The Real Custer (3 page)

The Innate Idea
, in D. H. Strother, “Personal Recollections of the War, by a Virginian,”
Harper's New Monthly Magazine
(1868).

CHAPTER ONE

“MY VOICE IS FOR WAR!”

G
eorge Armstrong Custer was born December 5, 1839, in the east Ohio town of New Rumley in Harrison County, which his great-uncle Jacob helped found in 1812. A period guide said New Rumley was “situated on a high, healthy site” and had a population of about 150 people in thirty houses, with a meetinghouse, a school, two physicians, three stores, and three taverns.
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It was typical of the small towns found in that part of the country, where most people worked the land and community life was strong.

George—who was called Autie, for how he pronounced his middle name when learning to talk—was a charismatic child with bright blue eyes and curly red-gold hair. He was born into a growing, close-knit family. His father, Emmanuel Henry Custer, was a thirty-three-year-old blacksmith from Cresaptown in western Maryland, descended from Arnold Küster, from the northwest German town of Kaldenkirchen, who
migrated to America sometime around the turn of the eighteenth century. Custer and his second wife, Maria Ward Kirkpatrick, would eventually have seven sons and one daughter, in addition to four children from his previous marriage.
²

“Father was pretty strict,” George's younger brother Nevin Custer recalled, “stricter than most fathers nowadays are, I guess. He made us ride to church a-horseback every Sunday morning, and mother and Margaret came in the cart, and we had to sit there and never so much as smile.”
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Nevin said his father “worked the farm just the same way. Everybody had his work cut out an' he had to do it without whimpering and do it promptly; sort of religious duty, yuh know.” When the kids worked the family farm, Emmanuel would put them fifty yards apart in the corn field “so we couldn't loaf and talk.” They worked hard, but young George hated to get his clothes smelly, so he split and carried wood while his brothers worked in the barns.

The Custer kids attended the local public school—Ohio had established a public education system under the 1787 Northwest Ordinance—and they received a decent education for those times. George was a studious child who loved to read, and he would occasionally get a talking-to if he took a book into the fields. George was “bright as a dollar and never missed a recitation,” Nevin recalled. While the other kids were “swimmmin' and boatin' and all that,” Autie “always wanted to stay home and read.” But George had a fun-loving side. He was friendly, outgoing, and mischievous, the latter a quality he got from his father, who, for all his seriousness at church or in the field, said he was “always a boy with my boys.”
⁴
George's cousin Mary said George was “full of life and always ready to do anything which had a semblance of daring in it.”
⁵

The children of New Rumley were taught by Mr. Foster, a strict disciplinarian who did not take misbehavior lightly. “Lawsey, how that
man could whip!” Nevin recalled, decades later. He was punished for whispering in class, while Tom Custer was in frequent trouble for chewing tobacco at school. Tom “bored a hole in the school room floor with an auger to give him a place to spit,” Nevin said. “He tried to keep it covered with his foot, but of course after [a] while Foster found it and Tom got licked.” Foster would make children stand with their toes on one crack of the wooden floor and their hands on another while he lashed them with a birch rod. “No teachers like them nowadays,” Nevin mused.

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!”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.