William Woods Averell described Benny as “of uncertain age, over fifty and under eighty, with a ruddy clean-shaven face which displayed soft little wrinkles about his eyes and mouth.” Old Ben was “full of wise saws and quaint stories” about former cadets who had gone on to fame as Army officers, “which he would relate with a merry twinkle of his eyes and a genial quaver of voice that made them fascinating to youngsters.” He was assisted by his three grown daughters, and being recognized or asked for by name by Benny or his daughters “was an honor to which no cadet was indifferent.”41 During the Civil War, the West Point drinking song “Benny Havens, Oh!” sung to the tune of the Irish ballad “The Wearing o’ the Green” became an Army standard, sung by soldiers who had never been to the tavern, and perhaps never knew it really existed.
Adventurous cadets who “ran it” to Benny’s could find good meals, companionship, and a break from the Academy grind. And there was of course an opportunity to drink. Benny Havens was famous for his “hot flip,” a hot rum drink he concocted by sticking a red-hot poker into a metal pitcher filled with his mix of secret ingredients. A few flips usually did the trick. Once George had to carry a fellow cadet who was too drunk to walk back from Benny’s, drag him upstairs, and get him undressed and into bed just minutes before reveille. Bearing back the “well-developed young sinner deadened with liquor” was “the hardest and most perilous feat of his varied adventures,” Libbie recalled.42
Benny Havens was the scene of many special events, such as a going-away party Custer organized in April 1860 for members of the class soon to graduate. The “firsties” being honored were Stephen Dodson Ramseur of North Carolina and Wesley Merritt of Illinois. Also present were Henry DuPont of Delaware, John Pelham of Alabama, Thomas Lafayette “Tex” Rosser of Texas, and of course Custer himself. It was a night of merriment and comradeship among young men who looked forward to bright futures as officers in their country’s service. What they did not know was that they would soon face each other across bloody battlefields in a country torn apart by war. In a few short years, three of the six around the table would have left the U.S. Army for the Confederate cause, four would become general officers, and two would be dead.
John Wolcott Adams, Benny Havens, from “Old College Songs,” Century 78, no. 181 (June 1909).
CHAPTER THREE
THE BROTHERHOOD BROKEN
In Raoul Walsh’s 1941 biopic, They Died with Their Boots On, Custer and other West Point cadets gather on the Plain in the spring of 1861 to hear an announcement from visiting “Senator Smith.” He asks them to sign an oath foreswearing all loyalties except to the national government. Those officers and cadets who felt they could not meet the requirements of the oath were allowed to depart. At the command, “Gentlemen of the South, fall out!” Custer—played by Errol Flynn, who personified the general for a generation—watches with concern as Southern cadets walk resolutely from the ranks.
Senator Smith grouses to the superintendent, Major Alexander H. Bowman, that he had “not been misinformed as to the preponderance of traitors at West Point” and that it was “high time that Congress acted to clean out this nest of secessionists.” But Major Bowman corrects the senator. “We don’t concern ourselves with the making of wars here,” he says, “only the fighting of them.” To the cadets, the Supe says, “We have lived as soldiers, and politics have had no place among us. Let us part then as we have lived, with the determination to do our duty, wherever it may lie.” The Southerners form a column and march off the field led by mounted Captain Fitzhugh Lee, nephew of Robert E. Lee. The post band plays “Dixie,” and the loyalist cadets present arms as their former classmates pass.
The Hollywood version of the Academy’s sundering is moving, but manufactured. The severing of the West Point fraternity came about gradually; when the Southern cadets left, they did so by ones and twos. They were enthusiastic, but most had not rushed headlong into the split. American military officers were supposed to be above politics. Judson Kilpatrick of the Class of May 1861, later Custer’s commander and rival, said there was a custom established among the cadets at West Point “which forbade the discussion of politics. The violation of this regulation was met with that severest of punishments, social ostracism.”1 The apolitical professionalism of the American soldier was based on long-standing concerns about the role of standing armies in the life of the Republic. West Point’s critics had long raised this issue, and it was only partially quelled by the heroism of Academy grads in the Mexican War. For most serving officers, and especially for West Point cadets, politics was off-limits.
