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

by Stiles, T. J.

  Struggling with a brain injury, Custer still had to sway the Senate to confirm his appointment as a brigadier general. It fell to Libbie to cultivate the right men. It proved alarmingly easy. Senator Morton Wilkinson of Minnesota invited her to the “hop” held every Thursday night at the National Hotel. The Custers found Senator Chandler there, as always. “He is very fond of dancing,” Libbie remarked. He begged her to dance, unsuccessfully, and insisted that she make up for it at the next hop.

  “I have made so many friends in Washington it seems quite like home,” Libbie wrote. In other words, she did her work well. On April 1, the Senate approved Custer’s appointment, along with a long list of others. In the end, it was perfectly routine, but Armstrong was so relieved that he sent a telegram to the Bacons in Monroe.8

  “I thought there would be so many generals in Washington he would be but little known,” Libbie wrote to her parents from Washington. “If he were not naturally a modest man his head would be turned by the attention he has received this week.” A sketch of him leading a charge appeared on the cover of the March 19 issue of Harper’s Weekly. “It is very agreeable to be the wife of a man everyone knows and respects.”9

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  CUSTER RETURNED TO CAMP as a man unmoored, because Grant removed his mooring. On March 25, Pleasonton was relieved of command of the Cavalry Corps and transferred to Missouri. Grant replaced him with Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan, an infantry-division commander from the West. “We are blue as a whole whetstone factory,” Jacob Greene wrote to Custer, who was still in Washington. “Pleasonton gone. You gone. Sheridan going to have the corps—& the Devil to pay generally. What are they sending a man for, that we don’t know or care for.”10

  Kilpatrick fell on April 7, assigned to lead Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s cavalry. Victor Comte wept at his farewell address. “If the Michigan Brigade has won a name in the Army of the Potomac, it is because of Kilpatrick and Custer; and if these two generals are famous, it is our brigade which has made them so.” Comte’s remarks show how closely Custer guarded his irritation with “Kill-Cavalry” from his men.11

  Custer joined his brigade on April 14, and heard he would fall next. “Rumor says Gen. Custer may leave us,” wrote Maj. James H. Kidd. “ ‘Bad luck’ to [us].…We swear by him. His name is our battle-cry. He can get twice the fight out of this brigade than any other man can possibly do.”12 Custer believed the rumor. He often inflated his insecurity into a sense of persecution. “An attempt was made by some of Grant’s favorites to have me relieved…the object being to give the brigade to one of Grant’s friends,” he wrote to Judge Bacon. He confronted Meade and Sheridan in person. They reassured him. But then Grant installed Brig. Gen. James H. Wilson as Kilpatrick’s successor. Being passed over for command of the 3rd Division galled Custer, but seeing the post go to Wilson infuriated him. Recently chief of the Cavalry Bureau and formerly a member of Grant’s staff, he had tormented Custer at West Point. Armstrong wrote to Judge Bacon that Wilson “is an engineer officer of Grant’s staff and had never even commanded a company of men.” He missed the irony that he, too, had been elevated directly from a staff post to an important command.13

  “Had [Pleasonton] remained in command of the Cavalry Corps I would now be in command of a division,” he fumed. He told Bacon that Grant fired Pleasonton “without apparent cause.…I know the reason but do not wish to state it on paper.” Once again he spread rumors about a commanding general he disliked—now taking the side of Meade, who (he claimed) told him he was unhappy that Grant would accompany him during the coming campaign. Custer enclosed a letter from Congressman Kellogg that was critical of Grant, and asked Bacon to show it discreetly to Judge Christiancy.14

  What saved Custer, ironically, was the man Grant put in Pleasonton’s place. Custer’s tone changed completely when he discussed him. “Gen. Sheridan is a very just man,” he wrote to Judge Bacon. He told Libbie, “Sheridan has impressed me very favorably.…Everything is arranged quite satisfactorily now.” Sheridan did not ask Custer to serve under Wilson, a less senior officer. He redesignated the Michigan Brigade the 1st Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division, which had a new commander, Brig. Gen. Alfred Torbert, “an old and intimate friend of mine, and a very worthy gentleman,” Custer wrote.15

