Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (18 page)

Custer was a “character,” bringing some amusement into the drab lives of the cadets. He was always and forever laughing, so it was
pleasant just to be around him. His pranks became legends. In French class he was asked to translate at sight,
“Léopold, duc d’Autriche, se mettait sur les plaines,”
and he set out boldly enough, “Leopold, duck and ostrich …” In Spanish class, Custer interrupted the instructor and asked him to translate into Spanish, “Class is dismissed.” When the teacher did so, Custer marched the class out of the room.
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He loved attention and was an expert at getting it. At West Point his lifelong ambivalence about his hair style began. He always attracted nicknames—among the cadets, a sure sign of acceptance into the group—and his nicknames usually referred to his current hair style. When he showed up at the Academy for the first time, his curly blond locks immediately won him the nickname “Fanny.” After a week or so of being called by a girl’s name, Custer shaved off most of his hair. But a crew cut stood out as much in the 1850s as did flowing, shoulder-length hair, so he bought a toupee and wore it for nearly a year. When his own hair had grown out again, Custer splattered it with hair oil—and picked up the nickname “Cinnamon” from the scent. By the time he graduated, he had acquired Crazy Horse’s childhood name, “Curly.”

Custer was very much “one of the boys,” a member of the in-group who could be counted on to participate in any extralegal caper. Aside from stealing a chicken, duck, or goose and roasting it over the fireplace, this usually consisted of sneaking away from the Academy grounds and having a forbidden glass of whiskey or rum at a local tavern, Benny Haven’s. Custer later said he went to Haven’s more often than he should have, which in translation meant that he may have had a few drinks on three or four occasions each year.

By the time Custer entered West Point, the sectional controversy that would tear the country apart was threatening to divide the Corps of Cadets into two political groups, but as a pro-South Democrat from Ohio, Custer had no difficulties. He got on easily with the southern cadets and there was only a handful of abolitionists among the northern boys. With his happy-go-lucky nature, his strong support of the Union, and his equally strong denunciation of Republicans as threats to the Union, he was a favorite with cadets from both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.
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In the summer of 1859 Custer had his only leave. He went to see his parents in Ohio, then to Michigan to spend some time with the Reeds. He may have seen Mary Holland—he had sent her a formal invitation to the 1858 West Point ball. When he returned to West Point, Cadet James B. Washington, a relative of George Washington,
remembered hearing “Here comes Custer!” Historian Jay Monaghan notes that “the name meant nothing to [Washington], but he turned, and saw a slim, immature lad with unmilitary figure, slightly rounded shoulders, and a gangling walk.”
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“West Point has had many a character to deal with,” Cadet Morris Schaff later wrote, “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. And yet how we all loved him.”
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Schaff, who was also from Ohio, a year behind Custer and one of his closest friends, wrote the classic volume on the pre-Civil War Academy,
The Spirit of Old West Point.
Speaking of Custer’s nature, Schaff said it was “full of those streams that rise, so to speak, among the high hills of our being. I have in mind his joyousness, his attachment to the friends of his youth, and his never-ending delight in talking about his old home . . ,”
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Schaff records numerous examples of Custer’s ability to bring some laughter into the dull routine of West Point. One summer Jasper Myers of Indiana arrived to take the oath as a cadet. Myers had a long beard. Custer walked up to Myers and gravely informed him that a mistake had been made. Myers should go home at once and send his son, because it was the boy that the government meant should have the appointment, not the full-bearded old man.
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Custer’s popularity also rested on his willing, even joyful, acceptance of group standards. He challenged no one’s intellect. He was far from being an original thinker and he did not question the clichés of his day. Like his father he loved to argue politics, but again like Emmanuel Custer he did so in a friendly spirit and had nothing new to say—he merely repeated whatever the current wisdom of the Democratic party might be. He filled his letters and his conversations with political slogans, which enlightened no one, not even Custer, who never thought very hard or long about what he was saying. But his clichés did not offend or make him many enemies.
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West Point had a small library, from which cadets were allowed to check out books from time to time. Custer was not much of a reader—during his last two years he took out nothing—and what he did read tended to be romantic adventure stories. He tried John Pendleton Kennedy’s
Swallow Barn,
which gave him a picture of a friendly, hospitable South with happy black folks bossing their masters around, and William Gilmore Simms’s
Eutaw,
a romance about
the Revolution. Both books were filled with admirable heroes, men of unbelievable courage who always won against overwhelming odds.
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Custer also read Cooper’s
Leatherstocking Tales,
which led him to write an essay for English class entitled “The Red Man.” In painstaking handwriting, he traced in two pages the history of the Indians on the North American Continent. Before the white man came, “they were the favored sons of nature, and she like a doting mother, had bestowed all her gifts on them.” But now “the familiar forests, under whose grateful shade, he and his ancestors stretched their weary limbs after the excitement of the chase, are swept away by the axe of the woodman.” The Indian’s hunting grounds were gone. “We behold him now on the verge of extinction, standing on his last foothold, clutching his bloodstained rifle, resolved to die amidst the horrors of slaughter, and soon he will be talked of as a noble race who once existed but have now passed away.”
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In both English and ethics class (Custer said later these were the two least helpful subjects he studied) Custer continued to mix his metaphors and confuse the singular and plural as he gushed out his schoolboy views. The “Elements of Ideal Moral Perfection,” he wrote in an essay for ethics, were “Benevolence, Justice, Truth, Purity, and Order.” In an analysis of “Christian precepts concerning obedience and command,” Custer quoted the Bible to support such lofty moral ideals as “Duty of obedience of children to parents,” “Disobedience mentioned among the signs of perilous times,” “Duties between servants and masters,” “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters,” “Slaves bound to their masters,” and so forth. It was rote work, nothing more nor less, but it was as close to a liberal education as a cadet could get at West Point.
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Although he got low grades in his English and ethics classes, Custer enjoyed writing. He became addicted to setting thoughts, feelings, emotions, and anecdotes down on paper. He wrote countless letters to his family (and possibly to Mary Holland) during his cadet days. The cadet schedule was so tight that the boys were allowed only seven hours’ sleep per night, but Custer got by on even less, because he needed the time to write. He would prop up a blanket in bed, then light a candle and crawl into the hideaway with pen and paper. Later, during his Indian campaigns, he would sit up through half or more of the night, jotting down the experiences of an exhausting day.

