Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America

by Stiles, T. J.

  In the meantime, Custer’s life was dominated by older boys. By day, he faced constant scrutiny. Day and night—especially at night—he faced “devilment.” He might be startled out of his sleep to find himself in a blanket held by six older cadets and tossed helplessly in the air. He could be ordered to report to a man he believed to be a doctor, who would diagnose a terrible illness and force him to drink a disgusting concoction to cure it. He might be confined in a tent or room as older cadets blew smoke in his face until he got sick—a torment called “smoking out.”

  In writing or conversation, Custer never dwelled on the devilment he endured. Yet he inevitably suffered with the others. The ritual forced the plebes to acknowledge the stratification of cadets—the supremacy of their own, unofficial rules. “It was a mighty leveler,” Schaff wrote. “The fellow who got it worst and most frequently…at least courted it by some lofty manner or resented witticism.”

  As for Custer, one trace of his torment would endure. “His bright locks gave him a girlish appearance,” one soldier later wrote, “which…procured him the nickname of ‘Fanny.’…The name ‘Fanny’ stuck to Custer through his academic life and long after.” In a world of boys struggling to be young men, in a constant battle for dominance, he was mocked with the name of a girl.

  Custer passed his tests.19

  —

  “I LIKE WEST POINT as well if not better than I did at first,” Custer wrote in a letter on August 7. “We have about three more weeks of camp life for this year.” He referred to the encampment, the summer military training program.20

  The cadets spent the Hudson Valley’s hot and humid weeks in rows of tents on the Plain, learning the practical business of being a soldier. They awoke at five thirty each morning for drills that took up much of the day, until five o’clock in the afternoon. In later years, Custer would study tactics for infantry, cavalry, and artillery, maneuvers for companies and battalions, siege techniques, and pontoon bridging, as well as the manufacture and firing of rockets, explosive shells, and other artillery munitions. In his first summer he entered the “school of the soldier.” As a member of one of four cadet companies, he trained as the lowest-ranking infantryman: formation marching, cleaning and firing a rifled musket, standing guard, and suffering “fatigue” duty, the military term for labor.21

  He did so under orders from fellow students. The first class—the senior class—provided the captains and lieutenants for the student companies. Sergeants came from the second class, and corporals from the third. Fourth classmen were all privates, as were fifth classmen. The five-year system began in 1854. Often attributed to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, it actually originated with Chief Engineer Joseph Totten. It increased the size of the Cadet Corps, placing greater responsibility on student leaders to maintain discipline and lead the training.22

  “There is something so ludicrous, when once it is seen through, about the airs of some cadet officers,” wrote Schaff. Perhaps that’s because their authority came from outside the society of boys. They were picked by the tactical instructors—that is to say, the institution. But some cadets held unspoken ranks, earned from their peers.

  In the athletic world of the encampment, prowess won respect. So did “spirit and honor,” as Tully McCrea called a willingness to fight. Once he saw a diminutive boy react to an insult with a punch that staggered the larger cadet. “He is a spirited, gentlemanly little fellow,” McCrea concluded, “and I like him very much.”23

  What separated an admired few from the more awkward and insecure cadets was a natural self-confidence. Herman Melville witnessed this in a nautical setting; he described a type he called the “Handsome Sailor,” who, “with the offhand unaffectedness of natural regality,…seemed to accept the spontaneous homage of his shipmates.” At West Point, Peter Michie recalled, “[h]e who was fearless, outspoken, generous, and self-sacrificing became the leader among his fellows.”24

  There was a third set as well. These boys did not excel in academics or drill; they scorned the institutional favorites as cadets who “truckle and cringe to those in power,” in McCrea’s words. Nor were they necessarily noble or self-sacrificing. Yet they won standing. If some cadets were “careful in behavior and attentive to discipline,” Michie recalled, “others, on the contrary, [were] quite the reverse.”25 For the latter, the highest accomplishment was not getting caught in an exploit known to the entire corps.