  Sheridan looked like a replacement patron, one who had much in common with Custer. “I was rather young in appearance,” Sheridan later wrote. He was thirty-three years old, just nine years older than Custer, though a good deal smaller—“but five feet five inches in height, and thin almost to emaciation, weighing only one hundred and fifteen pounds.” As an infantry division commander in the West, Sheridan had helped to salvage the battles of Stones River and Perryville through front-line leadership. At Chattanooga, he was ordered to launch a limited holding attack against Missionary Ridge; he and his division impulsively captured it, winning the battle. Dark-haired and broad-chested, with narrow, bullet eyes, prominent cheekbones, and a drooping handlebar mustache above a strong chin, he looked fierce. He was fierce. Like so many Irish throughout history (he was born to immigrant parents), he was a master of the English language—the profane part of it, at least. He wanted the Cavalry Corps to be a strike force that would whip J. E. B. Stuart. It was all that Custer wanted.16

  Custer left Libbie in Washington while he prepared for the great offensive. “How completely my time has been occupied,” he wrote to his father-in-law. Horses were rested and fed, and seven-shot Spencer carbines issued to men who did not yet have them. Contrabands piled sacks of grain, boxes of hardtack, and other supplies in wagons.17

  The brigade moved forward. Custer inspected the new camps, then sat on a bench by a log fire to write to Libbie. One staff officer sat on the ground nearby, reading a novel; Jacob Greene was in his tent playing his flute. Libbie’s absence freed Eliza Brown to tend to her own patronage network, using her control of the mess to distribute food and extend her influence with the brigade’s labor force. Custer wrote, “Eliza is entertaining an interesting group of Contrabands who are posted near her cook fire.”18

  He kept his anger at Grant secret from his wife, but he missed her. If she were there, he wrote, “Somebody would have insisted upon ‘Just one’ or would have been seen pushed a la ‘Tomboy’ on somebody’s lap.”19 Sheridan sent Custer to Washington on a final errand before the advance. He gave him forty-eight hours to complete it, knowing that Libbie was staying at a boardinghouse in the capital.

  Libbie was in her room chatting with a female visitor when she heard someone running heavily up the stairs. The noise brought other residents rushing to the corridor, afraid it might be a fire. Armstrong threw her door open. “The lady left immediately,” Libbie wrote to her parents. He had shaved off his mustache, which he had shaken into an envelope and mailed to her earlier. “He doesn’t know how to act without it, his mouth seems so strange to him.” His face was so smooth, she added, “it seemed like kissing a girl.”

  Outside, wagons rattled down the streets in long lines, carrying supplies to the vast depots of the Army of the Potomac. Veterans recalled from furlough and new recruits crowded the city on their way to their units—three regiments’ worth a day, Libbie reckoned. The press suddenly stopped reporting about the Army of the Potomac—a sign “that a great battle is expected,” she thought. The forty-eight hours ended, and Armstrong left to fight.20

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  ON MAY 3, CUSTER RETURNED to camp from Cavalry Corps headquarters with the order to move out the next day. “We ought to whip them,” Jim Christiancy wrote to his father. “My piles are terrible but don’t prevent me riding.” He would not have to ride far. The next morning the Michigan Brigade remained in the rear of the army, guarding the supply trains. “ ‘Pet’ Wilson,” as Christiancy called him, led the advance.21

  Grant planned for his army to cross the Rapidan River east of the Confederate position, turning the Army of Northern Virginia’s right flank in order to force it out of its fortifications and into the field. Sheridan assign
ed Wilson to screen the advance of the heavy infantry columns as they crossed two fords and marched south into the Wilderness, the dense forest where Lee had defeated Hooker a year earlier. Beyond it, the Union army would reach open ground where it could bring to bear its numerical superiority. It was essential that Wilson keep the rebels from detecting the movement.22

  He failed. He briefly scouted the roads leading west out of the Wilderness toward the enemy army, and reported that he had the flank well covered when he did not. On May 5, a Confederate onslaught took the Army of the Potomac by complete and unnecessary surprise, while still deep in the Wilderness. Grant ordered his men to stand and fight. Confused battles raged on narrow roads as forest fires began to burn.23

