“It was his own fault,” he explained to his sister and brother-in-law. “I told him twice to surrender, but was compelled to shoot him.” He was answering a silent question—a question no one had asked but himself. Often he had expressed his willingness to die for his country; though not a devout man, his statements reflected the faith in which he had been raised, a religion that worshipped Him who had given His life that others may live. But Custer had never written about killing. It was a soldier’s defining function, of course, what set him apart from the civilian, even the constable, detective, or armed guard. Now he faced its reality.
The enemy soldier had been riding away, trying to escape. Custer tracked him, calculated his approach, and took careful aim. He shot him in the back. He had picked a man and erased his memories, canceled his hopes. He had wiped from existence his victim’s taste for his favorite food, his habit of how he wore his hat, his superstitions, his most secret fear, the way he laughed. He took the man from his parents and children and friends forever. I tried not to kill him, Custer told himself. I tried twice. And then I had no choice. Whether the answer satisfied him or not, he never asked the question again.54
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“I AM WEARY, very weary, of submitting to the whims of such ‘things’ as those now over me,” McClellan wrote to Samuel Barlow. To his wife, Ellen, he wrote, “I can never regard him [Lincoln] with other feelings than those of thorough contempt—for his mind, heart & morality.” The cause of these outbursts was the president’s appointment of Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck as general in chief. “It is intended as ‘a slap in the face,’ ” McClellan complained. “I do not like the political turn that affairs are taking.”55
By now Custer belonged to the inner circle. McClellan said that he trusted “the really serious work, especially under fire,” only to a handful of professional officers, a few foreign soldiers, and “some youngsters I have caught,” including Custer. The young captain and the rest of the staff raged against the formation of the Army of Virginia under Maj. Gen. John Pope, who launched an overland offensive against Richmond. They hated Halleck’s appointment, and stormed against his order that McClellan withdraw the Army of the Potomac from the Peninsula in order to aid Pope. They began to mutter about marching on Washington.56
This shocked those outside headquarters. General Burnside visited Harrison’s Landing with Halleck in July; as McClellan’s old friend, he heard such chatter himself. “I don’t know what you fellows call this talk, but I call it flat Treason, by God!” he told them. Gen. Philip Kearny wrote, “McClellan or the few with him are devising a game of politics rather than war.”57
In August McClellan slowly, grudgingly withdrew from the Peninsula and shipped his men north. He personally set sail on August 23. With the threat to Richmond lifted, Robert E. Lee turned his Army of Northern Virginia against Pope’s Army of Virginia with full force. On Halleck’s orders, General Fitz-John Porter marched his corps to reinforce Pope, starting a process of whittling down the Army of the Potomac.
McClellan despised Pope, who took a much harder line toward secessionism and rebel civilians. He “will be very badly whipped,” McClellan wrote, “& ought to be.” With the Army of Virginia fully embroiled in a second battle of Bull Run, McClellan advised Lincoln “to leave Pope to get out of his scrape & at once use all our means to make the Capital perfectly safe.” It was a stunning display of self-absorption. Whatever Pope’s failings, if reinforced in time he might have avoided the crushing defeat he suffered in the battle. Lincoln called McClellan’s delays “unpardonable.”58
On September 1, McClellan arrived in Washington. There Custer joined him, having left the Peninsula only recently, after tarrying with Lea. Some 20,000 stragglers from Pope’s shattered army wandered the countryside. Halleck, now in great distress, removed McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac and put him in charge of the city’s defenses. Stanton wanted him fired. Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase privately remarked, “McClellan ought to be shot.”59
September 1 also saw a flanking attack by Stonewall Jackson on the Army of Virginia at the town of Chantilly. General Kearny died as he led a successful defense. “Unless something can be done to restore tone to this army it will melt away before you know it,” Pope reported. The capital itself was in peril. Lincoln saw no choice. He told the cabinet that he could not spare McClellan, not in this crisis. “We must use the tools we have,” Lincoln said. “If he can’t fight himself, he excels in making others ready to fight.” At about seven o’clock on the cold and windy morning of September 2, Lincoln and Halleck walked over to McClellan’s rooms on H Street and offered him command again. If he accepted, the Army of Virginia would be absorbed into the Army of the Potomac, which he would lead. He agreed.
