What Custer already knew—and most Union generals did not—was that McClellan had decided upon a “change of base.” Despite complete victory at Beaver Dam Creek (the Battle of Mechanicsville to the Confederates), McClellan believed that the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia numbered more than 200,000 men, roughly double his own force, enough to smash his supply line. So he elected to switch his base to the James River—to march his army across the Richmond front to the south side of the Peninsula. After a rearguard stand, the north bank of the Chickahominy would be abandoned, the remaining supplies destroyed, and the railroad given up to the enemy.
The truth was that he was allowing himself to be chased off by a smaller army, about 87,000 men to his 105,000. “Change of base” sounded like a step toward a renewed offensive, “yet in truth he was quitting his grand campaign, surrendering the initiative and giving up all hope of laying siege to Richmond from the line of the Chickahominy,” writes the historian Stephen Sears. Only the railroad could carry the siege guns that McClellan relied on; abandoning it, he abandoned the offensive.35
McClellan ordered Porter to pull V Corps back to the lines Barnard had laid out. Custer remained in the saddle all night as tens of thousands of troops marched and trains whistled and screeched in the darkness, hauling away supplies. The next day McClellan brooded in his headquarters tent south of the Chickahominy. The telegraph rattled with reports from the various corps commanders, especially Porter. At 2:30 p.m. the Confederates again attacked V Corps; the assaults grew heavier. “I am pressed hard, very hard,” Porter wired at 5 p.m. But McClellan feared that the rebels would advance out of Richmond and crush him in a pincer. He little realized that Robert E. Lee, now in command of Confederate forces, had taken a huge risk, sending 55,000 men against Porter’s reinforced 35,000, leaving only 27,000 rebels inside Richmond, where they put on a show of force to immobilize the 70,000 Union troops south of the river. McClellan ordered a mere two brigades, some 6,000 men, to march to Porter’s aid. He sent Custer to guide them. He himself remained at his desk as the crisis unfolded.36
The young captain had eaten little more than some hard bread crumbled into his coffee that morning, but he swung up into the saddle on his black horse and rode to find the reinforcements. He led them through the deepening afternoon, across the swaying Grapevine Bridge that sloshed just above the surface of the Chickahominy, into a meadow beyond. They ran into mobs of Union soldiers fleeing the enemy.
The line had broken. Porter’s corps was in full retreat. Brig. Gen. William H. French, commander of the reinforcing brigades, marched his troops up to the crest of the plateau that dominated the position. They opened fire on the advancing enemy, halting the onslaught. Custer’s own 5th Cavalry charged—without him, of course. Of two hundred enlisted men and seven officers who attacked, he wrote, “only one hundred and forty-five men and one officer returned unhurt.” One missing officer was a friend from West Point; only his horse came back, and “the saddle was covered with blood.”37
The enemy attack exhausted itself, but it had shattered the Union position irreparably. Custer spent another night on horseback, helping to get the walking wounded across the river as the V Corps abandoned the north bank. He rode among the clots of bandaged, bleeding men in the lantern-dotted darkness. The bridges would soon be destroyed, he said; they all would be captured if they did not hurry. We’re waiting for the ambulances, came a reply. “No ambulances are coming,” Custer said.
“Who says no ambulances are coming for us?” someone asked. Custer recognized the voice. It belonged to Julius Adams of Kentucky, a classmate and former roommate from West Point. Custer came over and told him that the battle was lost and they had to cross the river immediately. Adams replied that he was too badly wounded; he could neither walk nor ride. You’ll have to leave me behind, he said. “I told him I would not cross the river without him,” Custer wrote two weeks later. He swung to the ground, tied his horse to a tree, and ordered four unhurt men to help him break a gate off a nearby fence. They eased Adams onto the gate and carried him over the bridge and a couple of miles to Savage’s Station, as Custer rode alongside. Here the V Corps “train”—its herd of supply wagons—was gathered. Custer left Adams, assuming he would be carried along when the wagons moved out the next morning.
