But George was one of Foster’s favorites and somehow avoided punishment. “George kept his geography on top of his paper backed novels,” Nevin recalled. “He used to read ’em all the time in school, but Foster never caught him. . . . Foster’d come along and pat George on the head, and then yank up the rest of us.” The kids got Foster back once by locking him out of the schoolhouse for not giving them the customary treats at holiday time. When Foster tried to come in a window, they kept him at bay with a coal shovel they heated in the stove. “I guess we all got licked for that,” Nevin said, “except George. George wasn’t in it. He was home studying. Always studying.”
George was exposed to martial matters from a young age. His father, like most able-bodied men in the community, was a member of the local “cornstalk militia” unit, the confidently named New Rumley Invincibles. When he was four years old, Autie began to follow the men in their drills, running through the manual of arms with a small, wooden musket. Emmanuel had a little uniform made for George, and he became something of a mascot for the unit. The militiamen called Autie “a born soldier.” After George mimicked some classic oratory his brother was learning at school, father Custer took George to the drill, and “the child, in uniform, was lifted to the counter of the village store among the militiamen and, waving his sword, announced what proved to be the watchword of his future. . . . My voice is for war!”6
At age thirteen George moved to Monroe, Michigan, to live with the family of his older half-sister, Lydia Reed. Monroe was founded as Frenchtown and was the site of an 1812 battle in which the British and their Indian allies, led by the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, defeated the Americans.7 Custer entered the recently founded Boys and Young Men’s Academy, presided over by principal Alfred Stebbins, “an accomplished instructor from the eastern states,” according to John McClelland Bulkley, who as a boy shared a desk with Custer at the academy.8 Stebbins’ Academy was advertised as a “school for boys, exclusively, where they could enjoy all the comforts and privileges of home, and at the same time be fitted for any of the colleges and universities of the United States.”9 Students came to the academy from as far away as Chicago, Cleveland, and Buffalo.
“In the school were some of the brightest young men of the day,” Bulkley recalled, “and their names were found among the makers of history in the nation and honored in all the walks of civil life and military renown.”10 He believed that the “superior facilities of this school and the greatly improved social environments produced a most favorable effect upon the formation of [George’s] character.”11 When the school closed, Bulkley purchased the old desk he had shared with Custer that bore the initials they had carved into it.
George was still studious, but even more mischievous. One of his boyhood teachers confronted the young man after being caught misbehaving:
“I know it was wrong, but I could not help it.”
“Could not help it?”
“No, Sir. I wanted to do it.”
“But could you not restrain your impulses?”
“Don’t know, Sir—never tried.”
“But don’t you think you ought to try?”
“What if I could; but I don’t feel like trying.”12
Monroe would have an enduring hold on young George because there he met the love of his life. Custer did odd jobs for Judge Daniel S. Bacon, a local civic leader and one of the organizers of Stebbins’s school. One day, as he passed by the Bacon home, the judge’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Libbie, called out to him from the gate, “Hello, you Custer boy!” and then ran into the house. It was their first meeting, and though they would not speak again for years, that brief encounter was memorable for both of them.
“I can remember about the days on the farm and how ’fraid George was of the girls and bashful,” his brother Nevin recalled. “Why he’d blush as red as a tablecloth whenever a girl came his way.” But when it came to Libbie, his bashfulness vanished. Her spontaneous greeting to him “just won George right over.”
