There's More to New Jersey than the Sopranos

16 The Jersey General and the Secret of Custer’s Last Stand

The Secret of Custer’s Last Stand 81 books, like those showing that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t kill President John F. Kennedy. But the real reason that Grant turned down Lincoln is a lot more prosaic . It has to do with the fact that Julia Dent Grant could not abide Mary Todd Lincoln one little bit. It seems that Mrs. Grant had had several unpleasant experiences with Mrs. Lincoln. On one occasion, Julia Grant had hosted Mary Lincoln when the president came to inspect the army. To Mrs. Grant’s humiliation, Mrs. Lincoln behaved in an erratic manner; at one point, she screamed hysterically when an officer’s attractive young wife seemed to be flirting with the president. On a later visit to the front, Mrs. Grant fumed when Mrs. Lincoln neglected to invite her on board the presidential steamship. So when Julia Grant learned that she and her husband had been invited to accompany the Lincolns to the theater that night, she sent a note to Ulysses informing him that he ought to decline the invitation, that she wanted to go back to Burlington to be with the children. As it happened, Secretary of War Stanton also urged Grant not to attend the theater, on the grounds of safety. He had urged the same thing on Lincoln, but the president seemed determined to go. So probably it was some combination of Stanton’s warning, Julia Grant’s dislike for Mrs. Lincoln, and his own desire to see his children that prompted Grant to decline the president’s invitation. It is of such little domestic matters that great history is made. 16 The Jersey General and the Secret of Custer’s Last Stand You probably don’t think of New Jersey as part of the Wild West. But in fact our little East Coast state is where two of the great symbols of the American West originated—the Stetson ten-gallon hat and the Colt revolver. The first Western movie, The Great Train Robbery , was filmed here in 1903. The man who discovered gold in California and the man who discovered Pikes Peak in Colorado were natives of New Jersey. Annie Oakley, star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, lived much of her life in the Garden State (see chapter 23). General Edward Settle Godfrey in Full-Dress Uniform A survivor of Custer’s Last Stand, Godfrey kept a secret about the battle for half a century. U.S. Army Military History Institute. 82 There’s More to New Jersey . . . The Secret of Custer’s Last Stand 83 Another New Jersey link to the West is an old farmhouse in the rural village of Cookstown in New Hanover Township, Burlington County. The area was settled by English Quakers in the 1600s; the farmhouse itself was constructed around 1750 and was expanded and remodeled over the years, up to the 1930s. The building is now on the National Register of Historic Places and has been restored with the aim of making it a community center and museum, while preserving its original architectural character. What qualified this house to be listed on the National Register was not its eighteenth-century origin, but rather the fact that it was the home of General Edward Settle Godfrey, who lived there for the last quarter century of his life, from retirement from the army in 1907 to his death in 1932. Godfrey was a battle-hardened officer of the famed Seventh Cavalry in the Indian-fighting army of the nineteenth-century American frontier. He galloped the Great Plains on horseback, armed with carbine and pistol , his long mustache streaming in the wind. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroism and survived countless minor skirmishes and major battles of that era, including the famous Battle of the Little Bighorn, a.k.a. Custer’s Last Stand. A survivor of the Little Bighorn, you ask? Weren’t Custer and the Seventh Cavalry entirely wiped out during that battle? Not exactly. Just before the battle, Custer divided the regiment into three separate battalions that maneuvered on different portions of the battlefield. It was the battalion Custer led that was killed to the last man. Most of the troopers in the other battalions survived after retreating to an elevation now known as Reno Hill, because it was held by Custer’s second in command, Major Marcus A. Reno...