Stiles, Jesse James T. J. Stiles, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002).
Starr 1, 2 Stephen Z. Starr, The Union Cavalry in the Civil War, vols. 1 and 2 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979, 1981).
USMA Special Collections and Archives, United States Military Academy, West Point, N.Y.
Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin Robert M. Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin: George Armstrong Custer and the Western Military Frontier (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988).
Wert Jeffry D. Wert, Custer: The Controversial Life of George Armstrong Custer (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
Whittaker Frederick Whittaker, A Complete Life of Gen. George A. Custer: Major-General of Volunteers Brevet Major-General U.S. Army, and Lieutenant-Colonel Seventh U.S. Cavalry (New York: Sheldon and Co., 1876).
Preface
1. Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After the Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 78–79, 92–93.
2. Modernization theory includes a vast literature. I am influenced by some of it without adopting or advocating any particular theoretical construction. See, for example, the work of Max Weber and Eugen Weber’s landmark Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1976). In the American context, I draw upon Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), and, in the Western context, Richard Maxwell Brown’s adaption of Trachtenberg’s incorporation thesis to the armed conflicts in the mid- to late-nineteenth-century West, in No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), and “Violence,” in Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O’Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss, eds., The Oxford History of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 393–425.
3. The themes presented here have not been completely ignored in the vast literature about GAC. Richard Slotkin pays the most attention to the broader transformation of the country, but he too approaches GAC in terms of his cultural role as frontier hero. In an extended discussion in The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994 [orig. pub. 1985]), 375–76, 386–87, 397, he calls GAC a member of the “professional class of soldierly gentlemen…an early type of organization man, hiding in the costumes of the cavalier trooper and the Frontier buckskin.” I admire this book and Slotkin’s other work immensely, but I find that GAC was the antiorganization man, unable to thrive in an institutional or corporate environment. The only role in which he flourished was that of the cavalier trooper.
PART I
One: The Accused
1. Proceedings of the 1861 Court-Martial Trial of George Armstrong Custer (II-385) (to be referred to hereafter as “1861 Proceedings”), Records of the Office of Judge Advocate General, RG 153, CRM; Edward C. Boynton, History of West Point, and Its Military Importance During the American Revolution and the Origins and Progress of the United States Military Academy (London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1864), 258. For an excellent discussion of the trial, and the underlying incident that precipitated GAC’s offense, see Minnie Dubbs Millbrook, “Cadet Custer’s Court-Martial,” in Paul A. Hutton, ed., Custer and His Times (El Paso: Little Big Horn Associates, 1981), 59–83.
2. 1861 Proceedings; John A. Bingham to Jefferson Davis, November 18, 1856, George A. Custer Application Papers to the U.S. Military Academy, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1783–1917, RG 94, CRM.
3. Entry 333, Cullum 1: 243–44. In 1861 Proceedings, the list of court members runs from highest rank to lowest, and Nauman at the top.
4. Entry 558, Cullum 1: 347–48.
5. Coffman, 45; Cullum 1: 347–8; 1861 Proceedings.
6. 1861 Proceedings.
7. 1861 Proceedings; Millbrook, “Cadet Custer’s Court-Martial.” Millbrook shows that Ludlow was court-martialed as well for striking Ryerson, suggesting that GAC was actually intervening on behalf of Ryerson.
8. 1861 Proceedings.
9. Wert, 26. GAC’s arrival in June is verified in a letter, GAC to Brother and Sister, January 27 [likely 1858], Box 1, GAC Papers, USMA.
10. Stiles, First Tycoon, 102–09, 253–54; Edward Harold Mott, Between the Ocean and the Lakes: The Story of Erie (New York: Ticker Publishing, 1908), frontis, 109–13.
11. Morris Schaff, The Spirit of Old West Point (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), 13–14; Stiles, First Tycoon, 102.
