Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America

by Stiles, T. J.

  A general who planned in the rear, who received reports and wrote out orders, had no need to stand out. By choosing to attract attention, Custer declared that he would be in the midst of the fighting, that he intended to inspire. Of course, the enemy could spot him just as well as his own soldiers, and target him. His uniform announced his personal courage.

  In his black velveteen, Custer tried to shape how his men saw him. He tried to make them believe something about the man inside the uniform, inside his skin. It was a risk. Soldiers in battle saw through false fronts easily. In action, at least, he would have to be the man he tried to appear to be, or he would fail. The test began on the morning of June 29, when he rode off in his outlandish outfit to find his brigade, drenched by rain that poured down from the overcast skies.43

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  IN THE NOVEL WAR AND PEACE, Tolstoy wrote that the French invasion of Russia in 1812 did not take place because Napoleon willed it, but because hundreds of thousands, even millions, of Frenchmen desired it. In the midst of this masterwork of storytelling, Tolstoy paused to argue that the mass of humankind drives events, not those few who project the illusion of power, and who believe the illusion themselves.

  Perhaps Tolstoy went too far—but he would have been close to the truth if he had been writing of the American Civil War. Yes, high politics and historic issues produced the conflict; yes, decisions by politicians and generals changed the course of events. But it was only a war in the first place because the American people wanted to fight. They volunteered by the millions for years of combat; they demanded offensives and decisive battles. Even those who never enlisted applied themselves to logistics, military transportation, and weapons technology—inventing ironclad ships, new pontoon bridges, and repeating rifles, for example. Then there were African Americans, who conducted what one historian has called the greatest slave rebellion in history. They risked death to desert to Union lines by the hundreds, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands. In the end, what happened on factory floors and plantation fields, in town-square meetings and polling places, mattered more than any general’s orders.44

  The deceptively mechanical language of army organization obscures this reality. The term unit evokes an undifferentiated mass, a wooden soldier to be moved about. A company suggests an institution. A regiment sounds like an impersonal clockwork; and it is made up of battalions and grouped with others into a brigade, hard-edged words evoking blocs of firepower without humanity. And yet, the temporary army of U.S. Volunteers existed only because of individual choice and popular initiative. Citizens had assembled to create these units; initially their officers were voted in by the recruits or appointed by elected officials. Each company or regiment was a village under arms, a county on horseback, one community determined to wipe out another. In such an army, an officer could only command if his soldiers chose to follow.

  In detaching from home, though, each unit became a thing unto itself. Each day the men drilled in camp, each hour they spent on an exhausting march, each time they deployed in line of battle, their sense of community separated from their home places. They formed their own expectations, jokes, and jargon. As soldiers they belonged to one another as they never could to civilian friends and kin. At their best, they learned pride and comradeship through what they endured, what they lost, and what they achieved.

  But they were not always at their best. In that, their leaders made the difference. The commander made his community work or fall apart. His men united behind him with a common sense of purpose or atomized into a malfunctioning, dissenting horde. A trooper who wrote home of pride in his leader was expressing pride in himself and his unit; when he railed against his chief’s incompetence, he himself felt like a failure.

  What did the soldier want from the men who led him? Perhaps the question should be reversed: What did he not want? He did not want to die, of course, but it would be more precise to say that he did not want his life to be wasted. Aside from the draftee—a late-coming minority in the ranks—he enlisted to fight, and he knew that he could only do so at the risk of his life. He thought there should be good cause for that risk. He wanted leaders who were willing to take the same chances he did.

  The soldier was human. In the midst of his suffering, small comforts mattered. He hoped for a furlough, for soft bread and fresh meat, for shoes that did not hurt his feet. To varying degrees he understood the need for discipline, but believed it should be reasonable and fair. In the end, though, all those desires were secondary. In this people’s war, what the citizen soldier wanted most from his generals was victory.45

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  IN THE LATE MORNING of June 30, 1863, the 3rd Cavalry Division moved north, searching for the rebel army. Custer led the column with the 1st and 7th Michigan Cavalry regiments; the other two in his brigade, the 5th and 6th, had been detached before he assumed command and remained some distance west. Soon after passing through Hanover, Pennsylvania, the sound of gunfire erupted behind them.

