So he received his leave after all, once he filed the paperwork, including a surgeon’s certificate that he was “suffering the effects of a gunshot wound of the tibial region” from a bullet through his lower leg, almost grazing the bone. He went back to Monroe, having been the subject of more newspaper stories, these praising the “unequalled gallantry” of the “Boy General of the Golden Locks,” and another vanishingly narrow escape from death on his record. It hardly mattered that the battle itself hardly mattered.81
—
“IT WOULD ALMOST KILL dear Elliot [Bates] to have me finally refuse him,” Libbie Bacon wrote in her diary about a smitten West Point cadet. “I tell him over and over again I do not love him now enough to be forever.…Perhaps I may be able to judge my feelings after a year when my violent fancy for C shall have passed away.”82
Courtship and fancies and love (or want of it) defined Libbie’s existence. She had received as extensive an education as almost any young woman in America—as all but a small number of men—yet she was expected to do nothing with it. Neither her father, stepmother, nor the seminary thought she might lead her life on her own. Her task was to settle on a suitor, one who offered prospects of sufficient income to maintain her station, one of equal or better social standing, and, in particular, one approved by her parents. She did little but read, socialize, go to church, and receive gentlemen callers, such as the reserved Francis Chandler or Elliot Bates. The one area in which she had some control of her destiny—the choice of the man who would overshadow the rest of her life—was confined by her father’s judgment. So she tried to doubt her own attraction to Custer, dismissing it as “my violent fancy,” an ephemeral thing, hardly the foundation of a stable and respectable relationship.83
She had not expected to see Custer for some time, and went to Traverse City on Lake Michigan with her father and stepmother. On September 17 she stepped out of the train onto the platform in Monroe, and saw Custer, who had arrived the day before. “I could not avoid him,” she wrote. “I tried to, but I did not succeed.”
It would have been impossible to miss his presence in town. Prior to his receiving leave, Nettie had teased Custer, “What sort of sensation do you expect to make if you come here…? I am afraid so much ‘brass’ will dazzle the eyes of us poor Monroe girls. However we will do our best to endure the blaze of glory.” The joke became reality. The local newspapers, the Monitor and Commercial, quoted glowing articles about him from the metropolitan press, and announced that on September 28 the “Young Ladies and Gents of Monroe” were hosting “a Fancy Dress Ball at the Humphrey House…in honor of Gen. George A. Custer.”84
It was a costume ball. Libbie went. She selected a humble but exotic costume, the persona of someone always ready to pick up and move—a gypsy girl, tambourine in one hand. As the honored party, Custer dressed as Louis XVI. The band struck up at nine in the evening, followed by the unmasking at eleven, followed by dinner at midnight, followed by more dancing.85
She saw him as often as three times a day in the Humphrey House parlor during his two-week stay, hiding their romantic intrigue in plain view. Yet she found these moments filled with fresh intensity. He said he wanted to marry her, and she said she wanted to marry him. “I did not know I loved him so until he left Monroe in the spring,” she told her cousin Rebecca Richmond. “Try as I did to suppress the ‘fancy’ for six months it did no good,” she wrote in her diary. “I do love him and have all the time.…I believe I shall marry him sometime.”86
But there remained the opposition of her father. Custer had tried to build a relationship with Judge Bacon during his leave, often conversing with him about the war—though he could never quite nerve himself to ask permission to court the judge’s daughter. The last opportunity came at the railroad station on October 5, the day he left. Libbie and her father went with Custer, along with many others who came to say farewell. Judge Bacon pulled the young soldier aside before he boarded his train, and spoke kindly about his prospects, and “said he would be disappointed if he did not hear such and such things of me soon,” Custer recorded the next day. Custer replied that “I had desired to speak to him, but being prevented from doing so, I would write to him.” Bacon said, “Very well.”87
After Custer departed, emotion overwhelmed Libbie as she opened her diary. “Oh how dear he is. I love him so. His words linger in my ears, his kisses on my lips,” she wrote. “Then a thousand doubts come into my mind like tormenting devils and I doubt if I love him. I do tho and I shall sometime be his ‘little wife.’ ”88
