The Real Custer

by James S Robbins

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  Some of the primary sources used in The Real Custer are found in the United States Military Academy Special Collections. They include, inter alia, the George Armstrong Custer papers and papers of other graduates as cited, particularly documents in the files compiled by George W. Cullum for his Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates of the U.S. Military Academy (3rd ed., 3 vols., 1891), also known as the “Cullum files”; the “x-files” of cadets who did not graduate; the Annual Reports of the USMA Association of Graduates; the 1952 Register of Graduates and Former Cadets; the Register of Delinquencies, Staff Records, Post Orders, Special Orders; and other sundry records. Other sources include records and documents from the National Archives in Washington, D.C., the Elizabeth Bacon Custer papers, and other collections as cited. All Custer letters are from the United States Military Academy Special Collections unless otherwise indicated.

  Additional biographical details are from Francis Bernard Heitman, Historical Register and Dictionary of the United States Army, from its Organization, September 29, 1789, to March 2, 1903, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office (1903).

  Civil War–era after action reports, correspondence and other such records are from The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1902), unless otherwise indicated.

  Some of the secondary sources consulted are The Custer Story: The Life and Intimate Letters of General George A. Custer and His Wife Elizabeth, Marguerite Merington, ed. (New York: Devin-Adair, 1950); The Civil War Memories of Elizabeth Bacon Custer: Reconstructed from Her Diaries and Notes, Arlene Reynolds, ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994); Frederic F. Van de Water, Glory-Hunter: A Life of General Custer (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1934); D. A. Kinsley, Favor the Bold (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967–68); Jay Monaghan, Custer: The Life of General George Armstrong Custer (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959); Stephen E. Ambrose, Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975); Louise K Barnett, Touched by Fire: The Life, Death, and Mythic Afterlife of George Armstrong Custer (New York: Henry Holt, 1996); James Welch, Killing Custer (New York: Penguin Books, 1995); and Thom Hatch, The Custer Companion (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2002). The Real Custer expands and is partly based on the account of Custer in the author’s Last in Their Class: Custer, Pickett and the Goats of West Point (New York: Encounter Books, 2006).

  Special thanks to Michael Donahue, chairman of the Art Department at Temple College and longest-serving seasonal park ranger at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, for his generous assistance and invaluable comments.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1.Frederick Whittaker, A Complete Life of General George A. Custer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), first published in December 1876, 609–10. Whittaker is often faulted for not being accurate, to the point where, like Herodotus, historians avoid his work for fear of repeating a dubious tale.

  2.Philip Quilibet (George Edward Pound), “Luck,” Galaxy, October 1876, 555.

  3.Data from Google Ngrams show a reader was over one hundred times more likely to see a reference to “George Custer” in a book in the year 2000 than in 1876, and the greatest growth in Custer references came after 1966.

  4.Ronald Reagan, in a letter to Custer biographer David Humphreys Miller, June 21, 1984.

  5.John McClelland Bulkley, History of Monroe County Michigan, vol. I (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1913), 236–7.

  CHAPTER 1

  1.Warren Jenkins, The Ohio Gazetteer and Traveler’s Guide (Columbus: Isaac N. Whiting, 1837), 334.

  2.Charles B. Wallace, Custer’s Ohio Boyhood (Cadiz, OH: Harrison County Historical Society, 1993), 46. Emmanuel Henry Custer, born December 10, 1806, in Cresaptown, MD; died November 17, 1892, in Monroe, Michigan. On August 7, 1828, he married first Matilda Viers (March 4, 1804–July 18, 1835). Children: Hannah, Brice, William, and John A. He married his second wife, Mrs. Maria Ward Kirkpatrick (May 31, 1807–January 13, 1882), on February 23, 1836. Children: James, Samuel, George Armstrong, Nevin Johnson, Thomas Ward, Boston, and Margaret Emma.

  3.All Nevin Custer reminiscences from “Custer as His Brother Remembers Him,” newspaper article, Topeka, Kansas, June 1910. Accessed from the Monroe County Library (MI).

  4.Louise Barnett, “Early Days,” chapter 1 in Touched by Fire: The Life, Death, and Mythic Afterlife of George Armstrong Custer (New York: Henry Holt, 1996).

  5.Ibid.