However, sectional feelings went beyond politics. They were expressions of the cadets’ local and state pride, tradition, heritage, and community spirit. West Point was one of the few national institutions outside of the U.S. Congress where people gathered from every state, and naturally this generated friendly competition and a degree of culture clash. “Among the noticeable features of cadet life as then impressed upon me, and still present in my memory,” Custer wrote years later, “were the sectional lines voluntarily established by the cadets themselves; at first barely distinguishable, but in the later years immediately preceding the war as clearly defined and strongly drawn as were the lines separating the extremes of the various sections in the national Congress.”2
Over the decades, the Southern cadets had developed a reputation as forming a relaxed aristocracy. A British observer who stopped at West Point during the Thayer era commented, “There is a remarkable difference between the cadets of the Northern and Southern States: the former are generally studious and industrious; the latter, brought up among slaves, are idle and inattentive, so that they are almost all dismissed; consequently, the Academy is not ‘in good odor’ with the planters; for they imagine that favoritism prevails, and that the dismissals are not impartial.”3 In general, Southern cadets were regarded as less prepared and seen as underachievers.4 Because of stereotypes like this, there was a widespread view among Northerners that most officers who hailed from the South were incompetent. This idea persisted until the dramatic Confederate victories in the early years of the Civil War, when suddenly the Southerners were considered martial geniuses, and the Northern officers were dismissed as bungling and ineffectual.
Sectional rivalries among cadets were initially relatively harmless, but in the late 1850s they began to reflect the intensity of the growing national division, particularly over the issue of slavery. The Southerners were especially motivated. “While the advocates for and against slavery were equally earnest and determined,” Custer wrote, “those from the South were always the most talkative if not argumentative.”5 Francis Henry Parker of Custer’s class noted during his first months at West Point that “a man’s politics have a great deal to do with the opinion formed of a person by the cadets. There are very few Republicans here but they are all cut by the rest of the cadets. . . . Particularly are the Mass. men abused. . . . they have to fight continually, and in every way. But they are superior both mentally and physically and most always come off victorious.”6
The Republican party was young at that point, having been organized three years earlier in response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act by a coalition of abolitionists, former Whigs, and merchants. Other events followed that heightened sectional tensions: the terror of Bleeding Kansas, South Carolina representative Preston Brooks’s beating Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner with a cane on the Senate floor in May 1856, and the March 1857 Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford that legalized the unhindered expansion of slavery into the territories.
The watershed event for sectionalism at West Point, and the country generally, was John Brown’s attempted slave insurrection at Harpers Ferry and subsequent trial, which took place between October and December 1859. “The John Brown raid into Virginia stirred the wrathful indignation of the embryonic warriors who looked upon slavery as an institution beyond human interference,” Custer wrote, “while those of the opposite extreme contented themselves b
y quietly chuckling over the alarm into which the executive and military forces of an entire State were thrown by the invasion led by Brown, backed by a score or two of adherents.”7