On May 5, 1860, Custer wrote an eight-page letter to a boyhood companion in Ohio. After describing life at West Point in some detail,
he concluded: “I will change the subject by saying a few words on politics.” The “few words” occupied two and a half closely written sheets of the usual clichés denouncing the “Black-Brown-Republicans” who “will either deprive a portion of our fellow citizens of their just rights or produce a dissolution of the Union.”
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In his letters to his family he described his life in detail, asked after all his brothers and sisters and his parents, regretted that he was not sending money home to support the family, handed out advice about the children not smoking tobacco or getting into fights, and generally used written communications to help him feel as if he were still an intimate member of the family. He also wrote the kind of thing he knew the home folks wanted to hear: “I would not leave this place,” he told his sister Ann, “for any amount of money, for I would rather have a good education and no money than a fortune and be ignorant.”
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Throughout his life, Custer’s obsession with writing continued. He jotted down everything; nothing was too insignificant to escape his notice or his written description. If the total outpouring could ever be collected and counted, it would surely rank him with some of the most productive professional writers of the century, at least in terms of the number of written words. His style was convoluted and polite, like much of nineteenth-century American literature, and most of it dealt with what Custer had seen, heard, thought, or felt. He considered himself to be the most fascinating character he knew and therefore loved to write about himself, confident that others would find his experiences equally fascinating. But most of all, he wanted to leave a record, an ultimate proof that he had existed and that he was important. That burning need to write, to set down for posterity his own experiences, was as integral a part of Custer’s character as his courage, his ambition, or his joyful nature.

The United States Military Academy, like every other institution in America, was torn apart by the Civil War. The Academy was one of the last to divide. After the Democratic convention of 1860, the Academy and the Catholic Church remained as the only truly national institutions left in the United States. It was not surprising that this was so, for as the “national academy” it had consistently tried to eliminate sectional prejudice and foster national sentiments. But no matter what the authorities did, they could not totally isolate the cadets from events in a rapidly polarizing nation. In the late fifties at the Academy, fist fights, especially during election periods, became more frequent. In the aftermath of John Brown’s raid on Harpers
Ferry in 1859, there were many heated arguments and at least one duel, which involved Custer’s friend Pierce M. B. Young of Georgia.
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For Custer it was an exciting and distressing period. Exciting because of the prospect of war, now on everyone’s lips. War would mean immediate service, promotions, an opportunity to win fame. Distressing, because Custer did not want to fight against his southern friends, did not want to see the Union broken, and did not want to fight for a Republican Administration against the institution of slavery, which he continued to defend. Rumors flew among the cadets about who was going to do what, and there were countless quiet discussions in barracks far into the night, with cadets asking one another what they should do.

From the time of Abraham Lincoln’s nomination for President by the Republicans, and the division of the Democratic party into northern and southern wings, talk of secession was rampant. It was generally understood that secession would mean war. Cadets had a number of choices. Southerners could resign from the Academy, return to their home states, and expect a commission—at a much higher rank than second lieutenant—in either the prospective Confederate Army or their home state militia. Resignation came hard, however, especially to those who had endured four years of hell at the Academy and who, by resigning, would have nothing to show for it. Pierce Young told his parents, “You and others down there don’t realize the sacrifice resigning means.” He reminded them that “it is a hard thing to throw up a diploma from the
greatest
Institution in the world when that diploma is in my very grasp and you know that diploma would give me pre-eminence over other men in any profession.”
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Northern cadets could also resign, return to their states, and expect to become captains, majors, or even lieutenant colonels in their state forces. Or cadets could stay at the Academy, graduate, receive their regular Army commissions as second lieutenants, and then hope for a combat assignment. The problem with that last course of action was that promotion in the regular Army was governed by seniority and was exceedingly slow, while promotion in a state force for a trained professional soldier promised to be rapid indeed.

Many cadets agonized over their choice, but not Custer. Throughout the 1860 election campaign, when excitement was building every day, he damned Lincoln and the Republicans, expressed great sympathy for the southern position, and hoped that the Democrats would somehow win the election and avert a civil war. But no matter how
deeply he felt about the justice of the southern cause, Custer was no traitor. He never considered the possibility of joining the South or of doing anything less than his duty to the United States, a duty he had assumed when he took his oath of loyalty. He was a Democrat, but a Jacksonian Democrat. He believed in America and its mission. He could not abide the thought of breaking up the Union.

Many of Custer’s closest friends were Southerners, but concerned though he always was about politics, he never took them so seriously as to allow political differences to interfere with friendships. During and after the war he maintained a close rapport with his southern friends, even though he had fought many a bloody battle against them. All this had been prophesied; during the secession winter Pierce Young told Custer, “We’re going to have war. It’s no use talking; I see it coming. … Now let me prophesy what will happen to you and me.” Young said they would both become colonels of a cavalry regiment, Custer from Ohio and Young from Georgia. “And who knows but we may move against each other during the war.” Young added that “we’ll get the best of the fight in the end, because we will fight for a principle, a cause, while you will fight only to perpetuate the abuse of power.”
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