  6.“Michigan’s Tribute to General Custer,” Shreveport (LA) Caucasian, May 31, 1910, 2. Whether he knew it or not, he was quoting lines attributed to Cherokee leader Tuskenehaw when his people were facing banishment on the Trail of Tears. “My voice is for war,” he said. “I have killed all the whites I could find. . . . I, and all the brave warriors of my town, will die and be buried alongside of their fathers. Those who are afraid, like squaws, will let the white man come and drive them off. My voice is for war.” “The West Fifty Years Hence,” Southern Literary Messenger 4, 1838, 467.

  7.The Indians later massacred the American prisoners.

  8.John McClelland Bulkley, History of Monroe County Michigan: A Narrative Account of Its Historical Progress, Its People, and Its Principal Interests, vol. 1 (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1913), 421–22.

  9.Ibid., 422.

  10.Ibid.

  11.Ibid., 233.

  12.“Custer as a Boy,” New York Times, July 29, 1876, 2.

  13.Willard Glazier, Ocean to Ocean on Horseback (Philadelphia: Edgewood Publishing, 1899), 277–78. Glazier was a lieutenant in the 2nd New York Cavalry regiment before being captured and sent to Libby Prison in October 1863.

  14.“Some Reminiscences of the Boyhood Days of General Custer and Bishop Simpson,” Belmont Chronicle (OH), March 4, 1880, 1.

  15.Ibid.

  16.Ibid.

  17.Ibid.

  18.Ibid.

  19.GAC December 12, 1856.

  20.Harrison County had also shifted districts as Ohio grew, being previously part of the Fifteenth, Nineteenth, and Eleventh Districts.

  21.“Gen. Custer’s Father,” Lafayette (LA) Gazette, April 22, 1893, 1.

  22.EBC in Arlene Reynolds, ed., The Civil War Memories of Elizabeth Bacon Custer: Reconstructed from Her Diaries and Notes (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 9.

  23.The Opposition party (1854–58) was one of the political parties that bridged the disintegration of the Whig party after the passage of the compromise Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 and the rise of the Republican party after 1856. The Oppositionists—the name referring to their opposition to the Democrats—controlled one hundred seats in the Thirty-fourth Congress, the largest party but lacking majority control. Bingham had been a lawyer in New Philadelphia, Ohio, and had served as district attorney for Tuscarawas County. He served eight nonconsecutive terms in Congress. Bingham was a special judge advocate during the trial of the Lincoln conspirators, helped manage the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, was principal author of the Fourteenth Amendment, and was U.S. minister to Japan, 1873–85.

  24.“Gen. Custer’s Father,” 1.

  25.“How Custer Went to West Point,” Hocking Sentinel (OH), August 16, 1900, 3.

  26.“Some Reminiscences of the Boyhood Days of General Custer and Bishop Simpson,” 1.

  CHAPTER 2

  1.EBC in Arlene Reynolds, ed., The Civil War Memories of Elizabeth Bacon Custer: Reconstructed from Her Diaries and Notes (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 20.

  2.James S. Robbins, Last in Their Class: Custer, Pickett, and the Goats of West Point (New York: Encounter Books, 2006), 1.

  3.GAC, August 7, 1857.

  4.Morris Schaff, The Spirit of Old West Point, 1858–1862 (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1907), 86. Schaff knew Custer well at West Point and afterward, and his memoir of his cadet days is an important source on West Point in the years bef
ore and during the outbreak of the Civil War.

  5.See John Montgomery Wright, “West Point before the War,” Southern Bivouac, June 1885, 13.

  6.Joseph Pearson Farley, West Point in the Early Sixties: With Incidents of the War (Troy, NY: Pafraets Book Company, 1902), 78.

  7.George Custer, “War Memoirs,” Galaxy, April 1876, 450.

  8.GAC, January 27, 1858.

  9.GAC, June 30, 1858, from “Camp Jefferson Davis.”

  10.Custer, “War Memoirs”; and GAC, December 13, 1859.

  11.Reverend J. William Jones, ed., “Generals in the Saddle,” Southern Historical Society Papers 19, October 1891, 172.

  12.Marguerite Merington, ed., The Custer Story: The Life and Intimate Letters of General George A. Custer and His Wife Elizabeth (New York: Devin-Adair, 1950), 8.

  13.Wright, “West Point before the War,” 18.

  14.GAC, December 13, 1859.

  15.McCrea letter, January 19, 1861.

  16.Custer letter, August 7, 1857.

  17.Quoted in W. Donal Horn, ed., “Skinned”: The Delinquency Record of Cadet George Armstrong Custer, U.S.M.A. Class of June 1861, foreword by Blaine L. Beal (Short Hills, NJ: W. D. Horn, 1980), iii.