As the days passed, the tormenting continued. Custer’s letters to Nettie showed that he still had not written to Judge Bacon. “My mind has been alternating between hope and fear” concerning how Bacon would react to it, he wrote. “I cannot rid myself of the fear that I may suffer from some unfounded prejudice.”89
He dreaded being judged—being seen as the poor blacksmith’s troublesome son, the womanizing, cursing, gambling, heathen soldier, the Copperhead. Excuses followed. “I would have written that letter to her father today,” he wrote to Humphrey on October 9, “but that I knew I should be interrupted.…All my future destiny hangs on the answer my letter shall bring.”90
Finally, on October 16, he finished the letter and mailed it. It arrived two days later. He admitted his failings, but offered a defense for each. He had been a drinker, but had abided by the pledge made to his sister. He had escorted other Monroe girls in public, but merely to divert gossips from his passion for Libbie. He had left home as a teenager and had faced temptation ever since, “but have always had a purpose in life.”91
“Father is, to my surprise, on my side,” Libbie wrote in her diary. “Mother cannot, and will not see him in my light.”92 With a skeptical Rhoda lurking behind him, the judge was guarded in his reply to Custer. “The subject is one of vast moment to me, requiring thought and reflection, that I may require weeks or even months before I can feel to give you a definite answer,” he wrote. As a widower, Bacon suggested, he felt more than the typical concern for his child, though he was gratified that Libbie valued education and “moral deportment.” He and Rhoda “have guarded her reputation with intense parental solicitude.…She is esteemed by relatives and friends as worthy of the hand whose future shall be without spot or blemish.” And there was the trouble. Was the “Boy General of the Golden Locks” spotless? For that matter, was he solid, sensible, moral? Bacon did not mention Custer’s reputation as a ladies’ man, but it shadowed his final words—words of caution and concern, but touched with grace. “We are all liable to change in life and are not always our own keeper. Your ability energy and force of character I have always admired, and no one can feel more gratified than myself at your well earned reputation and your high & honorable position.” After Custer left Monroe, he wrote, he had held a very open conversation about him with Libbie. The judge said he would “talk with her more upon this important subject which she is at liberty to communicate to you.”93
“Liberty to communicate”: it was not the “future destiny” that Custer hoped for in Bacon’s letter, but it presented the path to the future. After trying to preserve all opportunities for so long, tugging along Fannie Fifield and Libbie Bacon—and perhaps other women—for nearly a year, Custer had finally committed himself by writing to Judge Bacon. “Liberty to communicate” was as good as an engagement. Custer’s bride would have to be Libbie Bacon, or he could never return home without disgrace.
Six
* * *
THE GENERAL
HE SAT ALONE IN the dark. It hardly mattered that others filled the seats below him in that theater in Washington, D.C., or that some may have shared the private box he rented. The experience of a play was private, intimate, enveloping. Hidden in darkness in his seat, the stage was all his world, and the players all its people, lit by flames flickering on their footlight wicks.
His love of the theater was both natural and surprising. Natural, because he had constructed his life as a drama
tic narrative, told to others in lengthy letters when not acted out in person, rewritten as needed to make a better story than reality could provide. For the past three months, no editing had been necessary. He had been the leading man—adorned in costume on horseback, adorned in costume in a ball held to honor him, adoring his lover in a hotel parlor. Upon his arrival in Washington earlier that day, he had sat very still for an oversized, hand-colored photographic portrait that cost him the extravagant sum of $30. He meant to be admired even when absent.1
Then, too, there were obvious similarities between a general and a famous actor. In nineteenth-century combat, a combat leader intended to be seen; he gestured and declaimed for a mass audience. Thousands attended his every movement on the battlefield. His dramatic instincts allowed him to communicate orders with a flash of his sword, to inspire sacrifice with a glance in the right direction.
