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

by Stiles, T. J.

  Deviling asserted Custer’s superior status, but so did kindness to plebes he liked. “Fellows, come here and hear my fellow Buckeye laugh,” Custer exclaimed when he heard Peter Michie’s “natural and infectious” guffaws, Schaff wrote. It was a friendly act, but it established Custer as the senior Ohioan, as Michie’s patron, revealing his growing deftness with the rules of this strange little society.46

  “A whole-souled generous friend, and a mighty good fellow, and I like him,” his roommate Tully McCrea wrote two years after Custer left West Point. During their cadet years, though, he offered a more nuanced assessment. “The great difficulty is that he is too clever for his own good,” McCrea wrote in a letter. “He is always connected with all the mischief that is going on and never studies any more than he can possibly help. He has narrowly escaped several times.”47

  Confident in his ability to avoid disaster, Custer took greater risks in more elaborate performances. Lt. Henry Douglas, an instructor, lived behind the barracks, below Custer’s window in the tower room. A beautiful buff rooster ruled Douglas’s garden; he would “crow defiantly from the top of the fence to all the roosters down the line of the professors’ quarters,” Schaff recalled. He also crowed at night—“too often.” Custer stole into the garden, snatched the rooster, and killed it. But he needed to do more if this were to be a prank of legend. So he plucked its feathers on a spread of newspapers, put a pot of water on to boil over his room’s gaslight, and dropped the bird in. When it was cooked, he ate it. The authorities never learned who did it. The cadets knew, though, and they remembered.48

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  HE NEVER FORGOT THE WORLD outside of West Point. He worried, rather, that it would forget him. Those who loved Armstrong knew that he loved them fiercely—and that his affection had an underside of defensiveness, resentment, and fear of neglect.

  “For months I have been anxiously and patiently waiting the reception of a letter from you in answer to one that I sent you several months ago,” he once wrote to a friend. He used the same tone with Ann—wounded, snide, even mocking. “I had been looking for your letter for some time…but I guess it is more trouble for you to write than for me,” he wrote on October 2, 1859, at a time when he felt overwhelmed with duties and classwork.49

  In the same letter, he mentioned that he had written to his parents about how sick he had been—sick enough to enter the hospital at the beginning of the fall term in 1859. “They wrote back that Mother had had dreams which made her think that I was sick. You know what a great person Mother is for dreams.” He scoffed at being the subject of supernatural news, but he remembered and repeated it.50

  He wrote incessantly. He wrote with passion. He wrote with manic energy. “Give me the news and particularly of the young folks” in Monroe, he begged, a constant refrain in his letters. He routinely included special greetings, jokes, and stories for his sister’s children. When Ann’s young daughter died, he wrote, “I thought that nothing that I could say would be of any interest to you.”51

  He fretted endlessly about his parents’ poverty and his mother’s poor health. He urged them again and again to move to Michigan, closer to the Reeds. “If they were only in better circumstances and were able to get along without working as hard as they have had to, I would have nothing whatever to trouble me,” he wrote. He felt motivated by the thought “that after I have graduated I could help them very much.”52

  He helped himself by physically escaping. The cadets’ tight restriction to academy grounds loosened for few exceptions. They received a leave of absence for the entire summer at the beginning of the third year. They could obtain a short leave, three days or so, as a reward for going three months without any demerits. And they could leave the campus on Saturdays after morning classes ended, as long as they returned by 10:45 p.m. the same day. “As punishment,” Custer recalled, he often had “to perform extra tours of guard duty on Saturdays—times which otherwise I should have been allowed for pleasure and recreation. If my memory serves me right, I devoted sixty-six Saturdays to this method of vindicating outraged military law during my cadetship.” Still he made his way out, in a manner he had studied.53

  He often stole off the grounds to Benny Havens’s famous tavern, “in a little cabin under a cliff,” as an old soldier wrote, about a mile south of West Point. “The forbidden locality of Benny Havens possessed stronger attractions than the study and demonstrations of a problem in Euclid,” Custer remembered. In the spring of 1860, for example, Custer organized a graduation party at the tavern for Stephen Ramseur, Wesley Merritt, and Alexander Pennington. He shared hosting duties with Adelbert Ames, John Pelham, and Thomas Rosser. His life would intersect theirs again and again in the decades to come, giving a lasting significance to such lighthearted evenings.54

  And Custer would sneak out to meet girls from the small civilian society that fringed the academy, consisting of locals and officers’ families. In November 1859, a girl invited him and his friends to a Thanksgiving Day ball. That night he put out the gaslight and went to bed, but not to sleep. At ten o’clock, an officer walked through the barracks, checking each room. After he passed, Custer dressed in civilian clothes and stuffed his bed, arranging the blankets to make it look as if he were sleeping there. He and his confederates slipped out of the barracks, sneaked past the sentries, and walked to the ball. He spent the night dancing, returning sometime after four in the morning, and “reached home a few minutes before reveille [at 5:00 a.m.], changed our citizen’s dress for our uniforms, and were then safe,” he wrote to his cousin Augusta Ward. “I was in poor humor for hard study during the next day…and under the circumstances I was almost (but not quite) sorry I had gone to the ball.”55