“I immediately went to work, collected my staff, and started them in all directions with the necessary orders,” McClellan wrote. Word came that Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was marching into western Maryland. If left unopposed, Lee might outflank Washington, capture a major city, perhaps even win foreign recognition of Confederate independence. McClellan’s mission changed from simply restoring order and morale to halting an invasion and salvaging the war itself.60 The crisis transformed young Captain Custer from the servant of a doomed man into the protégé of the savior of the republic—if McClellan could save it.
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ON SEPTEMBER 14, 1862, Capt. George Armstrong Custer rode alongside Brig. Gen. Alfred Pleasonton, commander of the cavalry division of the Army of the Potomac. They moved west, and they moved up—ascending the eastern slope of South Mountain, a wooded, ravine-split ridge that formed a natural barricade for the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, located somewhere beyond it. The rest of the Union army marched into the valley behind them.
“The heads of the columns began to appear, and grew and grew,” wrote a Union soldier who also stood on South Mountain, looking back at the Army of the Potomac. It was a “beautiful, impressive picture—each column a monstrous, crawling, blue-black snake, miles long, quilled with the silver slant of muskets at a ‘shoulder,’ its sluggish tail writhing slowly up over the distant eastern ridge.” To the north he saw the baggage train. “We knew that each dot was a heavily loaded army wagon, drawn by six mules and occupying forty feet of road at least.” In the valley immediately below, about a half mile from his position, the column of infantry “broke abruptly, filing off into line of battle, right and left, across the fields.” Pleasonton’s cavalry had found a Confederate blocking force on the crest of South Mountain above them.61
Custer had been in the saddle almost continuously since Lee crossed the Potomac ten days earlier. McClellan kept him in the field to observe and report. The cavalry handled reconnaissance, so Custer mostly accompanied Pleasonton, often riding back to brief McClellan as the Union army moved north of the Potomac and marched west toward the mountains that shielded Lee’s invaders.62
It’s possible, then, that Custer had not been present in headquarters on September 11, when Col. Thomas Key had approached Nathaniel Paige of the New York Tribune with grave news: “A plan to countermarch to Washington and intimidate the President had been seriously discussed the night before by members of McClellan’s staff,” Paige later recalled. Key claimed that he had stifled any such plot, and said that the general himself knew nothing of it. Did Custer?
Even if there was no real plan for a military coup, the intrigue at headquarters had only grown more byzantine and insidious. Simply by disavowing this talk to a reporter, Key sent a warning to the White House to adopt a conservative course. McClellan himself had considered an ultimatum, demanding Stanton’s resignation as his price for driving Lee out of Maryland, until Burnside dissuaded him.63
All this chatter ended abruptly, thanks to the “Lost Order.” On September 13, McClellan was handed a misplaced copy of Lee’s plans. It showed that the enemy divisions were scattered, vulnerable to being destroyed “in detail”—piece by isolated piece. Rarely in history has the fog of war l
ifted so completely. McClellan’s customary fatalism evaporated. “Here is a paper,” he exulted to brigade commander John Gibbon, “with which if I cannot whip ‘Bobbie Lee,’ I will be willing to go home.”64
But McClellan was still McClellan. Eighteen hours passed as he drew up his plans. Finally, at daylight on September 14, he put his men in motion. And so Custer found himself on the slopes of South Mountain. When he rode back to report, he found McClellan well to the rear, content to let his subordinates manage the fighting. Blue-white gun smoke enveloped the crest; by the end of September 14, the Union had won.65
At dawn the next morning, Pleasonton and Custer rode together with the 8th Illinois Cavalry Regiment in pursuit of the retreating Confederates. The thirty-eight-year-old Pleasonton had graduated from West Point in 1844 and served capably on the frontier and in Mexico. He was a handsome man with a close-cut beard and a mustache that he sometimes waxed into horizontal points. His rather large eyes glinted with intelligence and, some thought, a little too much calculation. He was a friend and ally of General McClellan in an officer corps increasingly divided over “Little Mac.”66
Down into the valley they went. On the edge of Boonsboro, a hamlet with close-built brick houses and storefronts, they saw the backs of the Confederate rear guard, a column of cavalry led by Col. Fitzhugh Lee, Robert E. Lee’s nephew. The Union troopers charged, and Custer charged with them. Riding half-ton horses at full gallop, the wave of cavalrymen collided with the enemy before the rebels could wheel about to face them. Panicked by the bone-breaking momentum of the Union stampede, the rebels scattered in confusion. Fitzhugh Lee was thrown off his horse, leaving it to be captured as he ran for his life through a cornfield. Clouds of dust kicked up on the hot, dry road billowed over the struggling cavalrymen. Finally the Confederates withdrew in disorder.