12. GAC to Minnie St. John, August 7, 1856, Box 1, GAC Papers, USMA.
13. Schaff, 14–16; George C. Strong, Cadet Life at West Point (Boston: T. O. H. P. Burnham, 1862), 46 (to be referred to as “Strong” hereafter); James L. Morrison Jr., “The Best School in the World”: West Point, the Pre-Civil War Years, 1833–1866 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1986), 64, 70. Tourists regularly took the steamer to West Point; see, for example, George Templeton Strong’s diary entry for August 4, 1851, in Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong, vol. 2: Turbulent Fifties, 1850–1859 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 60. (George Templeton Strong should not be confused with the West Point cadet George C. Strong, whose memoir is referenced as “Strong” below.) For an example of visiting royalty, see Catherine S. Crary, ed., Dear Belle: Letters from a Cadet and Officer to His Sweetheart, 1858–1865 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1965), 53–56.
14. Strong, 46–47.
15. Morrison, 64–65.
16. Schaff, 23–25; Morrison, 64–68.
17. Boynton, 260–61; Morrison, 64–65, 71.
18. Morrison, 63.
19. Morrison, 66, 72, 122; Schaff, 28; Whittaker, 33.
20. GAC to Minnie St. John, August 7, 1856, Box 1, GAC Papers, USMA.
21. GAC to Minnie St. John, August 7, 1856, Box 1, GAC Papers, USMA; Morrison, 69, 118–19; Strong, 325.
22. Schaff, 23–25; Morrison, 64–68, 72, 115, 119. Morrison, 83, notes the great extent to which the academy relied on cadets to police themselves.
23. Schaff, 24; Crary, 40.
24. Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Stories (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), 3–4; Peter Michie, “Reminiscences of Cadet and Army Service,” in A. Noel Blakeman, ed., Personal Recollections of the War of the Rebellion: Second Series (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897), 186.
25. Crary, 39; Michie, 194.
26. GAC to Minnie St. John, August 7, 1856, Box 1, GAC Papers, USMA.
27. GAC to Sister, December 12, 1856, GAC Correspondence, LBH.
28. Roger L. Geiger notes that “boys of about twelve assumed an economic role and semi-independence from their families,” in “The Era of Multipurpose Colleges in American Higher Education, 1850–1890,” in Robert Geiger, ed., The American College in the Nineteenth Century (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), 127–52. See also, in the same volume, Roger L. Geiger, “The Rise and Fall of Useful Knowledge: Higher Education for Science, Agriculture, and the Mechanic Arts, 1850–1875,” 153–68.
29. Wert, 15–18. In a letter, GAC wrote of his parents, “If they were only in better circumstances and were able to get along without working as hard as they have had to, I would have nothing whatever to trouble me. And if there is any one reason more than another which makes me wish I was through at West Point it is that I might be some aid to them.” See GAC to Brother and Sister, May 29, 1860, GAC Correspondence, LBH.
30. Wert, 15–18; Charles B. Wallace, Custer’s Ohio Boyhood: Third Edition (Cadiz, Ohio: Harrison County Historical Society, 1993), 5–7.
31. Wert, 20–22; Utley, 13; Reynolds, 11–12; Gerard N. Magliocca, American Founding Son: John Bingham and the Invention of the Fourteenth Amendment (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 49–50. Jurgen Herbst writes in And Sadly Teach: Teacher Education and Professionalization in American Culture (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 112, that even those educators who attended teacher-training normal schools “were not necessarily interested in diplomas, but they were eager to get back to work and support themselves through their teaching,” and were attempting “to brush up on their skills and knowledge for as long as they could afford it.” See also Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).
32. Ralph Kirshner, The Class of 1861: Custer, Ames, and Their Classmates After West Point (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 3; Stiles, First Tycoon, 227–36.
33. GAC to Brother and Sister, Jan 27, n.d. [apparently 1858], Box 1, GAC Papers, USMA; Morrison, 62, 158–59. The Charles Francis Adams family (offspring of Presidents John and John Quincy Adams) was aghast when Charles Francis Adams Jr. enlisted in the Union army during the Civil War; Edward Charles Kirkland, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., 1835–1915: The Patrician at Bay (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965).
34. James S. Robbins, Last in Their Class: Custer, Pickett, and the Goats of West Point (New York: Encounter Books, 2006), 193: Stiles, Jesse James, 308; Millard Kessler Bushong and Dean McKoin Bushong, Fightin’ Tom Rosser, C.S.A. (Shippensburg, Pa.: Beidel Printing House, 1983), 1–2.