The next day Custer came back and found the train gone but Adams still there, alone. “I told him there was now no chance for him,” Custer wrote. “He must make up his mind to be taken prisoner. He received this announcement as became a soldier and asked for my little order book to write a few lines to his Mother and to his Sweet-heart.” Custer promised to transcribe the notes and mail them. He said good-bye.38
The Army of the Potomac’s rear guard repelled another Confederate attack, only to continue retreating. McClellan left behind a field hospital with some 2,500 wounded men at Savage’s Station, along with doctors who volunteered to remain. McClellan marched his army south, allowing his corps commanders to manage the battles of Glendale the next day and Malvern Hill the day after that—the final clash in what became known as the Seven Days’ Battles.39
“The success of the movement throughout was all that could be asked and much more than could reasonably be expected,” Custer wrote to his sister. But the “change of base,” or “flank movement,” as Custer called it, confused many of the men. They knew they had repelled every rebel attack except the one at Gaines’s Mill, yet after each victory they had retreated.40
McClellan had wrung defeat out of victories, at great cost to his men. “The thirty thousand men killed and wounded in the Seven Days’ equaled the number of casualties in all the battles in the Western theater—including Shiloh—during the first half of 1862,” writes the historian James M. McPherson. Two-thirds of those casualties were rebels, but the Union’s 10,000 meant grim suffering among survivors and in homes of the dead.41
“I lost several friends in the various engagements and lament their loss,” Custer wrote to his sister. “It is better to die an honored death than to live in dishonor.” These words should not be lightly dismissed. They came from a man who won respect for his courage, who did his utmost to save a badly wounded friend. “In those days Custer was simply a reckless, gallant boy, undeterred by fatigue, unconscious of fear,” McClellan later wrote; “but his head was always clear in danger, and he always brought me clear and intelligible reports of what he saw when under the heaviest fire.”
Yet even Custer must have known that “death before dishonor” was too neat a formula. Take his friend Adams, for example. There was no clean battlefield death for him, no glorious final moment with an enemy flag in his hand. He lingered, apparently shot through the chest. He either escaped capture or was exchanged and spent most of 1862 on sick leave. Each time he tried to return to duty, the pain and complications of his injuries drove him back to his bed. He went on the line for the first three days of July 1863, then to the hospital; quiet harbor duty followed, then three days with the Army of the Potomac in June 1864, then sick leave again. Knowing he could never fight again, he resigned from the officer corps on June 29. Having suffered for three years from his wounds, he finally died of them on November 15, 1865, at the age of twenty-five.42
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A VOICE CALLED OUT TO CUSTER, telling him to come see the observation balloon. He stepped out of the large tent that he shared with three other officers and his dogs and looked up. It was aloft, floating over the Union encampment. He found his field glass in his hand, so he put its twin lenses to his eyes. He was stunned to see two young women from Monroe seated in the basket—women in whom he had a certain interest. He dropped his field glass and ran to the balloon’s base a short distance away. “Let me go up too,” he begged the men in charge of it. They agreed. In a moment he somehow reached the basket high above, “but my friends had gone, much to my disappointment.”
He awoke. Unusually, he remembered the dream. “I always deal with realities,” he wrote to his sister. “I am not a believer in dreams”�
�unlike his mother—“but on the contrary think it absurd to pay any attention to them.”43 The more he disavowed any significance, the more he implied that the dream haunted him. Two attractive young women appear in his most isolated post, a basket in the air; he suddenly, inexplicably, rises to that great height; they vanish the instant he reaches them. He corners what he desires, yet it escapes him, leaving him bewildered and alone.