  Custer ordered his men to turn about and head toward the fighting. He learned that Confederate horsemen, the advance guard of Stuart’s cavalry, had charged the division’s rear. At the start of the campaign, Stuart had taken his men on a long raid to the east, riding behind the Army of the Potomac. He had gathered plunder but deprived Lee of his scouting and screening force. Stuart needed to unite with the Army of Northern Virginia; to do that, he had to break through the 3rd Cavalry Division.

  As Custer deployed his men and artillery, the missing 5th and 6th Michigan Cavalry arrived on the scene. He dismounted his troops, every fourth man leading horses to the rear. The rest advanced on foot in a loose skirmish line and opened fire.

  Theirs was no ordinary fire. The 6th Michigan carried the revolutionary Spencer rifle. (Later the Spencer carbine—a short-barreled version designed for use by cavalry—would be issued in its place.) Unlike the standard single-shot, muzzle-loading rifled musket, it carried seven rounds in a tubular magazine loaded into the butt. A trooper cocked the hammer, yanked a trigger-guard lever that ejected the spent cartridge and loaded the chamber, and pulled the trigger—all in a fraction of a musket’s loading time.

  Custer loved a mounted charge more than almost anything in life, but he appreciated the Spencer—“in my estimation, the most effective fire-arm that our cavalry can adopt,” he wrote a short time later. Deploying his men on foot allowed them to work their rifles freely and aim accurately. The Confederates, one of Custer’s troopers wrote, “were struck dumb with surprise.” A prisoner later said “that they couldn’t understand how anyone could reload so rapidly.”46

  Stymied, Stuart pulled back and sought an easier route to the Army of Northern Virginia. The Union cavalry continued its own hunt in the intense heat, through a landscape of barns and fields and wooden fences, of low hills and bursts of green woods. Everywhere the armies went, they denuded fences of rails to stoke campfires and trampled the ground into mud and dust. Some of Custer’s men were fresh, but not all. “By this time we had become a sorry-looking body of men,” one veteran recalled, “having been in the saddle day and night almost continuously for three weeks, without a change of clothing or an opportunity for a general wash.”47

  “Do you know how cavalry moves? It never goes out of a walk, and four miles an hour is very rapid marching—‘killing to horses’ as we always describe it,” wrote Capt. Charles F. Adams Jr. to his mother. A company commander dreaded a march.

  You are a slave to your horses, you work like a dog yourself, and you exact the most extreme care from your Sergeants, and you see diseases creeping up on you day by day and your horses breaking down under your eyes.…Backs soon get feverish under the saddle and the first day’s march swells them; after that day by day the trouble grows.…Imagine a horse with his withers swollen to three times the natural size, and with a volcanic, running sore pouring matter down each side, and you have a case with which every cavalry officer is daily called upon to deal, and you imagine a horse which has still to be ridden u
ntil he lays down in sheer suffering under the saddle.…[The air reeks] with the stench of dead horses, federal and confederate. You pass them on every road and find them in every field, while from their carrions you can follow the march of every army that moves.

  It would astonish the civilians back home, Adams wrote, “to see the weak, gaunt, rough animals…on which these ‘dashing cavalry raids’ were executed. It would knock the romance out of you.”48

  On July 1, at the crossroads town of Gettysburg, the Army of the Potomac finally found the Army of Northern Virginia. The vortex of combat sucked in the scattered infantry corps and artillery batteries, as the two sides arrayed themselves in full force on opposing ridges. The climactic battle of the campaign had begun.

  On July 2, Kilpatrick led his division far around the left flank of the Confederate army as the fighting raged at Gettysburg. His men drove a small body of the enemy through the hamlet of Hunterstown, northeast of Gettysburg. On the far side, Kilpatrick saw a handful of Confederates out in the open and ordered Custer to clear them away. The young general deployed some of his men on foot to support his attack, and led a small force—just a few dozen riders—in a mounted charge. A Confederate brigade opened fire from cover. “Horses and men toppled into the road,” writes one historian. Custer’s horse fell, struck by a bullet, catapulting him onto the ground. A Union cavalryman rode forward, shot a man aiming at Custer, and pulled the general up behind him. The Yankees threw back a counterattack and pulled out after dark.