But the contrasts were stark. The soldier dwelt in war, the most intense reality of all. As a general, Custer altered the course of human events. He killed and he saved. The consequences of his actions reshaped the lives of men, women, and children who never saw his face or heard his name. The actor engaged in verisimilitude, not reality itself, pretending to be someone else. Evangelical Christians steeped in the revival fervor of the Second Great Awakening—such as Custer’s father and Ann—derided the theater as worldly, frivolous, and false; they dismissed playacting as superficial, a coarse pleasure performed by questionable types.2
Here lies the surprise. Custer knew the pious opinion of the stage, yet the footlight fires hypnotized him. He loved the deliberate performance, the cultivated appearance, the thing that was put on show that it might be admired by the world. Perhaps it was because his father’s religion disparaged the theater that he embraced it. He was only twenty-three, an age still fat with rebellion, a yearning for excitement and glamor. The phenomenon of stardom itself appealed to him. He wanted those things that were forbidden and pleasurable. He wanted admirers. He wanted embellishment. He wanted to control how others saw him. Like a star actor.
When the performance was over, he purchased a bouquet—presumably to throw onstage—from a vendor who came to his box. Struggling with the flowers and his payment, he placed his pocketbook on the floor. The next morning he discovered that he had left it there. The wallet contained $70. He rushed back, but it was gone.3
To lose money in a theater: nothing could have epitomized better his turn off the narrow road of faith, his flight from poverty and provincialism. His family freighted the issue of money with moral obligations again and again. “My Dear Brother I must caution you to be saveing of your money until you get your parents well provided for,” Ann had written to him at the end of August. “You know it all depends on you.” Emmanuel commented on October 25 on the difficulty of maintaining his new home. “Monroe is a nice place to live in I would like it first rate as Tom says if I had the means to live comfertable,” he wrote. “Now I am straped for the present and it seams that we hav not got any thing hardley this is the place to consume Green Backs.” Two days later Custer’s sister Margaret (or Maggie) wrote that his mother “is very sorry she has to [ask] you (if you have it to spare) to send her five dollars for to get that little building moved that is on the end of the lot.…Mother hates to ask you for it if you have not got it.”
His mother agonized over asking for five dollars while he spent thirty on a picture of himself and carelessly left seventy on the floor of a private box in a theater. These letters reminded him that each dollar he spent was sutured to the unhealing wound of his family’s poverty.4
And yet, he deliberately provoked Ann, bragging about his heedlessness. “I am extravagant in many ways,” he wrote on November 6. “I lost ten dollars today that I bet on a horserace with Gen. Kirkpatrick.…Between you and me I could keep a family with the money I spend needlessly.”
Here was Custer the thoughtless youth, and the prankster, the narrator, the dramatist. A prank deliberately attacks sensitivities; it is then defused with a revelation or a conciliating gesture (though only after the explosion). A story requires a change, best preceded by crisis. The reformation of a lead character demands dissipation first. He bragged about his spending both as a painful joke and to prepare for the coming turn in the Prince-Hal-to-Henry-V story he was writing for himself.