  This was a picture of intense pressure seeking release. West Point compressed scores of teenage boys and young men within the Plain—the barracks, the wool uniforms, the even more uncomfortable code of conduct—yet they did not cease to be who they were. “ ‘Wet dreams,’ ‘jerking off,’ and such are common conversation, and never excites any surprize [sic] anymore,” wrote Custer’s roommate, Tully McCrea. Cadets talked endlessly of sexual escape—discussing the best brothels in New York, for example, all nodding in agreement at the pleasures of Mercer Street.56

  What distinguished Custer was his success at finding that release. “He is a handsome fellow, and a very successful ladies’ man,” McCrea wrote of him a few years later. “Nor does he care an iota how many of the fair ones break their hearts for him.”57

  McCrea could have been writing specifically about a girl named Mollie. In 1856, when Custer taught outside of Cadiz, he had boarded in the home of Alexander Holland, superintendent of an infirmary. Holland had a teenage daughter named Mary Jane; Custer began to call her Mollie. They were attracted to each other. He wrote her letters, and even composed her a poem. It began:

  I’ve seen and kissed that crimson lip

  With honied smiles o’erflowing

  Enchanted watched the opening rose

  Upon thy soft cheek flowing

  He called himself her “true and faithful lover, ‘Bachelor Boy.’ ” He spoke of marrying her. He wrote of “when I see you next at the trundle bed.”58

  After he arrived at West Point, he wrote, “Does [sic] your father & Mother know that we correspond now. What do they say of me. You once promised to tell me what they had said about me but you never did.” Another time he begged, “Tell me what objections your Parents make against me.” It has been said that her father, a Republican, lobbied Congressman John A. Bingham to appoint the Democrat Custer to West Point just to get rid of him. Bingham’s biographers think it plausible. But the relationship, and Holland’s disapproval, lingered long after Custer left.59

  “You say you used to flatter yourself that we were well enough acquainted for me to tell you anything,” he wrote to her on November 13, 1858, “so we were and as far as I am concerned we are yet.…I am as full of mischief as ever. If there is any change in either of us it is in you.” He boast
ed of how well he jumped his horse in training, and turned the page ninety degrees to scribble a postscript: Are we, he asked, “not well enough acquainted to have a ‘sleep’ when I come home. Please say yes to it in your next and you may impose any condition upon me.”60

  He allowed for limits because she had declared that she would never be one of the “baby factories,” as she called married women. Her independence did not deter him; it may even have attracted him. As his summer leave in 1859 approached, he pressed her to let him into her bed when he returned. “What room do you have as your own, and tell me what plan you can make up so that we can have that great ‘sleep,’ ” he asked. “Now do not put me off by saying that you cannot think of any.”

  He teased her, even taunted her. “You wished to know whether I had any lady lover here or not. Of course I have.” He described a petite, black-haired, black-eyed beauty who danced gracefully and “has a very pretty foot & ankle.…But I suppose that I have given you a description sufficiently long for you to form an opinion of her and one which I should like to know.” Was he describing Mollie herself, making her jealous, or a bit of both? Was it cruelty or their characteristic banter?

  Then came cryptic references to “Miss Lizzie.” He wrote, “I think that I know more about her than any other person and have done more with her or rather to and she to me than any other one not excepting your many days acquaintance with her and if she had a husband he could not have done but one thing more than I did and I shall leave you to guess what that was. (Can you guess? If you cannot I will tell you.)” In a letter signed “Your true and devoted H——d,” Miss Lizzie, it seems, was the most intimate part of Mollie herself.61

  When summer came, he was free for two months to search for the “great sleep” wherever he wished, in nearby New York, in towns on the way home, in Mollie’s room. On August 29, 1859, the day after he reported back to West Point, a surgeon recorded that he was suffering from gonorrhea. This was the illness that kept him in the hospital at the beginning of the fall term, that his mother had dreamed of without knowing what it was. He must have caught it during his leave. He endured agonizing urination, possibly injections of mercury and solutions of other heavy metals, perhaps permanent damage. His romance with Mollie ended.62

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  CONGRESSMAN BINGHAM’S appointment of Custer to West Point led the cadets to assume that he, too, was a Republican. To varying degrees, the confusion over his politics would continue for years to come, sometimes generated by Custer himself. The truth mattered to others. When he arrived at West Point, he could see politics tearing the country apart. Before he graduated, the destruction would be complete. And the question of how politics might rebuild the ruins would overshadow the rest of his life.

