Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (16 page)

At this point Holland may have helped. He was a prominent member of the community, a Republican, a friend of Bingham’s, and he wanted the impetuous, love-struck Autie out of his daughter’s life. Possibly Holland talked to both Autie and Bingham about West Point. In any event, Autie wrote Bingham, described himself as a “Democrat boy” so that there would be no confusion on that score, and asked for an appointment on the grounds that he wanted to be a soldier. Struck by Autie’s boldness and originality, Bingham wrote a favorable response, saying he had already made an appointment for 1856 but would keep Autie in mind for the next year if Autie would send the required particulars.

Autie replied immediately, thanking Bingham for the opportunity and describing himself as seventeen years of age (which added six months to his real age), “above the medium height, and of remarkably strong constitution & vigorous frame.” Later that summer, when Bingham was in Ohio, Autie paid him a visit and impressed the congressman with his frankness and determination. Bingham said Autie could have the next appointment. Maria Custer was opposed, Autie wrote his sister Lydia in Monroe, for the mother did not want her son to be a soldier. But Autie added, “Pop favors it very much.” Indeed, Emmanuel was so pleased at the idea of his son’s getting a college education that he sold his small farm and gave Autie the buyer’s $200 down payment for expenses.
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And so the young man prepared in the summer of 1857 to go forth and make his mark on the world. With the help of his elders he had survived an intense teen-aged love affair more or less unscathed. By the standards of the time he was well educated already, and about to join America’s elite, for West Point was the outstanding engineering school in the country. If he completed the course, an officer’s commission would automatically make him a gentleman, a welcome guest at the best social functions. He was more experienced and independent than his age-mates, had lived in different places, and contributed to his family’s income while being responsible for himself.

The prospective cadet was a strikingly handsome lad, beautifully built, with everything in proportion—broad shoulders, strong arms, muscular legs, and a powerful chest. His health was excellent. He enjoyed life and was forever laughing, joking, playing. A free soul who hated restraint, he had nevertheless accepted the need for discipline
and realized that his advancement depended upon his superiors, who had to be respected and obeyed.

He was ambitious. Whatever he felt personally about such men as Judge Bacon or Mr. Holland, he was envious of their position in society and looked up to them as men to be emulated. He knew that getting ahead required him to curb his fun-loving, impulsive spirit. He was determined to channel his vast physical energy in the right directions.

He was not an original or an independent thinker, nor even intellectually curious. He accepted what he was taught. Autie echoed his father’s politics, denouncing abolitionists and Black Republicans at every opportunity, praising Democrats, and urging his fellow Ohioans to allow the South to work out its own problems. He had no sympathy for the underdog but great interest in and admiration for the rich and powerful.

He was a young man of action, direct action, speeding toward his goals. If a boy teased him during a spelling bee, he punched the boy in the nose, even if he had to go through a window pane to do it. If he fell in love, he tried to get married right away. If he wanted to go to West Point, he wrote directly to the man who could get him there, regardless of the unfavorable circumstances. He had, in short, all the qualities of a good junior officer.

He had a strong sense of self and of family. He consulted with his mother and father, and with Lydia and David Reed, before accepting the West Point appointment. He got on famously with his brothers and sisters; young Tom, in turn, worshiped Autie and imitated him whenever possible. Autie did not question his parents’ values and did his best to curb his spirits and make those values his own. Late in his life, he tried to express some of his feelings (and his gratitude) toward his parents. Typically, he wrote them out in a letter to Emmanuel: “You and Mother instilled into me principles of industry, self-reliance, honesty. You taught me the value of temperate habits, the difference between right and wrong. I look back on the days spent under the home-roof as a period of pure happiness, and I feel thankful for such noble parents.”
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* Libbie’s birthdate seems to be unrecorded, and Libbie refused to ever set it straight. A good guess is that she was born in 1841.

CHAPTER SIX

Custer at West Point

“The Academy stands
in loco parentis
not only over the mental but the moral, physical and, so to speak, the official man. It dominates every phase of his development.”     A West Point official

In July 1857 seventeen-and-a-half-year-old George Armstrong Custer entered the United States Military Academy at West Point. Save for one short summer vacation at the end of his second year, he would not leave again until July 1861. Custer himself set the theme for his biographers in their treatment of those four years: “My career as a cadet,” he wrote, “had but little to recommend it to the study of those who came after me, unless as an example to be carefully avoided.”
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One of Custer’s biographers describes him as “a slovenly soldier and a deplorable student … a tardy and a clumsy recruit who persistently was punished for slackness in drill, dirty equipment, or disorderly uniform.”
²
Another biographer asserts that “it is safe to say that in all the long history of the Military Academy it was never afflicted with a less promising or more cantankerous pupil.”
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Custer’s biographers delight in recording anecdotes about his life as a cadet, detailing his pranks, his free spirit and fun-loving nature, his refusal to live by the regulations, and his woefully bad record in his studies. The over-all picture is one of an irresponsible and irrepressible adolescent who came perilously close to being thrown out of the Academy on numerous occasions because of his violations of the rules and regulations, and of a lazy, indifferent student who graduated last in his class.

There is some truth in the assessment. Throughout his cadet career Custer found an outlet for his vast energy in forbidden activities. With his curly locks he looked more like a boy than a man, and he did the bare minimum to survive in his studies. His fellow cadets regarded him as a fun-loving prankster.

