He made the most of his privileged position in Cavalry Corps headquarters. He created his own patronage network, for example, helping to place Henry Christiancy on General Humphreys’s staff (as he reminded the judge) and bringing a friend from Monroe, Lt. George Yates, onto Pleasonton’s staff. Custer pushed his way into a raid behind enemy lines by part of the 3rd Indiana Cavalry—to the annoyance of its commander—and kept for himself the finest horse they captured, named Roanoke. Hooker personally praised his performance. Custer inflated his role in a letter to his sister, claiming he “had command.”27
The reality of a command eluded him, despite intense lobbying. He visited the camp of the 5th Michigan Cavalry and tried to persuade the officers to petition Governor Blair to appoint him as their colonel. “We all declined to sign such a petition as we considered him too young,” wrote one lieutenant. Custer sent detailed, urgent letters to Judge Christiancy about his effort to win over the governor. Blair visited the army, but a chagrined Custer missed his chance to see him. So he gathered recommendations from an array of generals, including Burnside, Stoneman, Humphreys, Pleasonton, and Hooker, who called him “a young officer of great promise and uncommon merit.” Custer forwarded them to Christiancy with the comment, “If the Governor refuses to appoint me it will be for some other reason than a lack of recommendations.” He already knew there was indeed “some other reason,” namely McClellan.28
“Everything indicates a protracted stay in this vicinity,” he wrote to Judge Christiancy on May 31. “Arbors have been built over the tents, board floors have been laid in them, and other circumstances show that an early advance is not anticipated.” Custer added a new pup to the small pack of dogs he kept with him in the field. He picked up his own camp follower, a homeless boy who had wandered into the Army of the Potomac’s city of canvas and campfires and attached himself to the young, long-haired staff officer. His name was Johnny Cisco. “I think he would rather starve than see me go hungry. I have dressed him in soldiers’ clothes,” Custer wrote. One day, returning from his duties, “I found Johnny with his sleeves rolled up. He had washed all my dirty clothes and hung them on the bushes to dry. He did them very well.” He let the boy sleep in his tent, curled up with the pup.
Custer’s own progress had stalled as well. He dealt with his situation philosophically—though it was a curious philosophy. He identified “a rule which I have always laid down—never to regret anything after it is done.” The conventional formula is to do nothing which one might later regret, not to dispense with regret no matter what one does. Custer’s peculiar approach was both his strength and his weakness. He never suffered from hesitation or second thoughts, which made him a decisive combat officer. But his refusal to regret indicates an indifference to the effects of his actions on others. He refused to admit he was wrong, lashing out sarcastically at his accusers. When cornered by his transparent guilt, he tried to trivialize or dismiss his misdeeds.
By stating this rule in a letter, he showed that he gave it conscious thought. It was a quintessential contradiction for Custer: in a moment of introspection he chose to avoid introspection—he examined himself and decided to shun self-examination. Did he fear the gap between the man he tried so hard to appear to be and the man he actually was? The answer remained locked in a part of his brain where he refused to look, let alone reveal to the world. For whatever reason, he concluded that he could only live by plunging ahead without glancing back.29
—
CUSTER WORKED FOR A MAN under pressure. Alfred Pleasonton had risen in large part by cultivating his superiors, by paying attention to his commanders’ moods. And the mood of General Hooker was very bad.
On June 4, 1863, the Bureau of Military Intelligence reported “considerable movement of the enemy.” The next day, Hooker told Lincoln that Lee would likely repeat the Antietam Campaign by marching the entire Confederate army through the Shenandoah Valley into Maryland. The looming rebel offensive created intense stress for Hooker, who could not survive as commander of the Army of the Potomac if he lost another battle. He was a man who passed pressure down.