When he stepped outside of his tent in the morning—awake, this time—he found himself at Harrison’s Landing, the James River bivouac where the Army of the Potomac had retreated after the victory at Malvern Hill. McClellan established his headquarters at Berkeley Plantation, virtually the birthplace of the slaveholding aristocracy in the South. Out of respect, McClellan did not occupy the brick manor house, but ordered tents erected on the grounds. There he brooded on his enemies in the administration.44
Just after the Battle of Gaines’s Mill, McClellan had sent a remarkable telegram to Secretary Stanton. “If I save this Army now I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or any other persons in Washington—you have done your best to sacrifice this Army.” He knew his accusation was shocking, but, he wrote to his wife, Lincoln was “entirely too smart to give my correspondence to the public—it would have ruined him & Stanton forever.” His delusion was not tested. In Washington the telegraph supervisor excised that last sentence, and so McClellan’s anger grew unchecked.45
On July 8, in stifling heat and humidity, Lincoln came to Harrison’s Landing. McClellan and staff, including Custer, met his steamer at the pier and conducted him on a review of the army. Afterward the general and the president sat together under an awning on the deck of Lincoln’s vessel. McClellan handed the president a letter. Lincoln opened it and read as the general waited.46
“I earnestly desire…to lay before your excellency, for your private consideration, my general views concerning the existing state of the rebellion,” McClellan wrote.
It should not be a war looking to the subjugation of the people of any State in any event. It should not be at all a war upon population, but against armed forces and political organizations. Neither confiscation of property, political executions of persons, territorial organization of States, or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment.…Military power should not be allowed to interfere with the relations of servitude, either by supporting or impairing the authority of the master.
He argued that the owners of contrabands should be compensated. And he backed his political lecture with an implicit threat: “A declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our present armies.”47
Lincoln said nothing, a silence that McClellan took as vindication. The general even saw his defeat as a fine thing, reversing his earlier analysis. “God has helped me, or rather has helped my army & country,” he told his wife on July 10. “If I had succeeded in taking Richmond now the fanatics of the North might have been too powerful & reunion impossible.” He wrote to Samuel L. M. Barlow, the Democratic Party insider, “I have lost all regard & respect for the majority of the administration, & doubt the propriety of my brave men’s blood being spilled to further the designs of such a set of heartless villains.”48
The self-absorbed general did not see the rising anger at his performance, in the North and even in his own army. Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, an influential Radical on the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, wrote to his wife on July 6, “I can hold my temper no longer & will not try.…McLelland is an awful humbug & deserves to be shot.” McClellan airily wrote to Barlow, “I do not think it best to reply to the lies of such a fellow as Chandler—he is beneath my notice.”49
McClellan also misread Lincoln. The recent setbacks had convinced the president that victory required farther-reaching policies. On July 13, he told two cabinet members, “We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued. The slaves were undeniably an element of strength to those who had their service, and we must decide whether that element should be with us or against us.”50 But McClellan was blind to these shifts in politics—and blind to himself as well.
Custer was more complicated. In the weeks that followed Lincoln’s visit, he did two things that illustrated his inner contradictions—actions that were true to himself, yet pointed to two very different possible futures.
One of his deeds was to take part in a Confederate wedding. His old friend John “Gimlet” Lea had been paroled after the Battle of Williamsburg—allowed to go free as long as he did not return to military service before being formally exchanged. Prisoners on both sides obeyed the terms of paroles with remarkable faithfulness. Custer had heard that a family in Williamsburg was caring for his badly wounded friend, and McClellan gave permission to go to look for him.
Custer found Lea restored to health. Lea said that he was engaged to the daughter of his host—“very beautiful to say the least,” Custer wrote—and asked Custer to serve as best man. He agreed. During the wedding ceremony they stood together in uniform, one in blue and one in gray, opposite the bride and her attractive cousin Maggie. As Custer escorted Maggie out of the room, he told her she couldn’t be a very strong secessionist to agree to take the arm of a Union officer. “You ought to be in our army,” she said. “I asked her what she would give me if I would resign in the Northern army and join the Southern,” he wrote. She replied, “You are not in earnest, are you?”
