Custer went over and introduced himself. McLish jovially invited him to raise a glass, but Custer said he no longer drank. Dawn approached; the dance dwindled; McLish got drunk. His humor faded as he hung on the lieutenant and talked, swearing and cursing himself. Liquor had ruined him, he said. If not for that, he would have been rich. McLish asked about everyone in Monroe. Tell them you saw me, he said. Stay another day, he begged; come see my wife. Custer declined.
“Do not tell any of his or her relations in Monroe,” Custer wrote to Ann, after recounting the meeting, “as it would only pain them without doing any good.”20
—
THE YOUNG OFFICERS RODE OUT on horseback from Camp Cliffburn outside of Washington at 8:30 p.m. on February 20, 1862, with a mounted band trotting behind them. Custer rode beside a West Point classmate, Lt. Leroy Elbert of the 3rd U.S. Cavalry. “He is the best friend I ever had,” Custer wrote the next day. “I could not think more of him if he was my brother. He has no secrets from me and I none from him.”
They headed into the capital and rode to the home of Elbert’s girlfriend. The band played a tune and the young men sang below her window. Afterward the party rode from house to house, serenading young women they knew. At each place, the lady went to the door in her nightgown and invited them inside; the young men crowded in and accepted cups of beer or wine. They returned home at three in the morning.
Custer told his sister that “at no place did I drink a drop, not even of ale.” But his self-control did not reflect a new maturity when it came to women. Though Elbert had a sweetheart, he observed, “I am not blessed with such a treasure (?).” He urged Ann to give his love to Nellie Van Wormer and Mary Arnold, and added flirting instructions. He forgot Mariah—if he had ever mentioned her to his family in the first place.21
—
CUSTER LED THE LINE of horsemen at a slow trot, to keep their mounts rested until the last moment. Fifty troopers of the 5th U.S. Cavalry Regiment followed Custer, with a supporting company about 500 yards behind. Halfway to the rebels, now a quarter of a mile away, Custer gave the order to draw revolvers. He reined his horse over to the right of the line to get out of the way of his own men’s fire.
It was the middle of March 1862, near Manassas. The Confederates had remained there since their victory at Bull Run the year before. Now they were withdrawing south. The Union cavalry had followed to a point some eighteen miles beyond Manassas, where they encountered a line of men stationed behind a wall. These were pickets—outlying guards who kept watch on the enemy and screened their own army from reconnaissance. Orders had come to Custer’s regiment to drive in the pickets upon the main body of the Confederate army. Custer—still a junior officer, not a company commander—had volunteered to lead the attack.
He kicked his horse into a gallop and launched his men into a charge. It was all over in a few minutes. The rebels escaped to the far side of a ravine, where the cavalry could not easily follow, and opened fire. “The bullets rattled like hail,” Custer wrote to his parents. “Several whizzed close to my head.” He ordered a withdrawal.