But the portrait of Custer as a cadet who thumbed his nose at
the authorities and who successfully maintained his individualism in the face of West Point’s pressure toward dull conformity, misses the point. Custer survived four years at the Academy intact, but hardly unchanged. At West Point, Custer learned the meaning of institutional discipline and the importance of selective obedience. He learned to regard all his fellow cadets (and future fellow officers) as competitors in the race for position and honors. He came to expect to be judged, and ranked, every day. He developed a cool contempt for civilians, especially civilian soldiers, and an exalted view of the United States Army and its officers. He absorbed enough of the social graces to be able to mingle freely with America’s elite. He learned a little military and much civil engineering, some mathematics, a smattering of Spanish, the Army’s technical jargon, a few ideas about tactics, and almost nothing about strategy.

Most of all, Custer developed his sense of timing, a characteristic too often ignored in accounts of the great and near-great. All comedians have it, and Custer had it as a child—timing is the essence of the practical joke, and as a boy (and a man) Custer was above all else a practical joker. Nor was young Autie’s sense of timing limited to knowing the precise moment when pulling a chair from under someone would be funny rather than hurtful—he could also pick the exact place in a conversation to interrupt and call out, “My voice is for war!”

As a cadet, Custer learned to use his sense of timing for practical and immediate results. Any cadet who received more than one hundred demerits in a six-month period was automatically dismissed from the Academy, and Custer (and his biographers) made much of the fact that he had ninety-four demerits in one six-month period, ninety-eight in the next, and so on. What stands out, however, is not that he could not curb his impulsiveness and thus was always on the brink of dismissal, but rather that he
could
curb himself when it was necessary. Once, when he gathered over ninety demerits in the first three months of a reporting period, he went the following three months without collecting a single one.
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At West Point, that was an accomplishment even the most serious-minded, mature cadet found it difficult to match.

In his studies, Custer did what had to be done. He may have been last in his class, but he
did
graduate, and in any case emphasizing the fact that he was thirty-fourth in a class of thirty-four is entirely misleading. There were one hundred eight candidates for admission to his class, but only sixty-eight passed the entrance examination—Custer among them. Of the sixty-eight admitted, only half graduated
—Custer among them (twenty-two Southerners resigned to join the Confederacy, while a dozen other cadets were dismissed for academic or disciplinary reasons). Further, western and southern boys always brought up the tail end of the West Point class, because their preparation was not equal to that enjoyed by cadets from the East Coast. Most importantly, Custer always knew exactly where he stood in his class and exactly what he had to do to graduate—and he did it. “At least 20% will probably ‘flunk out,’” he wrote his sister in May, 1861, “but I have no intention of being among the number.”
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And he was not.

Throughout his West Point career, Custer knew what he could get away with without being thrown out of the Academy and he delighted in going right to the line but never beyond it. He knew when he had to study, or behave, and he did what was necessary. Thousands of Americans before and since have gone through college in just that style, of course, but what makes Custer’s record impressive is the place that he made it. Nowhere else in the country, and perhaps in the world, did a stricter discipline or more rigid enforcement of rules exist than at West Point, nor did any other institution require as much memorization of scholastic detail. Every cadet was graded, every day, in every subject, and all those marks went into a cadet’s final class ranking. Cadet Custer took advantage of most opportunities to taste of forbidden fruit, but in comparison to his fellows at civilian colleges he was a scholastic monk.

When Custer entered West Point he delivered himself into the hands of an administration and faculty obsessed with the development of character. They pushed, pulled, shaped, and hammered the boys into the accepted mold of a Christian soldier, emphasizing the virtues of duty, loyalty, honor, and courage. The methods used in building moral fiber were simple: required attendance at church, minute regulation of daily life, cold rooms in winter and hot ones in summer, inferior food and uncomfortable clothing, and no recreation. The Academy, in the words of one official, “stands
in loco parentis
not only over the mental but the moral, physical and, so to speak, the official man. It dominates every phase of his development. … There is very little of his time over which it does not exercise a close scrutiny, and for which it does not demand a rigid accountability.”
⁶

When the cadets did have some time off, as on Sunday afternoons, the authorities did their best to see to it that there was nothing to do. There were no organized activities and the only voluntary associations permitted were debating clubs—which by regulation
could not debate political questions. No outside lectures were allowed and the cadets could subscribe to no more than one periodical per month. The cadets never got leaves and had no cash to spend. The over-all effect of all this was one of stifling boredom—West Point was oppressively dull. At West Point, one cadet said, “all is monotony,” while one of Custer’s classmates told his father, “I don’t like this mode of life at all; it is too much like slavery to suit me.”
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At West Point the cadets were not “boys” but “men,” and their superiors said they expected them to act as such. The rules and regulations, however, expressed a different view; the authorities assumed the cadets were wild youngsters who had to be watched and from whom temptation had to be removed. One official claimed that “the moral discipline of the institution is perfect; the avenues to vice are closed, and the temptations to dissipation … have been vigilantly guarded against.” Custer and his fellows were forbidden to drink liquor, play cards or chess, gamble, use or possess tobacco, keep any cooking utensils in their rooms, participate in any games, go off the post, bathe in the Hudson River, or play a musical instrument. They could possess only certain items and each of these had to be in its assigned place in their rooms.
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