He remained with Lea for two weeks, flirting with Maggie. The four spent each evening in the parlor, playing cards or listening to Maggie on the piano, playing “Dixie,” “For Southern Rights Hurrah,” and other rebel tunes. Custer did not mind; he was more interested in her beauty than her politics. In a sense, though, his very presence was political, in a way McClellan fully endorsed.51
The other thing he did set a different tone, an implacable tone. “He vowed that he would not cut his hair until he entered Richmond,” Tully McCrea wrote to a friend. “You may think from this that he is a vain man, but he is not; it is nothing more than his penchant for oddity.…He is a gallant soldier.” He would let his curly blond hair grow and grow until the Union achieved total victory—a sign that he wanted total victory, a sign that became more visible with each day.52
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“CAPTAIN! CAPTAIN!” Custer heard the cry from the far side of some nearby bushes. It was the bugler, still just a boy. “Two secesh are after me!” Custer reined his horse around and found the lad firing his carbine at two Confederates approaching on horseback. Custer drew his revolver and spurred toward them.
It was August 5, 1862, on the Peninsula. Two days earlier he had crossed the James River on a raid with Col. William W. Averell, who commended him for his “impetuous dash.”53 Now he rode with Averell again in a probe of the rebels near White Oak Swamp. He and about 400 Union cavalrymen had charged a few dozen troopers of the 10th Vir ginia Cavalry, dispersing them. Custer had galloped off to the left after some escaping Confederates, away from the main body, when he heard the bugler.
Seeing Custer, the two rebels turned and fled. Custer rode one of them down; at his call to surrender, the Confederate hesitated, then reined in his horse and handed over his carbine. Custer took him back to the rest of his detachment and put him under guard, then rode out again, accompanied by a lieutenant and ten men. “We had not gone far until we saw an officer and fifteen or twenty men riding toward us with the intention of cutting their way through and joining their main body,” he wrote. “When they saw us coming toward them however, they wheeled suddenly to the left and attempted to gallop around us.”
Custer picked out the officer and spurred his fine black horse into a gallop. The rebel’s mount was at least as fast, so Custer angled to cut him off at a rail fence ahead. The Confederate jumped his horse cleanly over it. Custer followed, his own horse clearing the top rail. He had never felt such a surge of adrenaline—“exciting in the extreme,” he wrote. The enemy landed on soft ground, wet after a recent rain, which slowed his progress. Custe
r guided his horse to more solid footing and rapidly drew closer, hooves thudding the earth, freshly loaded revolver in hand.
Surrender, he yelled. Surrender or I will shoot. “He paid no attention,” Custer wrote. He fired and missed. “I again called on him to surrender, but received no reply.” He cocked his revolver—the six chambers in its cylinder hand-packed with lead balls, powder charges, and percussion caps—and leveled the barrel as he rode. “I took deliberate aim at his body and fired.” The hammer snapped down on the percussion cap, sparking the gunpowder, which exploded in a jet of flame and smoke, propelling the ball on a spiraling path through the rifled barrel until it burst out of the muzzle. The other rider suddenly relaxed, sat upright in his saddle for an instant, and toppled heavily to the ground.
Now Custer’s strange sense of isolation, his temporary tunnel universe of only him and his prey, evaporated. His party appeared all around him, firing wildly at the rest of the escaping Confederates. The bugle call of “rally”—the command to return to the main force—warbled through the trees. Custer spotted a cluster of five riderless horses. He recognized a bright bay, a “blooded” thoroughbred. An exceptional straight steel sword swung from a black morocco saddle ornamented with silver nails and a red morocco breast strap. It was the horse of his victim, “a perfect beauty.” Custer took its rein and led it behind him. “A splendid trophy,” he wrote.
He did not see the man he had shot. The lieutenant who fought with Custer “told me that he saw him after he fell, and that he rose to his feet, turned around, threw up his hands and fell to the ground with a stream of blood gushing from his mouth.”
Again Averell commended Custer, for his “gallant and spirited conduct.” But this skirmish was unique. It was the first time he had killed a man—rather, that he knew he had killed a man. He had ridden in charges and ordered at least one himself; he had shot at the enemy and commanded that volleys be fired; but never had he selected an individual and destroyed his life. He had passed through a doorway with no return.
Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America Page 10