A few days after warning Lincoln, Hooker informed Pleasonton that General J. E. B. Stuart, the Confederate cavalry chief, had concentrated his horsemen to the west, near Culpeper Court House, south of the Rappahannock River. Whatever Stuart planned, Hooker wanted Pleasonton “ ‘to bust it up’ before it got fairly under way.”30
A photograph taken about this time shows Custer and Pleasonton in the saddle, their horses facing one another. White conical Sibley tents loom in the background, and a trooper stands between them. Pleasonton, his shoulders somewhat hunched, is on a dingy gray animal and wears a high-crowned hat tilted forward and to the right at a sharp angle. Custer sits erect in an elegant saddle on a handsome black horse, hand on his hip, light blue pants tucked into high cavalry boots, dark blue shirt tucked into cavalry gauntlets, with a checked necktie, long curly hair and arching mustache, and a forage cap sloping down to his eyebrows. On his right hip his revolver sits in a holster, butt forward in cavalry fashion, and on his left a long straight sword is visible, the fine blade of Toledo steel he took from the first man he ever killed. He looks content, self-assured, even proud. Pleasonton does not.
It’s a subjective matter, judging any person’s emotional state from an image of an instant in time. Pleasonton seems grim, unhappy, though the impression may reflect the ultimatum Hooker gave him. But Custer’s cockiness is unmistakable. He looks very much like a man determined to regret nothing, and who therefore may do almost anything.
On June 9, the two men splashed their horses across the Rappahannock along with two divisions and reserve brigade of cavalry and an infantry brigade under Brig. Gen. Adelbert Ames, who had graduated from West Point one class ahead of Custer. Pleasonton launched a two-prong attack on Stuart’s camp near Brandy Station, starting a messy, hard-fought battle. When it was all over, he praised Custer for “gallantry throughout the fight,” and sent him to deliver a captured Confederate battle flag to Hooker’s headquarters. He boasted that he had won a great victory at Brandy Station, the biggest cavalry battle in the entire Civil War. The Union horsemen did better than ever before, but Hooker knew it was far from the “bust up” he had demanded.31
“We can never discover the whereabouts of the enemy, or divine his intentions, so long as he fills the country with a cloud of cavalry,” Hooker complained to Lincoln on June 16. “We must break through that to find him.” Somewhere across the Rappahannock to the south, across the Bull Run and Blue Ridge mountains to the west, Lee’s army marched—its size, location, and destination unknown. It was Pleasonton’s duty to discover all of these. Hooker grew impatient at his continuing failure. “Drive in pickets, if necessary, and get us information,” he wrote. “It is better that we should lose men than to be without knowledge of the enemy, as we now seem to be.”32
On June 17, Custer rode west with Pleasonton toward the Bull Run Mountains. Near the village of Aldie they learned that Brig. Gen. Judson Kilpatrick’s brigade had collided with Confederates posted in the Gap beyond. Valedictorian of the West Point class just ahead of Custer, the little Kilpatrick had deep-set eyes, a long ship’s-prow nose, and a brick of a jaw fringed with enormous whiskers. He made up for textbook perfection at the academy with recklessness on the battlefield. Custer arrived just as a body of Union troopers fell back from another failed attack, chased by rebel horsemen. Kilpatrick ordered the 1st Maine to counter-countercharge. Custer joined in.
When Frederick Whittaker wrote about this moment more than a decade later, he tried to explain the thrill of a cavalry charge, based on his personal experience as a Union trooper. It was “the fiercest pleasure of life,” he wrote. “Horse and rider are drunk with excitement, feeling and seeing nothing but the cloud of dust, the scattered flying figures, conscious of only one mad desire, to reach them, to smite, smite, smite!”
“Mad” certainly described Custer’s horse, a beautiful black animal named Harry. It
broke formation, streaking ahead of the Union line. Horse and rider plunged into the onrushing mass of enemy cavalry. One Confederate swiveled and fired his revolver; Custer swung his sword and cut almost all the way through the man’s arm. Another rebel, saber in hand, galloped after Custer from behind, a position that gave him an advantage, since it was difficult for Custer to twist around to slash or shoot. Custer reined to a stop. His pursuer sped past, reversing the advantage. Custer spurred after him. He swung his blade overhead; the other man raised his to block it. Custer beat down the rebel’s sword and finally cut into his skull and brain.
He found himself completely surrounded by Confederate horsemen. But they did not attack. He thought his slouch hat fooled them; when he wore it his fellow soldiers told him he looked like a Southerner. But in the chaos of the fight, amid clouds of dust kicked up by horses and smoke erupting from firearms, the Confederates might never have guessed that a solitary enemy rode among them.
