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

by Stiles, T. J.

  He admitted that the Democratic Party had suffered a “temporary division” at its convention in Charleston. Hardline Southern “fire-eaters” had stormed out, and the orthodox remnant had adjourned to Baltimore. But Custer predicted that all Democrats would unite behind “a sound national & conservative man as their standard bearer who by advocating equal rights to the citizens of every section of our Republic will put down and defeat any candidate who holds to the doctrine and principles of the, so called, Republican Party.” By “equal rights,” he meant the right of white slave owners of the South to carry their slave “property” into the Western Territories—that the South’s “peculiar institution” should not be discriminated against in favor of free labor. He went on to argue that Republicans represented only the North; if they won the presidency they would either oppress the South or “produce a dissolution of the Union.” He seemed to be eating the same fire as the most militant Southern leaders. “The South has insult after insult heaped upon her but when such acts as the John Brown raid at Harper’s Ferry are committed…they determine no longer to submit to such aggression but demand that northern abolitionists shall not interfere with their constitutional rights.” Custer blamed the growing national crisis on aggression, writing of Southern rights being “invaded” and “trampled.” Since he was writing to a Republican, he comes across as sincere, believing that his was the “national” and “conservative” cause.73

  It was not. Ever since the Northwest Ordinance, predating the Constitution itself, Americans had accepted limits on slavery. Southern politicians broke with that tradition. They made unprecedented, nonnegotiable demands: slavery had to be allowed in all new territories, and the Republicans could not be allowed to win the presidency. If these terms were not met, the South would secede from the United States. National politics had become a hostage negotiation, the hostage being the Union. Most Northern Democrats refused to go so far; they wanted respect for popular sovereignty, which meant abiding by Kansas settlers’ rejection of slavery. That was why the Charleston convention split in two. Yet Custer embraced Southern extremism.74

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  THE DEMOCRATS DID NOT UNITE. Once Southerners withdrew from the convention, the remaining, largely Northern Democrats reconvened in Baltimore and nominated Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois for president. Southern fire-eaters held their own convention and nominated then vice president John C. Breckinridge and, as his running mate, Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon, father of one of Custer’s friends. Old border-state Whigs, proslavery but Unionist, formed the Constitutional Union Party. And the Republican Party nominated Abraham Lincoln.

  “Politics are ‘raging high’ here now and we hear nothing but talk of disunion,” Tully McCrea, a Republican, wrote on October 27, 1860. “Some of the cadets from the southern states had a disunion meeting last night and are going to go home if Lincoln is elected.” He added two weeks later, “It has been the cause of much ill feeling among cadets for the last few weeks.”

  Lincoln won. McCrea was ecstatic. “As we rejoiced the other parties mourned,” he wrote on November 10; “the southerners swore and (as is customary with a great many of them) they threatened to do all kinds of terrible things and blustered around at a great rate.”75

  On December 20, South Carolina withdrew from the United States. Secession conventions met across the South. Mississippi went next, followed by Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and then Texas. At West Point, Southern cadets began to resign, draining out over the months that followed Lincoln’s election.76

  “I remember a conversation held at the table at which I sat during the winter of ’60–’61,” Custer later wrote. He took a place next to P. M. B. Young. The conversation turned to the political situation, as it always did these days. Young turned to Custer and said, “in a half jocular, half earnest manner…‘Custer, my boy, we’re going to have war. There’s no use talking; I see it coming.’ ” One day soon, he predicted, they would face each other in battle.77

  By implication, Young told Custer that he belonged to the North whether he liked it or not. After years of edging in among Southern cadets, Custer found that he could never be one of them. He discovered his intrinsic loyalty to the Union and his fellow Northerners. One day Schaff argued angrily with a much bigger Southern cadet. “On my return from recitation,” he recalled, “Custer and [Elroy] ‘Deacon’ Elbert of Iowa, who had heard about the row—and were about the size of the Southerner—met me…and said, ‘If he lays a hand on you, Morris, we’ll maul the earth with him.’ ”

