ALSO BY T. J. STILES
The First Tycoon:
The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
Jesse James:
Last Rebel of the Civil War
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2015 by T. J. Stiles
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: The New York Public Library: Excerpts from Marguerite Merington papers from the Manuscripts and Archives Division. Reprinted by permission of The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. · Shirley A. Leckie: Excerpts from Elizabeth Bacon Custer and the Making of a Myth by Shirley A. Leckie. Reprinted by permission of the author. · Yale University Press: Excerpts from Life in Custer’s Cavalry, edited by Robert M. Utley. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stiles, T. J.
Custer’s trials : a life on the frontier of a new America / T. J. Stiles.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 9780307592644 (hardcover) — ISBN 9781101875841 (eBook)
1. Custer, George A. (George Armstrong), 1839–1876. 2. Generals— United States—Biography. 3. United States. Army—Biography. 4. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865. 5. Little Bighorn, Battle of the, Mont., 1876. 6. Indians of North America—Wars—Great Plain. I. Title.
E467.1.C99S76 2015 973.82092—dc23 [B] 2015002070
Cover photograph courtesy the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Cover design by Oliver Munday
Maps by Mapping Specialists
v4.1
a
To my parents,
Dr. Clifford and Carol Stiles,
to my late mentor,
Richard Maxwell Brown,
and most of all
to my daughter,
Sasha
And how much he suffered merely to appear in his own eyes what he wished to be!
—LEO TOLSTOY, “The Raid”
Contents
Cover
Also by T. J. Stiles
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Preface
Part One
RISE 1839–1865
1 The Accused
2 The Observer
3 The Protégé
4 The Prodigy
5 The Women
6 The General
7 The Hero
8 The Victor
Part Two
FALL 1865–1876
9 The Executioner
10 The Politician
11 The Fallen
12 The Indian Killer
13 The Financier
14 The Writer
15 The Enemy
16 The Accuser
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Primary Source Bibliography
Index
A Note About the Author
Illustrations
Illustrations
George Armstrong Custer as a Cadet
Parade on Park Row, New York, 1860
A Staff Officers’ Picnic on the Peninsula
Observation Balloon
General George B. McClellan and Mary Ellen McClellan
Both Sides and the Cause
Abraham Lincoln with General McClellan and Staff
Custer and General Alfred Pleasonton
The Battle of Aldie
Isaac Christiancy
Zachariah Chandler
Custer as a General, with General Pleasonton
Battle of Falling Waters
General J. E. B. Stuart
Elizabeth Bacon
George Armstrong and Elizabeth Bacon Custer
Eliza Brown with the Custers
Custer on the Cover of Harper’s Weekly
General Ulysses S. Grant
General Philip H. Sheridan and His Generals
Custer’s Charge at Winchester
The Burning
Custer’s Salute
Custer Presents Flags Captured at Cedar Creek
The Cold Harbor Dead
Custer’s Shenandoah Headquarters
Full-Length Portrait
The Custers and Brother Tom Custer
The Flag of Truce, Appomattox Court House
The Grand Review
Custer’s Headquarters in Austin, Texas, 1865
President Andrew Johnson
1866 Campaign Poster for Hiester Clymer (1)
1866 Campaign Poster for Hiester Clymer (2)
Laurence Barrett
Fort Leavenworth, Kansas
Railroad Construction and Wagon Trains
General Winfield Scott Hancock
General William T. Sherman
Pawnee Killer
The Kidder Massacre
The Medicine Lodge Council
Custer in the Washita Campaign
Camp Supply
Washita
Return with the Prisoners
Three Hostages
A Sutler’s Store
A Buffalo Hunt
The Trial of President Andrew Johnson
President Ulysses S. Grant
George Armstrong Custer
The Ku Klux Klan
Grant Signs the Ku Klux Klan Act
Colonel David S. Stanley
Bloody Knife
Sitting Bull
Lakota Lodges
The Panic of 1873
Custer’s Grizzly
At Home at Fort Abraham Lincoln
The Indian Frauds
Hiester Clymer
The Belknap Scandal
General Alfred Terry
Captain Frederick Benteen
Major Marcus Reno
Custer in Dress Uniform, 1876
The Burial
Maps
Custer’s America
Peninsula Campaign, 1862
Custer’s Civil War
Yellow Tavern, May 11, 1864
Trevilian Station, June 11, 1864
Third Winchester, September 19, 1864
Southern Plains
Northern Plains
Little Bighorn, June 25–26, 1876
Preface
THE STORY BEGINS WITH its ending. On June 25, 1876, George Armstrong Custer led the 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment to the Little Bighorn River in the Montana Territory, where Lakota and Northern Cheyenne warriors surrounded him and a detachment of more than 200 troops and slaughtered them to a man. Renowned as Custer’s Last Stand, it was the greatest defeat inflicted upon the U.S. Army in the late-nineteenth-century Indian wars. Like John Hancock’s signing of the Declaration of Independence, it is the one fact about the man that lives in American memory.
