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

by Stiles, T. J.

  At five in the afternoon of July 23, Custer took the division into the crossroads known as Amissville in Rappahannock County, Virginia. Lee’s army marched by just to the south, on its way back to its fortified position at Fredericksburg. Custer notified Pleasonton that evening, “I will endeavor to annoy the enemy tomorrow morning as much as it is in my power to do.”58

  The result was nearly a disaster. He threatened an infantry corps with just three worn-down cavalry regiments and one battery; in response, the enemy partly encircled his tiny force. “I think our position today the most critical I was ever in,” he reported to Pleasonton. He adroitly escaped, but the risk had been entirely unnecessary—a lesson in the dangers of overreaching as a division commander.59

  The clash (called Newby’s Crossroads or Battle Mountain) punctuated the end of the long tale of fighting that began before Gettysburg. Back in camp at Amissville, Custer endured the true tedium of command—in other words, management. “You cannot imagine how completely my time is occupied,” he wrote to his sister on July 26. “I am at work night and day usually get up before daylight go to bed late am called up several times during the night.” After hard campaigning, the division needed food, new boots, uniforms, and equipment, grain and shoes for the horses, and new horses to replace the many dead. “We have had no forage whatever for three days, not even wheat,” he reported. “The grazing is very indifferent. My men are out of rations.”60

  Foraging became a kind of economic warfare that punished local civilians. “The rebels have been collecting and driving off all the cattle, horses, and sheep in this county,” he told Pleasonton. Victor Comte and his fellow Frenchmen in the 5th Michigan took pleasure in their own harvest. “While our regiment was chasing the Rebels from Ashby Gap, I was chasing a pig, which I killed,” he wrote to his wife. One comrade, he noted, “cooks chickens better than you can get in a hotel. He has fun making coffee and I have fun watching him do it.…We make cream sauce twice a day. Fresh beef and pork are not wanting.”

  But raiding civilians also troubled Comte. “I pity the farmers because if the army stays here another week they’ll die of starvation next winter,” he wrote on July 30. He and a friend stopped seven soldiers from the 7th Michigan from looting a farmhouse filled with poor women and children, only to see them return with an officer who ordered them to seize the family’s flour and cornmeal. “I’m angry to be forced to do things which I detest,” he wrote. “I’m fighting and will continue to fight to the end for the Union but they’ll never make me cause defenseless innocents to suffer.”61

  Custer might have been inclined to share Comte’s sentiments, given his politics. But certain imperatives came with his command position. Anything left behind would supply the enemy. Even worse, white civilians began to turn on his men. A Confederate cavalry officer named Maj. John Singleton Mosby led a unit of Partisan Rangers in guerrilla raids and ambushes behind Union lines. Soon no officer in the division went without an escort. Custer sent 300 picked men to hunt for Mosby.

  They would fail, thanks to the population. Indeed, the partisans were the population. Custer complained to Pleasonton that civilians “injure us through bushwhacking, &c.…They are bolder and more defiant.…I can suppress bushwhacking, and render every man within the limits of my command practically loyal, if allowed to deal with them as I choose.” In guerrilla-wracked Missouri, the kind of authority Custer desired led junior officers to burn homes and render civilians “practically loyal” through summary executions. Meade refused the request.62

  If military logic led to harsh policies, Custer’s personal ethics were another matter. They always tended to squirt one direction or another depending on the situation. It was fair enough to capture a fine horse, expensive saddle, and first-rate sword from an enemy in the field, and standard practice to occupy a civilian house as a headquarters. But it was rather unusual to “capture” an expensive private carriage with silver harness. Custer did all of these.

  The more successful he was in the field, the more room he allowed for his personal indulgences. He kept his band busy blaring cheerful tunes outside his headquarters as his dogs slept on his bed inside, while Johnny Cisco, the homeless boy, washed his socks and uniform. Custer filled out his staff with young friends from Monroe, including Jacob Greene, boyfriend of Nettie Humphrey. When Custer wrote to his schoolmate John Bulkley on August 2 to explain how he would maneuver him into a position, Greene added a note. “It is just a little more ‘bully’ than you can think,” he wrote. “Come by all means. The thing can be easily fixed.…It is delightful.”