“I am going to make a great change some of these days, a change for the better,” he added. “I think you will approve of it when you know more about it. Do not let anybody else see this letter. Don’t forget it. I must close as I have another letter to write to a young lady in Monroe.”5
—
THE CHEERS OF THE MEN rose as dusk fell on October 8, 1863, as soon as they spotted Custer riding into the camp of the Michigan Brigade. The band gathered and began to play “Hail to the Chief.” It gratified him. “I wish you could have seen how rejoiced my men seemed to be at my return,” he wrote to Nettie Humphrey (knowing Libbie would read his words). “Whatever may be the real sentiments entertained by the world at large, I feel assured that here, surrounded by my noble little band of heroes, I am loved and respected.” Everyone was happy to see him, he told his sister, “not excepting Eliza.” Eliza was the most likely to rejoice, of course, after weeks without her patron and protector. She was a young black woman alone amid thousands of young white men, shielded only by their respect for Custer and her own force of personality.6
The next day the Cavalry Corps broke camp and moved south to investigate reports that Lee was on the march—perhaps to take advantage of the recent departure of two corps to help Gen. Ulysses S. Grant lift the siege of Chattanooga. The Union troopers found the Army of Northern Virginia moving rapidly to outflank the Army of the Potomac—including themselves. The cavalry withdrew north on October 11, but the Confederates cut off the 3rd Division near Brandy Station. Custer led a series of charges that cut open an escape route, losing two horses killed beneath him within fifteen minutes of each other.7
Custer did not secure the division’s escape alone, but he proved again that he was most adept on the battlefield, where he never lost confidence in himself. He recovered quickly from the surprise of a gaping ditch that halted his first charge, and regained command of his troops after he fell violently from a dying horse. He displayed his fluency with the mechanics of command under fire, smoothly directing the movements of batteries, regiments, squadrons, and companies.
Custer possessed “a gift for combat leadership,” writes Robert Utley. He combined keen observation with an intuitive grasp of the meaning of what he saw. A cloud of dust behind a hill might indicate an enemy outflanking maneuver or a retreat; a flicker of gray-clad men in a tree line might be a mere picket or a massed column preparing to charge. He sometimes guessed wrong, but more often he judged right—far more than most. He had a talent for choosing the correct course amid chaos.8
After it was all over, though, he could not resist embellishing the story. In his official report, he inhabited the minds of his men, turning them into a grand unified supporting cast. “I informed them that we were surrounded, and all we had to do was to open a way with our sabers. They showed their determination and purpose by giving three hearty cheers.” The band’s music “made each individual member feel as if here was a host himself.…It required but a glance at the countenances of the men to enable me to read the settled determination with which they undertook the task before them.”9
He told Nettie Humphrey (and, implicitly, Libbie Bacon) that just before his attack he pulled out a locket with Libbie’s picture and opened it, in case it was his last chance to look at her. “Oh, could you but have seen some of the charges that were made!” he wrote. “While thinking of them I cannot but exclaim, ‘Glorious War!’ ”10
Biographers would often quote the phrase, and one would use it as the title for a book about Custer’s Civil War career.11 Yet prosaic duties consumed most of his time as a brigade commander. In performing them, he created managerial friction. It is a phenomenon inherent in hier
archical organizations, with their tiers of authority and partitioned fields of responsibility. Officials at every level push up, push down, push sideways—demanding, defending, or simply disliking one another.
“It is an actual fact that there are men in my command who have been captured by the enemy, carried to Richmond, and rejoined my command in less time than it frequently requires for men to proceed to the Dismounted Camp and return mounted,” he complained. The chief of the Cavalry Bureau, Maj. Gen. George Stoneman, blamed the riders. “I have understood that Custer’s brigade are great horse-killers,” he wrote.12
Some rattling of the chains of command was inevitable. Since the army pioneered the organizational society in America, it naturally pioneered bureaucratic infighting as well. And who is to say that Custer was wrong? He was responsible for his own unit; if kicking the machine delivered better horses faster, then he served his men well. Yet managerial friction exposed the self-important, self-destructive side of his personality.
What chafed him was the conduct of the Bristoe Station Campaign, the seesaw movements that included his narrow escape on October 11. Meade withdrew all the way to the Bull Run battlefield, escaping Lee’s outflanking maneuver, and got the better of the battle that gave its name to the campaign. The Confederates retreated in turn to a position behind the Rapidan River, followed cautiously by the Army of the Potomac.13
“The movements of this army for the past three or four weeks have been a complete farce,” Custer wrote to Judge Christiancy on October 29. “Could I see you I could make some developments [i.e., reveal information] which would astonish you, but I dare not trust it on paper. I do not refer to idle rumors, but to established facts,” he wrote. Keep all this secret, he insisted. “I have never expressed an opinion in the presence of anyone and I should consider it wrong for me to do so were my opinion made public.”14
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