The Real Custer (8 page)

Young resigned in March 1861, eventually becoming an officer in the Cobb Legion Cavalry in J. E. B. Stuart's Corps.
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“One by one the places occupied by the cadets from the seceding States became vacant,” Custer wrote. “It cost many a bitter pang to disrupt the intimate relations existing between the hot-blooded Southron and his more phlegmatic schoolmate from the North. No schoolgirls could have been more demonstrative in their affectionate regard for each other than were some of the cadets about to separate for the last time, and under circumstances which made it painful to contemplate a future coming together.”
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One Saturday in late December, Custer was, as usual, walking an extra, when he saw a group of cadets carrying two others toward the wharf on their shoulders. One was his classmate Cadet First Sergeant Charles P. Ball of Alabama, the other John Herbert Kelly of California, of Custer's company. As the men were borne away, they raised their hats to Custer across the plain in farewell. After looking to see if he was being watched, George saluted them by bringing his musket to “present.”

“Those leaving for the South were impatient, enthusiastic, and hopeful,” Custer wrote. “Their comrades from the North, whom they were
leaving behind, were reserved almost to sullenness; were grave almost to stoicism.”
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Francis H. Parker wrote to his father that if war comes, “this government is going to have a pretty hard time to sustain it and
entres-nous
I think that the South stands as good a chance of coming out victorious as the North, if not a better. . . . I've heard many a northern cadet and soldiers say they never would go south and fight the battles of the Black Republicans.”
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By February 1861 seven states had left the Union. On February 8, the Convention of Seceded States declared the formation of the Confederate States of America, and ten days later Jefferson Davis was sworn in as its president. Abraham Lincoln was on his way to Washington, still weeks away from his inauguration, and lame-duck president James Buchanan was doing little to prevent the continued dissolution of the country.

On the morning of February 22, 1861, the Corps of Cadets marched to the chapel to the tunes of the West Point band. An order had come down that in honor of Washington's birthday, they were to “listen to the friendly counsels, and almost prophetic warnings,” in his Farewell Address.
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Commandant John F. Reynolds led the group into the chapel. The cadets took their seats and listened as Washington's words were read, entreating them to “properly estimate the immense value of your national union” and to frown on “every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.”
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The cadets were then released for the customary holiday.

It was a cloudy day, and most spent it indoors, discussing the political crisis or studying. The cadet barracks, a stylized castle, had two major wings, east and west, with a sally port between the wings on the ground floor. Over the years, the cadets had—perhaps unconsciously, certainly without plan—segregated themselves: Northerners on the east side of the port, Southerners on the west.

At 9:30 p.m., the hour of evening tattoo, the post band formed near the gun on the north side of the plain and marched toward the barracks playing “Washington's March.” Cadets gathered at the windows to watch and listen. As the band marched through the sally port, it struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.” When it emerged on the south side of the barracks, Custer, whose window faced that side, began a cheer that was soon taken up by the rest of the Northern cadets. The cheering was against regulations, but it persisted. The Southern cadets, led by Tom Rosser, responded with massed cheers for “Dixie.” The Northerners “flung back a ringing cheer for the Stars and Stripes; and so cheer followed cheer,” Schaff wrote. “Ah, it was a great night! Rosser at one window, Custer at another.”
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Six weeks later the mirthful mood at West Point had changed. The idea that conflict could be avoided had given way to certainty that it would soon arrive. “The excitement is so great concerning the probability of war that I have scarcely thought of anything else,” Custer wrote in a letter to his sister. “No one speaks of anything but war and everyone on this part of the country firmly believes that we will hear in a few days that hostilities have commenced.”
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Francis H. Parker echoed these sentiments. “It is the general opinion among cadets and officers on the Point,” he wrote on April 7, “that President Lincoln intends to fight, or at least to adopt such measures and take such steps as will bring on the war.”
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Custer predicted, “I feel confident that we will have war in less than a week.”
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Two days later Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor.

Events at Sumter electrified the North. “Opponents in politics became friends in patriotism,” Custer wrote, “all difference of opinion vanished or were laid aside.”
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But the attack also unified the South, and George blamed the Republicans for tearing the country apart. President Lincoln's call for troops to occupy the seceded states after the Fort Sumter
attack tipped the balance for the middle states that had yet to leave the Union. “Everything here is full of excitement and suspense,” Virginian Thomas Rowland wrote two days after the attack. “There will be several resignations today, and the whole of the North Carolina delegation will resign this week. As soon as I hear that Virginia is going to secede I should like to resign immediately.”
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Virginia adopted a secession ordinance April 17, and Rowland left soon after. On April 18 the cadets were required to take an oath of allegiance, and ten Southern cadets refused and were dismissed. Thirty-three cadets resigned on April 22, 1861, the largest single-day group. Among them was Custer's friend Thomas Rosser, who headed to the then-Confederate capital, Montgomery, Alabama, to seek a commission.

With hostilities underway, the Class of 1861 petitioned to graduate early and were given their wish on May 6. They were sent to Washington immediately, being delayed briefly in Philadelphia by the chief of police, who suspected them of being a band of secessionists.
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Custer's class also petitioned to leave early, which would mean missing their fifth and final year. Rather than being commissioned right away, the cadets were rushed through a compressed version of the fifth-year curriculum, a “course of sprouts” one said.
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The cadets rose at 5:00 a.m. for two hours' study, then had breakfast. They continued in classes until 4:00 p.m., then had an hour's drill, parade, supper, and a half-hour break before studying again until lights out at 10:00 p.m. Many cadets put blankets over their windows and continued to study. “This method of cramming a year's course into two months time is rather hard on us,” Francis Parker wrote, nine days into the course. “I never studied so hard and did so poorly as I am now.”
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One cadet estimated that they were reading about 125 pages of lessons a day.
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Custer said the pace was so physically punishing that they were all becoming thin and pale, and he had lost five pounds in two weeks. “There was never an instance of so severe studying being done
as is now done by my class,” he wrote.
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He stayed up studying until one in the morning, catching a few hours' sleep before rising again at five.