For generations of writers about Custer, death defined his life. Since none of the soldiers who accompanied him on his final ride lived to tell about it, his annihilation has been a great mystery. The mechanics of his last battle have been analyzed and supposed in extreme detail in order to solve it. Every accident in his life, every choice, every personality t
rait has been interpreted in terms of how it led here. In most books he appears as a man on the march to the Little Bighorn, or a glorified corpse thereafter.
Death has defined his significance as well. His personal end brought to a climax a defining narrative of American mythology and American guilt: the conquest and dispossession of the native peoples of this continent. His personal moral character has stood in for the moral character of the United States. As the cultural consensus has shifted, the image of Custer in national memory has changed from champion of civilization, who died to tame the savage wilderness, to arrogant murderer and land thief. “Custer has been shorthand for hubris, ignorance, and had-it-coming,” Timothy Egan observed in the New York Times on November 30, 2012, “but in earlier decades Custer was a hero.”
Well said—though Egan might have specified hubris with regard to American Indians, a hero on the Great Plains. For posterity, Custer’s death seals him into the single role of frontier soldier. We remember him as a man of one region, the West, and one conflict, the Indian wars. The judicious Robert M. Utley devoted all but twenty of the 209 pages of narrative in his seminal biography, Cavalier in Buckskin, to the frontier years.
That’s fair enough. The Little Bighorn was a landmark event, and Custer played a high-profile role in Western history. And much of the writing about him has been very good, whether by Utley, Evan Connell, Richard Slotkin, Paul Hutton, Shirley Leckie, Jeffry Wert, Louise Barnett, or others. I also greatly respect the researchers with no other credentials than their passion who have uncovered a wealth of information. (Fascination with Custer is such a phenomenon that there is a fascination with the fascination, as seen in Michael Elliott’s fine book Custerology.) I did not write this book as a rebuttal, or because previous work is substandard.
Rather, I want to change the camera angle—to examine Custer’s life as it was lived, in order to better grasp the man, his times, and his larger meaning. If we can escape the overshadowing preoccupation with his death, a critical fact stands out: he captured the American imagination long before the Little Bighorn, even before he went west. That means he had a significance independent of his demise. But mere chronological balance is not enough. Other, worthy books emphasize his earlier role in the Civil War, when he first won national attention. I am telling his story in a particular light, with a particular sense of context. The result, I hope, is not simply an addition to a familiar story—he was famous for this as well as for that—but something larger and more comprehensive. I want to explain why his celebrity, and notoriety, spanned both the Civil War and his years on the frontier, resting on neither exclusively but incorporating both.
Something was going on in the country that included the Civil War, westward expansion, and much more. Something about the man resonated with Americans as they experienced it. He caught the public imagination because his life spoke to that something.
The search for this unifying theme is complicated by the astonishing number of roles he played. How do we reconcile the buckskin-clad outdoorsman and Indian fighter with the Midwesterner, college graduate, and professional writer? Or the battlefield emancipator with the avowed white supremacist? The widely admired military professional with the malefactor who was court-martialed twice in six years? The loyal friend, loving brother and son, and devoted husband, with the oversensitive, sarcastic gambler who craved attention and intrigued with other women? Then there was the entrepreneur, political partisan, and urbane theater lover. How do we integrate all these conflicting parts?
It is not news that he was contradictory. But we have to grasp the nature of his contradictions to see the man in his totality and understand his significance for the public of his day. Getting at them requires a fresh look at the intimate details of his life, but also a new sense of context. We must see him less in terms of place than of time.
George Armstrong Custer lived on a chronological frontier even more than a geographical one. He and his contemporaries experienced the greatest wave of change ever to strike American society, a tsunami that ripped out and reordered everything. This is what his life spoke to, wherever he went.
This moment is when the modern came. The emerging new order was industrial, corporate, scientific, and legal—diminishing the individualistic, the romantic, and the heroic in American culture. The rise of impersonal institutions, governmental bureaucracies, and national markets began to overshadow everything local, traditional, and customary, imposing organization, rationalization, standardization, and centralization.
Such a brief description sounds overly schematic, because it is. America has never been locked into a steady state, but has always been dynamic. Even before Custer’s birth the public embraced the rowdy marketplace, celebrating its virtues of competition and entrepreneurship as the spirit of “go-ahead.” Monetary transactions already edged in among traditional relationships of Southern master and slave or the Hudson Valley gentry and his tenant farmers. Nepotism and personal patronage would linger long after the rise of the corporation and professionalization. A dust cloud obscures any historical movement; clear distinctions blur on close inspection.
