"Whistler was the son of a railway engineer, born in Lowell, Massachusetts, but throughout his life he pretended to be a Southern gentleman. He was, in most imaginable ways, self-invented. Like West, he was irked by the low status America accorded its artists. His solution was not to attach himself to a court, as West did, but to depart for Paris and London and pretend to be a native aristocrat from an America he would never revisit. Perhaps his fixation on rank was impressed early: he was partly raised in Russia, where his father was designing the St. Petersburg-Moscow railway for Czar Nicholas I. It may have been reinforced at the military academy at West Point, from which he flunked out in 1854 for his cluelessness about chemistry. 'Had silicon been a gas,' he would say later, 'I would have been a major general.' He left for Paris the next year, aged twenty-one. Thus, although he liked to pose as a dashing Tidewater cavalier, Whistler never became an officer, still less saw action in the Civil War..."
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/W/whistler.html
OK, let's say that Whistler studies chemistry harder, and passes the exam. He gets to pursue a military career. What happens to him in the ACW? As a Yankee who liked to pretend that he was a Southerner, which side does he take? It is possible that some of his pro-southernism in his later life came precisely from his failure at West Point and from the fact that Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, while he would not re-admit Whistler, helped to get him a job in the Coast Survey. http://www.history.noaa.gov/art/whistler_pennell.html Presumably if Whistler had passed his exam, he would not have had to approach Davis. Of course another reason may simply be that to Whistler's friends in London and Paris, Southerners were more "aristocratic" and interesting than those dreadful, middle-class, philistine Yankees.
(Whistler did get military experience of a sort in OTL: "In 1866 a combination of factors--among them guilt from dropping out of West Point, an artistic ebb, and the difficulty of keeping his mother and his mistress in the same house--sent Whistler to Chile to assist in the war against Spain. The only action he saw was a hasty retreat on horseback from a Spanish bombardment, of which he later reported, 'The riding was splendid and I, as a West Point man, was head of the procession...."
http://smithsonianeducation.org/spotlight/artists1.html which concludes that "Whistler was a better artist than soldier..." No argument there, but after all some not-particularly-competent soldiers did get to become officers in the ACW.)
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/W/whistler.html
OK, let's say that Whistler studies chemistry harder, and passes the exam. He gets to pursue a military career. What happens to him in the ACW? As a Yankee who liked to pretend that he was a Southerner, which side does he take? It is possible that some of his pro-southernism in his later life came precisely from his failure at West Point and from the fact that Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, while he would not re-admit Whistler, helped to get him a job in the Coast Survey. http://www.history.noaa.gov/art/whistler_pennell.html Presumably if Whistler had passed his exam, he would not have had to approach Davis. Of course another reason may simply be that to Whistler's friends in London and Paris, Southerners were more "aristocratic" and interesting than those dreadful, middle-class, philistine Yankees.
(Whistler did get military experience of a sort in OTL: "In 1866 a combination of factors--among them guilt from dropping out of West Point, an artistic ebb, and the difficulty of keeping his mother and his mistress in the same house--sent Whistler to Chile to assist in the war against Spain. The only action he saw was a hasty retreat on horseback from a Spanish bombardment, of which he later reported, 'The riding was splendid and I, as a West Point man, was head of the procession...."
http://smithsonianeducation.org/spotlight/artists1.html which concludes that "Whistler was a better artist than soldier..." No argument there, but after all some not-particularly-competent soldiers did get to become officers in the ACW.)