  Custer and his friends were still more boys than men. But Custer’s colorful presence and lighthearted air—matched as it was with personal courage and skill—fed his soldiers’ pride. The men, too, began to wear bright red neckties.63

  He also schemed to bring James Christiancy out of a regiment in the West to join his staff. He liked Jim, but continued to cultivate his father, Judge Isaac Christiancy. The United States Senate had not yet confirmed Custer’s appointment as a general, and he was worried. On July 26, he sent a letter to the judge explaining how he hoped to get Jim onto his staff. “I wish to speak of another matter and will then close,” he added. He feared that a political enemy would lobby Michigan’s senators to vote down his confirmation as brigadier general. “If I fail to receive my confirmation from the Senate because I am not worthy to fill the position, well and good. But I do not wish to be defeated in an unfair manner. I speak of this to you hoping and feeling assured that you will do all in your power to aid me and to counteract the influence I speak of.”

  The judge was inclined to help. As he later told Custer, “Michigan is more proud of your deeds than those of any other man she has sent to the field.” But Custer’s well-timed offer to help James struck at a vulnerable point, and he felt it. “Poor Jim! I have spent many a sleepless night in consequence of his errors,” Christiancy later wrote. Alcoholism—“dissipation”—put him almost beyond help.64

  As so often in Custer’s life, it is difficult to separate opportunism from sincere feeling. He liked Christiancy and his family, and enjoyed being surrounded with Monroe boys on his staff, yet he requested a kind of quid pro quo. Custer undeniably served his country, yet he pursued his own agenda all the while.

  As all this played out, Custer remembered the most remarkable luxury he had ever seen in a general’s tent—the black cook who served Pleasonton. Sometime before the 3rd Division departed the vicinity of Amissville on July 30, Custer rode over to the nearby camp holding the scores of contrabands who had rushed into Union lines.65

  —

  “I ALLUS THOUGHT THIS, that I didn’t set down to wait to have ’em all free me. I helped to free myself.” When Eliza Brown later looked back at her teenage self of the summer of 1863, she remembered her march to the Union bivouac at Amissville as an act of will. And it was—a personal rebellion that took her away from the only home she knew, away from the social and kinship networks that supported her, and toward a war. Contraband camps, writes one historian, were “marked by conditions that should have deterred all but the hardiest and most determined of souls.”66

  The escapees often traveled long distances, developing open sores, swollen feet, and hunger. The local food supply had been devoured by both armies, the water polluted. Before Union troops found work for contrabands or transported them out of the battle zone, they put them out of the way. “They have been stowed away in narrow, dark, filthy sheds, old houses, cellars—any sort of places—with scarcely rags enough to cover their persons, or straw enough to sleep upon,” a reporter in Virginia wrote in 1863. “Many are lodged in old slave-pens.”

  On one hand, a historian notes, the camps “became more than mere collecting points.…They also became the first great cultural and political meeting grounds that the war produced.” For many freed people, the camps reinforced the spirit of freedom, invigorated their sense of their right to liberty, to personal autonomy. On the other hand, they became vectors
for outbreaks of lethal diseases.67

  “The day I came into camp,” Brown recalled, “there was a good many other darkeys from all about our place. We was a-standin’ around waitin’ when I first seed the Ginnel.” The arrival of the lean young man with a star on each shoulder and an aide beside him drew attention in this holding pen. A general would only come if he had work, and work meant better food, better living conditions, and possibly pay.

  He went over to the young women—eighteen of them, by Brown’s recollection—and looked them over. Then he came to the teenager Brown, a small woman with a wide mouth, broad, pronounced cheekbones, large, rather sad eyes, a somewhat thin nose, and a face that narrowed sharply from her cheeks down to her chin, almost in the shape of a heart. Clearly she was self-assured. As one woman described her, “She was young though with mature ways.”68

  Custer paused. He looked at her carefully, and asked, “Well, what’s your name?” Eliza, she said. “Well, Eliza, would you like to come and live with me?” He needed a cook, he explained.

