These days of mutual intoxication and tossed-up sheets could not last long. On February 26, Pleasonton ordered Custer back immediately.59
—
WHEN ELIZA BROWN saw four mules pull an ambulance up to the general’s impounded farmhouse near Stevensburg, Virginia, and a petite, pretty, stylishly dressed woman step out, she knew enough to see a threat. By taking charge of the general’s mess, Brown had established greater safety for herself than she had ever known. Slavery allowed no personal security, but Custer’s invitation to cook for him meant consistent work, meals, and shelter—and much more. Through ingenuity and strength of personality, she had turned the tyranny of racial and gender roles to her advantage. White men were happy to leave the kitchen to her, so she made it her fortress, the seat of real authority. She used her position to trade information, food, and favors.60
But then Libbie Custer showed up. It was universally accepted in mid-nineteenth-century America that the wife controlled all things domestic—particularly the kitchen. Even in Southern homes filled with slaves or Northern ones staffed with Irish maids, the woman of the house supervised and scrutinized. If Mrs. Custer took command of the cookery, she would destroy Brown’s security. She might fire Eliza in a moment of pique, or eradicate her authority by overruling or undercutting her. Brown faced the delicate task of keeping Mrs. Custer out of the kitchen without alienating her. Better yet, if she could turn her into an ally, Brown would be almost invulnerable.
She stood on the porch with Johnny Cisco as the general and his staff helped Mrs. Custer to the ground. Brown greeted her with a wide smile—what Libbie later called “motherliness and a beaming face.” And that was her first defense against encroachment: smothering care.
Brown immediately recognized that Libbie was daunted by her new life in this sparsely furnished old house so close to the front, surrounded by soldiers. She played on Libbie’s unease. “Day by day Eliza quietly and tactfully took us all in hand,” Libbie later wrote. “She had taken care of her invalid master and elderly mistress and had that rock-a-bye tone and coddling way that I fell victim to very soon. It was protecting and enveloping and…she seemed to stand between me and care, or responsibility.” Libbie soon learned that Brown was capable of “as delicate diplomacy as many a subtle, deep-thinking person could have exercised.”61
Brown had Libbie at a disadvantage. For all of Libbie’s education, intelligence, and outward advantages of race and marriage to the commanding general, she was a white woman in a white world. She had limited experience with servants, and had not given her interactions with them much thought. Eliza was a black woman in a white world. She had spent her life in radically unequal power relationships; adroitness with whites was her foremost survival skill. She understood just how hard to push back.
“She…was decidedly the King of the Kitchen Cabinet,” Libbie recalled. “It was tacitly understood that I was [not] to know anything about the ‘mess.’ ” Brown could flare in “wrath,” but she calibrated it precisely. Libbie called it “some scolding that was not dangerous.” Dangerous to the recipient, or to Brown? The truth is that anything that felt actually threatening to a white person was most dangerous to Eliza herself. She kept back intruders, including “Miss Libbie,” without going too far.
In time, Libbie came to grasp how Brown outmaneuvered her. Years later she felt the need to explain why she did not assume the domestic authority expected of her. In her first memoir, she would promote the teenage Eliza to seniority, describing her as “the General’s old colored servant.” She would claim that her husband positively prohibited her from housekeeping. And she, too, would play on cultural expectations of femininity, by exaggerating her own weakness and inability. “I knew that I was not to be foisted upon anyone without perfect understanding of my ignorance of house lore,” she would write. “I knew nothing about dishwater.”62
But her education in Brown’s diplomacy lay ahead of her. More immediately she learned the difference between a soldier at home, an attraction at parties in his dress uniform, and a soldier at war, surrounded by saluting subordinates, with a desk covered in maps and the army’s ubiquitous forms. Almost immediately upon the Custers’ arrival at Stevensburg, the brigade began to prepare for a raid. Bags of grain and crates of hardtack were stacked and loaded into wagons, carbines and cannons cleaned and inspected, horses saddled, companies and regiments formed into columns, flags and guidons raised overhead. Armstrong left.
