The Real Custer (5 page)

Tully McCrea of the Class of 1862, a fellow Ohioan who roomed with Custer his first year at West Point, observed that “the great difficulty is that he is too clever for his own good. He is always connected with all the mischief that is going on and never studies any more than he can possibly help.” Yet, Tully “admired and partly envied Custer's free and careless way, and the perfect indifference he had for everything. It was all right with him whether he knew his lesson or not; he did not allow it to trouble him.”
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In his first summer at the Academy, Custer noted that he was “becoming accustomed to the strict discipline and [had] escaped with but few demerit marks.” In fact, he had earned twelve demerits in his first month, a reasonable total for a beast. “Though some find it difficult to avoid,” he continued, “getting this number at one hundred and fifty marks [in a single semester] would dismiss a person and as some offenses give one a five demerit a person has to be very careful in his conduct.”
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Custer did not take his own advice to heart. Peter Michie, second in the Class of 1863 and for thirty years a leading professor at West Point, recalled that “Custer was constantly in trouble with the school authorities. . . . He had more fun, gave his friends more anxiety, walked more tours of extra guard, and came nearer being dismissed more often than any other cadet I have ever known.”
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Morris Schaff, of the Class of 1862, wrote that the Academy “has had many a character to deal with; but it may be a question whether it ever had a cadet so exuberant, one who cared so little for its serious attempts to elevate and burnish, or one on whom its tactical officers kept their eyes so constantly and unsympathetically searching as upon Custer.”
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Custer's mischief was frowned on by the authorities but was part of cadet life and tradition. Cadets found a variety of prohibited ways to amuse themselves in their off-hours, such as smoking, drinking, playing cards, having “hash parties” of contraband food, and other amusements. They played cat and mouse with the tactical officers who tried to catch them in the act. The cadets used a variety of subterfuges to trick the Tacs, such as tapping codes on the barracks' heating pipes to alert others to surprise inspections. Cadets like Custer who lived on upper floors could quickly put their rooms in order before the officers arrived.
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But institutional memory worked against them; some of the Tacs had been in their position years earlier when they were cadets and knew all the tricks. So for example Custer thought he had secured his cooking utensils by hiding them in the chimney, until an officer “hived” his hidden hash
kitchen during an inspection. George A. Woodruff of Custer's class, fated to die at Gettysburg, tells the story of a cadet, probably Autie, “hanging outside a fourth-story windowsill by his fingertips to escape the inspecting officer who was hunting up students out of their rooms after ‘taps,' engaged, in this instance, in making molasses candy.”
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Many cadets smoked, but not Custer. “Nothing could induce me to use tobacco either by smoking or chewing as I consider it a filthy, if not unhealthy, practice,” he wrote his father. “I can say what very few of my age can, and that is I never ‘chewed' of tobacco in my life and what is more I do not think I ever will.”
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However, he sought a letter of permission to smoke from his father, explaining that he wanted to be able to barter with his roommate. Smoking in the barracks was forbidden, and George was skinned more than once for having tobacco smoke in his room, since the cadet in charge of the room the day of the infraction got the demerits.

Custer also engaged in the tradition of hazing plebes and other unsuspecting cadets, whether “deviling” cadets on guard duty or “yanking” them from their tents in the middle of the night. Custer once stole a rooster belonging to Lieutenant Henry Douglass because the incessant crowing bothered him. He got rid of the evidence by eating the bird. Another cadet volunteered to throw away the feathers but carelessly left a trail of evidence leading back to him, and took the punishment.

