A man out of time with his times makes for instability. One moment Custer would show skill, judgment, loyalty, selflessness, courage, and love; the next he would veer into self-indulgence, impulsivity, sarcasm, self-justification, lies, even betrayal. This is true to some extent of most people, but Custer would pivot with stunning speed, lunging from one extreme to another, often in public.
The popular imagination today sees him as arrogant in his flamboyance—a Glory-Hunter, to cite the title of an influential biography. But his dramatic self-regard flowed in large part from deep insecurity. He never stopped trying to escape obscurity. His blacksmith father, Emmanuel Custer, reared him in a stern evangelical Christianity. Much has been written of Emmanuel’s playfulness with his sons, but more should be made of his fixed opinions and glowering judgment. He expected Armstrong, as he called his oldest son, to undergo conversion, and implored him to submit to divine authority. Custer’s family whispered to him eternally about his soul.
Fleeing obscurity, dreading condemnation, craving approval, he went toward whatever might distinguish him from the crowd, to better appeal to the crowd. Custer imagined a self and sought to make others believe it. What has confused observers is the fact that his ability was real, his courage genuine. The axiom that a big show hides a hollow man does not apply to Custer. The truth is much more complex. He worked to present himself as the man he wished to be—but the effort could make him brittle and defensive. His long practice of conjuring a Custer for public view helped him attract girls and women; he lured them with his living portrait of the reckless hero. But even after he finally won his bride, Libbie, he never felt entirely at ease in marriage. He encountered modernity in a series of trials—some of them in actual courts—and lost. Again and again he saved himself with his gift for fighting. He finally failed at that, too.
From a twenty-first-century perspective, Custer’s contradictions make him morally perplexing at best, abhorrent at worst. Many identify him as a willing perpetrator of genocide against American Indians. His admirers note that he didn’t make policy, but executed it; if he had died in 1865, another would have carried out the same missions in the West. This is true, though he was responsible for his own decisions and beliefs. He acted out of principle at times and self-interest at others; he believed in the rights of some, but not all, despite a new chorus for equality.
He’s a tricky subject for a biographer. For me, he calls to mind chapter five of the Gospel According to Mark. It tells how Jesus encountered a man possessed by demons, who said to him, “My name is Legion: for we are many.” With this transposition of singular and plural pronouns, Legion identifies with his evil spirits, and even speaks on their behalf. “And he besought him [Jesus] much that he would not send them away out of the country. Now there was nigh unto the mountains a great herd of swine feeding. And all the devils besought him, saying, Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them. And forthwith Jesus gave them leave.” Rather than cast the demons into hell, Christ takes pity on them.
Theologically it is a confusing passage, blurring the boundary between good and evil. In literary terms, it is a piece of pure wisdom. A biographer must sympathize with demons. We cannot be separated from our devils; they define us as much as our goodness and grace. That does not mean we should ignore them or apologize for them—they are still demons, after all. But they are integral to our existence.
Custer’s demons were his own, but also his contemporaries’, and ours as well. So were his angels. His achievements shaped our past and present, as did his failings. To reduce them all into his final failure—catastrophic though it was—is to turn away from ourselves, to refuse to see the worst in American history or how hard it was to achieve the best. In his own bedeviled way, he confronted questions still asked in the twenty-first century: What do equality and humanity mean? Is there room for the individual in an organizational society? When does individuality become mere selfishness? How can a minority’s distinctiveness and autonomy survive amid a mass-market, globalized culture? How to cope with a time of dramatic change? Does the hero still live?
The violence that suffused his life shadows ours. The ambivalence of his contemporaries is our ambivalence—toward our time as well as theirs. Custer’s story begins with its ending, and it never ends.
Part One
* * *
RISE
1839–1865
I am as full of mischief as ever.
—George Armstrong Custer, November 13, 1858
Custer—the light-hearted and gallant fellow, I cannot mention his name without swimming eyes!
—Morris Schaff, The Spirit of Old West Point
The great difficulty is that he is too clever for his own good.
—Tully McCrea, January 19, 1861
I saw him plunge his saber into the belly of a rebel who was trying to kill him. You can guess how bravely soldiers fight for such a general.
—Victor Comte, July 16, 1863
Generalship is bad for people.
—John Keegan, The Mask of Command
One
* * *
THE ACCUSED
GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER’S GUILT was never in doubt. The question was how harshly he should be condemned for being Custer.
His trial began on the morning of July 5, 1861, at the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York. The designated court-martial room was in the academic building, a stone, neoclassical structure, three stories high and striped with red sandstone pilasters, with a clock tower rising from its northwest corner. The trial chamber occupied the center of the building, along with the gymnasium, and shared the first floor with the Chemical Department in the south wing and the Fencing Department in the north.1
Custer entered the room before ten o’clock on July 5. He came without counsel. He wore the gray, single-breasted uniform of a cadet: brass buttons in rows of three across the chest, each row linked by a dark line of embroidery, stacked and widening like a fan from waist to clavicle; and a white collar folded over the rim of gray wool at the neck. Dark piping ran down the outside of his gray pant legs above black shoes. The boy looked younger than his twenty-one years. His blond hair curled at the top when cut short, as it was now. He had clear blue eyes, a long nose with a bit of a bulb at the end, a rather narrow mouth with a pronounced lower lip. His ears stuck out. At seventeen he had already grown to nearly five feet ten inches. Even if he did not grow after entering the academy, he stood taller than the average man. But he was thin.