  Custer’s politics began at home. To his father, the Democratic Party was life itself. “Our father Custer was of the most intensely argumentative nature,” a daughter-in-law would recall. “He was the strongest kind of politician…and grows excited and belligerent over his party affairs.” He held dear the Jacksonian ideals of individualism and equality. But the individuals and equals he had in mind were all white men. This was a general truth in American politics, but a particular truth about him. The same daughter-in-law would one day write in a letter, “You are well aware how father Custer feels over the ‘nigger’ question,” and, “You know well father Custer’s antipathy to the negro.”63

  The Custers belonged to border-state culture. The Marylander Emmanuel had joined a broad migration from the upper South across the Ohio River. But Bingham was a Republican and an open abolitionist as well, casting suspicion on Custer. The congressman was close to Joshua Giddings, despised in the South for his vehemently antislavery views, and lodged in the same boardinghouse with him in Washington. Southern cadets noticed such things, and demanded that plebes state their political views. “It required more than ordinary moral and physical courage to boldly avow oneself an abolitionist,” Custer recalled.64

  This hostility reflected a rolling revolution in American politics. For a generation, the Whig and Democratic parties had shared power nationally and in virtually every state. In broad terms, Whigs believed in a partnership between wealthy interests and active government to harmonize society and develop the economy. They celebrated banks, public works, and government-sponsored corporations. The Democrats organized behind Andrew Jackson, who vilified “monopoly” and “aristocracy,” as they called those who benefited from government favoritism. Democrats wanted fierce and fair competition between individuals, who would rise on their merits.65

  A battle over the West exploded this system. The struggle centered on whether slavery would be expanded into the unorganized lands west of Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, and Arkansas, or into the territory acquired from Mexico in 1848. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 barred slavery north of a line roughly equal to Missouri’s southern border (except in Missouri itself), and California was admitted as a free state as part of the Compromise of 1850, but the debate continued. “Fire-eating” Southern politicians battled slave exclusion with rising militancy. The Territories and unorganized lands belonged to all the states, they argued; barring slavery discriminated against the South’s labor system.66

  The decisive moment came just three years before Custer entered West Point, with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Drafted by Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas, it organized the Nebraska and Kansas territories west of Iowa and Missouri, opening these lands to white settlement. The act allowed slavery if settlers voted for it, in what was called “popular sovereignty.” It shattered the Missouri Compromise prohibition. Outrage swept the North. The Whig Party disintegrated along sectional lines, and the Republican Party arose from its remains. Its reason for existence was opposition to the spread of slavery. It staggered Democrats, winning elections across the North.

  Republicans officially opposed abolition, but that mattered little in Dixie. The white South grew increasingly intolerant of any criticism of its “peculiar institution” as a cycle of militancy, paranoia, and anger sabotaged routine politics.67

  In this tense environment, Custer put suspicious Southerners at ease. He roomed with cadets from the South or who had ties there; he made friends with Texans, Mississippians, and Georgians. And he belonged to a largely Southern company, out of the four in the battalion of the Cadet Corps. Traditionally the cadets were sorted by height, since it looked better on the parade ground, but a cadet adjutant made company assignments. Peer pressure led to the Dixification of D Company, where Custer found a home.68

  Timing helps explain Custer’s success in cultivating Southerners. In his first year or two, cadets could still joke about sectional tensions. Virginian Thomas Rowland wrote to his mother that he had liked his sister’s letter about “the irrepressible conflict,” a phrase made famous by the antislavery senator William Henry Seward of New York in 1858. “I hope, though that Disunion is not so near at hand as she represents it; it might interfere slightly with my commission.”69

  Then, on the night of October 16, 1859, John Brown and eighteen followers seized the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, hoping to spark a slave revolt. Instead Brown was captured and sentenced to hang. “Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice,” he said in his final oration, “and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done.”70

  “How little we cadets at West Point foresaw what the death of that tall, gaunt, gray-bearded and coldly gray-eyed man meant,” Schaff reflected. “That trap of the gallows creaking beneath him was the first dying wail of an age; that civilization was facing about.” In the North, Brown became a martyr in the cause of freedom; in the South, a symbol of the viciousness of abolitionists. Southern cadets hanged Brown in effigy outside the barracks. Custer’s friend from Georgia, P. M. B. Young, said he wished he could behead ever
y last Yankee. Wade Hampton Gibbes of South Carolina commented on Emory Upton’s “intimate association with negroes, of a character keenly offensive, and such as no self-respecting cadet could stand for a moment,” Schaff wrote. Upton challenged him to a fight. The result was a bloody match, carefully staged in a barracks room, with cadets crowded in the hall and stairs and stoop outside to watch or merely listen.71

  “I suppose you are a ‘Seward’ man. If you are I am really sorry for you,” Custer wrote to an old New Rumley friend on April 7, 1860. He spent the first part of this letter in a discussion of cavalry exercises, the “Spring Drill” in infantry tactics, and practice with howitzers, mortars, and mounted batteries. But he was more interested in the next election and Brown’s impact. It’s striking that Custer, who preferred pranks or the novels of James Fennimore Cooper to studying, grew intensely serious when it came to politics. “One thing is certain, democracy [i.e., the Democratic Party] is sure to come out victorious in the next national contest,” he wrote. “The victory will be gained by the votes of the conservative masses of the north who hitherto have manifested no interest in the elections but who now will be called out by the desire to repudiate…the treasonable foray of John Brown.”72

  On May 5, he composed another letter to his friend on the same themes. He complained about being punished with extra guard duty in the unusual heat, and praised the balls that cadets held during the summer. Then he made a remarkable declaration of his politics, showing how thoroughly he identified with the South.