One trait, I think, was very remarkable in our family—the respect and courtesy manifested toward each other. I never received a reproof or heard an impatient word from either of my brothers. They always displayed toward each other and my mother and myself, the same courtesy they would show to a commanding officer. The petting and love I received was enough to have spoiled me for life for contact with the world.
In the case of William, at least, the spirit of courtesy would not appear to have been so overwhelming as to prevent an occasional exuberance of spirits, an instance of which is told of in a letter from Mrs. Julia G. Horton of Buffalo, cited by Mrs. Edwards as follows:[4]
[4] Ibid, p. 38.
Will was never happier than when playing some joke upon one of his elder brothers. One summer evening I accompanied his brother Alonzo (Allie, as we used to call him) "to the mill-pond," upon his invitation to take a row in a forlorn old scow which was much patronized by the young people for what they considered delightful trips over the smooth pond. When we reached the bank we found that some one had untied the boat and set it adrift. No other boat was to be had and so we sat down on a log, wondering if some one had tricked us out of our row. Soon we heard a wild whoop in the distance and saw Master Will waving an oar and shouting to us: "Next time you want to row, don't forget to ask your friends."
Mrs. Horton also tells an anecdote of how the future commander followed her and one of his brothers to a prayer-meeting, seating himself behind them and singing improvised personalities instead of the approved words of the hymns that were being sung by the worshippers, so that he was discovered by a church official and led out of the congregation in disgrace. There are other like narratives surviving among the relatives and acquaintances of the Cushings, but none of them throw additional light upon the young men in whom we are at this time most interested. With Milton, the eldest, tradition has not seemed to busy itself. He was not a native of Wisconsin; and it may be enough to say here that in due time he became a paymaster in the Union navy, receiving promotion, until he was retired for disability, as paymaster of the fleet then in the Mediterranean, and died January 1, 1886. He married, but left no issue.
Of the younger lads, Howard appears to have been endowed with an unusual aspiration for independence of action, so that at fourteen years of age he took the position of "devil" in the office of The Censor, in his home village of Fredonia. As soon as he had obtained enough of the technique of the trade to imagine himself able to hold his own among strangers, he went to Boston, where flourished the aristocratic relatives of his mother. Here he continued his labors at the press and in the composing room until affected with some illness that made him homesick as well, upon which he returned to Fredonia to recover under his mother's ministrations. When that result was attained he started for Chicago, memories of which progressive town doubtless had haunted him all through his sojourn in the East.
He had left Chicago before he was ten years old. The Cushing traits of character were shared by him in such measure, however, as to make it reasonably certain that he was remembered affectionately by former acquaintances, and the road towards independence was doubtless made as easy for him as it could be made with a youth whose dread of being under personal obligations to his friends was in any instance hard to overcome. A situation as typesetter was given him in the office of The Farmer's Advocate, and in that capacity and place he worked until his enlistment in 1862 as a private soldier in an Illinois volunteer artillery regiment.