Back in Union camp, he reported to Brig. Gen. George Stoneman, the army’s chief of cavalry—and to correspondents for the New York Tribune, New York Times, New York World, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He found it exhilarating to finally battle the enemy after trailing them for a week through cold, steady rain, without more than an hour of sleep on some nights or a single change of his wet, filthy uniform.22
The Confederate withdrawal and Union pursuit marked a change, but its nature remained a mystery. During Custer’s sick leave, the Union force had been reorganized as the Army of the Potomac, under the command of thirty-five-year-old Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan. He had trained, equipped, and supplied the army brilliantly, transforming it into a potent force. But he had done nothing with it.23
At first, it seemed as if Custer’s charge might presage a battle. Instead, he and his regiment were recalled to Alexandria. Discontent with McClellan’s inactivity had simmered for months in Congress and the press, especially among Republicans; now it came to a boil. On March 17, a motion to censure him only narrowly failed in the Senate.24 Even Custer’s father, Emmanuel, grew uncomfortable with the army’s passivity. No friend of Republicans, he wrote to his son, “If the object of the present war is to abolish slaveary [sic] I would say to all the soldiers that was opposed to that do [sic] throw down their arms and go home and let the abolitionist and the rebels fight it out among them selves [sic].” But, he said, “I have been looking for a General move of the army.”25
“I have more confidence in him [McClellan] than any man living,” Custer wrote back. “I am willing to forsake everything and follow him to the ends of the earth and lay down my life for him if necessary. He is here now. I wish you could see him. Everyone officer & privates worship him. I would fight anyone who would say anything against him.”26
To show that McClellan was “in earnest,” he enclosed a copy of his orders, apparently those of March 14, printed and distributed widely to the troops. “SOLDIERS OF THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC!” the general declared. “For a long time I have kept you inactive, but not without a purpose.…The period of inaction has passed. I will bring you now face to face with the rebels, and only pray that God may defend the right. In whatever direction you may move, however strange my actions may appear to you, ever bear in mind that my fate is linked with yours, and that all I do is to bring you, where I know you wish to be—on the decisive battlefield.”27
—
“THE GREATEST EXPEDITION EVER FITTED OUT is now going South,” Custer wrote to his parents on March 26, 1862. He sat on a wharf in Alexandria, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. Tens of thousands of soldiers crowded the waterfront among countless crates, barrels, wagons, horses, mules, cannons, and other freight. Out on the river floated 113 steamers to carry the men and 276 sailing craft and barges to haul the animals, arms, and equipment. Here were fast sidewheel steamers that usually churned the Hudson or Long Island Sound, double-ended ferries from the Delaware and Raritan, not to mention ocean liners—all leased by the War Department. Gathered in a fleet in the Potomac and the upper reaches of Chesapeake Bay, they took turns nosing into the Alexandria wharves.
Bands played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Dixie” and steamboat whistles screeched as “the men marched up the gangplanks in steady procession, and steam derricks hoisted aboard wagons and guns and supplies and even artillery horses in slings,” writes the historian Stephen W. Sears. McClellan himself went aboard the Commodore, the handsome Long Island Sound steamer with first-class accommodations that had been constructed by (and named after) Cornelius Vanderbilt.28
The general and his staff embarked from the same dock where Custer sat writing to his parents. The young lieutenant boarded the humbler Adele Felicia, which steamed down the river the morning of March 28. Rumors of its destination ran through the boat. Custer had little to do in his cabin except to peer through his binocular field glass at abandoned Confederate batteries and at Mount Vernon. And he wrote letters, as he always did in spare moments. He asked his sister to give his regards to a list of friends from Monroe, and to tell them how busy he had been recently. “I wish you would tell Nellie Van [Wormer] the same thing because I do not want her to think that it is for want of care that I do not write to her. To tell you the truth I think a great deal of Nellie,” he wrote. “Give my love to Riley Emma & Aut [Ann’s children]. Tell them to be good children and if they never see me again they must never forget me.”29
He often wrote of the likelihood of his death. In a letter to his friend McCrea, he remarked that he had no idea where the army was headed, but if they went through as much fighting as he expected, “he would probably be in ‘Kingdom Come.’ ” He told his parents that to die for his country would be an honor, “but I anticipate no such result. I think and feel confident that I will go through this war, particularly the coming struggle safely and satisfactorily and that at its close I
will return to you all.” He scoffed at his mother’s premonitions, but he trusted his own.30
The rented armada anchored off Fort Monroe, a stone-walled citadel at the tip of a peninsula extending east and southeast from Richmond, between the James River to the south and the York to the north. The ensuing campaign would recast it as the Peninsula. Fort Monroe had remained in Union hands, a formidable but isolated outpost that made a convenient staging point for a drive on the rebel capital.