He started for an opening in the enemy ranks. A single rebel discovered him and raised his sword, “but I struck him across the face with my sabre, knocking him off his horse,” Custer wrote. “I then put spurs to ‘Harry’ and made my escape.”33
The charge that Custer joined finally dislodged the enemy, driving them back into Aldie Gap. But the Union cavalry still did not get a look at Lee’s main force. The pressure on Pleasonton increased. He tried to save himself by lobbying Washington behind Hooker’s back. He wrote Congressman John Farnsworth, uncle of a young officer on his staff, Elon Farnsworth. In the absence of any real intelligence, he made up a story. “The [Confederate] raid into Pennsylvania appears to be a fizzle, & some of the negroes say, it is reported Gen. Lee is moving his troops back.…Tell the President this. Give him my respects & don’t forget the medals.”34
After more fruitless attacks, his scouts finally ascended the Blue Ridge and glimpsed Lee’s army massed in the Shenandoah. But Pleasonton’s standing remained precarious. On June 23 he wrote again to the congressman. “Our cavalry business is badly managed & will lead us into trouble unless speedily corrected.” He wanted a cavalry division under Brig. Gen. Julius Stahel from the Washington garrison, but Stahel’s rank predated his own. Stahel, he noted, was a German-speaking Hungarian. “Tell the President from me…that I will not fight under the order of a Dutchman.” He attacked Hooker’s orders without mentioning his name, saying, “I am sacrificing the lives of gallant & noble men without a purpose or hope of success.”
“I am sadly in want of officers with the proper dash to command cavalry, having lost so many good ones,” he added. This sounded more like exasperation than a specific request. Hooker seemed ready to fire Pleasonton, in which case Custer would lose a second patron, and drift still farther away from his dream of leading a regiment.35
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PLEASONTON SURVIVED. Hooker did not. As Lee advanced unhindered into Pennsylvania, Lincoln gave command of the Army of the Potomac to Maj. Gen. George Meade, former head of V Corps. Meade looked a decade older than his forty-seven years, and was as flamboyant as an old scuffed shoe. But he lacked Hooker’s or McClellan’s ego, and his fellow corps commanders respected him.36
When Pleasonton learned of the change on June 28, he left the house he had taken as his headquarters and rode off to confer with Meade. He returned at about three in the afternoon and called Custer into his room. For the young lieutenant, the meeting was ripe with anticipation. Pleasonton had just been promoted; Custer expected to be elevated to captain again, a rank he was entitled to on the staff of a major general. Some time before, Pleasonton told him, he had urged that Custer be promoted—to brigadier general. Now, with Lee marching into the North, Meade agreed to give the brigadier general’s star to Custer and two other young officers on Pleasonton’s staff, Elon Farnsworth and Wesley Merritt; he had telegraphed Halleck in the War Department to ask for the appointments immediately.
“I almost wished the General had not informed me of the recommendation, as I felt it would only excite hopes and aspirations which, to say the least, could not be realized at present,” Custer wrote to Judge Christiancy a few weeks later. It could never happen, he thought, given his age and low rank, and the fact that “I had not a single ‘friend at court.’ ”
That long Sunday afternoon darkened into a long evening as Custer waited for the response from Washington. He was nervous. And yet, he was disingenuously modest in his letter to Christiancy. He had actively pursued more than one Republican “friend at court,” particularly Bingham and Christiancy himself. He enjoyed the sponsorship of Pleasonton, which made the promotion possible in the first place. Far from refusing to believe it possible, Custer wrote in the very same letter, “I will be candid enough to admit that my ambition long since caused me to hope in the course of time to render me worth a ‘star.’ This thought perhaps influenced me not a little in seeking the position of Col. of a cavalry regt.” But he never imagined “that in one sudden unlooked for leap” he should go from first lieutenant to brigadier general at the age of twenty-three.