  “I waited a minute,” she recalled. “I looked him all over, too.” He was as self-assured as she was, with a cocky air, long, curly hair, enormous mustache, and flamboyant dress. He obviously held high rank, but was perhaps less intimidating because of his youth—and he offered an opportunity to escape the camp. “I reckon I would,” she said. “As long as you’ll be good to me then I’ll be good to you.”69

  “But oh, how awful lonesome I was at fust, and I was afraid of everything in the shape of war,” Brown later reflected.70 The journey to Custer’s headquarters took her into yet another world, the military world, a strongly male sphere. Men marched and rode past in regimented columns; they bathed, urinated, and defecated in the open; they gathered in small mobs around card games or pots over fires, shouting profanities and laughing at dirty jokes. Everywhere there were rifles, cannons, caissons, and sabers, not to mention wagons, crates, prisoners, horses, carcasses of horses, and piles of amputated arms and legs outside the surgeon’s tent after a skirmish. Most were young, though no one seemed younger than the Boy General and his boyish staff, who constantly kidded one another and played practical jokes.

  But Eliza Brown could read white society, even such a strange and artificial one as the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Cavalry Division of the Army of the Potomac. She learned the tensions and allegiances among the officers, and the significance of the fact that she would run the household of the most important man in the brigade. She would share his power to a small degree—filtered by her sex and race and civilian status, but power enough, provided that Custer himself respected her.

  It was a situation that called for assertiveness, and she asserted. The small, teenage girl in a calico dress, hair wrapped in a bandana, took charge of the boy Johnny Cisco, established her authority over the general’s mess, and learned how to acquire food and supplies from sources other than the quartermaster’s stock. Instead of shrinking before a brigade of armed white men, she often pushed them. “Eliza became mother to the boyish staff,” wrote someone who met her a few months later, “advised and scolded if she thought they were too convivial, as if she had been forty. When promotions came it was [she who] sewed on the new shoulder straps.” The young men began to seek her out to press their special requests on Custer. She learned of “their joys, their best girls at home, their injuries, their ambitions, their sly suggestions that ‘the old man’ might consider their case…in advance of the others.”

  It was a role she had trained for on the Pierce farm. As she did then, she acquired news, even secrets, from officers and couriers who, “knowing that a pan of hot biscuits seemed perpetually in the oven, slyly slipped into the kitchen on the way to their horses.” She had spent her life learning that information was the key to survival.71

  Did Custer have sex with her? It is a natural suspicion. Men raped black women throughout the South; and a young woman in an army camp seemed particularly vulnerable. But there is a strikingly total lack of evidence that he did. Indeed, the only real source on this question is Brown herself. “There’s many folks says that a woman can’t follow the army without throwing themselves away, but I know better,” she later said. “I went in, and I come out with the respect of the men and officers.” No credible evidence contradicts her. The source as well as the result of her preservation was, as she said, “respect.” She earned it.72

  —

  CUSTER HAD TROUBLE with authority figures in 1863—two, to be precise. The first was Gen. Judson Kilpatrick, who returned from leave on August 4. Back in command, he grew irritated with his flamboyant subordinate, already beloved by reporters. Kilpatrick himself liked to cultivate the press, and wrote official reports notable for their inexact correspondence to reality; even fellow cavalry officers thought him affected and self-serving. It’s not surprising that Kilpatrick would find these very traits to be especially reprehensible in someone else.73

  On August 14, Custer learned a universal truth about life in a large organization: when the boss reprimands you in writing, he is really angry. That day Kilpatrick had his assistant adjutant general send a one-sentence letter to Custer: “The General Comdg [commanding] directs me to say that you will under no circumstances forward an Official communication to Major Gen Pleasonton except through Head Quarters.” Having risen through favoritism and personal connections, Custer had been too careless about the chain of command.74

  Then Kilpatrick learned that Custer and his staff had, characteristically, held a friendly chat with a number of enemy officers. The division was stationed across the Rappahannock from Fredericksburg; Custer received a request for a conference with Col. Robert C. Hill of the 48th North Carolina. They met on August 18. Hill asked for an end to the random daily fire because it endangered the civilians still living in Fredericksburg. Custer agreed. “Much was [then] said that had no connection to the business which caused the meeting,” Hill wrote. He claimed that he and his staff were guarded, but “Gen. Custer and his staff, all mere youths, branched out extensively, and tried to show us how much they knew.” Hill implied that they revealed military secrets.