Several things conspired to keep the youngsters apart. One was their relative social standing: Elizabeth Bacon was from a leading family in the town, and George Custer, bluntly, was not. There was also a difference in ages. And there was timing; George was soon to graduate from Stebbins’ Academy and return to Ohio. However, “it was love at first sight for Custer,” one of his former officers later wrote, “and although they did not meet again for several years, he was determined to win the owner of those brown eyes.”13
Back in Ohio, George used his Stebbins diploma to secure work as a teacher in the one-room Beech Point schoolhouse in the town of Hopedale, ten miles southeast of New Rumley. “Us younger boys always expected to grow up on the farm,” Nevin said, “but George didn’t. He wanted to teach school right off.” In addition, George was apprenticing as a cabinetmaker. He would return home every other week, using part of his dollar-a-day teaching salary to help with the family finances. “He was handsome, tall, straight, well built, quick and agile,” a local recalled, “with a clear and sparkling eye, well chiseled features, and a compact head, which made him a youth of mark even in that little town, among his play fellows.”14
George was popular with the children, was very animated in the classroom, and as he was only a teenager himself, was known to roughhouse with the older boys. But his youth made it difficult for him to command respect. When he was teaching at a district school near Cadiz at age seventeen, he lost control of the situation and the boys took over the schoolhouse. “They tossed him about like a baby, and the girls themselves even joined in the melee to laugh at and abuse him.”15 George was so humiliated that he went home and cried. In those days he did not show qualities of daring or heroism, according to a contemporary: “Quite the reverse. He was more distinguished for good looks, quick movements and gentlemanly demeanor than for courageous boyish exploits.”16
But after the humiliating incident at the school, George summoned the courage he previously lacked. One night at Hopedale, he was sitting near a window and “some big fellow on the outside was standing at the window making faces at him and calling him ‘Baby!’ ‘Baby Custer!’ ‘Oh dear, little darling!’” Custer jumped up and “quick as lightning said, ‘Damn you!’ and ran his fist through the glass, striking the fellow full in the face.” His tormenter was more surprised than injured, and George cut his hand badly. But as one observer noted, the incident “gave him a standing for courage that he had never maintained before.”17
A local resident recalled that around this time, George was “remarkable only for brightness and aptness, and even in that not to an extraordinary degree. He was generally popular on account of his urbanity, and was sort of a favorite among the girls because he was rather good looking.” He eschewed manual labor and “was more fond of roaming over the country and loafing at the corners than attending to the trade to which he was apprenticed.” Custer did not seem to be destined for greatness. “I presume if Custer had not made such a famous career in his after life that his boyhood would have been passed over as one of perfect mediocrity,” the townsman said. “At least then his future was not marked very high.”18
But George harbored greater ambitions than being a rural schoolteacher or Ohio cabinetmaker. He wanted to be a famous soldier or, failing that, a great educator at an eastern college. Given his circumstances, the most direct route to achieve this was through the United States Military Academy. “I think [West Point] is the best place that I could go,” he wrote his sister in 1856.19 “Mother is much opposed to me going there, but Father and David are in favor of it very much.” His mother had always envisioned George taking the cloth like the Methodist preacher he was named after. But Emmanuel approved of the idea in principle. The trick then was getting an appointment.
Custer’s family lived in Ohio’s competitive Twenty-First District, which had shifted over the years between Democratic, Whig, and other parties.20 Emmanuel was a Jacksonian Democrat and a man of strong convictions. “He was an ardent, impulsive Method
ist, and a staunch, uncompromising Democrat,” one profile noted. “People who did not believe as he did in either way he would not even argue with, unless the argument was all on his side.”21
“Father Custer was a man of fire and intense feeling,” Elizabeth Custer recalled, “and though he exhorted in the prayer meetings Sunday, politics and patriotism were equally as much a religion to him weekdays.”22
George followed in his father’s outspoken partisan footsteps. Unfortunately, their member of Congress was John A. Bingham, elected in 1854 on the post-Whig Opposition party ticket and reelected in 1856 as a Republican.23 Under most circumstances the congressman would not be expected to grant his allotted seat at West Point to a vocal member of the opposing party.