At nine o’clock that night a telegram arrived from Washington. Custer’s promotion had been approved. “To say I was elated would faintly express my feelings. I well knew that I had reason to congratulate myself,” he wrote.37
Custer stayed up with Pleasonton as he reorganized the Cavalry Corps, which officially absorbed Stahel’s division, minus Stahel. Pleasonton renamed it the 3rd Cavalry Division and gave it to one of his favorites, Judson Kilpatrick, previously promoted to brigadier general. He made room for his three new brigadiers by firing existing brigade commanders; he explained that he wanted officers “whom he knew.”
What should I do with you? Pleasonton asked Custer. “I replied at once that I had but one request to make.” He wanted command of the Michigan Brigade, one of two brigades in the newly designated 3rd Division. It comprised the 5th, 6th, and 7th Michigan Cavalry; Custer asked that a fourth regiment, the 1st Michigan, be added to it. Pleasonton told him to take command in the morning.38
The promotion of very young men to such high rank occurred many times in the Union army. Examples surrounded Custer, including Kilpatrick and Ames, as well as Merritt and Farnsworth. Still, Custer and others thought his elevation to be rather remarkable. Custer took particular pleasure in outflanking the opposition of Governor Blair, defeating political patronage with military patronage. He wrote to his sister, “The regiment of which I endeavored to obtain the Colonelcy (5th) belongs to my brigade so that I rather outwitted the Governor who did not see fit to give it to me.”39
The suddenness, not the promotion itself, is what surprised him. He told Christiancy that he had hoped to be a general “in the course of time,” though he expected it to be a short course. This was shown by a unique uniform that appeared on him with almost magical speed, just hours after he left Pleasonton’s office. It began with his broad-brimmed, low-crowned felt hat, tilted to one side, above his long, curly blond hair, broad, drooping mustache, and tuft of hair beneath his lower lip. He wore a black velveteen jacket rimmed with gold piping. It was double breasted—a distinction reserved to generals—with eight buttons on each side, grouped in vertical pairs. Five parallel lines of gold embroidery looped about the forearm sleeves from wrist to elbow. Underneath he had on a sailor’s shirt, its broad rectangular blue collar with white trim draped over the jacket’s neck and shoulders, with a star sewn in each corner. A bright red tie, or cravat, puffed out of the neck at the front. He tucked his dark pants into high cavalry boots braced in gilt spurs.
Where did it come from? One unreliable chronicler, Marguerite Merington, attributed its creation to the teenager Joseph Fought, a bugler in Custer’s old company in the 5th U.S. Cavalry who stayed with him as an orderly. Fought gave his recollections many years later, claiming that Custer turned to him to find something distinctive for his general’s uniform. The boy tracked down a peddler, “an old Jew.” But Fought’s account identifies only a pair of stars as his contribution. The rest was Custer’s.
It appears that the lieutenant kept a general’s double-breasted jacket stowed in his bags in anticipation, that he had long thought about how he would look with a sailor’s collar and red tie flapping at his neck over black velveteen. No one knows when he expected to wear this costume, but he had been planning, or at least dreaming.40
Clothing is communication, a message to the world about the person within. The usual point of a uniform is to express commonality—to say a soldier belongs to an army and a branch of service. It deliberately submerges one’s identity in the mass. But Custer’s outfit declared that he was an individual, not a replaceable part in a great machine. As Tully McCrea said, Custer delighted “in something odd”—something unexpected, distinctive. In this, he reflected the romantic individualism of antebellum America.41
By standing out so clearly, Custer insisted that others look at him. Whether they found him curious, laughable, or inspiring, they had to stare. “This officer is one of the funniest-looking beings you ever saw,” wrote one officer, on seeing him soon after his debut as a general. “His aspect, though highly amusing, is also pleasing, as he has a very merry blue eye, and a devil-may-care style.”42 Custer’s eye may have been natural and spontaneous, but his style was not. He crafted it to serve a purpose. On the battlefield of the 1860s, tactical command and control operated largely through sight and sound. Larger formations—a corps, a division—might be directed by written orders, but the men in companies, regiments, and brigades listened for drums, bugles, and bands; watched for their unit flags; and looked for their leaders on the field. Custer chose to stand out, in part, as a tactical decision, to allow his men to see and follow him, to let subordinates know where their brigade headquarters could be found.
Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America Page 14