Pleasonton witnessed the attack. In his report, he cited several Union officers who “were conspicuous for their gallantry on this occasion,” including Custer. He was growing fond of the young captain, for his merits as well as his ties to McClellan.67
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INSTEAD OF RIDING BACK TO speak to McClellan in person, Custer took out a pencil and a small pad and scratched a quick note. He was ebullient after the climactic charge. Around him the people of Boonsboro poured onto the streets, waving flags and cheering the infantrymen of I Corps who marched through town. “We captured between two & three hundred prisoners in Boonsboro,” he wrote. “Our cavalry has made several dashing charges. The rebels are scattering all over the country.…Everything is as we wish.” He signed it, “Custer,” but before he could send it back he encountered the I Corps commander, the clean-shaven, hard-drinking, and confident Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker. He told Custer, “Inform the general that we can capture the entire rebel army.” Custer added to his original note, “Gen Hooker says the rebel army is completely demoralized. The rebels are moving towards Shepherdstown. Boonsboro is full of rebel stragglers. Hooker has sent [Maj. Gen. Israel B.] Richardson in pursuit (double quick) and will follow immediately.” Custer found a messenger to carry his report back to headquarters so he could ride at the forefront.68
Custer caught up to the retreating Confederates by midday. He saw that the Army of Northern Virginia had halted on the north side of the Potomac and deployed in a line that arched across a bend in the river, anchored on the village of Sharpsburg behind Antietam Creek. Again he quickly wrote to McClellan.
The enemy is drawn up in line of battle on a ridge about two miles beyond Cartersville [i.e., Keedysville]. They are in full view. Their line is a perfect one about a mile and a half long. We can have equally good position as they now occupy. Richardson is forming his line to attack. We are lacking in artillery…hurry up more guns we can get good position for two hundred guns. Longstreet is in command and has forty cannon that we know of. We can employ all the troops you can send us.69
Oddly, his language removes himself from the general he served: “We can employ all the troops you can send us.” To an extent, this reflected his experience with McClellan. In all the battles fought by the Army of the Potomac, McClellan had never taken tactical command, and even Custer assumed he would abdicate that responsibility now.
He was also distancing himself from himself—from Custer the junior staff officer, the loyal messenger and passive observer. In the charge at Boonsboro, Custer the warrior—Custer the killer—had emerged supreme. He had cultivated this persona during his months at headquarters, slipping away from staff duties to volunteer for scouts and attacks. This was the part of him that wanted to win, to destroy his enemy—the part that had developed a taste for combat, if not an actual addiction. Keenly wanting a role in the assault, he identified with the vanguard of the Union army.
He did not know that McClellan would finally take field command in person and fight Lee in a set-piece battle. He could not foresee that this was the place where more Americans would die in one day than on any battlefield in history.
Lee had not yet united his army. When Custer scouted his line, he had only 15,000 men in hand. More arrived hourly, but many were completing the capture of the Union garrison at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, several hours’ march to the south. Speed could destroy Lee. But his stand on the north side of the Potomac surprised McClellan; as Stephen Sears notes, “McClellan was invariably nonplussed by the unexpected.” So the general waited through the rest of that day and the next as troops arrived, his artillery rolled up, and he prepared his plans.
