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those friendships did more than that; they even survived the trial of civil war, the hardest possible test for any friendship.
Time after time the old records tell the story. John Lea, Confederate States Army, had resigned from the June class when Mississippi left the Union. He was severely wounded and taken prisoner in the retreat from Williamsburg. As he recovered, he fell in love with the daughter of the family that had nursed him. Finally they were married. Who stood up with the groom? George Armstrong Custer, United States Army.
?1 am not disloyal when I tell you we heard with secret pride of his gallant deed's on the field of battle,? wrote Adelbert Ames of Alabama?s John Pelham. ?It was what we had the right to expect of him?he was our classmate for five years?he was one of the best of us?who should win honors and glory if not he? And we were deeply grieved when we heard of his death.?
These friendships extended beyond immediate class limits to bind all those who had been cadets together.
?Late one night, while I was on my way from Montgomery to Atlanta just after the war,? wrote Morris Schaff, class of 1862, ?the ramshackle train stopped at a lonely station. Charles Ball [class of June, 1861], still in Confederate gray, entered. As soon as he recognized me, he quickened his step and met me with such unaffected cordiality that the car seemed to glow with new lamps. In view of what had gone before I would not have been hurt had he merely bowed and passed on, for I realized how much there had been to embitter. Yet, he sat, and we talked over old times half the night. I could not help wondering, as he parted from me, whether I could have shown so much magnanimity had the South conquered the North, and had I come home in rags, to find the old farm desolate. I doubt it.?
The impersonal records tell how the Confederate general Dodson Ramseur?s headquarters flag was carried to the War Department in 1864?part of the booty Sheridan?s men took when they defeated and captured that gallant graduate of 1860. But personal letters tell how the wounded Ramseur was carried to Sheridan?s headquarters; how Union surgeons labored with a Southern doctor to save him; how friends in blue uniforms took down messages for Mrs. Ramseur and cut off a lock of brown hair for the baby daughter the young general would never see; and how, after long hours of agony, Dodson Ramseur died in the arms of his classmates.
One of the most enduring of these friendships was that between Custer and Thomas Lafayette Rosser. Rosser,
three years older than Custer, was a member of the May class. He had been born in Virginia but was raised on a pioneer?s farm in Texas. He was big?six feet two inches?and strong in everything but book learning. Rosser roomed with John Pelham, and the three had one thing in common from the beginning: they were the best riders in the corps. If Custer, Pelham, or Rosser could not stay on a horse, that horse could not be ridden.
John Pelham was as fair as Rosser was dark. He was a quiet boy, a shade higher than the other two scholastically. He was one of the best-liked men in his class, and later in the Army of Northern Virginia. And he has probably had more children named for him than any other bachelor in military history. These children included Virginia Pelham Stuart?the last-born child of Pelham?s commanding officer, the famous Jeb Stuart.
In March, 1863, Rosser was wounded at Kelly?s Ford.
In May of that year he married his young lady. It was a sad wedding. Pelham, who was to have been best man, had taken his death wound at Kelly?s Ford. In his place stood James Dearing, who would have graduated in 1862 had Virginia stayed in the Union. Before the war ended, Dearing too would be killed in a last futile battle just before Appomattox.
Rosser was one of the few who did not surrender with Lee. He was a major general of cavalry by this time. He had put in almost a year fighting Custer up and down the Shenandoah Valley. Now he tried breaking through to the last Confederate command in the Carolinas. He almost made it. The Yankees caught him near Lynchburg.
So the war was over. Most of his friends were dead, and Tom Rosser was a professional man barred from his profession?a major general with no job and a hungry family. He went to work with a pick and shovel for the Northern Pacific Railroad.
Soon they allowed he was an engineer and gave him the job of surveying the line?s route to the West Coast. Regular regiments were assigned to guard these operations from whatever Indians might not like the idea of a railroad so near home.
?Well, I have joined the engineers,? wrote Custer to his Elizabeth in 1873. ?I was lying half asleep when I heard ?Orderly, which is General Custer?s tent?? I sprang up. ?I know that voice, even if I haven?t heard it for years!? It was my old friend General Rosser. Stretched on a buffalo robe, under a fly, in the moonlight, we listened to one another?s accounts of the battles in which we had been opposed. It seemed like the time when, as cadets, we lay, huddled under one blanket, indulging in dreams of the
The young men of the classes of 1861 literally loved their enemies?and would continue to do so through years of deadly combat.
CIVIL WAR CHRONICLES 9