  It has been estimated that Custer led about forty men in his charge. At least twenty-seven of them died, suffered wounds, or were taken prisoner. The wonder is that as many as thirteen came back unhurt, and that Custer did too. But he was always lucky.49

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  THE THIRD OF JULY was the third day of battle at Gettysburg. The men of the North expected a Confederate assault. The day before, Lee’s men had come perilously close to capturing Little Round Top, anchoring the southern end of the Army of the Potomac, and Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill on the northern flank. Had the rebels seized any of these, they would have unhinged the Union line and won a great victory. Having come so close to success on the second day, Lee seemed sure to attack on the third.

  The stakes could not have been more obvious to the soldiers on both sides. The entire Army of Northern Virginia—reinforced to 75,000 troops, including six brigades of cavalrymen—had swept far to the north of the federal capital. Lee and his soldiers were buoyant after their triumph at Chancellorsville, confident in their ability to crush the Army of the Potomac. Meade had a lower standard for success—his army merely had to endure and bring the rebel invasion to a halt—but, unlike Lee, he could scarcely survive a failure. Defeat so far north would demoralize the public and perhaps guarantee Confederate independence. With some 90,000 men—15,000 of them cavalry—Meade had an edge in numbers, but not overwhelming superiority.

  Custer had spent all night retreating from Hunterstown with the roughly 2,000 men of his brigade (far less than the unit’s maximum strength of 4,800). At about four in the morning he and his troopers unsaddled their horses five miles southeast of Gettysburg. A couple of hours later one of Kilpatrick’s staff officers rode up and ordered Custer to move with the rest of the 3rd Division to guard the army’s far left flank. He roused his men and formed them into a long column. Another staff officer rode up, sent by Brig. Gen. David Gregg, commander of the 2nd Cavalry Division, who ordered Custer to the far right of the line of battle, with Pleasonton’s approval.50

  The young general led his men to the intersection of Hanover and Low Dutch roads, almost due east of the northern end of the Union line on the Gettysburg battlefield. From a historical perspective, Custer was in the right place. Since ancient times, horsemen had guarded an army’s flanks. Infantry occupied the center and engaged in the heaviest fighting. Firepower made infantry supreme. The rifled musket carried by Civil War foot soldiers had a range of hundreds of yards, visibility permitting; supporting artillery shot still farther. Men on horseback made easy targets, and they lacked firepower. They usually dismounted to shoot even when they used the carbine, the rifle’s shorter-barreled sibling—which reduced their numbers by a quarter, since horse holders could not fight. The introduction of the Spencer pointed to a more powerful combat role, but only a few cavalry regiments possessed it.

  Cavalrymen on both sides still romanticized the era when mounted charges could shatter enemy lines and win battles. They celebrated medieval knights, royalist cavaliers, and Murat’s exploits in Napoleon’s campaigns. These all predated the mass use of the rifle. When cavalry charged prepared infantry in the Civil War, they met disaster, as at Gaines’s Mill on the Peninsula. A properly controlled charge moved at a slow pace until quite close to the enemy, lest the horses tire out early; when the riders finally spurred into a gallop, they wielded revolvers or sabers, close-range weapons that required them to get almost to within an arm’s reach of the foe. Mounted charges could still work, but almost strictly against other horsemen, or foot soldiers who were badly outnumbered, panicking, or unsuspecting. Civil War cavalrymen usually found themselves restricted to raiding, reconnaissance, screening the infantry from observation, pursuing the fleeing enemy after a victory—or fighting enemy cavalry on the flanks of a great battle. And Gettysburg was a great battle.