  “Occasionally some of the cadets have the boldness to cross the sentinels’ posts at night,” Custer wrote on August 7. He described how they would go to the village of Buttermilk Falls, a couple of miles south, for illicit pleasures. He detailed the method (changing into civilian clothes), the penalties (“occasionally persons are dismissed”), and a foray two nights before by “one of my class mates in company with two elder classmen.…Both are now in confinement in their tents. One is in the tent next to mine and neither of them can leave their tents and when they go to their meals they are marched under a guard of eight cadets.”26

  Custer always had a keen eye when something interested him.

  —

  HE COMPLETELY MISREAD WEST POINT before he arrived. On December 12, 1856, he assessed his plans to enroll in a letter to his half sister, Lydia Ann Reed, who lived in Monroe, Michigan. “Mother is much opposed to me going there but Father and David [his older half brother] are in favor of it very much. I think it is the best place that I could go,” he wrote. He listed one reason: money.

  “I will get $28 per month for five years and be getting a good education at the same time and when I come out I will get 5 years pay ahead,” he calculated. “I think I am lucky in getting the appointment which I think I am certain of now.” He was indeed lucky to get it; it had been extremely unlikely. But the kind of luck he had in mind was financial. “John McNutt…is worth upwards of two hundred thousand dollars now which he has made in the Army.”27

  It was only natural that he thought of money first. He had been at work since the age of nine, off and on. It was the way of the time, and the way of his family.28

  In 1824, his father, Emmanuel H. Custer, had moved from Maryland to what became New Rumley, just north of Cadiz in eastern Ohio. The village was closer to Virginia than Michigan or even Cleveland. Emmanuel was a blacksmith. He struggled, but he believed in struggle—both as a devout evangelical Methodist and a partisan Jacksonian Democrat.29

  A man with a long nose and wide mouth, sporting a long sheaf of a beard that would turn white with time, Emmanuel married, had a daughter, lost a daughter, had two sons. His wife died in 1835, after they had been married for not quite seven years. On February 23, 1836, he married again. His second wife, Maria Ward Kirkpatrick, already had a son, David, and a daughter, Lydia Ann. Maria too had been widowed in 1835, after twelve years of marriage.

  A parent dreads a child’s death more than anything else. It is the gravest of all struggles of the spirit. Emmanuel had lost one, and he lost more. In 1836, his son John died at the age of three. Maria gave birth to another, James, who died soon after. In 1838, she delivered another, Samuel, who died soon after. On December 5, 1839, she brought George Armstrong onto the earth in a room in the rear of the ground floor of a two-story log house on the corner of Main and Liberty streets in New Rumley. They called him Armstrong, or (in time) “Autie,” after his mispronunciation of his name as a toddler. He would always be Armstrong or Autie to those close to him.30

  Emmanuel tried to improve his fortunes by moving the family to Monroe, Michigan, in 1842, where his brother George (Armstrong’s namesake) had his own metalworking business. He moved them all back after a few months. In 1849 they settled on a farm, which he operated along with his blacksmith shop in New Rumley.

  For a Jacksonian man in 1849—north of slavery’s border, at least—the highest aspiration was to make his own way in the world, with his own hands and his own skill, on his own farm or in his own shop. Armstrong was only nine when Emmanuel tried to equip him for the effort by apprenticing him to Jose
ph Hunter, a furniture maker in Cadiz. Hunter failed to turn the boy into a craftsman, despite three years before the lathe. In 1852, Emmanuel sent Armstrong to school in Monroe, where Lydia Ann Reed—Ann, as Armstrong called her—now lived. She had married David Reed, a farmer and drayman (in the business of transporting freight by wagon).

  Armstrong grew close to his brother-in-law and even closer to Ann. He made friends in Monroe, and came to regard it as his other hometown. But he returned to New Rumley in 1855, just fifteen, to teach school, first in a private academy and then in a public school outside of Cadiz. (His youth was not exactly unusual; in the era’s improvised, rapidly growing education system, poorly paid teachers rarely held college diplomas.) There he applied to Congressman John A. Bingham for an appointment to West Point. Each member of the House of Representatives could name a young man to the military academy; usually he would choose someone of the same political party. Bingham, a Republican, knew that Armstrong came from a Democratic family, but nominated him nevertheless, impressed with the sincerity of the young man’s request.31