Libbie went upstairs to the bedroom, lay down on the four-poster bed decorated with calico curtains by the wives of other officers, and wept. “I was completely overwhelmed with intense anxiety for my husband, bewilderment over the strange situation, and terror of the desolate place,” she later wrote. Few soldiers remained in camp, and few women; a Southern family lived downstairs in the same house, which left her constantly uneasy. Brown followed her upstairs and “treated me alike an infant, coddling, crooning over me, ‘He’ll come back Miss Libbie. He always does you know. Didn’t he tell you he’d come back?’ ” Before long, Brown erupted. “She could not resist, she could endure ‘no longer’ a secret she was bottling up: her wrath at what she termed ‘onerous and outrageous’ treatment of the General.”
In the course of Brown’s constant information gathering, she had learned about the operation that called Armstrong away. The idea for the raid, she told Libbie, originated with Kilpatrick. In November, he had gone home for the birth of a son. His wife and their child both had died during delivery. He had returned even more reckless than before. He had proposed a cavalry raid into Richmond to liberate Union prisoners, burn the Tredegar Iron Works, and distribute copies of the Emancipation Proclamation.
It was a preposterous plan, of course, but Brown heard that it had been approved through “political influence in Washington,” as Libbie recalled. It was close enough to the truth. Kilpatrick had ignored the chain of command, taking his proposal directly to the White House. Lincoln authorized the raid, which was launched within days.
“General Custer was assigned the duty of attracting the whole Southern Army in another direction,” Libbie gathered from Brown, “leaving this warrior [Kilpatrick] a clear field. It was for this reason the raid was delayed until General Custer’s return.” Even worse, Kilpatrick assigned Custer four regiments of unfamiliar troops and kept for himself much of the crack Michigan Brigade.63
And so Libbie tried not to cry, and Eliza tried to comfort her. Armstrong’s sudden departure made them immediate allies. He was the foundation of both their lives, here on the right flank of the Army of the Potomac. Without him, each would be alone among strangers, with only the other for company.
—
“THE GREAT RAID ON RICHMOND has ended and U.S. is satisfied that Kilpatrick can’t do everything. One thing at least he is unequal to, the capture of Richmond with cavalry,” James H. Kidd of the 6th Michigan wrote to his parents. “Gen Custer you know distinguished himself as he always does.”64
Armstrong returned—if not covered in glory, then “perfectly successful,” General Meade concluded. Custer reported that he had burned a bridge and three flour mills, smashed six caissons and two forges, captured fifty prisoners and 500 horses, led more than 100 contrabands to freedom, and “on my return was cut off by a large force of cavalry and artillery.” His friend Lt. George Yates, who came on the raid, wrote that Custer had ambushed his ambushers: “General Custer had massed his forces in a ravine out of sight of the enemy,” and as his advance guard was driven back “ordered a charge of this entire force. Officers and men moved forward in magnificent style, charging desperately upon the enemy, driving them back in confusion.”65
For Libbie, his return put everything right again. She wrote to her parents, “I am so charmed with the mountains.” She considered many of the officers whom they socialized with daily to be “very superior men.…A great many are from Philadelphia and New York.” It was a relief to be married, she wrote; she did not have to restrain herself so carefully as when
she was single, and she liked the attention they gave her. One day, amid a cluster of officers, she praised “the pleasant gentlemanly air an officer in the regular army has.” After they left, Armstrong warned her that the volunteers might resent it. It did not sink her buoyant mood. “Mother I haven’t uttered a cross word since I was married. Now isn’t that pretty well for me?”66
She and Armstrong visited his friends, dropped in on division and corps headquarters, inspected the troops. They went riding, and drove out in the fine carriage with silver harness that he had appropriated as the spoils of war, drawn by a beautiful matched pair of horses with four to six troopers riding behind as an escort. They were returning from a drive one day in the middle of March when the accident happened.