“Bingham was a Republican and Pap was a Democrat,” Nevin said, “and we didn’t think George would ever get anything.” Father Custer recalled that George “asked me once to see Congressman Bingham about getting him an appointment to West Point. Bingham and I were opposed politically, and I didn’t want to ask him to do anything for me or mine.” But George went ahead anyway, “stole a march on his father and asked Bingham himself.”24
“I received a letter, a real boy’s letter, that captivated me,” Bingham recalled. “Written in a boyish hand, but firmly, legibly, it told me that the writer . . . wanted to be a soldier, wanted to go to West Point, and asked what steps he should take regarding it.” The letter read,
Dear Mr. Bingham: I am told you can send a boy to West Point. I am also told that you don’t care whether he is a Democrat boy or a Republican boy. I am a Democrat boy and I want to go to West Point and learn to be a soldier so I can fight for my country.
Sincerely yours,
GEORGE A. CUSTER.
“Struck by its originality, its honesty,” Bingham said, “I replied at once.”25
Bingham “took a fancy to him,” a local politician recalled. “He saw that there was something in the young man and so pushed him along. Bingham was a good judge of boys, as well as of men, and he could see that Custer’s bright eyes, quick perception and fluent manners marked for him a successful career, if he ever had a chance to show himself. Bingham determined to give him a chance.”26
Bingham’s nomination letter for George describes him as “17, 5’9 3/4”, good health, no deformity, reads well, spells correctly, writes a fair and legible hand, able to perform with facility and accuracy the ground rules of arithmetic, fully possesses all the qualifications physical, mental, and moral required.” It was an accurate, if not dazzling description. But the hopeful applicant was also aided from an unexpected quarter.
While teaching, George roomed at the home of a local farmer named Alexander Holland, who was influential in Republican circles. Holland made an appeal to Bingham on Custer’s behalf and helped secure the appointment. He might have fallen under the Custer charm and wanted to help the earnest young man realize his ambitions. Or he might have had another motive—namely, breaking up a budding romance. While staying at the Holland house, George formed a close relationship with the farmer’s daughter Mary. In one letter to her, he wrote, “You occupy the first place in my affections, and the only place as far as love is concerned.” After alluding to the possibility of marriage, he concludes, “I will talk with you about it when I see you next at the trundle-bed. Farewell, my only Love, until we meet again—From your true and faithful Lover, Bachelor Boy.”
“Bingham appointed him in spite of politics,” Nevin said. “Men was honester then than they are now—and if you ever saw a crazy youngster it was George.” The congressman’s recommendation was approved, and George’s appointment letter for the Academy arrived in early 1857, signed by Secretary of War Jefferson Davis.
CHAPTER TWO
CUSTER THE GOAT
“I never heard anything of his successes at West Point,” Libbie recalled. “It was a tale of demerits, of lessons unlearned, of narrow escapes from dismissal, of severe punishments, but all told in so merry a way and the very caressing tone of his voice proving that nothing was dearer to him than the four years of his life as a cadet.”1 George cautioned that his “career as a cadet had but little to commend it to the study of those who came after me, unless as an example to be carefully avoided.”