The forest of coal-fired smokestacks and slant-sailed schooner masts jostled as one boat after another moored at the fort’s dock and disgorged men, horses, and freight. It took nearly three weeks to transport the entire army: 121,500 men, 1,592 animals, 1,224 vehicles, 44 batteries of artillery, and vast quantities of supplies and equipment.31
Like a wet dog emerging from the ocean, the Army of the Potomac shook itself out and trampled a place to lie down outside the fortress walls. Generally speaking, companies of up to 100 men, led by captains, assembled ten to a regiment (later twelve for cavalry regiments), led by a colonel; four regiments to a brigade, led by a brigadier general; three brigades to a division, led by a brigadier or major general; and three divisions to a corps, led by a major general. This was a host of infantry, armed with rifled muskets. Present in smaller numbers were artillerymen, manning four to six cannons in each battery; cavalry, dispersed among the various infantry divisions for scouting and picket duties; as well as engineers, quartermasters, and others.32
“Our camp here is really a pretty one,” wrote the New York artilleryman Charles Wainwright, “clean white little shelter tents sparkling amidst the young green of the woods for the leaves are just beginning to come out. At night especially when the hundreds of camp fires are lighted the scene more resembles a fairly land or a grand picnic than what one would expect of grim war.”33
Wainwright’s primary impression was of size—size and effort. If the Army of the Potomac were a city, it would be the ninth largest in the United States, ahead of Chicago and just behind St. Louis. Each horse and man was deliberately placed here, assigned a location, fed, sheltered, and clothed. Ammunition was stockpiled and distributed, arms cared for, fortifications dug, waste eliminated. It was a vast machine in motion.
But a blind machine. General McClellan scarcely knew where his own army was, let alone the enemy’s. “No one knew the country,” wrote François, Prince de Joinville, a French nobleman who served unofficially on McClellan’s staff; “the maps were so defective that they were useless.” He found this “total ignorance” to be rather remarkable. “We were here twenty-four miles from Yorktown [the town that anchored the Confederate line], and we could not learn what works the enemy had thrown up, nor what his force was within them.”34
Second Lt. Custer received orders to report to the topographical engineers, the unit that drew maps. If he imagined that he would quietly work at a drafting table, he was mistaken. Quite the opposite: he would scout ahead of the main body of the army in a nearly continual reconnaissance. The topographical engineers were to sneak through woods and swamps, “sketching by the eye and the compass provisional maps, which were photographed at headquarters for the use of the Generals,” Joinville noted. Observing the enemy would now be Custer’s duty.35
—
THE SCOUTING PARTY HALTED IN THE WOODS some distance in front of the Union line. Custer and the others dismounted and tied up their horses in the brush, where they would not be noticed by the enemy. Their assignment was to find a Confederate gun emplacement somewhere nearby. On hands and knees they crawled through the mud and underbrush of the Peninsula forest, hoping to escape notice. A black man—an escaped slave—led them forward. At the edge of a clearing below a hill, he stopped. The guns are just over the crest, he said. Most of the detachment waited there in the tree line as Custer, another officer, and the guide crawled up the slope to the smoldering ruins of a house, its two chimneys still jutting out of the embers. Custer and his colleague stood up behind one of the chimneys and peered through their field glasses at the Confederate battery, just 500 yards away. Just as they finished their observations, the Confederates spotted them. Custer saw a cannon swivel toward them and fire.
Artillery in the Civil War fired a variety of munitions. For example, there was solid shot—a heavy metal ball that would skip across the ground with enough force to dismember a horse. There was canister (commonly known as grapeshot), a short-range round consisting of a tin can that held many metal balls; they sprayed upon leaving the muzzle, turning a cannon into a giant shotgun. And there was shell. This consisted of a gunpowder charge inside a metal casing, detonated by a fuse; the fuse was cut to different lengths according to the distance to the target.
What the Confederates fired was a shell. At the blast of flame and smoke from the cannon muzzle, Custer and his comrade fell facedown in the mud. The round hummed over their heads, flying on to the edge of the woods. It exploded over the party that had remained behind, where it was supposed to be safe. Metal fragments strafed the soldiers below. One man was hit by a hot, jagged shard that slashed through wool, skin, muscle, and bone, tearing off his arm. Custer, protected from harm by going to the most exposed and dangerous place, scrambled to his feet and ran.36
—
THE BURIAL PARTY TUCKED THEIR SPADES into the ground under the shade of a stand of trees, hollowing out shallow grave after shallow grave. When Custer rode up on the scene, he decided to swing out of his saddle and watch. The detail laid bodies next to their holes, then lowered them into the ground without coffins. Custer counted about 200 dead, killed in a clash with the rebels.