  Custer and his brigade joined the battle on May 6, fighting on the army’s left flank. He drove off a Confederate cavalry brigade under the command of Brig. Gen. Thomas Rosser, his old friend from West Point. More than 100,000 Union soldiers fought some 60,000 Confederates in the Battle of the Wilderness on May 5 and 6. It cost the two armies almost 18,000 and more than 11,000 casualties, respectively, counting killed, wounded, and missing. That depleted the Army of the Potomac by a little less than 18 percent, and the Army of Northern Virginia by rather more. This level of lethality had been seen before, but the results were entirely new. Unlike every previous Union commander surprised by Lee, Grant did not retreat. On May 7, he ordered the army to continue to move south.24

  The men cheered. They were right to do so on one hand, and crazy on the other. Right, because Grant chose the only path to victory. He understood clearly that he could not wage a Napoleonic campaign in which one decisive battle would break up the enemy army and convince the hostile government to surrender. The resilience of the armies on both sides over three years had proved that this was virtually impossible. This warfare had to demonstrate, day after day, the futility of rebellion. Grant believed that the key was to fight on, no matter what the result of any given day. He would bring to bear (on multiple fronts) the numerical and industrial superiority of the North. He asked his army to inflict pain and endure.

  And that is why his men were also crazy to cheer his advance. This “Overland Campaign,” as it would be dubbed, threw them into bloodshed of prolonged intensity unlike any campaign before. Each day the odds of any man surviving steadily dwindled. Hostile historians would deride Grant as a butcher, but his campaign was the logical conclusion of the seemingly inexorable trend of mass infantry warfare in an existential political conflict. The individual foot soldier was not the gallant hero of antebellum myth; he had become ammunition. More than just expendable, he had to be expended to secure victory.

  In this war rode George Armstrong Custer, a living contradiction. He was a romantic and professional both. He had no sense of irony, no cynicism, no sardonic fatalism—the defining characteristics of the modern soldier. He used the word “gallant” with sincerity. He made himself a champion and a target with his costume and deliberately crafted persona. He fought on horseback with a sword in the age of long-range killing machines. Yet he was also a skillful commander who deployed that machinery mercilessly and well. He measured the means for each end accurately, and his ultimate end was total victory. He led charges on horseback because, under the right circumstances, they could still work, and he had a grasp of what made the circumstances right. The spectacle he made of himself was still useful in rallying and inspiring his men—for the material element in war had not yet eradicated the moral. But it had a way of eradicating spectacles.

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  THE PRISONER MARCHED SLOWLY, oppressed with the heavy Virginia summer heat. His name was Edwin. The Confederates had captured him in the Wilderness, where, in the noise and smoke of battle, he had not realized that his regiment had fallen back without him. The rebels had herded him together with nearly 380 others and looted their possessions, compensating them with Confederate currency, worthless even to Confederates. They slept in the open, shared what little food they had, and suffered in the heat, some collapsing along the road from exhaustion. Their guards told them that they were headed for Beaver Dam Station, where they would be fed.

  At sunset on May 9, Edwin heard a train whistle. The station was close. Next he heard gunshots. “Gen. Custer, at the head of a brigade of cavalry, came thundering down upon us with sword drawn, hat off, and hair streaming in the wind,” he wrote shortly afterward. The prisoners cheered as the column charged by in pursuit of the guards, most of whom escaped. The rescuers and rescued poured into the station. Edwin and the famished prisoners tore open boxes and barrels, and found 200,000 pounds of food for Lee’s army.25

  Less than an hour later Sheridan arrived with the rest of the Cavalry Corps. In the aftermath of the Battle of the Wilderness, Sheridan had fought with Meade over the proper role of the cavalry, demanding that he be allowed to take the Corps on a raid, with the particular goal of defeating his counterpart, J. E. B. Stuart. Meade had wanted the cavalry to guard the army’s flanks, protect the trains, and screen and scout. Grant had backed Sheridan. And so the three divisions moved in a solid mass to strike the enemy. Sheridan named Custer’s brigade the advance guard.26

  At the station, Edwin wrote, “the heavens were brilliantly lighted nearly all night long by the burning buildings, cars, &c.” Custer’s men torched three long trains, mounds of supplies, and the station itself. Edwin snatched a blanket out of a captured wagon and slept soundly. Roused at dawn, he saw “the huge column of horsemen was again wending its way southward.”27

