Strange of Fluvanna County became the first cadet sentinel when he relieved the arsenal guard. The inaugural class at VMI numbered twenty-three cadets until 1860, all cadets were from Virginia. Claudius Crozet-a French-born graduate of the École Polytechnique in Paris, an officer who served under Napoléon I during his invasion of Russia (1812), and a professor of engineering at West Point-was president of the Board of Visitors. (Off-duty soldiers constituted a “very undesirable element,” according to one of the town’s residents.) Norfolk-native Francis Henney Smith, an 1833 West Point graduate and a professor of mathematics at Hampden-Sydney College, was hired as the school’s first superintendent and remained in that position until 1889. The Virginia Military Institute was founded on November 11, 1839, on the site of a Virginia state arsenal in Lexington, whose citizens had sought the change. In June, Union general David Hunter ordered the school burned, and the cadets relocated to Richmond, where they helped to defend the Confederate capital. Cadets famously were called to fight in the Battle of New Market, contributing to the Confederate victory on May 15, 1864. Army), with about 250 of them killed in action.
During the American Civil War (1861–1865), approximately 1,800 VMI graduates served (including 19 in the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859, and they led cadets to his execution in Charles Town, where they helped to provide security. “Stonewall” Jackson and John McCausland were VMI instructors during John Brown‘s raid on the U.S.
Located in the Shenandoah Valley town of Lexington, it was only the second governmental military academy in the United States, after the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York (founded in 1802), and represented increased educational opportunity for non-elite southern men. The Virginia Military Institute (VMI) is a state-funded military academy founded in 1839.
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