Custer's record of delinquencies contains self-explanatory entries such as the night of July 9, 1860, when during encampment he was cited for “being out of his tent without hat, coat, or pants after 10:00 p.m.” (one demerit) and for “interfering with a new cadet on guard” (five demerits). But some pranks were much more elaborate. Cadet Thomas Rowland, who was first in the Class of 1863 before he resigned to join the Confederacy, recalled the night in 1860 when some older cadets snuck into the rooms of sleeping plebes and stole all their clothes. The consequence, he wrote, was “the Plebes were half of them absent from
reveille; the rest presented a most ridiculous appearance. All of them without hats, some in their stocking feet, no man with his own coat on, while from the windows above the others looked down with long faces and wrapped about with blankets, terrified to death at being reported absent from reveille, but ‘not even an umbrella in case of a fire.'”
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Of course, with pranks came consequences. With characteristic self-mockery, George sketched a picture of the cadet guardhouse, a face peering through the barred windows, with the caption, “G. A. Custer's Summer Home on the Hudson.”
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Custer said his “offenses against law and order were not great in enormity, but what they lacked in magnitude they made up in number.”
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The record bears this out. Of his five and three-quarters folio pages of demerits, most were one- to two-point violations, some three to four, and a few fives. He was marked down for being late, talking, napping, being absent, skipping class, neglect of studies, collar turned up on coat, long hair, room in disorder, idling, visiting, laughing, throwing bread at dinner, trifling, loitering, being unshaven at inspection, having his hair brush out of place in his room, throwing snow balls, throwing stones, having a rusty musket, playing cards, riding despite being on sick report, and being absent from hospital when sick. In his first year, he racked up 151 demerits, the fifth highest in his class, other than those who were expelled.

The Custer legend contends that he holds the all-time record for demerits, and his total of 726 in four years is an impressive—or notorious—achievement. But the absolute demerit record was set decades earlier. Charles H. Larnard of Rhode Island, Class of 1831, had a career total of 1,658 demerits, and even racked up 729 in a single year, three more than Custer's four-year total. But partly because of Larnard, the Academy imposed a two-hundred-point annual demerit limit his final year. Anyone straying over that line, or receiving one hundred “skins” in a semester, risked expulsion. So neither Custer nor anyone else could get near the Larnard record. Also in earlier years, firsties (seniors) had 50
percent added to their demerit totals because they were expected to know better. This was done away with by Custer's day; by then, plebes were forgiven a third of their demerits in recognition of being “less experienced, and more likely to err.”
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So for example Custer's 151 total at the end of his plebe year reflected an earned 226 demerits minus one-third.
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Given the changing rules and the two-hundred-point limit, the matter of the demerit record becomes somewhat subjective.

However, for his era Custer set a strong demerit pace that continued with few breaks right up to the end of his West Point career. He had ninety-seven demerits in the six months up to June 6, 1861, when the term ended. In the next three weeks, suspecting his class would graduate early, he racked up fifty-two more.

Cadets had a safety valve to clean up their demerit records. They could voluntarily “walk an extra,” which, in Custer's words, “consisted in performing the tiresome duties of a sentinel during the unemployed hours of Saturday; hours usually given to recreation.”
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A tour lasted four hours, walking back and forth on a thirty-yard interval in full uniform with musket. Each tour would eliminate one demerit. Custer estimated he walked sixty-six Saturdays total, to stay within the one hundred-point semester limits. This might be a low estimate; from January through March 1860, he accumulated 129 demerits (fifty-three in February alone) and over the full semester walked off thirty of them.

Tully McCrae said that “extra guard duty is severe punishment, as I know from experience.” He preferred confinement to quarters.
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But in a letter home, Custer noted that “everything is fine” after describing punishment tours. They were a way of cleaning up his record and showing the authorities that he was committed to the institution and its ultimate authority. Punishment was the price he paid for living the life he had chosen. “Military law is very severe,” Custer once wrote, “and those who overstep its boundaries must abide the consequences.”

Custer played by his own rules at West Point, but he also knew how far he could push the system. He had ways of getting into trouble, but he also had a talent for getting out of it, which was the greater skill. His repeated brushes with the authorities and near escapes from harsher punishment gave rise to an expression that would come to be known throughout the Army, “Custer's luck.”