Yet Custer’s contemporaries felt themselves caught in a great transformation. The antebellum economy of personal relationships, of independent merchants, artisans, and farmers, had provided the basis for Jacksonian laissez-faire populism and the Republicans’ Free Labor philosophy. During Custer’s adult life, Americans saw themselves falling under the shadow of capital, concentrated in gigantic corporations. Before the war, working for hire was seen as only a temporary stage on the way to working for oneself. By 1868, writes the historian Heather Cox Richardson, the “ideal of self-sufficiency” began to give way to the reality of “a permanent class of wage earners.”1 The nation’s informal, improvised quality (Lincoln was a self-taught lawyer) faded as large institutions and expanded government bureaucracies rationalized their operations and professionalized their staff. Inherited distinctions, particularly the distinction of race, were dismantled in law if not in effect, replaced with at least technical equality. Taken together, all this looks like the birth of modernity.2
This wave of change defies the impulse to tell a story of good versus evil. The Civil War slaughtered three-quarters of a million people and devastated much of the South, yet it freed four million slaves and preserved the Union. The Indian wars crushed the independence of indigenous peoples, yet the central government acted out of similar motives as in the Civil War, asserting national unity and federal authority. The new corporate economy concentrated wealth and power, creating vast disparities, yet also brought development, individual mobility, and new opportunities. The media became national in scope, fostering a distinctively American literary culture; but the Civil War gave rise to a darker, more modern sensibility in intellectual circles.
Custer lived his entire adult life on the crest of this transformation—yet he was personally unreconciled to it. Of the many contradictions in his life and personality, this is the overarching theme: he never adapted to the very modernity he helped to create. His ambivalence toward his times mirrored the mixed feelings of the American people. Like so many of his fellow citizens, he celebrated old virtues even as he supplanted them, and thrilled to innovations even as he struggled with them.
His life intertwined the old and new from the beginning. He was the son of an artisan, a poor blacksmith, who championed the Jacksonian ideal of a producers’ republic of equal and independent white men. But Custer went to West Point, the first school of professional education in America, and entered the hierarchical Regular Army, the pioneering institution of rationalization and systemization. The Civil War, though, spawned a different army, reflecting antebellum American society. It gave him room to indulge his romantic, individualistic impulses, and allowed him to rise through connections as well as merit. Promoted to general at an astonishingly young age, he showed that he understood mass, industrialized warfare, yet anachronistically fought with a sword at the head of cavalry charges. He helped to
destroy slavery, and implemented emancipation and civil rights acts in Texas and Kentucky after the war. But he never accepted the equality of African Americans or the federal role in protecting civil rights. Indeed, race and politics largely defined his worldview—and he did not look forward to the nation we know today.
Custer battled American Indians ruthlessly, yet wrote that he would resist too were he one of them. He protected the advancing transcontinental railroads, bringing the business corporation and its industrial technology to the frontier, yet he affected the role of the rustic, individualistic frontiersman, wearing buckskin and escorting visiting dignitaries on hunting expeditions. His heroic style of leadership did not serve him well in peace, in an era that required managerial skill and tact.
Even when Custer tried to profit from the new America, he never quite mastered the times. He spent months on Wall Street, with alarming results. He plunged into politics, alienating much of the public. He became something of a public intellectual and popular writer, but his romanticism left him far from the advancing early modernists, such as Mark Twain or Ambrose Bierce.
In an era when women increasingly demanded equality, he married Libbie (Elizabeth) Bacon, an intelligent, highly educated woman. His biography is inevitably hers as well. She played a critical role in his career and did much to create his posthumous myth; yet she carefully cultivated a persona of vulnerable femininity, as society still expected of her. For many years the couple employed an escaped slave, Eliza Brown, to manage their household. She was a central figure in their lives, an independent, outspoken, and formidable young woman. The larger story of upended race relations played out in the privacy of their home, in the sometimes fraught relationship among these three.
Custer’s contradictions spoke to the millions of Americans who also failed to root themselves in the new world. They were anxious, uncertain, and divided. When they looked to Custer, though, his admirers saw the Boy General of the Civil War, the gallant soldier who fought like a medieval knight, the daring frontiersman. He seemed to represent the country’s youth as it slipped away, the nation as it had been and never would be again. His critics saw him as a sympathizer with slave owners and reactionaries, an egotistical tyrant of an officer who did not care for the equal dignity of his citizen soldiers. Custer became an icon because he embodied the times in a heightened, dramatic way. He was the exaggerated American.3
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