  News of the parley infuriated Kilpatrick, “as such a proceeding on the part of Gen. Custer was most undignified and improper. I spoke to Gen. Custer about it and learned from him that the report was true,” he wrote. As we know, it was not the first time Custer had fraternized with the enemy. Samuel Harris of the 5th Michigan later recalled how, shortly before the incident that agitated Kilpatrick, Custer had crossed the river under a flag of truce to pay a social call on Brig. Gen. Thomas Rosser, his friend from West Point, now a Confederate cavalry officer. After a few hours he returned, and said he “had a fine time over there.”

  Kilpatrick reminded Custer of an explicit order “forbidding all intercourse with the enemy whatever.” Custer claimed ignorance but promised to obey it in the future. Kilpatrick took no further action, but the tension simmered.75

  Custer hoped to influence the other authority figure who vexed him: Judge Daniel Bacon. On August 13 Custer wrote to Nettie Humphrey and asked how the judge saw him since he became a general. As it happened, she had seen much of him recently. “Your name is seldom if ever mentioned between us,” she replied. “He is a man of strong prejudices—you & I think some of them unfounded—but—what necessity for me to go over the reasoning I have used so often before!”

  The message was clear: he still prohibited Libbie from receiving Custer as a suitor. “He is a truly good man and a fond, devoted Father who would feel ingratitude or deceit on the part of his child, most keenly,” Nettie wrote. “An act of disobedience from Libbie, in a matter of importance, would almost kill him, I think.” His bias was so fixed that she thought it might be best to abandon “forbidden hopes.” She promised to continue to write to Custer, though, because one thing prevented any real harm: Libbie would never disobey her father.76

  Custer still cultivated Fannie Fifield, but less avidly as summer went on. Libbie aroused more serious feelings in him.
On August 27, while Humphrey was still composing her discouraging letter, he had Jim Christiancy write to Judge Bacon in order to have himself put in a better light.77 “Please pardon this seeming impudence in writing to you uninvited,” Christiancy wrote, but he thought that news of the “gallant Michigan Regiments under the command of the no less [gallant] Genl. Custer would afford you some pleasure.” He described a recent operation, and praised Custer as a hero and—more important—a serious man. “To say that General Custer is a brave man is unnecessary. He has proven himself to be not only that but also a very cool and self-possessed man. It is indeed very difficult to disturb his mental equilibrium.”78

  But Custer knew he would have to go to Monroe in person to sway Bacon. On September 5 he asked for twenty days’ leave to return to Michigan, claiming it was “absolutely necessary…owing to the serious illness of my mother.” Ann did not mention any illness in a letter she finished the day before—though she did say that his parents had purchased a house in Monroe, had no money, and that “it all depends on you and with your salery you can make them comfortable.” It was in this note that she said that Fannie thought “you was displeased at her.”79

  Custer did not get his leave. Orders came from Pleasonton for all three cavalry divisions to move across the Rappahannock. Meade wanted the horsemen to confirm reports that Longstreet had taken his corps west and Lee was retreating to a new position below the Rapidan. Pleasonton’s advance led to a battle with Confederate cavalry at Culpeper Court House on September 13, in which Custer led “a really handsome charge,” according to Theodore Lyman, who served on Pleasonton’s staff. After the enemy was driven back in defeat, Lyman saw Custer approach the headquarters group. “His first greeting to General Pleasonton, as he rode up, was: ‘How are you, fifteen-days’-leave-of-absence? They have spoiled my boots but they didn’t gain much there, for I stole ’em from a Reb.’ And certainly,” Lyman wrote in his diary, “there was one boot torn by a piece of shell and the leg hurt also.”80