The Great West Point Eggnog Riot of 1826

It happened on the very early morning of December 25, 1826, after two campus officers attempted to break up an alcoholic eggnog-fueled Christmas party at West Point’s North Barracks. 

The seeds of the chaos were sewn in the summer of that year, when the esteemed and unflinchingly strict superintendent of the Academy, Colonel Sylvanus Thayer, instituted a sweeping ban on the purchase, storage, or consumption of alcohol anywhere on the grounds of West Point. 

It was put in place shortly after that year’s exceptionally rowdy July 4 celebration, which ended with a group of drunken cadets hoisting the school’s Commandant of Cadets, William Worth, on their shoulders against his will and uneasily carrying him John Madden/Rudy Ruettiger-style back to the campus’ aforementioned North Barracks. That sort of free spirited merriment was common at the Academy in the decade or so after it first opened its doors in 1802, but Thayer - a West Point grad himself - and his administration changed all that when they took over in 1817, around the time Congress got serious about putting a proper standing army together. 

Today known as ‘The Father of West Point,’ Colonel Thayer had completely remade the Academy within just a few years of taking the job through the institution of a set of uncompromisingly strict rules and regulations, including prohibitions on gambling, smoking, casual dueling - which was not uncommon before then  - and even leaving the campus’ grounds at any time, for any reason. While these policies transformed West Point into the model of discipline it remains in our era, they consequently inspired a spirit of rebellion among some of the more iconoclastic cadets, as inflexible rules often do.