  Custer halted his men facing west, and sent out scouts on a wide-ranging search for the enemy. It was quiet. A little over a mile to the north was a low rise of wooded ground dignified with the name Cress’s Ridge, where enemy cannons soon appeared. A heavy skirmish line moved into view, gray-clad troopers edging their way south on foot. The guns began to boom, sending solid shot and exploding shells squarely into the Michigan Brigade. Custer redeployed his men to face the new threat and ordered his skillful artillery chief, Lt. Alexander Pennington, to fire at the enemy guns. Pennington’s three-inch rifled cannons soon silenced the better-placed Confederate artillery. Custer sent the 5th Michigan forward in a dismounted skirmish line, and he dispatched scouts to ride around the enemy flanks and investigate the force he now faced.51

  Unknown to Custer, Lee had decided to win the Battle of Gettysburg with a decisive thrust at the center of the Union line. He had called on General Stuart to take his much-admired horsemen and swing around the Union right flank in a solid mass. He was to get into the rear of the Union infantry during the frontal assault and pursue and destroy the retreating foe. The Michigan Brigade was the last obstacle in his way.

  Custer’s scouts reported that a heavy force of Confederate cavalry lay to the north. But the rebels hesitated, unsure of what they faced. The morning passed amid mere skirmishing. At midday, one of Kilpatrick’s staff officers rode up and ordered Custer to follow his original instructions—to go to the opposite flank of the Army of the Potomac. A brigade of General Gregg’s 2nd Division soon arrived to relieve him, and Custer reluctantly ordered his men to withdraw. Before he departed, Gregg rode up to confer with him.

  At thirty, Gregg was Custer’s senior by only a few years, but he looked much older, with dark straight hair and an enormous curly beard. He said that Pleasonton had also ordered Custer to go to Kilpatrick. But he had received a dispatch that “large columns of the enemy’s cavalry were moving toward the right of the line”—and here they were. Gregg thought that the Confederates across the field were “evidence that the enemy’s cavalry had gained our right, and were about to attack, with the view of gaining the rear of our line of battle,” he later reported. They could not risk weakening this critical point by letting Custer’s brigade go.

  Both men knew that if Custer stayed at Gregg’s request, Gregg would be disobeying a direct command from the corps commander. Gregg needed Custer’s agreement with his analysis and cooperation in refusing the order.

  “General Custer,” Gregg wrote, “fully satisfied of the intended attack, was well pleased to remain with his brigade.” Just after 1 p.m., as the two generals made their plans, thunder rolled over the field—th
e concussion of some 150 Confederate artillery pieces all blasting at once, “the largest Southern bombardment of the war,” writes James McPherson. For the next two hours, the rebel guns fired shot and shell at the center of the main Union line on Cemetery Ridge, preparing the way for an assault by 12,000 men led by Maj. Gen. George Pickett.52

  On this field, the battle between cavalry simmered less dramatically. Gregg sent a line of dismounted skirmishers toward Cress’s Ridge. A larger rebel force advanced to meet them. Custer dispatched the 5th Michigan on foot to reinforce Gregg’s men. They held the line, but fell back when they ran low on ammunition.

  The Confederates chose that moment to attack. Two regiments advanced uncertainly on foot. Another rode out of the tree line atop the ridge and down toward the Union skirmishers. It was the veteran 1st Virginia Cavalry.

  Custer trotted his horse over to the 7th Michigan, a regiment he had kept mounted and in reserve. Inexperienced, badly understrength (with only 461 officers and enlisted men, less than 60 percent of the brigade’s largest regiment), it was the only unit in position to save the endangered skirmishers on the field. Coming up to its commander, Col. William D. Mann, Custer learned that Gregg had ordered the regiment to charge. He said he would go with them. Mann gave the command, and the column rode through the fields at a trot. As the troopers approached the enemy, they sped into a gallop.

  Custer rode ahead of them. By now his flamboyant uniform had endured days in the saddle and hours of sleep taken here and there on the ground. It had absorbed dust and rain and mud, not to mention the sweat of a man hard at work in the dense, humid heat without a moment to bathe. Yet he remained distinctive still. Some would remember him flourishing his sword, others, him waving his hat. But all accounts agree that he turned toward his men and shouted, “Come on, you Wolverines!”