  On February 22, 1861, Washington’s birthday, the full cadet band followed tradition by performing as the flag was lowered and darkness fell. As the music struck up, cadets gathered at the barracks windows to watch. At the end of the ceremony, the band marched in formation toward the sally port, and began to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Custer started a cheer. In another window, his friend Tom Rosser led a cheer for “Dixie” among the Southern cadets. “And so cheer followed cheer,” Schaff wrote. “Ah, it was a great night! Rosser at one window, Custer at another.”78

  Custer remained loyal to the Union—but did his underlying politics change? It was a question that important men would try very hard to answer in the years ahead.

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  “HE HAS NARROWLY ESCAPED several times before but unluckily did not take warning, and now it is too late,” McCrea wrote about Custer on January 19, 1861. The midyear examinations were at hand. With expectations of war intensifying, the Academic Board at West Point decided to make the test harder than ever before. Custer, as usual, lagged behind in his studies. He doubted that he could survive the questioning. So he resorted to burglary.

  Each class was divided into sections according to students’ standing. The top section was taught by the professor, the rest by junior instructors, often young officers. At the examination, the Academic Board watched each instructor quiz his cadets, one by one. Custer knew he would fail one class unless he learned the questions in advance.

  The instructor lived in the post hotel, where, McCrea wrote, “bribing one of the servants” was possible. With money or stealth, Custer broke into the instructor’s room. He found the examination notebook and started to copy the test. He heard footsteps. He ripped out the sheet of questions and slipped out before he was caught. “But in doing this he spoiled everything, for as soon as the instructor discovered that the leaf was missing he knew that some cadet had it,” McCrea observed in a letter. The instructor “changed all the subjects and the risk and trouble was all for nothing.” Custer failed the test, along with more than thirty other cadets. The board allowed a reexamination. Custer flunked again, as did all but a few. After three and a half years at West Point, with war seemingly inevitable, his army career was over.

  Then he was reinstated. Out of dozens who were dismissed, he was the only one to be saved. He had no idea why. Not for the first time, not for the last, an extraordinary, inexplicable turn of luck had saved him from himself.79

  And so he remained at West Point in that cascade of days in early 1861, studying, drilling, practicing “cutting heads”—slashing with a saber at leather balls stuffed with straw while riding a horse.80 There was a new girl, too, named Mariah. McCrea warned Custer that a rumor had swept West Point and its civilian fringe, “generally believed, that you are engaged to Mariah. It is thought so by the ladies as well as cadets. I do not believe it myself, and for your sake I hope that there is no foundation in the report.”81

  He said good-bye to most of his Southern friends as all but a few resigned and went home. He was fond of them still. One Saturday, he recalled, he was yet again serving guard duty as punishment when he saw two of them headed for the steamboat dock amid a crowd of cadets. They “raised their hats in token of farewell,” Custer recalled, and he saluted them the only way he could on duty, “by bringing my musket to a ‘present.’ ”82

  By the time Lincoln took the oath of office on March 4, the secessionists had already organized the Confederat
e States of America and selected Jefferson Davis as president. Federal troops withdrew from the South or were taken prisoner. In April, the question of war came to rest on Fort Sumter, an island bastion in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. Its commanding officer, Maj. Robert Anderson, refused calls to surrender it to the state. A company of engineers stationed at West Point left for New York to join a resupply flotilla sent to sustain Sumter. Everyone wondered if the Confederates would fire on it.