The Harpers Ferry raid affected the Corps personally; one of Brown’s hostages was Colonel Lewis Washington, great-grandnephew and closest living relation of George Washington and father of plebe James B. Washington of Virginia. The troops that ended the siege and captured Brown were commanded by the former superintendent Colonel Robert E. Lee and his aide-de-camp, Lieutenant James E. B. Stuart of the Class of 1854. Lieutenant Israel Greene, USMC, who commanded the Marine platoon that stormed the firehouse where Brown was holed up, had recently received artillery training at West Point. The cadets followed reports of the raid, trial, and execution closely. On December 2, 1859, the day John Brown was hanged in Charles Town, Virginia, he was also hanged in effigy from a tree in front of the barracks. Afterward sectional feelings at the Academy became more acute and more overtly political, and they sometimes led to violence.8
“It required more than ordinary moral and physical courage to boldly avow oneself an abolitionist,” Custer recalled of those days. “The name was considered one of opprobrium, and the cadet who had the courage to avow himself an abolitionist must be prepared to face the social frowns of the great majority of his comrades and at times to defend his opinions by his physical strength and metal.”9 One such cadet was Emory Upton of the Class of May 1861. Upton was appointed to the Academy from New York but for the previous two years had been a student at Oberlin College in Ohio. Oberlin was a noted center of progressive education, the first college to admit African American students (in 1835) and the first coeducational college (in 1837). “Upton was a bold fellow and thoroughly radical in his views,” his classmate Jacob B. Rawles recalled.10 Upton was the first cadet to openly declare himself an abolitionist, and as Morris Schaff stated, “this made him a marked man.”11
Wade Hampton Gibbes, Class of 1860, was the son of a slave owner and had grown up on a South Carolina plantation. He was a vocal firebrand, and he disliked Upton intensely. He started a rumor that the young abolitionist had been involved with a black woman at Oberlin, and after it got back to Upton, he called out Gibbes.
“One noon we were drawn up preparatory to marching to the mess-room,” Judson Kilpatrick recalled. “Upton stepped out from his position on the right of the battalion, walked deliberately down the line to the extreme left, where Gibbes was standing, and asked him if he had used the language attributed to him.” Gibbes said he did, and Upton “brought his hand down on the face of the vilifier with a ringing slap.” Upton was jumped by “a score of high-toned Southerners,” and he was rescued by “those who were willing to see fair play.” It was “a pretty plucky thing for one to do with all the odds against him, and only three friends in the Academy.”12
They agreed to meet in the barracks and settle the matter as gentlemen. The two came to blows and cadets crowded around, cheering them on. Gibbes got the better of Upton, who eventually emerged, his face bloody, heading for the stairs up to his room. The Southern cadets were shouting threats and insults, when Upton’s roommate, a big Pennsylvanian named John I. Rodgers, appeared at the top of the steps, his eyes “glaring like a panther’s,” according to Schaff, and said to the jeering Southerners, “If there are any more of you down there who want anything, come right up!”13
The Upton-Gibbes fight “was the most thrilling event in my life as a cadet,” Schaff wrote, “and, in my judgment, it was the most significant in that of West Point itself.” In it Schaff saw a prophecy of the war to come, reflecting both “the courage and the bitterness with which it was fought out to the bitter end.”14
The fight stood out in memory because it was the exception. Northern and Southern cadets did not generally engage in brawls over politics. When fights did happen, they were usually over other matters. But sectional tensions continued to percolate at the Academy, and they came into sharp focus during the 1860 election campaign.
In October 1860, Southern cadets arranged an electoral straw poll. Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon, the father of John Lane, Custer’s friend, classmate, and sometime-roommate, was the vice presidential nominee of the Southern Democrat faction headed by Breckenridge.15 Custer, being a Northern Democrat, could be expected to support Stephen Douglas, the establishment Democratic nominee. But the real purpose of the straw poll was to root out the Republicans in the Corps’ midst.
