The Real Custer (7 page)

The Harpers Ferry raid affected the Corps personally; one of Brown's hostages was Colonel Lewis Washington, great-grandnephew and closest living relation of George Washington and father of plebe James B. Washington of Virginia. The troops that ended the siege and captured Brown were commanded by the former superintendent Colonel Robert E. Lee and his aide-de-camp, Lieutenant James E. B. Stuart of the Class of 1854. Lieutenant Israel Greene, USMC, who commanded the Marine platoon that stormed the firehouse where Brown was holed up, had recently received artillery training at West Point. The cadets followed reports of the raid, trial, and execution closely. On December 2, 1859, the day John Brown was hanged in Charles Town, Virginia, he was also
hanged in effigy from a tree in front of the barracks. Afterward sectional feelings at the Academy became more acute and more overtly political, and they sometimes led to violence.
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“It required more than ordinary moral and physical courage to boldly avow oneself an abolitionist,” Custer recalled of those days. “The name was considered one of opprobrium, and the cadet who had the courage to avow himself an abolitionist must be prepared to face the social frowns of the great majority of his comrades and at times to defend his opinions by his physical strength and metal.”
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One such cadet was Emory Upton of the Class of May 1861. Upton was appointed to the Academy from New York but for the previous two years had been a student at Oberlin College in Ohio. Oberlin was a noted center of progressive education, the first college to admit African American students (in 1835) and the first coeducational college (in 1837). “Upton was a bold fellow and thoroughly radical in his views,” his classmate Jacob B. Rawles recalled.
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Upton was the first cadet to openly declare himself an abolitionist, and as Morris Schaff stated, “this made him a marked man.”
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Wade Hampton Gibbes, Class of 1860, was the son of a slave owner and had grown up on a South Carolina plantation. He was a vocal firebrand, and he disliked Upton intensely. He started a rumor that the young abolitionist had been involved with a black woman at Oberlin, and after it got back to Upton, he called out Gibbes.

“One noon we were drawn up preparatory to marching to the mess-room,” Judson Kilpatrick recalled. “Upton stepped out from his position on the right of the battalion, walked deliberately down the line to the extreme left, where Gibbes was standing, and asked him if he had used the language attributed to him.” Gibbes said he did, and Upton “brought his hand down on the face of the vilifier with a ringing slap.” Upton was jumped by “a score of high-toned Southerners,” and he was rescued by “those who were willing to see fair play.” It was “a pretty plucky thing for
one to do with all the odds against him, and only three friends in the Academy.”
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They agreed to meet in the barracks and settle the matter as gentlemen. The two came to blows and cadets crowded around, cheering them on. Gibbes got the better of Upton, who eventually emerged, his face bloody, heading for the stairs up to his room. The Southern cadets were shouting threats and insults, when Upton's roommate, a big Pennsylvanian named John I. Rodgers, appeared at the top of the steps, his eyes “glaring like a panther's,” according to Schaff, and said to the jeering Southerners, “If there are any more of you down there who want anything, come right up!”
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The Upton-Gibbes fight “was the most thrilling event in my life as a cadet,” Schaff wrote, “and, in my judgment, it was the most significant in that of West Point itself.” In it Schaff saw a prophecy of the war to come, reflecting both “the courage and the bitterness with which it was fought out to the bitter end.”
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The fight stood out in memory because it was the exception. Northern and Southern cadets did not generally engage in brawls over politics. When fights did happen, they were usually over other matters. But sectional tensions continued to percolate at the Academy, and they came into sharp focus during the 1860 election campaign.

In October 1860, Southern cadets arranged an electoral straw poll. Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon, the father of John Lane, Custer's friend, classmate, and sometime-roommate, was the vice presidential nominee of the Southern Democrat faction headed by Breckenridge.
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Custer, being a Northern Democrat, could be expected to support Stephen Douglas, the establishment Democratic nominee. But the real purpose of the straw poll was to root out the Republicans in the Corps' midst.

“A better scheme than this straw ballot to embroil the Corps, and to precipitate the hostilities between individuals which soon involved the
States, could not have been devised,” Morris Schaff wrote. The ballot was secret, with a voting box inside a long shed near the barracks. “The balloting was generally secret, for several reasons,” recalled Jacob B. Rawles of the Class of May 1861. The Northern and Southern cadets, especially roommates, held their friendships “in high regard, and as the feeling was very intense through out the country, before the impending crisis of that four years of fratricidal warfare, our personal opinions were more or less guarded.”
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This was not the case with Emory Upton, who took the opportunity to provoke the Southerners. He walked to the shed waving his ballot over his head shouting, “I'm going to vote for Abraham Lincoln, and I don't give a rap who knows it!” Several Southern cadets rose to the provocation, and another brawl seemed imminent, but Charles C. Campbell of Missouri, later a Confederate major, intervened and insisted on a fair fight. Cooler heads prevailed and stopped a repeat of the previous bloodletting.
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Breckenridge won a plurality of ninety-nine votes out of 278, and Lincoln was second with sixty-four. The incensed Southerners then began to hunt out the “Black Republican Abolitionists in the Corps.”
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Only thirty cadets admitted they backed Lincoln, and all of them from west of the Hudson. Ohioan Schaff, a Lincoln backer, called the unwillingness of the New England Republicans to stand by their votes “the most equivocal if not pusillanimous conduct I ever saw at West Point.”
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Lincoln was soon hanged in effigy, like Brown, in front of the barracks.