  Deep in the rear of the enemy army, marching slowly toward Richmond, Sheridan knew that Stuart would try to catch him. He counted on it. On May 11, he discovered that Stuart had taken a position near Yellow Tavern, a crossroads just north of Richmond, squarely across the Union line of march. The Confederate commander had only Fitzhugh Lee’s division, less than half his total force, divided into two brigades. But Stuart was a cunning foe, never more so than when outnumbered.28

  When Custer arrived from the west, he saw “the enemy was strongly posted on a bluff in rear of a thin skirt of woods, his battery being concealed from our view by the woods.” Stuart assumed a concave line on two ridges; despite the Union preponderance in numbers, he felt confident enough to risk battle. The terrain favored him, and his deployment was clever. Generally speaking, long-range rifles and artillery gave the defense the tactical advantage in the Civil War. The Union cavalry shook out into a line. Custer’s men cleared the woods, but the rebels remained firmly on the heights beyond. By late afternoon, Sheridan wanted decisive action. He sent orders for the 1st Division to capture the ridge on the right.29

  Custer deployed his men just inside the far edge of the wood and made “a personal examination of the ground.” The key was a well-handled artillery battery on the right of the rebel line, from Custer’s perspective. “I discovered that a successful charge might be made upon the battery of the enemy by keeping well to the right,” he wrote. Brig. Gen. Wesley Merritt, temporarily in command of the division, gave him permission to try. He ordered the 5th and 6th Michigan regiments to “occupy the attention of the enemy” and his own artillery to shell the enemy’s front. In the woods, hidden from the enemy, he formed the 1st Michigan into a column; the 7th Michigan would follow as its reserve. When the men had formed up, Custer addressed them. “There is good ground over there,” he said, meaning the right terrain for a charge, “and I think we can take their battery.” He ordered the mounted band to play “Yankee Doodle” and led them out of the woods. Riding forward through enemy fire, the column broke down fences and crossed a narrow bridge, until they finally came close enough to the enemy to launch a charge.

  Sheridan watched them pick up speed. “Custer’s charge…was brilliantly executed,” he reported; “first at a walk, then at a trot, then dashing at the enemy’s line and battery.” Riding up quickly on the Confederates’ left flank, Custer ordered the men to spur into a full gallop. Sabers drawn, they screamed “with a yell which spread terror before them,” he wro
te. The horsemen hacked with their swords as they rode through a pair of cannons and dismounted Confederate troopers, who panicked and fled.30

  The 5th and 6th Michigan moved up the slope as well. Colonel Russell Alger of the 5th reported that a subordinate pointed out an enemy general and his staff on a hill beyond the ridge they had just captured. According to the Chicago Tribune, one of Alger’s privates took a shot at the enemy general and missed. Another private remarked, “Too high and too far to the left.” Someone asked the critic what he knew about shooting. He said he had served two years in the Berdan Sharpshooters, an elite unit of marksmen. He then laid his long-barreled Spencer rifle over a fence, aimed, and fired. The enemy general convulsively threw up his hands on the impact of the bullet. The marksman said to Alger, “Colonel, there is a spread eagle for you.”

  The private’s name, Alger said, was John A. Huff. Thirty minutes later, Alger reported, the Michigan Brigade captured the hill where the enemy general fell. The federal troopers came to a house where a slave and a white woman told them that Huff had shot J. E. B. Stuart himself. His staff had carried him, mortally wounded, into the house.31 He had insisted that the battle continue, telling his staff, “I had rather die than be whipped!” He would not have a choice between the two. The Union cavalry smashed his position and scattered the retreating rebels in different directions. As Custer reported, “His defeat was complete.”

  Stuart’s death was, for the Union, a stunning accomplishment; for the Confederacy, a stunning loss—“a blow to Confederate leadership next only to the death of [Stonewall] Jackson a year and a day earlier,” writes the historian James McPherson. Widely credited as a genius of mounted warfare, Stuart was close to Robert E. Lee, who relied on him heavily. And Custer’s attack killed him.32

  “The rebel General Stuart, who was wounded in the charge led by your Boy, is dead,” Custer wrote to Libbie from Haxall’s Landing on the Peninsula. To his mind, his pursuit of glory, victory, and fame was a gift to her, a sign of his love. “For you dearest and best of girls I am striving to make a name which will be a source of pride to you,” he wrote. He said the risks he took made his love even more precious. “Even death staring me in the face only serves to render you more dear. Had I fallen in the late battles your dear name would have been the last spoken from my lips.”33