When required, George could toe the line. His cadet lifestyle was a matter of choice, not a compulsion. Custer demonstrated that he could be a model cadet in the three months of April through June 1860, when he received no demerits. As a reward he was given a day of extended limits. But after July 4, Custer reverted to his more familiar ways. He began accumulating skins again, and by December 1860 he was five demerits below the one-hundred-point limit for the semester. And the following month, it looked like Custer's luck had run out.

George was worried that he might not pass the January 1861 midterm exams. He was suffering from too much revelry, not enough study, or a combination of both. So Custer decided to collect some tactical intelligence. Professors prepared lists of questions for each cadet to be asked by the examining board. The exam questions were a closely guarded secret, and cadets tried a variety of means to get copies. In one case a cadet snuck into the professor of rhetoric's room and was copying the exam, when the professor returned. He dove into a trunk and hid until a sympathetic female servant distracted the professor, and he slipped out.

Custer infiltrated the room of one of his professors and found the notebook in which the questions were recorded. He was busily copying his page when he heard someone approaching. He tore out the page with his name on it, replaced the notebook, and fled the scene. Of course, when the professor later consulted the notebook and noted the missing page, he had a very good idea who had taken it.
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Custer was arrested, along with some others who had been up to the same thing, and all the
exam questions for everyone were changed. The result was one of the most difficult exams in West Point history, and thirty-three cadets washed out.

Proceedings were brought against the cadets who tried to cheat, and it did not look good for George. Tully McCrae wrote home that expulsion was unavoidable and that he was sorry to see Custer go. Three weeks later the verdicts came down, and most of the cheating cadets were dismissed. But not George. “Custer with his usual good luck was also reinstated, and he was the only one in his class, while the rest were sent off,” McCrea wrote. “He does not know why it is he was more fortunate than the rest, but I am quite sure that he will be more careful in the future and study his lessons more.”
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That, of course, was wishful thinking.

Cadet life was strict, but it had its diversions. West Point of the 1850s was not as isolated as it had been in the past, and in fact it had become a tourist destination. Hudson River school artists, such as faculty member Robert Walter Weir, popularized the natural beauty of the area. The Hudson Valley was lined with hilltop homes—called “castles”—of the wealthy and influential. “A ‘brownstone front' in New York and a home on the Hudson meant social distinction and great wealth,” Libbie wrote.
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Roe's Hotel, at the bend in the river that had made West Point a strategic asset during the Revolution, where chains were laid to prevent passage by British ships, was renowned to have one of the best views in the country. When George arrived in 1857, he called West Point “the most romantic spot I ever saw.”
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Visitors flocked to the Academy in the summertime to enjoy the setting and the social life. Glee clubs, excursionists, day-trippers, and dignitaries all arrived on a daily basis. And, fortunately for the cadets, they brought their daughters.

Young ladies would gather on the shady, tree-lined edge of the Plain and watch the cadets in their drills. During their off-hours, the cadets, freshly scrubbed and docked out in their crisp uniforms, would escort the young women around the post, telling tales of life at the Academy.
The cadets held “hops” three times a week during the summer encampment to make more opportunities to meet and mingle. “The large room in the Academic Hall is filled with a crowd of gaily dressed ladies and their attendant Cadets,” one account noted. “Indeed during the summer months West Point presents the appearance of a fashionable watering place.”
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Another report from the fall of 1860 noted that “the cadets have rather a glorious time than otherwise” with the many visitors, and “as a crowning enjoyment, the young gentlemen have the satisfaction of knowing that they are prime favorites with the ladies.” The buttons on the cadets' dress uniforms became special objects of attention and conquest by the female visitors. The “spoony buttons” were given over as tokens of favor, or marks of affection, or in return for some fleeting, usually harmless, physical contact. Some of the ladies were quite brazen in their pursuits. One reporter, sitting on the piazza of Roe's Hotel, heard a “maiden coaxing her father to remain over Sunday. ‘Just one day longer, dear papa,' said she, exhibiting a jingling handful of bullet-buttons, ‘Here are five, and Sunday evening will surely make out the half dozen.'”
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