As the election neared, Custer wrote, “the Breckenridge army of Southern Democrats did not hesitate to announce, as their seniors in and out of Congress had done, that in the event of Lincoln's election secession would be the only resource left to the South.”
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Lincoln's victory on November 6, 1860, demonstrated the breakdown of the national political system. Lincoln swept the free states and carried none of the
slave states, the first and only such outcome in presidential electoral history. McCrea, another of the Lincoln supporters from Ohio, celebrated the Republican victory. “As we rejoiced the other parties mourned,” he wrote, “the southerners [fumed] and (as is customary with a great many of them), they threatened to do all kinds of terrible things, and blustered around at a great rate.” He thought that it “would be a blessed good thing” if the Southerners resigned, because “it would clear the institution of some of the worst characters.”
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Not everyone was certain the coming division was a “blessed good thing.” William A. Elderkin from New York, of the Class of May 1861, expressed the ambivalence some cadets felt in the days after Lincoln's election: “Election is at last over . . . ominous signs of dis-union are plainly visible, and probably before we see each other again ‘something will turn up'—I do not blame the ‘south' for feeling as they do—nor would I wonder to see them take the sword, if necessary, to defend their just rights—still, I was born under a northern sun and have sworn to serve under the federal constitution, and so I must do—yet. God forbid that I should ever be called into a hostile field against my own countrymen.”
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But among the Southern cadets, particularly those from the Deep South, it was clear that a long-expected revolution was imminent. “It seemed to have been a part of the early teaching of the Southern youth,” Custer wrote, “that the disruption of the Union was an event surely to be brought about.”
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Thomas Rowland of Virginia, head of the Class of 1863, observed in a letter home that “a great many cadets have assumed the blue cockade, tying a small blue ribbon upon the cap button” in solidarity with the South.
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Three days after the election, the Columbia, South Carolina,
Guardian
published an open letter from the West Point cadets of the Palmetto State pledging to stand by their homeland if it left the Union. “All we desire is a field for making ourselves useful,” they said.
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Ten days later South Carolinian Henry S. Farley resigned, followed
four days later by James “Little Jim” Hamilton. The Janesville, Wisconsin,
Gazette
mocked these and other departing cadets, editorializing that “after their
chivalry
gets chilled, and their vacancies have been filled, these boys will be forced to the conclusion that they have made asses of themselves.”
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Eighty-six of the 278 cadets at the Academy at that time were from states that eventually joined the Confederacy. Sixty-five of them left or were discharged for reasons connected to the war. Six left for other reasons, and fifteen sided with the Union.
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The Southern cadets did not leave en masse, as portrayed cinematically, but departed in small numbers as the Union slowly disintegrated through the winter and spring of 1860–61. Custer observed that one important reason the Southern cadets were in a hurry to leave was because the Confederate government was organizing its armed forces, and “it was important that applicants for positions of this kind should be on the ground to properly present their claims.”
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Custer noted with some amazement that the Academy raised no barriers to the cadets' resignations and departures, even though their intentions to join the nascent Confederate forces were clear. Indeed, throughout the whole of the Army, officers and troops changed the blue for the gray with little difficulty.

“What is to become of our glorious Union?” Cadet Rowland fretted. “Disunion gains ground only because the conservatives remain inactive, and the violent meet with no opposition sufficient to check their impetuous course.” He said he would remain loyal as long as he could, then “we must all cast in our lot with Virginia and hope for the best. I do not fear civil war,” he continued, “for I do not think it is the spirit of the nineteenth century to fight over an abstract principle.”
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Custer remembered things differently. “War was anticipated by [the Southerners] at that time and discussed and looked forward to . . . with as much certainty as if speaking of an approaching season,” he wrote. “The cadets from the South were in constant receipt of letters from their
friends at home, keeping them fully advised of the real situation and promising them suitable positions in the military force yet to be organized to defend the ordinance of secession. All this was a topic of daily if not hourly conversation.”
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Rowland noted that discussion about “the prospect of dissolution interferes somewhat with the studying throughout the corps, among the excitable or the lazy.”
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But despite the prospect of cadets facing each other in deadly contest on future battlefields, there was no noticeable animus between them. “The approaching war was as usual the subject of conversation in which all participated, and in the freest and most friendly manner,” Custer wrote. “The lads from the North discoursing earnestly upon the power and rectitude of the National Government, the impulsive Southron holding up pictures of invaded rights and future independence.”
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George had always gotten along with the Southern cadets, in part because he was a strong Democrat and an anti-abolitionist who openly denounced the “Black Republicans.” Also Custer knew the Southerners better; he was a member of D Company, most of whom were from the South or West. One of Custer's roommates and a close friend was Pierce Manning Butler Young from Cartersville, Georgia.
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Schaff called him “a very good fighter, and a very good hearted fellow.”
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Young was also a strong Southern partisan. During the John Brown trial in 1859, he said he wished he had a sword as long as from West Point to Newburgh so he could cut off every Yankee head in a row. “I am devoted to my whole country,” Young wrote to his father, “but to that portion of my country who array themselves under a black republican banner, I am a sectional enemy.”
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One day in the winter of 1860–61, while the cadets discussed current events, Young made a prediction:

            
Custer, my boy, we're going to have a war. It's no use talking; I see it coming. . . . Now let me prophesy what will happen to you and me. You will go home, and your abolition governor
will probably make you colonel of a cavalry regiment. I will go down to Georgia and ask Governor Brown to give me a cavalry regiment. And who knows but we may move against each other during the war. You will probably get the advantage of us in the first few engagements as your side will be rich and powerful, while we will be poor and weak. Your regiment will be armed with the best of weapons, the sharpest of sabres; mine will have only shotguns and scythe blades; but for all 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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