He walked over to a lifeless boy lying next to his grave. “I had never seen him before,” he wrote to his sister. “I was struck by his youthful appearance, together with something handsome about his face which even death had not removed.” He turned to the other soldiers who stood watching and asked if anyone knew the young man. “They all spoke highly of him and informed me that he had married a beautiful girl a few days previous to his leaving home for the war. I at once thought of the severe shock that awaits her.” She would want a memento, he thought. “I took out my knife and stooped down to cut open his pockets. From them I took a knife and a ring. I then cut a lock of his hair off and gave them all to one of his comrades who was from the same town.”37
On behalf of this stranger, Custer carried out a ritual that became common in the Civil War. It was an attempt to provide a battlefield version of the Good Death, as the historian Drew Gilpin Faust writes in her seminal This Republic of Suffering: “a substitute for the traditional stylized deathbed performance,” an attempt to “make it possible for men—and their loved ones—to believe they had died well.” Custer acted on his own behalf, too. When he singled out a rare still-handsome corpse, he reinforced the illusion that his would be a Good Death as well, his body intact, his looks preserved, his family informed of his valor. Or perhaps the ritual allowed him to more easily forget the wider field of young soldiers, slaughtered in an attack that served no purpose.38
He mounted his horse and rode to find the 7th Michigan Infantry Regiment, which had been organized in Monroe. He ran into a group of its officers, many of them his old friends. He joined their circle on the ground, where they ate crackers and drank tea and laughed. One of his Monroe friends “told me he enjoyed the present life and had better health than he ever had before.” The war made them happy.39
—
THE SILENCE STRUCK him most, the noiselessness of being lifted to heaven. There was none of the yammering of the machinery of modernity—the familiar chuffing and thrashing of the steamboat, the clacking and shrieking train, the brattle of telegraph clicks. Once the hydrogen-producing apparatus finished inflating the great diaphanous membrane, the balloon lifted into the air without a sound.40
Custer occupied a shallow basket, only two feet high, attached to the swollen bag above him by cables that were looped by a metal band at chest height. Professor Thaddeus Lowe, chief aeronaut of
the Balloon Corps, crammed into the small vehicle beside him. Not yet thirty, with a walrus mustache and a history of adventure aloft, Lowe had pioneered something new in military history: aerial observation. But the army wanted a professional to go up in Lowe’s craft, the Intrepid, to take a look at the Confederate line. Custer got the job.41
Custer had never imagined that he might someday fly. He later admitted that he was reluctant, if not terrified. At first he remained seated as low as he could get in the little basket as men’s heads and then rooftops and then treetops sank below him, as he rose 1,000 feet in the air. He asked if the flimsy-looking basket could possibly be safe. Lowe leaped up and down violently. Custer did not ask again.
Then he noticed the view—the forested, wrinkle-edged Peninsula, extending northwest between the wide James and York rivers. He identified the markers of the Confederate line—Warwick Creek on the left, dammed in several places to turn it into a chain of impassable lakes, and Yorktown on the right, on the shore of the York. The wind repeatedly caught the balloon and knocked it about; but when it died down, “with the assistance of a good field glass,” he recalled, he could “catch glimpses of canvas through the openings in the forest.…Here and there the dim outline of an earthwork could be seen more than half concealed by the trees…while men in considerable numbers were standing in and around the entrenchments, often collected in groups, intently observing the balloon.”
The young man sketched the enemy line and camps as best he could. A thought occurred to him: Why not go up at night? Campfires would be visible through the forest canopy. So he came down, delivered his map, and went up alone after dark. But in late April tidewater Virginia was already warm, and the rebels lit few fires. He thought of a new approach. Now a veteran balloonist, he went aloft just before dawn, when fires were lit to cook breakfast. This time he saw the encampments precisely, and made an estimate of Confederate strength.42
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