  18.Schaff, The Spirit of Old West Point, 194.

  19.McCrea letter, December 22, 1858.

  20.Memoir of George A. Woodruff, unpublished manuscript, USMA Archives, 24.

  21.Custer, West Point–era letter, date uncertain.

  22.Letter from T. Rowland written in 1860, reprinted in “Hazing at West Point,” Stevens Point Journal, April 22, 1916.

  23.EBC in Reynolds, The Civil War Memories of Elizabeth Bacon Custer, 39.

  24.Custer, “War Memoirs,” 454.

  25.Edward C. Boynton, History of West Point, and Its Military Importance during the American Revolution: And the Origin and Progress of the United States Military Academy (New York: Van Nostrand, 1863), 279. Some have said that the demerits Custer was forgiven at the end of his first year were “Custer’s luck,” but in fact all cadets in his class were given the one-third reduction.

  26.The one-third reduction explains Custer’s comment about the 150-demerit limit. It was actually a one-hundred-demerit-per-semester limit, but plebes could go up another fifty since it would revert by one-third.

  27.Custer, “War Memoirs,” 452.

  28.McCrea letter, September 23, 1860.

  29.McCrea letter, January 19, 1861. McCrea offered helpfully that a better idea would have been to take the whole notebook and replace it later by bribing an employee at the hotel.

  30.McCrea letter, February 10, 1861.

  31.EBC in Reynolds, The Civil War Memories of Elizabeth Bacon Custer, 39.

  32.Custer letter dated August 7, 1857.

  33.“Affairs at West Point,” New York Times, August 9, 1860.

  34.“West Point and Newport,” New York Times, September 11, 1860, 2.

  35.“West Point,” New York Times, September 13, 1860, 2.

  36.R. W. Johnson, A Soldier’s Reminiscences in Peace and War (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1886), 25–27. Johnson graduated thirtieth of forty-three in his class and was a brevet major general in the Civil War.

  37.Custer letter, August 7, 1857.

  38.Custer letter, December 13, 1859.

  39.Custer, “War Memoirs,” 454.

  40.Robbins, Last in Their Class, 21.

  41.Edward K. Eckert and Nicholas J. Amato, eds., Ten Years in the Saddle: The Memoir of William Woods Averell (San Rafael, CA: Presidio Press, 1978), 38.

  42.EBC in Reynolds, The Civil War Memories of Elizabeth Bacon Custer, 23.

  CHAPTER 3

  1.“The West Point Troubles,” New York Times, October 21, 1871.

  2.George Custer, “War Memoirs,” Galaxy, April 1876, 449.

  3.Quoted in George C. Strong, Cadet Life at West Point (Boston: T. O. H. P. Burnham, 1962), 297.

  4.See Elizabeth D. J. Waugh, “Brothers at War,” chapter 9 in West Point (New York: Macmillan, 1944).

  5.Custer, “War Memoirs,” 449.

  6.John M. Parker III, “The Life of Francis Henry Parker, 1838–1897, A U.S. Army Ordinance Officer” (unpublished manuscript), USMA Archives, 32–33.

  7.Custer, “War Memoirs,” 449.

  8.See Waugh, West Point, 115–16.

  9.Custer, “War Memoirs,” 449.

  10.Jacob B. Rawles, “General Rawles Tells Stories of West Point’s Famous Class of ’61,” San Francisco Call, March 20, 1910, 4.

  11.Morris Schaff, The Spirit of Old West Point, 1858–1862 (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1907), 145.

  12.“The West Point Troubles.”

  13.Schaff, The Spirit of Old West Point, 147. Rodgers was an artillery officer during the first years of the Civil War and taught mathematics at West Point in 1864–65. He was a brigadier general and chief of artillery during the Spanish-American War.

  14.Schaff, The Spirit of Old West Point, 144. Schaff believed that the Northern temperament, which withstood insults, tended to encourage the Southerners, who misconstrued taciturnity for lack of courage. “It took Gettysburg and the Wilderness and Chickamauga to prove them their fatal error,” he wrote (see The Spirit of Old West Point, 83).

  15.Lane resigned February 16, 1861, and became a Confederate artilleryman. He was in all the major battles in the East, serving under Pendleton at Gettysburg in the Sumter Artillery, Hill’s Corps, Anderson’s Division. He was probably at Appomattox as a lieutenant colonel.