  “No one speaks of anything but war,” Custer wrote on April 10, 1861. “I feel confident that we will have war in less than a week, and if we do I never expect to graduate here, neither does any one of my classmates nor the class above me, as we would be ordered to join recruits, etc. This is what the officers and professors say.”83

  The first of Custer’s predictions came true at 4:30 in the morning on April 12, when Southern gunners opened fire on Sumter. Two days later they pulled down the U.S. flag flying over the fort. On April 15, Lincoln asked for 75,000 militiamen to put down the South’s rebellion. The North responded with mobs of volunteers, patriotic mass meetings, and red-white-and-blue bunting from Iowa to Maine.84

  “The effect was instantaneous,” McCrea recalled. On the night when the news of the attack reached West Point, Northern cadets crammed into a room in the barracks. “One could have heard us singing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ in Cold Spring [a town across the Hudson]. It was the first time I ever saw the Southern contingent cowed. All their Northern allies had deserted them, and they were stunned.”85

  Custer stood firm for the Union. He wrote to Ann on April 26, “The excitement here is intense. We can scarcely study in consequence of our thoughts being elsewhere.” He wrote ponderously of his obligations. “Every good loyal citizen should feel it his duty to support the government to the full extent of his power and if this is obligatory upon all citizens how much more so it is upon me.”

  But already he was calculating. He had written to Ohio’s governor, he said, to ask that he might serve in one of the regiments of volunteers being formed in the state. Such state-organized units, known as the U.S. Volunteers, formed the vast bulk of the forces that would prosecute the war, yet they remained organizationally separate from the standing Regular Army. “I would prefer serving with the troops of my native state. Besides I could get a much higher office [than] in the regular army.” The latter mattered most to him. “I would be a Lieutenant but in the volunteers I could be certain of being at least a Captain and probably higher.” But the governor made no promises.86

  The end of Custer’s stay at West Point came into view. The first class had graduated early, on May 6. Custer’s class would follow seven weeks later, a year ahead of schedule, to supply officers to meet the crisis. He told Ann he was determined to pass his finals on June 18. “I…have only averaged four hours sleep in twenty-four during the last two weeks,” he wrote on May 31. “Everything is uncertain, life is always so and at no time was it ever more so than at the present,” he added. “It is useless to hope that the coming struggle will be a bloodless one or one of short duration. It is certain that much blood will be spilled and that thousands of lives will be lost.” Armstrong told Ann he was willing to die, but had a feeling that he would live through the war. “I shall certainly like to.”87

  Custer survived the examination. On June 24, he graduated thirty-fourth in a class of thirty-four. His tally of demerits for the year, 192, was eight short of the annual limit, out of 726 for all of his West Point career—the most of anyone in his class.88

  On June 29, Custer remained at West Point as the War Department tried to find places for the new graduates, either in Regular Army regiments or as instructors for the U.S. Volunteers. Still treated as a cadet, he served as officer of the guard during the summer encampment. After a quiet morning, he heard “a commotion near the guard tents”—the cadets Peter Ryerson and William Ludlow were having a fistfight, surrounded by a crowd. Custer reacted—not as he had been trained, but as who he was.

  “I should have arrested the two combatants and sent them to the guard tents,” Custer later wrote. “But the instincts of the boy prevailed over the obligation of the officer of the guard. I pushed my way through the surrounding line of cadets, dashed back those who were interfering in the struggle, and called out loudly, ‘Stand back boys; let’s have a fair fight.’ ”89 After surviving failed examinations, escaping expulsion for his misdeeds, and actually graduating with hopes of “much higher office,” he found himself under arrest. He finally faced the consequences of being Custer.

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  AT HALF PAST NINE in the morning of July 6, the court-martial reconvened. There were no more witnesses. There was only Custer left to speak for Custer. He read his final statement, written the night before.

  “Mr. President and gentlemen of the court, the case now presented for your examination and judgment, from the character of the charges, from the nature of my plea, and from the conciseness and conclusiveness of the evidence will need but a simple analysis and a brief statement of the facts on my part before I submit it to your final consideration.” He was always wordy when insecure, and he could hardly be more insecure than after pleading guilty before a court-martial. Yet he made a simple case: he was guilty, but not of much. The witnesses had demonstrated that the matter was “trifling.” The so-called fight was “merely a scuffle.” He certainly would have intervened if it had seemed to be “of a serious character,” likely to cause injury.