Despite his studiousness, Custer tested poorly in the 1861 exams, coming in at the foot of the class. George C. Strong, who graduated fifth in the Class of 1857, noted that “it is a favorite idea among many here that it requires an abler man to stand at the foot of his class throughout the course than at the head of it.” The academic style of the goat—to study only when absolutely necessary and then to cram in just enough to pass—were “symptoms of that epidemic which is called Genius.”
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But even as the last man of his class, Custer was a survivor. In the ten years before the Civil War, the graduation rate was only 52 percent.
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One hundred twenty-five cadets entered with Custer in 1857; of those, most washed out, twenty-two resigned to join the Confederacy, and thirty-four graduated. And as Custer liked to add, “Of these, thirty-three graduated above me.”
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Custer later claimed that some of the Southern cadets, had they remained, “would probably have contested with me the debatable honor of bringing up the rear of the class.”
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Custer was last in his class in his third year, and the five cadets above him all fought for the Confederacy and could have dropped below him the final year.
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The sixth was Charles Nelson Warner from Pennsylvania, who was found deficient in January 1861 and sent home, but recalled to finish his studies and graduated as the goat of 1862.

Custer had predicted that his class would be gone by June 25, “if not sooner,” and he was close to the mark. On June 30, 1861, they were relieved of duty at West Point and ordered to “report to Washington City without delay.” However, when his classmates departed, Custer was not among them. He had a final trick to play on himself.

On the evening before his class was set to graduate, Custer was serving as officer of the guard at the encampment. “I began my tour at the
usual hour in the morning,” he recalled, “and everything passed off satisfactorily in connection with the discharge of my new responsibilities, until just at dusk I heard a commotion near the guard tents.”
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He rushed over to find a crowd of cadets ringed around two of their fellows, yearling William Ludlow and an upperclassman, swearing oaths at each other. “Ludlow was a greeny,” Custer later explained, “but he had pluck.”
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Just as Custer arrived, the two came to blows, “a good square out-and-outer.”
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“I had hardly time to take in the situation when the two principals of the group engaged in a regular set-to,” Custer wrote, “and began belaboring each other vigorously with their fists.”
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Custer should have arrested them, but as he later wrote, “the instincts of the boy prevailed over the obligation of the officer of the guard.”
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Some friends of the older cadet were trying to trip up Ludlow, so Custer waded into the mob of cadets and said, “Stand back, boys, let's have a fair fight!”
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The contest resumed and “Ludlow was getting the best of it,” when the crowd evaporated. Custer noticed too late the cause: Lieutenants William B. Hazen and William E. Merrill were approaching, the former the officer in charge.

“Why did you not suppress the riot which occurred here a few minutes ago?” Hazen demanded. Custer gave his opinion that a fight between two boys could not properly be described as a “riot,” which was the wrong answer. The next morning Commandant Reynolds placed him under arrest. “I was in the guard house when my class graduated,” he said. Custer's classmates bade him farewell as they departed for Washington, and he replied, merrily, “I'm the nest egg!”
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Custer remained at West Point for two long weeks before a general court-martial convened, presided over by Lieutenant Stephen Vincent Benét.
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“I was arraigned with all the solemnity and gravity which might be looked for in a trial for high treason,” Custer recalled.
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Cadet “George
W. [
sic
] Custer” was charged with “neglect of duty” (for not breaking up the brawl) and “conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline” (for calling for a fair fight). He pled guilty on both counts. “The trial was brief,” he recalled, “scarcely occupying more time than did the primary difficulty.”
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Meanwhile, Custer's classmates were doing what they could in Washington to secure the release of their class goat. “Fortunately some of them had influential friends there,” Custer observed.
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He was also aided by the fact that trained officers were needed to assign to the units that were being hurriedly put together in anticipation of open warfare with the Confederacy. On July 17, Custer was ordered to report to the adjutant general in Washington. He left West Point the day after the telegram arrived, rushing off to war without waiting for a verdict from the court. “What the proceeding of the court or their decision was, I have never learned,” he wrote.
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In absentia, he was sentenced only to be reprimanded in orders. The court noted that it was being lenient “owing to the peculiar situation of Cadet Custer represented in his own defense, and in consideration of his general good conduct, as testified to by Lieutenant Hazen, his immediate commander.”
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Shortly before his class graduated, Custer had written his sister that he was not certain when they would next meet. “I would not be surprised if I never visited home again,” he wrote, “everything is uncertain, life is always so and at no time was it ever more so than at the present.” Many people were expecting the war to be brief and bloodless. Woodruff, in the excitement after the attack on Fort Sumter, wrote he hoped soon to see “an army in the field which shall be sufficiently large to be absolutely irresistible by any force the south can bring against us.”
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But George was not convinced. “It is useless to hope or to suppose that the coming struggle will be a bloodless one or one of short duration,” he wrote. “It is certain that much blood will be spilled and that thousands of lives lost,
perhaps I might say hundreds of thousands. In entering the contest everyone must take his chance and no one can say that he will live through it, but this is a necessary consequence and cannot be avoided. If it is to be my lot to fall in the service of my country and in defense of my country's rights I have or will have no regrets.”
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