineering, not only because artillery and logistics demanded it, but because the expectation was that the academy would produce engineers, first, who could if called upon function as soldiers, rather than soldiers who might occasionally assist in engineering. This is totally consistent with the political limitation of the US army in peacetime. It was a politically limited arm, expected only to serve in times of defense, not to start or carryout offensive wars. This remained the political reality even in the lee of the Mexican War, an unambiguously offensive war of conquest that was, like the War of 1812, cast as defensive in rhetoric and spirit, if not reality.

This also meant that the graduating butterbar facing his first post in the west might be utterly unprepared to lead men in the field against hostile natives, or to intervene during times of domestic guerilla warfare, like Bleeding Kansas. West Point graduates, though given command preference in the army during the Civil War, were not necessarily any better trained or experienced than some volunteer officers only by their graduation from West Point. Everyone in the United States army had to learn the new tasks of the job on the job, which was a feature of both the US and the British political-military doctrine.

The year would end with exams, a review of their merits and demerits - a system implemented in 1817 by Sylvanus Thayer, a graduate from 1809 who had served in the War of 1812 and then toured European military academies, and brought back knowledge of their practices to the United States. Thayer was, like most other American officers, an enthusiastic devotee of the French system, and was especially influenced by their practices.

Thayer had graduated at a time when the Academy had no regularized curriculum, no official course of study, few rules, and not even an age limit. Some cadets were as young as fourteen, and several were long in the tooth, in their forties. Part of the problem was that the superintendent before Thayer, Alden Partridge, was less interested in producing effective officers than he was in running what appeared to be, in essence, a social club with a military flavor. When Thayer was first appointed, Partridge had not been made aware of the change, and the two had a series of dueling commands in a struggle to control the place.

Thayer eventually won and went on to institute a series of extremely unpopular reforms, but ones that professionalized and regularized instruction at the Academy. Chief among them was the rigorous "board" process, in which students, once a day, would write answers to questions on chalk boards, reciting every subject every day. This is, again, on top of drill, hazing, cleaning, and guard rotations. The most consistent subjects were mathematics and science, then languages - predominantly French but Spanish as well, especially by the 1870s. Thayer also limited class sizes so instructors could better individually scrutinize cadets - very similar to modern educational best practices but with a slightly inverted purpose. The most lasting reform he made was likely the system of merits and demerits, known as points.

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