The Real Custer (6 page)

The more adventurous couples would take a stroll on “Flirtation Walk,” originally the access path to the Revolutionary War–era cross-river defensive chains. The walk extended along the riverbank from the wharf below the hotel, south to a spot known as Kosciuszko's Garden, after Thaddeus Kosciuszko, the Polish engineer who had designed West Point's fortifications for George Washington. It was wooded and rocky, had many twists and turns, and was well hidden from view from the Academy above. Here, especially on moonlit nights, nature frequently took its course, and as one observer put it, “if trees had lips as well as lungs, they could probably reveal some very tender secrets.”
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R. W. Johnson of the Class of 1849 recalled that “many youthful maidens, with their breasts heaving with emotions they could not suppress, and with
their voices tremulous with excitement, have said ‘yes' when ‘no' would have been far better for their future comfort and happiness.”
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But there was fun to be had beyond formal dances and informal romances. When George first arrived at the Academy, he noted that some of the cadets donned civilian dress and “have the boldness to cross the sentinels posts at night and go to a small village two or three miles down the river for the purpose of getting things which are not allowed, such as ice cream, candies, fruit and (I am sorry to say) some even go for wines and other liquors.”
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Custer soon became an expert at these daring exploits, stealing out after the 10:00 p.m. bed check. As he noted, “Because we are in bed at ten o'clock is no reason why we should remain there until reveille [5 o'clock].” He and his cohorts would arrange things in their beds to make them look occupied in case there was an informal inspection in the middle of the night, some cadets even fashioning dummy heads for added realism. Then, donning civilian clothes, they would slip off post and make their way to the nearby town of Buttermilk Falls to while away the time until early morning when they had to return. On Thanksgiving 1859 George and his friends blew post to attend a ball where they “passed a very pleasant night, reached home a few minutes before reveille, changed our citizens' dress for our uniforms and were then safe. But I was in poor humor for hard study during the next day.” He was “almost (
but not quite
) sorry” he had gone to the ball.
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One of the main centers of cadet off-post antics was a riverside saloon known as Benny Havens. “The forbidden locality of Benny Havens' possessed stronger attractions than the study and demonstration of a problem in Euclid,” George wrote, “or the prosy discussion of some abstract proposition of moral science.”
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Benjamin Havens had been a vexing presence to the authorities since he had first been run off post for dispensing spirits to cadets forty years earlier. He had served libations to generations of future officers from his two-story tavern, and
cadet Edgar Allan Poe said Old Ben was “the sole congenial soul in this God-forsaken place.”
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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.”
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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.
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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

I
n 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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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In general, Southern cadets were regarded as less prepared and seen as underachievers.
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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.”
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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.”
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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 by 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.”
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