  And so he came to the academy with dreams of $28 per month and five years’ pay in advance. He never spoke of these figures again. He met such cadets as Henry Algernon du Pont, of Delaware’s famous gunpowder dynasty, and George Washington Vanderbilt, son of the fabulously wealthy shipowner “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt, who had taken George and the rest of his family on a grand tour of Europe in 1853 in a yacht the size of an ocean liner.32

  The Corps of Cadets included “the sons of some of the greatest men in our country,” Custer wrote during his first year. The remark speaks to how deeply such boys impressed him, rather than the demographic facts. Few of the nation’s old patrician families sent their sons to West Point. “There were no Byrds, Randolphs, Carters, Boylstons, Peabodys, Winthrops, De Lanceys, De Peysters, Schuylers, or others of their status,” the historian Morrison observes. The Adams family, which gave America two presidents, would have been appalled if Henry or Charles Francis Jr.—Custer’s contemporaries—had chosen the Plain of West Point over Harvard Yard. Academy records show that not even 5 percent of the cadets in this era had affluent parents. Most of the students were sons of farmers, others of merchants, lawyers, and other professionals.33

  The military academy served not as a school for the elite, but rather as a nationalizing force. Cadets came from every congressional district. Custer studied alongside Edward Buchanan, nephew of President James Buchanan; Adelbert Ames of Maine, who had sailed the globe on his father’s ship; and Thomas Rosser, who had left behind several hundred acres of cotton land in Texas, worked by slaves and haunted by alligators. They impressed Custer, who was pleased with himself for joining them.34

  Having traveled from humble New Rumley to this great national institution, Custer experienced conflicting feelings. As his third year at West Point drew to a close, he wrote to a hometown friend and contrasted their childhoods with the present. “We were happy then because our minds were free and had no care for the future, but now it is different.” As he prepared for a professional career, he explicitly recognized that he had responsibility for himself, that “our dependence must be on our own abilities and on these we must rely for all we expect to be or have in future.”

  Ironically, though, the academy’s rigid rules and supervision released him from responsibility. Before he first stepped off the steamboat at West Point’s landing, he had struggled alone in the marketplace, earning his living and managing his own affairs. Here his superiors told him when to get up, what to wear, and when to wash. They freed him to be a boy again, in the company of boys.35

  —

  “BETWEEN NINE AND TEN HOURS DAILY in class or studying”: That, writes James Morrison, was how a cadet’s time went when the academic year began. The remains of the day included “approximately three hours in military exercises, two hours in recreation, and two hours at meals.”36

  Custer had little ground for comparison. He had embarked on an extraordinarily rare thing in antebellum America: a professional academic education. Few Americans attended even an ordinary college; just 1 percent of working-age men at the time graduated from one. There were only 136 colleges in 1850, increasing to just 209 in 1860. They were small, averaging under 100 students. Studies were limited, since higher education was intended to create gentlemen, not scholars or technical experts. At West Point, as at other schools, the course was the same for every student, with classes in such subjects as chemistry, ethics, and French, relying on memorization and daily recitation. What distinguished West Point was practical military coursework, as well as its emphasis on engineering. Custer studied fortification drawing, bridging methods, siege techniques, and much more.37

  “Our January examination is over now and I am glad of it,” Custer wrote to his half sister, Ann, and her husband, David, on January 27, 1858. “I passed my examination very creditibly [sic] but…a great many [were] found deficient and sent off among them to be found the sons of some of the greatest men in our country.…My class which numbered over 100 when we entered in June is now reduced to 69. This shows that if a person wants to get along here he has to study hard.”38

  He did not say that he barely survived. He put his performance in the context of those who failed, not those who excelled. He did it smoothly, a magician pulling a coin from his sister’s ear. Look how many were sent off—distracting from the many more who scored higher. It’s impossible to know if he could have done better. His fellow cadets thought he didn’t care to try. Peter Michie recalled, “Custer said that there were but two positions of distinction in a class—head and foot; and as he soon found that he could not be head he determined that he would support his class as a solid base.”39