As Custer waited, eight of the officers who comprised the court listened as the minutes of the previous session were read. A ninth member arrived late. Custer was asked if he objected to any of the men sitting in judgment of him. He did not.2
The crime that brought him before the court amounted to little in itself. The military often held courts-martial for the kinds of minor offenses that would be handled administratively in centuries to come; conviction need not end an officer’s career. Yet this trial threatened Custer with serious trouble. It might deny him a part in a great civil war, the culmination of a long-brewing national crisis. A new president, Abraham Lincoln, had taken office; much of the slave-owning South had seceded and organized into the Confederate States of America. As Custer sat in the court chamber, a federal army faced a rebel army in northern Virginia. Everyone expected a great battle—today, tomorrow, next week—that would decide the fate of the Southern rebellion. And he might not see it.
The trial also presented a crisis in his understanding of himself. Custer had just graduated from the U.S. Military Academy, but his four years of professional education had not gone smoothly. Almost from the day of his arrival he had grated against the school’s regimentation, on a course toward the reckoning in this room. The court could only address the facts of a single violation. In a sense, though, it would pass institutional judgment on Custer’s character.
Maj. George Nauman presided. An 1823 graduate of West Point, he had fought in the Seminole War from 183
6 to 1838 and served in combat in the Mexican War. To reward his valor, this army without medals had promoted him to brevet lieutenant colonel. Brevets were honorary ranks; they formed a hierarchy of distinction parallel to the functional one, the organizational one. Soldiers treated brevets with enormous respect. Nauman led the court because his brevet predated the actual rank of lieutenant colonel held by William Hoffman.3
Hoffman, another West Point graduate, also had fought in a variety of conflicts: the Black Hawk War of 1832, the Seminole War, nine separate battles and skirmishes in Mexico, and an expedition against the Sioux in 1855.4 Most members of the court had led men under fire, and knew the necessity of discipline.
And yet, they did not serve as judges because of personal experience or merit. They represented the institution of the army. With the cherished exception of brevets, their professional identities were organizational. Service ranks were moored to specific posts in particular regiments; an officer was captain of the 1st Infantry, major of the 3rd Artillery. Men waited years for positions; Custer himself remained technically a cadet, despite having graduated from West Point, as he waited for an opening. Promotion often followed behind a funeral. At fifty-eight, Hoffman could hardly hope to become a full colonel, let alone a general.5 Their careers moved in grooves cut into the deep-laid stones of the permanent military establishment. They were Regular Army.
First Lt. Steven V. Benet, the judge advocate (the prosecutor), swore in the court and read the charges. First, “Neglect of Duty.” Custer, “being officer of the Guard, did fail to take the proper steps to suppress a quarrel between two Cadets near the Guard Tent, in his presence. This at Camp Anderson, West Point, N.Y., on or about the evening of the 29th day of June 1861.” Second, “Conduct to the prejudice of good order and Military discipline,” in that Custer “did give countenance to a quarrel between two cadets near the Guard tent, in his presence, by saying, ‘Let there be a fair fight,’ or words to that effect.”
The accused pleaded guilty. Then he called witnesses.6
Custer did not challenge the facts of the charges, but hoped to minimize them. He questioned Cadet Peter M. Ryerson, a participant in the brawl, who testified, “The fight was not very serious. It was more of a scuffle. There was only two hard blows given, the first he struck me and the next I struck him. Neither of the parties received any serious injury.” Ryerson did not mention that his opponent, Cadet William Ludlow, was an upperclassman who had been harassing him. Ludlow had called him a coward, then hit him in the face. Ryerson had struck back. Someone had stepped in to hold Ryerson. It was then, apparently, that Custer had called for a fair fight. Ludlow confirmed Ryerson’s account, though he sneered at the underclassman’s prowess. “It was of no serious nature, and I received no injury whatever.”7
Custer called 1st Lt. William B. Hazen. “Since February I have occupied the position of Assistant Instructor of Tactics, Commanding a Company of Cadets,” Hazen said.
“Was the accused a member of the company you commanded, and if so, state what his character has been during that time?” Custer asked.
“Yes, he has been a member of the company commanded by me until recently—and so far as I have seen, his conduct has been perfectly proper, and I have only had occasion to report him for trivial offences [sic], until the one for which he is now on trial. And during that period he has held a good character for conduct.”
Hazen himself had arrested Custer for failing to halt the fight, and his testimony helped the prosecution. By contrasting the charges with Custer’s past “trivial offences,” he underscored the seriousness of the matter at hand. The army could hardly maintain discipline if soldiers engaged in fistfights, let alone with the approval of their superiors.