“Everybody seems to think it is a miracle I was not killed,” Libbie wrote to her parents on March 20. Her written account is unclear, a fog speckled with specifics: the prize horses bolting down to the stable, toppling an ambulance and smacking into Eliza Brown’s cow, and Armstrong lying on the ground as if dead. “He does not remember anything about the accident or subsequent delirium and I suppose he never will.” He suffered a severe concussion. He needed rest, but Libbie could not convince him to remain in bed. About ten days after the accident, the brigade surgeon examined him and found him still suffering from traumatic brain injury.67
During this period, he received a troubling notice from Pleasonton. A young woman named Annie E. Jones had been arrested for spying. In a sworn statement, she claimed she had been “the friend and companion of Genl Custer” in the summer of 1863. She said Kilpatrick was jealous and falsely accusing her of being a spy. Pleasonton told Custer that he must respond to the charge.
Yes, he knew Annie Jones, he wrote. She had come to him asking for a position as a nurse. He had allowed her to stay at his “headquarters” (in her own tent? in his tent? in his bed?) as he made inquiries at army hospitals. No nurse was needed, so after a week he told her to leave. “I informed her that she must never visit my command again.” Some weeks afterward she appeared late at night, driven in an army ambulance with a military escort, and demanded admittance. He reluctantly allowed her to spend the night but sent her away the next morning, and never saw her again. “It is simply untrue” that he and Kilpatrick quarreled over her. But he was curiously reluctant to condemn her. She was no spy, he argued, but was obsessed with the idea of performing some daring feat. “In this respect alone, she seemed to be insane.”68
It is impossible to know if Custer’s account was accurate, a fabrication, or significantly incomplete—or if his concussion affected his memory. Why was he so firm in sending her away the first time, after he spent a week trying to find her a position? Did she grow demanding? Did a brief sexual affair suddenly seem dangerous? And was he able to keep this exchange with Pleasonton secret from Libbie, who hovered over him as he recuperated? If he did keep it from her, she might have noticed that he was hiding something. If he did not, she might have been alarmed at the implications of the story, even if she believed him. It was not good.
On March 24, soon after Custer delivered his formal response, he applied for a medical leave of absence, supported by the surgeon’s certificate. He needed to heal himself and, perhaps, his marriage. The request was granted.
Seven
* * *
THE HERO
“GEN. GRANT IS QUITE inferior looking,” Libbie Custer wrote. Her husband introduced her to “the distinguished man” after they had boarded a special train from the Army of the Potomac to Washington. “So plain and not even a bright eye to light up his features. His hair and whiskers are sandy and his eyes are light greenish blue.” She had to remind herself that everyone expected this “ordinary-looking” fellow to win the war.1
It had been two weeks since Ulysses S. Grant had first appeared at Meade’s headquarters, freshly promoted to lieutenant general. He had won victory after victory in the West: the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson, the defeat of the Confederate attack at Shiloh, the capture of Vicksburg and its defending army, the victory at Missionary Ridge, breaking the siege of Chattanooga. He came east when President Lincoln named him general in chief.
The Army of the Potomac saw him as an outsider. “The feeling about Grant is peculiar—a little jealousy, a little dislike, a little envy, a little want of confidence,” wrote Capt. Charles Francis Adams Jr., grandson of John Quincy Adams and brother of Henry. Grant left Meade in command, but planned to accompany him on the impending campaign, an unsettling arrangement. “All, however, are willing to give him a full chance,” Adams added. “If he succeeds, the war is over.”