  16.Rawles, “General Rawles Tells Stories of West Point’s Famous Class of ’61,” 4.

  17.Ibid. Rawles confusingly says that Gibbes was present during this incident, but since he had graduated in July 1860, it was unlikely unless the straw poll was held before the 1860 graduation.

  18.Schaff, The Spirit of Old West Point, 165. Lincoln was elected with just under 40 percent of the popular vote.

  19.Schaff, The Spirit of Old West Point, 165.

  20.Custer, “War Memoirs,” 449.

  21.McCrea letter, November 10, 1860.

  22.William A. Elderkin letter, November 14, 1860, USMA Archives.

  23.Custer, “War Memoirs,” 449–50.

  24.Letter from T Rowland dated November 11, 1860, in Southern Atlantic Quarterly 15, no. 1 (January 1916), 148.

  25.Quoted in Peter S. Michie, The Life and Letters of Emory Upton, Colonel of the Fourth Regiment of Artillery, and Brevet Major-General, U.S. Army (New York: D. Appleton, 1885), 28.

  26.Janesville (WI) Gazette, December 3, 1860, 1.

  27.Edward C. Boynton, History of West Point, and Its Military Importance during the American Revolution: And the Origin and Progress of the United States Military Academy (New York: Van Nostrand, 1863), 281.

  28.Custer, “War Memoirs,” 451.

  29.Rowland letter, December 27, 1860.

  30.Custer, “War Memoirs,” 450.

  31.Rowland letter, December 27, 1860.

  32.Custer, “War Memoirs,” 450.

  33.After the war, Young was a congressman, minister to Guatemala, and consul-general to Russia.

  34.Schaff, The Spirit of Old West Point, 149.

  35.Lynwood M. Holland, Pierce M. B. Young: The Warwick of the South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1964), 27.

  36.Custer, “War Memoirs,” 451.

  37.Wiley C. Howard, Sketch of Cobb Legion Cavalry and Some Incidents and Scenes Remembered (Atlanta, GA, 1901), 4–5.

  38.Custer, “War Memoirs,” 452.

  39.Ibid. Ball commanded the 8th Alabama Cavalry regiment during the war, and afterward he became an inventor. Kelly, in November 1863, became the youngest general in the Confederacy, a counterpart to his friend Custer, who achieved the same distinction in the Union Army six months earlier. Kelly was killed in 1864 during a raid near Franklin, Tennessee.

  40.Parker, The Life of Francis Henry Parker, letter of April 7, 1861, 45–46.

  41.Presidential order quoted in Schaff, The Spirit of Old West Point, 201–2.

  42.Quoted in Schaff, The
Spirit of Old West Point, 204.

  43.Ibid., 208.

  44.Custer letter, April 10, 1861, USMA archives.

  45.Parker, The Life of Francis Henry Parker, letter of April 7, 1861, 44.

  46.Custer letter, April 10, 1861, USMA archives.

  47.Custer, “War Memoirs,” 453.

  48.Rowland letter, April 14, 1861.

  49.“Detention of West Point Cadets in Philadelphia,” New York Times, May 9, 1861. See also letter by Lieutenant William Anthony Elderkin (USMA May 1861), May 8, 1861, USMA Archives.

  50.New York Times, June 22, 1861. The Class of 1862 almost graduated early as well, but it was felt that there was nothing to be gained putting officers in the field who were little better trained than the militia officers already being commissioned in large numbers balanced against such a severe disruption of the Academy system.

  51.Parker, The Life of Francis Henry Parker, letter of May 18, 1861, 47.

  52.“The West Point Cadets,” New York Times, June 22, 1861.

  53.GAC letter to his sister, May 31, 1861.

  54.Quoted in James S. Robbins, Last in Their Class: Custer, Pickett, and the Goats of West Point (New York: Encounter Books, 2006), x. The book remains the invaluable guide to the goats.

  55.Boynton, History of West, 281.

  56.Custer, “War Memoirs,” 454. Of the 330 serving West Point graduates appointed from the Southern states, 168 joined the rebellion, and 162 remained loyal to the Union. See Ellsworth Eliot Jr., West Point in the Confederacy (New York: G.A. Baker, 1941).

  57.Custer, “War Memoirs,” 454.

  58.Two of them, Frank A. Reynolds and George Owen Watts, graduated and then resigned. Clarence Derrick, who graduated fourth in the class, also resigned after graduation.