35. GAC to John, April 7, 1860, GAC Collection, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. As Geiger notes, “In an age when boys of about twelve assumed an economic role and semi-independence from their families, attending college most likely meant the prolongation of dependence and control.…Collegians were expected to undertake thorough preparatory study, followed by a continuous four-year course. And while most young people enjoyed considerable personal freedom, collegians were constrained by myriad rules, enforced in the spirit of petty but inefficient despotism.” See Roger L. Geiger, “The Era of Multipurpose Colleges in American Higher Education, 1850–1890,” 140, and Geiger, ed., The American College in the Nineteenth Century, 127–52.
36. Morrison, 73.
37. Robert L. Geiger, “Introduction: New Themes in the History of Nineteenth-Century Colleges,” 1–36; Roger L. Geiger with Julie Ann Bubolz, “College As It Was in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” 80–90; Roger L. Geiger, “The Era of Multipurpose Colleges in American Higher Education, 1850–1890,” 127–52; Roger L. Geiger, “The Rise and Fall of Useful Knowledge: Higher Education for Science, Agriculture, and the Mechanic Arts, 1850–1875,” 153–68; all in Geiger, ed., The American College in the Nineteenth Century; Morrison, 110–11, 115–19.
38. GAC to Brother and Sister, January 27 [no year named, but the contents show it must be 1858], Box 1, GAC Papers, USMA.
39. Michie, 194. For other such assessments, see Wert, 31.
40. On daily recitations and general examinations, and the impact of graduation standing on future promotion, see Morrison, 87–88.
41. Morrison, 73–74, 120–21.
42. Register of Delinquencies, 1856–1861, 192–93, 342–43, 448–49, USMA. Note, by contrast, that Adelbert Ames, one class ahead of GAC, did not even fill one page with demerits over the same period of time (Register of Delinquencies, 4).
43. Register of Delinquencies, 341; Wert, 32.
44. EBC, Tenting on the Plains, 320; Morrison, 116. The Spanish class incident appears in virtually every account of GAC’s life. See, for example, Reynolds, 22.
45. Schaff, 25–28, 66–67.
46. Schaff, 116, 193–94.
47. Crary, 42–43, 214–15.
48. Schaff, 193–94.
49. GAC to John, April 7, 1860, GAC Collection, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah; GAC to Brother and Sister, October 2, 1859, GAC Correspondence, LBH.
50. GAC to Brother and Sister, October 2, 1859, GAC Correspondence, LBH. On his illness, see also GAC to Cousin, December 13, 1859, Letters: Copies and Transcripts, GAC Papers, USMA.
51. GAC to Brother and Sister, June 30, 1858, GAC Correspondence, LBH.
52. GAC to Brother and Sister, October 2, 1859, May 29, 1860, GAC Correspondence, LBH.
53. Morrison, 119, 121–22; GAC, “War Memoirs: From West Point to the Battlefield,” Galaxy (April 1876) (to be called War Memoirs I hereafter).
54. Whittaker, 31; Morrison, 78; War Memoirs I; Gary W. Gallagher, Stephen Dodson Ramseur: Lee’s Gallant General (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 26–27.
55. GAC to Cousin, December 13, 1859, Letters: Copies and Transcripts, GAC Papers, USMA.
56. Tully McCrea to GAC, August 13, 1861, GAC Correspondence, LBH.
57. Crary, 215.
58. Monaghan, 10–11; Wert, 22–23. The quotations are from Monaghan, who was not above fictionalizing (placing GAC in a scene from the memoirs of a fellow cadet, for example), but he explicitly stated that he saw this correspondence, and judging from GAC’s letters to Mollie preserved at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, he is credible on this point.
59. GAC to Mollie, November 13, 1858, GAC to Mollie, January 1, 1859, GAC Letters to Dear Mollie, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.; Monaghan, 10–11; Wert, 22–23; Magliocca, 49–51; Erving E. Beauregard, Bingham of the Hills: Politician and Diplomat Extraordinary (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), 32–33; Wallace, 21–22.
