At any given time, Dr. Hodge’s gracious home near the Princeton campus provided a hospitable haven for friends and relatives, whether they were visiting or studying at Princeton. Some members of the extended family had rooms in the seminary or college, but took their meals at the house. Graduation and other ceremonial occasions brought throngs of students, alumni, and friends to the house to renew acquaintances and pay their respects to “the Presbyterian Pope,” as Scott’s grandfather was called—sometimes in admiration and sometimes in derision—for his unwavering defense of Calvinism.3
Young Hugh, who was known to his family as Len, had been named for his great-uncle, Dr. Hugh Lenox Scott, a physician and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Besides connections to Presbyterian Church circles, family ties such as these provided the young Scott with a number of advantageous connections to people of influence in government, academia, and the military, and generally equipped him with an entrée into good society that was to serve him well throughout his life. Len’s grandmother Sarah Bache was the great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin. She was also a niece of Caspar Wistar, an anatomist and paleontologist who served for many years as president of the American Philosophical Society. His grandfather’s second wife came from one of New Jersey’s leading families, the Stocktons, and was a cousin of Commodore Robert F. Stockton. The Stockton family home, known since colonial times as Morven, was one of the area’s most distinguished old houses. When Lord Cornwallis’s troops occupied Princeton, the general took it as his headquarters.4
Most significant for Scott’s career, however, was the patronage of his step-grandmother’s brother, Major General David Hunter, a friend of both Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. It was at his grandmother’s instigation that Uncle David secured an appointment for Hugh Lenox Scott to West Point from President Grant.5
Uncle David accompanied Len Scott when he went up to West Point in the spring of 1871, introducing him to the superintendent and commandant of cadets as well as his many other acquaintances at the academy from which he himself had graduated a half-century earlier. Finally, he entrusted the young man to two sons of old army friends, one of whom was President Grant’s son Fred.6
Hugh Lenox Scott’s army career—both in the West in the 1880s and 1890s and later in Cuba and the Philippines—was notable for the ethnographic work he carried out among the various peoples the U.S. Army sent him to police and superintend, to pacify and subjugate, and to recruit to aid the army in its work: Indians, Moros, and Cubans. The work had a clear military purpose and application, but it was also furthered by a dogged scholarly inclination. On the strength of his interest and proficiency in native languages and seeming affinity for “Indian ways,” seasoned frontier campaigners, including Generals Sheridan, Miles, Merritt, and Ruger, sought his advice and allowed him a degree of autonomy he relished—all while he was still a lieutenant of cavalry. When he was seconded to the Bureau of Ethnology to write a book on sign language, even Colonel John Wesley Powell deferred to his expertise in the subject. The work in military ethnography he undertook as a commander of Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche scouts in the 1880s and 1890s also provided the basis for the kind of diplomacy he pursued with other farther-flung “primitive peoples” on behalf of the United States.
As a student at West Point in the early 1870s, however, Scott showed few signs of the scholar he would become. Perhaps it was more the case that the curriculum offered a limited scope for the development of his particular scholarly potential. In Scott’s day, the West Point curriculum concentrated on engineering, law, ordnance, and gunnery. To this was added some instruction in drawing, mathematics, chemistry, and language studies (Spanish, French, and German). The predominant method of instruction was recitation. After their first year, cadets were ranked in classes according to their performance on the previous year’s exams, and attended recitations in the various subjects throughout the week.7 In the winter, after recitations were over, the cadets practiced boxing, fencing, and dancing with one another to improve their technique; in the summers they spent the time in outdoor drill and swimming in the river at night. Scott was a strong swimmer who once saved a classmate from drowning on a return swim across the Hudson.8
In his second year, Scott was caught hazing a first-year plebe and was suspended for it and ordered to join the next lower class. Although forbidden at West Point, the practice of hazing was a time-honored and well-entrenched tradition. Scott was sanctioned for ordering a new man to walk with his palms facing forward with pinky fingers on the crease of his pantaloons in compliance with the drill regulations, and then catching his wrist to enforce his oral orders in the matter. Although such hazing (and worse) was common at the academy, Scott became the only member of his class to be “sent down” for it.9
In late January of his fifth and final year, Scott wrote to his mother apologizing for having missed his customary weekly letter, noting that he had been “more pressed for time” than he had expected as a result of his examinations. The rest of the letter gave a run-down on exams and resulting rankings in various subjects. He reported poor performance in his law exam in which he had been confronted with a question on “General Orders No. 100,” which he had neglected to study, as he told his mother, because he had understood it would not be included on the exam. “Consequently, I didn’t do very well,” he wrote. The letter went on to detail his class standing in other exams: in Ordnance he had come thirty-seventh and had “lost about 9 files in Engineering.”10
One implication of his exam results, as Scott saw it, was that he was unlikely to attain a commission in a white regiment. Scott preferred a white regiment over a black, but above all he had his heart set on the cavalry. There were thirty five vacancies in white regiments, as he explained to his mother when she wrote to him in May expressing her concerns about his hopes for joining the Tenth Cavalry, one of the four African American regiments (two cavalry, two infantry) that had been organized following the Civil War. In apparent response to some strategies she had suggested—probably involving Uncle David—for securing a desirable place in a white regiment, he wrote, “The rest of your letter was just so much energy wasted. I shall come out 39 or 40 (of 48). So I must either take Nigger horse or Nig. foot & I infinitely prefer the horse.”11 While echoing the prejudice that prevailed among his classmates against serving with a black regiment, Scott tried to reassure his mother by telling her that he had spoken with several officers including Colonel Beaumont and Lieutenant Morton Stretch, one of his tactical officers, both of whom had served at posts with the black cavalry units, and that both had told him that “they [were] as good as any in the service.”12
When they were small boys growing up in Kentucky, Mary Hodge Scott had told her sons frightening stories of the slave uprisings of the previous century in Haiti and Santo Domingo. These cautionary tales communicated a widespread fear among whites that they were vulnerable to the same fate at the hands of their slaves unless they kept them in check. Mrs. Scott retained this antipathy toward blacks and was opposed to the idea of her son’s association with a colored regiment. Scott responded to her concerns by pointing out that he would not “have near as much to do with them personally as you would with a black cook.”13 In fact, the Hodge family’s servants tended to be mostly Irish, black servants in Princeton being “not quite the thing” among their social set.14
In his determination to have nothing to do personally with black troops, Scott was typical of his generation of white army officers. This attitude was reinforced by army policy and traditions at the academy. The post–Civil War army was thoroughly racially segregated and remained so until 1948. Men of African descent—both enslaved and free—had fought in all the nation’s wars, of course, but they had been accepted by the white officer corps and the country’s leaders only reluctantly and never fully integrated into the overall structure of the army. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, blacks responded to the call for volunteers in large numbers, rushing to recruiting stations. Initially, the idea of black troops was rejected by both the civilian and military leadership. It took two years of petitioning Congress, the president, and municipal governments as