  Michie’s was a polished formulation, in keeping with a legend that would vine its way around Custer’s tomb—the Prince Hal of West Point, carousing until the moment for greatness came. But it is difficult to believe that Custer deliberately planned each daily recitation, each twice-a-year examination, with the goal of skimming just above failure without sinking in. The consequences of low standing could last for an entire career, since class ranking determined a graduate’s place on the promotion list. Yet Michie’s recollection contained an essential truth. Custer analyzed the United States Military Academy and calculated his place—more precisely, his audience. He would perform not for the officers and professors of the official institution, nor even for the cadet officers, but for the society of boys. Poor grades were the unfortunate result.40

  Conduct as well as academic grades affected class ranking. Demerits drove down the conduct score, and could lead to outright dismissal. Starting in 1855, cadets were limited to 100 demerits every six months; fifth classmen had up to 150 for the same period. A cadet would be “skinned” with a demerit or two for being late to roll call, and as many as ten for an unauthorized absence. He could face punishment as well, since a demerit was an academic mark, not a disciplinary action in itself.41

  The relatively light weight given to conduct saved Custer. Year after year, he kept a clerk busy recording his demerits, page after page after page. Two adjectives repeat: Boyish. Trifling. August 8, 1857: “Boyish conduct” while cleaning up the camp. September 29: “Trifling in ranks marching in from parade.” October 21: “Trifling in Ethical section room” while the instructor was busy at the chalkboard. December 19: “Highly unmilitary & trifling conduct throwing stones on post.” He laughed in class, talked in ranks, played cards, threw snowballs, lobbed bread across the mess hall.42

  It was boyish, yes, but not all trifling, not from Custer’s perspective. Infectiously, winningly exuberant, he cared very much about his fellow cadets’ esteem. He performed for them even in what he did not do. He was appointed a squad marcher, a first rung on the ladder of authority, charged with keeping a small section of cadets in line during the endless formations, reviews, and marches. The Register of Delinquencies describes the inevitable result. February 13, 1858: “Gross & willful neglect of dut
y as sqd marcher, in not keeping his [section] at attention after having been twice ordered to do so by the [officer] in charge.” Also February 13: “Not marching section from Dialectic hall.” February 18: “Not dismissing his sectn at proper place.” February 20: “Not preservg order in his section.” He and three other squad marchers were cited for “allowing gross violations of military propriety.” Superintendent Richard Delafield took away the “military trust confided in him.”43

  As the months went by, Custer’s antics grew more active, calculated, and funny. During a sermon in the chapel, he sat behind a boy with bright red hair. He stuck one hand in the hair, pantomimed a blacksmith putting metal in a fire, and pretended to hammer his hand on an anvil, to the amusement of cadets next to him. In Spanish class, he asked Professor Patrice de Janon to translate “Class is dismissed.” The professor did so; Custer stood and led the rest of the class out the door. De Janon, a Colombia native who previously taught fencing at the academy, was “a poor disciplinarian,” writes Morrison, “who could easily be diverted from the subject at hand by questions on dueling etiquette.” He did not report Custer, and the incident became a legend.44

  Custer would always love pranks, a form of humor that combines creativity, energy, and cruelty in nearly equal parts. At West Point they played a social role. As soon as he ascended to the fourth class, he began to devil plebes with enthusiasm. Some of it was simple harassment—yanking them out of bed at night or collapsing their tents on them in the summer encampment. More tellingly, he mocked anything unusual or distinctive. Jasper Myers arrived with an enormous beard, fit for a biblical patriarch; Custer earnestly told him that the government had made a mistake—the appointment to West Point was intended for Myers’s son; the old man should go home and send the boy. A plebe from Maine owned “a huge double-cased silver watch,” Schaff recalled. The affectation drew close scrutiny from Custer and his friends, such as Alonzo Cushing from New York and John “Gimlet” Lea of Mississippi. They “would gather about,” Schaff wrote, and bombard the animal with questions about it, “asking how he dared to risk his life through New York with it; insisting daily on taking him to the sun-dial…and threatening at last that if he didn’t bring it to running accurately with the dial, they would have to report him for carrying a timepiece that discredited the official time.”45