The War Department had briefly tried the experiment of a five-year course in place of the normal four years so the men who had become cadets in 1856 were due to graduate in the month of May, 1861, just ahead of the men who had entered in 1857 and would get their diplomas in June. The word “classes” is used advisedly, for West Point sent forth two groups in that tragic spring of fire and conflict. Some of them lived and some of them died, but all of them knew the strange, sad mixture of enmity and personal affection that was the peculiar heritage of the classes of 1861.
And in the spring of 1861 the southern states were seceding from the Union, and war was upon the land, and so in a very short time many of the former West Point comrades were in opposition armies, fighting against one another. Many things are learned at West Point among them, the great fact of comradeship, the bond that ties together men dedicated to a common calling. But there is an especially somber and haunting hue to the atmosphere of the late 1850s, for the country was breaking apart, and the line of fracture ran straight across the special world inhabited by young West Pointers. There is a strange and romantic haze resting on the high plain that overlooks the Hudson at West Point-that plain where so many of America’s greatest soldiers, living briefly in a world apart, learned the rudiments of their demanding profession. In all the long history of West Point no cadets had gone forth into a more tragic world than the ones who left in the spring of 1861. Yet there were others, once well known, all still deserving of remembrance: and they were a fated group, for a pathetic conflict of loyalties and emotions was their lot when they left the Military Academy. He is just about the only member of his class who does come down to us! His classmates took one good look at his rather long, Hessian-yellow hair and joyously dubbed him “Fanny.” In the footnotes of the history books and in innumerable Western films he comes down to us as General George Armstrong Custer. His family and close friends had always called him Autie. Then he made the necessary inquiries reported to the necessary places, signed the necessary papers in a bold, splashing hand, and became that lowest form of animal life-a new cadet. He stood for a few moments, awkward and shy, more alone than he had ever felt in all his seventeen years more alone than he would ever feel again until his years had readied thirty-seven.
Sun-drenched fields, dipping elms, indigo hills, and silver river spread out before him: the almost unbelievable beauty which would be the backdrop of his life for the next four years. He shouldered his baggage and climbed the steep path to the plain. It was just a century last summer since a tall, raw-boned Ohio farm boy stepped from the two o’clock boat to West Point’s South Dock.
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