Like most “animals” or “beasts,” as the new arrivals were (and still are) called, George Custer’s introduction to West Point life was three months of drill, servitude, and sleeping in tents. When he arrived at the Academy in the summer of 1857, the cadets were in their summer encampment on the Plain. One new arrival described encampment as “a time of joy and merriment to the old cadets, but a time of trouble and fatigue to the new ones. The new cadets are compelled to clean the parade ground, before the tents, in the tent, make the beds, clean the ditches, bring water, while the old cadets fiddle, dance, sing, get drunk and be merry.”2 But the indignities of the encampment did not seem to make an impression on young George, and a few months into his stay, he wrote his sister, “I like West Point as well if not better than I did at first.”3
George easily made friends in the Corps. His natural charisma and easygoing, fun-loving personality resonated among his peers. Morris Schaff observed his inborn qualities: “His nature, so full of those streams that rise, so to speak, among the high hills of our being. I have in mind his joyousness, his attachment to the friends of his youth, and his never-ending delight in talking about his old home.”4 George quickly established himself as one of the Academy’s lovable rogues. Then-plebe John Montgomery Wright recalled the scene in August 1859 when the cadets who had been on furlough were returning through the gate, and the cry went up “from a hundred throats . . . ‘Here comes Custer!’” Wright saw “an undeveloped looking youth, with a poor figure, slightly rounded shoulders, and an ungainly walk. . . . an indifferent soldier, a poor student and a perfect incorrigible . . . a roystering, reckless cadet, always in trouble, always playing some mischievous pranks, and liked by everyone.” A few nights later, in one of the traditional West Point initiations of the day, a laughing Custer “yanked” Wright from his tent, dragged him in his blanket across the Plain, and sent him flying down the slope.5
Like most cadets, Autie picked up nicknames, such as “Fanny,” for his long hair and peaches-and-cream complexion. It was an unbecoming moniker for a warrior, but cadets could be harsh with those who too obviously paid attention to their grooming. He was called “Curly” for his curly locks, which coincidentally was Crazy Horse’s boyhood name. He tried to keep his curls under control using cinnamon-scented hair oils, which were the style of the time, but this made matters worse, and he became known as “Cinnamon.” He then sought to dispense with all hair-related names and shaved his head. However, now Custer faced reports for having his hair too short, so he wore a wig to stay within regulations until his hair grew out.6
The cycle of life at West Point was well established by the time Cadet Custer arrived. The structure, traditions, and importance of the Academy were firmly rooted. The academic system devised by Superintendent Sylvanus Thayer forty years earlier had remained largely unchanged. Cadets experienced a mix of academic and tactical instruction geared toward producing what the institution believed was the ideal officer. The academic curriculum was focused on mathematics, drawing, language, and some history and liberal arts. Military lessons included infantry, artillery, cavalry tactics, and practical leadership lessons. Discipline was strict, and daily life was highly regimented. The most notable difference between the Thayer system and the West Point of Custer’s day was the addition of a fifth year, which was instituted a few years earlier by Secretary of War Davis, who was an 1828 grad. When Davis fought to preserve the extra year as a senator, a Georgia cadet wished he would go to hell, but then quickly said, “No, I take that all back; for I believe the day is coming when the South will have need of Mr. Davis’ abilities.”7
The first big hurdle in a cadet’s academic career was the series of first-year midterm exams. This was the largest winnowing of any incoming
class. “Our January examination is over now and I am glad of it,” George wrote after the 1858 exam. “I passed my examination very creditably but there were a great many found deficient and sent off. . . . 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.”8
The end-of-year exam was another milestone that could potentially be disastrous for an unprepared cadet. The trial lasted over two weeks and covered all aspects of the cadet curriculum. The 1858 exam claimed more plebes from Custer’s class, but he was not among them. “I am glad that I can say that I went through my examination in a manner that did honor not only to myself but to my instructors also,” George wrote from his second encampment.9 He had come in fifty-eighth of the sixty-two who passed. “I am now one class higher than I was before,” he continued. “I am well and have been well all the time. I would not leave this place for any amount of money because I would rather have a good education and no money than to have a fortune and be ignorant.”
If Autie got a good education at the Academy, it was despite himself. Custer’s poor academic performance at West Point is part of Academy lore. George was consistently in the last academic section, known as “The Immortals,” and also performed poorly in tactical instruction. But not everyone who wound up at the bottom was there because they could not cope with the curriculum. Cadet Custer had a sound educational background and clearly could have done better if he had chosen to. But George was part of a long line of West Point cadets who did not care about class rank and were content to use the time they might have been studying (or “boning,” as cadets said) to socialize, play pranks, or engage in other forbidden pursuits. The least able cadets and those with severe disciplinary problems would wash out early. Those left at the bottom were either working diligently to hang on or, like Cadet Custer, taking it all in a carefree spirit, knowing they could pull out a minimal passing grade at the last minute.
The Real Custer Page 2