“Grant is not a striking man,” Meade wrote privately, “is very reticent, has never mixed with the world, and has but little manner, indeed is somewhat ill at ease in the presence of strangers; hence a first impression is never favorable.” Not quite forty-two, Grant, like Custer, was the son of a struggling artisan in rural Ohio. Like Custer, he had graduated from West Point with a weak record. Like Custer, he had excelled at war, winning recognition as a young officer in Mexico. But rumors of alcoholism had plagued him afterward. He had left the army, failed in business, and ended up in Galena, Illinois, working in his father-in-law’s tannery. When the Civil War began, he had volunteered, writing that he felt himself equal to the command of a regiment. Success followed success, promotion followed promotion, and this “stumpy, unmilitary, slouchy, and Western-looking” man (in the judgment of the genteel Col. Charles W. Wainwright) found himself in the nation’s highest military position, surrounded by its loftiest people. It left him even more awkward and closemouthed.2
But not with Libbie. The pretty, charming young woman put him at ease, and he unfolded himself in a way that only his close friends usually saw. “No show-off but quite unassuming,” Libbie described him, “talked all the while and was funny. Told the gentlemen that small army men invariably ride horses 17 hands high.” That would make the horse very large—a joke about pretension, which he despised. But it was also self-deprecating; Grant himself was rather small and his horse, Cincinnati, was seventeen and a half hands high. He kept a cigar in his mouth constantly but went to the rear platform to smoke, “fearing that it might be disagreeable to me, till Autie begged him to return,” Libbie wrote. “Tho disappointed in Grant’s looks, I like him.”
“Instead of speaking with men who could do so much for him, Autie sat by me and only spoke when necessary,” she added.3 For Custer, who so carefully cultivated patrons, such reticence is curious. Her explanation was modesty. But there was an unspoken dynamic between her husband and the hero in that rattling car, which swayed alarmingly over rebuilt track through fought-over country.
Grant’s joke about pretensions in the army set the tone. He himself engaged in “no Napoleonic displays, no ostentation, no speech, no superfluous flummery,” the New York World reported. The military historian John Keegan writes, “If Wellington eschewed ceremony, theater, and oratory, Grant actively disliked all three, with rigorous distaste.” He wore a private’s coat. He lived in a small tent with a cot, a pair of folding chairs, and a table. Libbie was right: he was “no show-off,” but rather a man of quiet moral force. The contrasts with Custer went deeper. Grant managed his army—a hero who provided “unheroic leadership,” in Keegan’s words. Respectful of long-range firepower, he remained at a safe distance from the firing even when riding along the line. He directed battles largely through remarkably clear written orders and telegraph dispatches. He has been described as one of the first modern generals.
Did Custer become painfully aware of his black velvet jacket with gigantic coils of gold braid, the sailor shirt, and the giant star on his broad slouch hat? Was he embarrassed at the thought of his dramatic manner in front of his troops, his speeches, his band, his insistence on leading charges with his upraised straight saber? Did he grow ashamed of the comfortable farmhouse he took for his quarters, his personal cook, his private carriage with silver harness? Was he uncomfortable at seeing all th
e attention directed at someone else? Or was he merely polite? All that can be known is that, when confronted with the hero of the hour, Custer had nothing to say.4
—
THE REPRISE OF THEIR HONEYMOON began in Baltimore, which Libbie had never visited before. Armstrong took her to the theater to see a famous comic actor. In one skit, he played a servant who pretended to be the lord, dressed in his master’s clothes. “He goes to see a young lady and the lord’s pantaloons are so tight he cannot sit down without pain and has to keep his legs stretched out, and cannot bend his knees,” she wrote. Armstrong “exhausted” himself laughing at someone trying to elevate himself beyond his place, in preposterous clothes that could not conceal the true man beneath. As Libbie wrote, “It was killing.”5
When they were alone, they were playful and indulgent. “Do you remember how somebody’s little girl used to amuse herself by tickling somebody’s nose with his own mustache,” he later asked her. He called her “my darling little durl” and “my Gipsie.” Libbie no longer felt the hesitation of her wedding night. They invented intimate euphemisms. They asked each other for “just one.” She would “sit Tomboy,” straddling his lap in his chair. “Oh, I do want one so badly,” he later wrote, when the war separated them. “I know where I would kiss somebody if I was with her tonight.”6
“I am so sorry to hear…that your head is no better,” adjutant and friend Jacob Greene wrote to Armstrong on March 30. Jim Christiancy accompanied the couple on their travels, but Greene worried. “You need perfect rest & quiet & that I know you are not getting.” Greene knew Custer well, in some ways better than Custer knew himself. “You are only flesh & blood & can break down like any other man.”7
Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America Page 23