The young captain would not belong to a we who would win a quick victory ahead of you, the main body of the army. Instead, he rejoined the staff that waited on McClellan as he established his headquarters at the redbrick Philip Pry house, on a hill east of Antietam Creek, and deployed his corps left and right along the stream.70
September 17, 1862, was the day of battle—a battle named Antietam. (The Confederates referred to it as Sharpsburg.) Custer wrote no more hasty reports, but spoke to McClellan in person, if he spoke to him at all. The general took his staff on a short ride to the headquarters of Fitz-John Porter, where he had a better view. The staff perched a telescope atop a small fortification improvised from fence rails. McClellan peered through it and occasionally spoke quietly with Porter beside him. He kept the staff at bay, unless he called someone to deliver an order or investigate something.71
Custer did not join the fighting on the northern flank of the Confederate line, where McClellan ordered the assault to begin. He did not wade into the gunfire that would capitalize with corpses the humdrum features of the landscape: the Cornfield, West Woods, East Woods, Dunker Church, Sunken Road. He did not join the painfully delayed charge on the left under General Burnside, a run through deadly fire across a narrow bridge, a charge that finally crumpled the overstretched Confederate line. He did not fall back with those same men when rebel reinforcements arrived from Harper’s Ferry. It was Custer’s good fortune to be on McClellan’s staff on September 17. He liked to be at the forefront of charges, and, as a rule, such men died that day. About 6,000 men lost their lives and another 17,000 were wounded, counting both sides. It was a tally worse than the losses in the War of 1812 and Mexican War put together.
“It was a good battle plan,” James McPherson writes, “and if well executed it might have accomplished Lincoln’s wish to ‘destroy the rebel army.’ But it was not well executed.” McClellan still might have won if he had struck the thin enemy center with his reserves. He was unwilling to take the chance. Despite grave losses, Lee taunted McClellan by remaining in place on September 18. McClellan refused to attack again. On September 19, the Confederates marched south, unhindered by pursuit.72
Years later, Custer would sit with pen in hand and contemplate the failure of the leader he admired so much. McClellan had “all the natural and acquired endowments sought for in a great leader,” he would write. His “mental training and abilities were of a higher order,” his “military qualifications and knowledge were superior to those possessed by any officer who subsequen
tly led the Army of the Potomac.”
Why then, he would ask himself, did his general not win the war? “McClellan’s greatest disadvantage” was that he “was thrust…into supreme command of an army without having first had an opportunity to prepare himself by apprenticeship, as his successors had, by working their way up, step by step…from colonels and captains to that of general commanding-in-chief [sic].”
But he saw a bigger reason. It showed that he had imbibed the intrigue at headquarters. “The defeat of McClellan was not the result of combinations made either in the Confederate capital or in the camp of the Confederate army, but in Washington,” he would claim. “It was the result of an opposition whose birth and outgrowth could be traced to the dominating spirits who at that time were largely in control of the Federal Government.” The abolitionist Radicals stabbed him in the back.73
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THREE JOURNEYS TELL THE STORY of Antietam’s aftermath—three treks that reveal the battle’s impact on America, on Custer, and on his future.
The first began in Boston. The very night of the battle, a doctor got of out bed to answer a loud knock at his front door. The doctor’s name was Oliver Wendell Holmes. He was a fifty-three-year-old professor of medicine at Harvard University, but he was best known as the author of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, along with other books, and as a contributor to the Atlantic Monthly. He had a son by the same name, who was only twenty-one and a captain in the Army of the Potomac. The doctor opened the door and found a messenger with a telegram. It was about his son.
“Capt. H—— wounded shot through the neck thought not mortal at Keedysville,” it read. Keedysville was the village nearest Union lines at Antietam. “Through the neck,—no bullet left in wound,” he pondered, as he would later recall. “Wind-pipe, food-pipe, carotid, jugular, half a dozen smaller, but still formidable vessels, a great braid of nerves, each as big as a lamp-wick, spinal cord,—ought to kill at once, if at all.”
Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America Page 11