Custer had often been punished before, but it seems he never grasped the reason. Military discipline serves a larger purpose than merely balancing the scales of justice. It must teach soldiers to follow orders and abide by regulations, in order to create a force that responds to commands predictably and efficiently. Discipline is the very point of the institution, the difference between an army and a mob. But Custer never admitted the necessity of his own prosecution.
His fear of being left behind preoccupied him. His academy class had graduated a year ahead of schedule. His friends had all rushed to Washington, D.C., and Virginia, where they trained troops or joined regiments for the imminent battle. But he remained, detained, facing the consequences not merely of one misdeed, but of four years of transgressions.
He asked for a recess until the next morning to prepare a final statement to explain himself. The court granted his request and adjourned.8
—
ALL OF CUSTER’S ADULT LIFE beamed through the aperture of his first day at West Point. It was not a lens, focusing him on an inevitable fate, but a prism that established the spectrum of what might come. In the years ahead, he would face potentially fatal decisions—some avoidable, others less so—all of which resulted from where he went in early June 1857.9
He arrived alone. All the new cadets did. They boarded Hudson River steamboats at Albany docks, Manhattan slips, New Jersey piers, or the Erie Railway terminal at Piermont, New York. The boys wandered the decks between paddlewheels that churned in arching wooden cowlings, ordered drinks from the bar and dinner from the kitchen, chatted in parlors, or watched the Palisade shore from the rail.10
Seemingly every traveler described the Hudson Valley as stunningly beautiful—especially in the Highlands, the region above Stony Point, New York, about thirty miles north of the uppermost tip of Manhattan. “The passengers had gathered in the forward part of the boat,” Morris Schaff recalled, writing of his initial voyage to the academy, “and what a scene of river and mountains lay before us!” One observer claimed that it was impossible to “give an idea of the sudden darkening of the Hudson, and the underground effect of the sharp, overhanging mountains as you first sweep into the highlands.” Schaff remembered the thrill, as his boat steamed south, when “I heard a passenger nearby observe, ‘There is West Point!’ ”11
“I think it is the most romantic spot I ever saw,” Custer wrote on August 7, 1857.12 The features that had led the Continental Army to fortify the site during the Revolution—the narrowing of the great river, the perfect forty-acre plateau 160 feet above water level, shelved into the Highlands—made it a destination for tourists, artists, and foreign dignitaries.
Down on the river, the steamboat slowed to moor at a dock beneath the bluff. Would-be cadets boarded a horse-drawn omnibus or threw their bags into a cart and walked up a steep, winding road cut into the bluff. Finally they reached the Plain, rimmed by twin rows of elms. “The library, chapel, and turreted, four-storied, granite barracks [stood behind the trees] on the south side,” Schaff wrote, “and on the west the unpretentious quarters of the superintendent, the commandant, the professors and instructors, all overlooking the velvety sward of the extensive parade [ground].”13
George Strong arrived during a dress parade by the Corps of Cadets. He vividly remembered the “hundreds of eager spectators, the stirring music—and then the dead silence, broken at length by the voice of the officer in charge, as by seeming magic he put in motion the gray clockwork of the manual of arms.”14
When the clockwork stopped, Strong crossed the Plain to find his place, as Custer and all the others did. These bewildered boys ran from the adjutant’s office to the treasurer to the quartermaster, signing the register, handing over their money, receiving the few things allowed in the barracks: a dipper, tin washbasin, bucket, slate, stationery, mathematics book, and two blankets that reeked of lanolin gone foul, a scent that new cadets carried for weeks.15
Adjutant, quartermaster, barracks, blankets: these were elements of the official West Point, the formal institution that would test, grade, and assign demerits. But Custer found another West Point within the barracks—the internal hierarchy of boys that defined daily life far more than written rules, recitations, and professors.
This
inner reality was not entirely unofficial. In the barracks, the new arrivals met cadet officers—upperclassmen assigned to take charge of them. Schaff vividly recalled how older boys surrounded him on his arrival, shouting at him to take off his hat and stand at attention, in a torrent of derision and fury. A new cadet heard that he was lowest of all creatures. A “plebe.” An “animal.”16
The cadets’ world existed largely within the barracks, the academy’s largest building. Its stone walls rose four stories above the south side of the Plain, 360 feet long and 60 wide; a wing extended another 100 feet to one side. Completed in 1851, it resembled a Tudor manor house, or perhaps a hotel that had been converted into a fortress. Crenellated battlements of red sandstone ran across the top between the hexagonal towers at each corner. A large passageway called the sally port pierced the center at ground level; above it was a large hall with chapel-like windows reaching nearly three stories in height. Eight separate doors perforated the front; they opened into the eight divisions, or separate blocks of rooms. Altogether they contained 136 cadet rooms, with desks, chairs, and simple beds with thin mattresses. Gaslight was installed the year Custer arrived. He would shift from division to division over the years, but this building would be his home until he left West Point.17
He had to pass two examinations to be accepted, physical and academic. The latter merely tested basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. Even so, each plebe received a tutor and studied four hours each day. Even if Custer were to fail, he could try again in August. Real attrition would come later, when classes began.18
Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America Page 2