“A better scheme than this straw ballot to embroil the Corps, and to precipitate the hostilities between individuals which soon involved the States, could not have been devised,” Morris Schaff wrote. The ballot was secret, with a voting box inside a long shed near the barracks. “The balloting was generally secret, for several reasons,” recalled Jacob B. Rawles of the Class of May 1861. The Northern and Southern cadets, especially roommates, held their friendships “in high regard, and as the feeling was very intense through out the country, before the impending crisis of that four years of fratricidal warfare, our personal opinions were more or less guarded.”16
This was not the case with Emory Upton, who took the opportunity to provoke the Southerners. He walked to the shed waving his ballot over his head shouting, “I’m going to vote for Abraham Lincoln, and I don’t give a rap who knows it!” Several Southern cadets rose to the provocation, and another brawl seemed imminent, but Charles C. Campbell of Missouri, later a Confederate major, intervened and insisted on a fair fight. Cooler heads prevailed and stopped a repeat of the previous bloodletting.17
Breckenridge won a plurality of ninety-nine votes out of 278, and Lincoln was second with sixty-four. The incensed Southerners then began to hunt out the “Black Republican Abolitionists in the Corps.”18 Only thirty cadets admitted they backed Lincoln, and all of them from west of the Hudson. Ohioan Schaff, a Lincoln backer, called the unwillingness of the New England Republicans to stand by their votes “the most equivocal if not pusillanimous conduct I ever saw at West Point.”19 Lincoln was soon hanged in effigy, like Brown, in front of the barracks.
As the election neared, Custer wrote, “the Breckenridge army of Southern Democrats did not hesitate to announce, as their seniors in and out of Congress had done, that in the event of Lincoln’s election secession would be the only resource left to the South.”20 Lincoln’s victory on November 6, 1860, demonstrated the breakdown of the national political system. Lincoln swept the free states and carried none of the slave states, the first and only such outcome in presidential electoral history. McCrea, another of the Lincoln supporters from Ohio, celebrated the Republican victory. “As we rejoiced the other parties mourned,” he wrote, “the southerners [fumed] 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.” He thought that it “would be a blessed good thing” if the Southerners resigned, because “it would clear the institution of some of the worst characters.”21
Not everyone was certain the coming division was a “blessed good thing.” William A. Elderkin from New York, of the Class of May 1861, expressed the ambivalence some cadets felt in the days after Lincoln’s election: “Election is at last over . . . ominous signs of dis-union are plainly visible, and probably before we see each other again ‘something will turn up’—I do not blame the ‘south’ for feeling as they do—nor would I wonder to see them take the sword, if necessary, to defend their just rights—still, I was born under a northern sun and have sworn to serve under the federal constitution, and so I must do—yet. God forbid that I should ever be called into a hostile field against my own countrymen.”22
But among the Southern cadets, particularly those from the Deep South, it was clear that a long-expected revolution was imminent. “It seemed to have been a part of the early teaching of the Southern youth,” Custer wrote, “that the disruption of the Union was an event surely to be brought about.”23 Thomas Rowland of Virginia, head of the Class of 1863, observed in a letter home that “a great many ca
dets have assumed the blue cockade, tying a small blue ribbon upon the cap button” in solidarity with the South.24 Three days after the election, the Columbia, South Carolina, Guardian published an open letter from the West Point cadets of the Palmetto State pledging to stand by their homeland if it left the Union. “All we desire is a field for making ourselves useful,” they said.25 Ten days later South Carolinian Henry S. Farley resigned, followed four days later by James “Little Jim” Hamilton. The Janesville, Wisconsin, Gazette mocked these and other departing cadets, editorializing that “after their chivalry gets chilled, and their vacancies have been filled, these boys will be forced to the conclusion that they have made asses of themselves.”26
Eighty-six of the 278 cadets at the Academy at that time were from states that eventually joined the Confederacy. Sixty-five of them left or were discharged for reasons connected to the war. Six left for other reasons, and fifteen sided with the Union.27 The Southern cadets did not leave en masse, as portrayed cinematically, but departed in small numbers as the Union slowly disintegrated through the winter and spring of 1860–61. Custer observed that one important reason the Southern cadets were in a hurry to leave was because the Confederate government was organizing its armed forces, and “it was important that applicants for positions of this kind should be on the ground to properly present their claims.”28 Custer noted with some amazement that the Academy raised no barriers to the cadets’ resignations and departures, even though their intentions to join the nascent Confederate forces were clear. Indeed, throughout the whole of the Army, officers and troops changed the blue for the gray with little difficulty.
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