60. GAC to Mollie, November 13, 1858, GAC to Mollie, January 1, 1859, GAC Letters to Dear Mollie, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
61. GAC to Mollie, January 1, 1859, GAC Letters to Dear Mollie, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
62. Wert, 34–35. For a thinly veiled account of how cadets discussed brothels in New York, see Tully McCrea to GAC, August 13, 1861, GAC Correspondence, LBH.
63. EBC, Tenting on the Plains, 245–46, 284.
64. Richard L. Aynes, “The Continuing Importance of Congressman John A. Bingham and the Fourteenth Amendment,” Akron Law Review 36: 589–615; War Memoirs I; Schaff, 145.
65. Stiles, First Tycoon, 93–99.
66. The struggle over the expansion of slavery has given rise to a vast historical literature. For summaries, see McPherson, 47–249; Stiles, Jesse James, 46–55.
67. Stiles, Jesse James, 46–55; Heather Cox Richardson, To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 6–24.
68. Wert, 28–29; War Memoirs I; Schaff, 159; Morrison, 129–30.
69. Schaff, 29; Morrison, 129–30; Thomas Rowland, “Letters of a Virginia Cadet at West Point, 1859–1861,” South Atlantic Quarterly 15, no. 4 (October 1915): 330–47. GAC wrote in 1876 that the sectional division among cadets was “at first barely distinguishable, but in 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”; War Memoirs I.
70. McPherson, 152–53, 202–13.
71. Schaff, 142–49; Crary, 64; Morrison, 129–30.
72. GAC to John, April 7, 1860, GAC Collection, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. Kirshner, 6, observes that GAC checked Cooper’s novels out of the West Point library, while Tom Rosser took out a biography of Philip II and Adelbert Ames borrowed Aristotle’s Rhetoric.
73. GAC to Friend John, May 5, 1860, GAC Collection, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.
74. Curiously, GAC voiced the same sentiments in his War Memoirs I, but put them in the mouth of the secessionist cadet P. M. B. Young.
75. Crary, 70–71.
76. McPherson, 213–35; Morrison, 126.
77. War Memoirs I.
78. Schaff, 84, 207–08; Crary, 78.
79. Crary, 42–44. McCrea stated that GAC did not know why he was reinstated. Utley, Cavalier in Buckskin, 15–16, writes that the attempted theft of the questions took place after GAC failed the main examination, while he was preparing for the second round.
This may be so, though I find no evidence to indicate whether it was for the initial test or the reexamination. Judging from the mid-month date of McCrea’s letter, I believe it was more likely a theft before the initial test. Utley stresses how this incident illustrates GAC’s extraordinary luck.
80. War Memoirs I. Henry A. du Pont, a class ahead of GAC, described “cutting heads” to his mother on February 26, 1860, which means that GAC would have been practicing the same drill in early 1861. See Kirshner, 4.
81. Tully McCrea to GAC, August 13, 1861, GAC Correspondence, LBH.
82. War Memoirs I.
83. GAC to Sister, May 31, 1861, Letters: Copies and Transcripts, GAC Papers, Special Collections and Archives, USMA.
84. McPherson, 273–74.
85. McCrea quoted in Schaff, 220.
86. GAC to Mrs. David Reed, April 26, 1861, typescript copy, GAC Collection, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.
87. GAC to Sister, May 31, 1861, Letters: Copies and Transcripts, GAC Papers, Special Collections and Archives, USMA.
88. Wert, 38–39.
89. War Memoirs I.
90. 1861 Proceedings.
91. Mark R. Wilson makes this important point about the army in The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Though the Regular Army had fewer than 16,000 men before the Civil War, it was still enormous compared to almost any private enterprise in 1860, and its wide dispersal across the West required a high degree of organization for supply. As Wilson notes, 35–36, “Well before 1861, the U.S. military supply bureaus were among the most stable, most bureaucratic, and most important governmental institutions in America.…During the years before the Civil War, most army quartermasters were stationed at far-flung posts in the great West, where they handled small-scale procurement and long-distance logistics.…During the decades before the Civil War, the military regularly accounted for well over half of the total national government expenditures.”
Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America Page 66