  Then he asked for something else: pity. Pity for being a soldier held back from war. Pity for being himself. After entering West Point in 1857, he said, “I plodded my way for four long years preparing myself for a chosen avocation…one which offers to my ambition the most glorious career.” Now he had to watch his classmates, “close friends, companions, and brothers,” depart for war. Imagine, he asked, “my grief and disappointment at not being permitted to accompany them from our common Alma Mater.” This “chagrin and anxiety at being detained at this place…to say nothing of the inconveniences that result from being in arrest with restricted limits…far exceed any punishment that could be expected under ordinary circumstances from the offences [sic] with which I am charged.” He was willing to endure any penalty the court enacted, he said, but he wished them to consider “the peculiar situation which I occupy.”

  With these mournful words, he recast himself as a victim of circumstance rather than an admitted violator of military law. Yet, for all his misdeeds, he was never rebellious. He pushed against boundaries, but never questioned them. Having come to West Point in search of $28 per month, he discovered that he loved being a soldier.

  The judges listened. When Custer finished, Major Nauman, the president of the court, ordered the room cleared for deliberations. Custer did not wait long before being ordered back in to hear the verdict. The court found him guilty on all counts.

  The judges sentenced him to—nothing. His only penalty was “to be reprimanded in orders.” Judge Advocate Benet explained, “The Court are this lenient in the sentence owing to the peculiar situation of Cadet Custer as presented in his defense, and in consideration of his general good conduct as testified to by Lieutenant Hazen his immediate commander.”90

  Custer’s career would continue. But the trial left a larger question unanswered: What place could he have in the Regular Army? It was one of the largest, most rigidly hierarchical, most systematic institutions in America—but Custer was individualistic, romantic, and impulsive. This contrast would color the rest of his life. He was perhaps the truer representative of the young republic, but the army foreshadowed its future.91

  He remained in the army, bottom of his class, bottom of the promotion list, a highway of misconduct behind him. Only luck had saved him—the very good luck that the nation was descending into the most brutal war in its history.

  A little more than a week later, Custer received orders to report to army headquarters in Washington, D.C.92

  Two

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  THE OBSERVER

  HE WENT TO WAR alone. He did not board a steamboat full of new graduates from West Point. He did not ride off at the head of a regiment, or even trail behind one. George Armstrong Custer set out for Washington by himself.

  War is, of course, a group activity. The personal experience in wartime is one of immersion in crowds, those organized assemblies of men known as armies. In the Civil War especially, the soldier rarely found himself alone. There were marches and messes and drills, shared tents and mass formations. Every feature of his existence was standardized, homogenized—soldiers’ clothes are called “uniforms” for good reason—and became more so as the war progressed, as the Quartermaster’s Department took over the states’ initial pell-mell effort to rush troops and supplies to the front.1

  But Custer began alone. His court-martial jolted him off the tracks that most of his classmates rode to war. That would emerge as a pattern. For most of the next two years, he would be a soldier apart from his unit, an officer with none to command.

  He received his commission as second lieutenant of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry Regiment and boarded a steamer at the West Point pier on Thursday, July 18, 1861. He debarked in New York, entering a city that had changed since his last furlough—though not entirely. Broadway still thronged with people passing in and out of shops, their bonnets and top hats shadowed by walls of flat-faced buildings, four to six stories high. The humid air still stank with the manure of countless horses that dragged rattling wagons, carriages, and omnibuses crammed with food, people, goods, and garbage. Newspaper offices still perched in floors above basement oyster cellars and shared-table restaurants on Park Row. P. T. Barnum’s American Museum still offered glimpses of the bizarre, not far from the Astor House hotel as well as cluttered warehouses and textile workshops.

  What had changed was the public mood. Only a few months before, New York’s leading merchants had lobbied Washington to compromise with the South. Mayor Fernando Wood even proposed that Manhattan secede and become a free city, to protect its cotton trade. Now flags and stars-and-stripes bunting brightened the masonry ravines. Recruiting stations sprouted in parks.2