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

by Stiles, T. J.

  Victory at Yellow Tavern and the killing of Stuart contrasted with the simultaneous struggle between the massed infantry of the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia. At Spotsylvania Court House, south of the Wilderness, Lee blocked Grant’s outflanking maneuver. On May 12, Grant broke through Lee’s line, only to be driven back. It was another indecisive battle with heavy casualties on both sides. George Templeton Strong, a well-placed New York lawyer, spoke for many when he wrote in his diary, “These are fearfully critical, anxious days.”34

  Custer, on the other hand, helped to win a clear victory, and he did it with flair. Flair mattered to the weary public. “I think it proper to say a few words about the personal appearance of Gen. Custer,” wrote a New York Herald reporter; he found it important enough to interrupt a description of Custer’s charge at Yellow Tavern. “The dashing young ‘General of the golden locks’…dresses in somewhat of the old cavalier style—black velvet jacket, with a blue shirt collar turned over the same.…He wears a slouched hat with a star in the front, and a red scarf cravat around his neck.” He embodied old-fashioned warrior virtues. “Whenever he orders a charge, he always leads it in person, and bursts upon the enemy with a yell equal to that of any Rocky Mountain aborigines.” This persona—combined with success, of course—kept alive the public’s faith in the heroic and romantic amid the disillusionment of war. As the rescued prisoner Edwin wrote, Custer was “the very personification of the gallant, dashing, daring, ideal soldier we read of in romances.”

  His men spoke of him in similar terms. Major James Kidd wrote home, “So brave a man I never saw, as competent as brave. Under him a man is ashamed to be cowardly. Under him our men can achieve wonders.” Only Eliza Brown, who came on the march, resisted his charisma. When yet another trooper praised his courage in an awestruck tone, she remarked sardonically, “Why, Gin’ral, the men think you can do as much as the Almighty!”35

  His most important admirer was Sheridan. He was a fighter who liked fighters, especially those who won victories. Yellow Tavern began Custer’s rapid rise as Sheridan’s favorite subordinate, the man he could always count on to press the attack home, to keep cool in a crisis. He told Alger, “Custer is the ablest man in the Cavalry Corps.”36

  —

  “AFTER YOU WENT I watched you admiringly as you rode along,” Libbie Custer wrote to her husband, “then I went up to my room to cry.”37

  She remained in Washington, in a boardinghouse shared by people who alarmed her, owned by a woman who complained about the Yankees who rented the rooms. She smelled the rosebuds in the garden. She played with her kitten. And she felt the void of Armstrong’s absence.

  She tried to like Washington by dwelling on Georgetown, if not in it. She enjoyed church, too, but it was a shallow puddle of piety in the city’s filthy streets. “In this Sodom and Gomorrah everybody drinks,” she wrote. When she went out, she draped herself in drab—nothing more colorful than gray, or else the soldiers who staggered down sidewalks would assume she was a prostitute. She could not even wear blue!38

  “Armstrong, like most nineteenth-century men, believed his wife his moral superior,” writes Libbie’s biographer, Shirley Leckie. In his letters, he described a marital division of labor, in which he would earn fame and she would keep him holy. He observed his old pledge to never drink, but gambled and cursed with enthusiasm. He assured her he swore less now. He belonged to no church, but described a private faith activated by his love for her. And he asked her to be “my treasurer.” He wrote, “Only bear in mind we are just entering upon life’s journey with all its cares, and, I hope, in a short time its responsibilities.” It was an allusion to elusive parenthood. In the meantime, Libbie had plenty of responsibilities.39

  The Republican ascendancy left Armstrong feeling vulnerable and anxious. But Libbie could now be his “friend at court.” She could charm congressmen and senators with her beauty, style, and educated wit. Leckie writes, “They had formed a partnership, committed to moving the boy general up the ladder of success.” But it would be complicated, in part, by Libbie herself.40

  “Of course I am no abolitionist,” she wrote. She declared this a year and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, a year after the establishment of the federal Bureau of Colored Troops, and as tens of thousands of black men volunteered to fight in the Union army (ultimately reaching a total of 179,000). She wrote this after meeting and thinking well of Eliza Brown, the escaped slave who wanted to help win the war. She wrote this at a time when the sentiment in government favored abolition; even soldiers in the conservative Army of the Potomac now called for ending slavery to win the war. The nation was changing; Libbie was not.

  It’s revealing that she wrote, “Of course.” It seems that anyone who knew Libbie knew her politics. Her tendency to express her opinions made men nervous. “You and Autie have cautioned me about holding my tongue on army and political matters,” she wrote to her father—then expressed her outrage at a rumor that General Pleasonton had been sacked because the administration suspected he was a political enemy. Now she had to do more than keep her mouth closed. She had to cultivate her political foes.41

  Representative Francis Kellogg, a stout fifty-three-year-old with a bulbous nose, took Libbie and his own wife to the White House. President Lincoln was holding a levee—a reception for the public. Carriages crammed wheel to horse nose on the curving drive to the front door. Libbie moved in a crush past soldiers standing with swords drawn. “The crowd was so dense I could not move my arms, but was fairly pushed in,” she wrote. Finally the line brought her face-to-face with Lincoln, “his Highness” and “the prince of jokers,” as she mocked him in a letter, “the gloomiest, most careworn looking man I ever saw.” From his great height he briefly acknowledged her, then realized who her husband was. He enclosed her small hand in his oversized grip “very cordially” and said, “So this is the young woman whose husband goes into a charge with a whoop and a shout. Well, I’m told he won’t do so any more.”

  I hope he will, she replied. “Oh, then you want to be a widow, I see.” He laughed and she laughed, but they both knew it was not really a joke. Lincoln carried the weight of the generation he had ordered toward death, and yet he had to push the thing to its end. He admired Custer, he needed Custer, but he understood the mathematics of modern firepower as well as anyone. Libbie generously accepted his remark simply as a kindness. “I never liked Mr. Lincoln particularly before I came here but I do now,” she wrote to an aunt. “He is very genial and kind hearted and as he said some very pleasant things to me about my husband.”

  Her personal lobbying continued that very morning. Kellogg introduced her to Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax. Colfax turned to Kellogg and said, “I have been wishing to be presented to this lady, but am disappointed she is a Mrs.!” It flattered her, but she appreciated the effect she had on men, especially men of power. She cultivated the righteous and the lecherous alike, as long as they possessed influence. She received a visit from the former congressman John A. Bingham, for example, the gentlemanly Republican who had appointed Custer to West Point. He was a judge advocate now, but still regarded Custer “as his protégé.” And she went to the hops at the National, as Armstrong “urged” her, where senators slurred and stumbled over her. Senator Chandler, she wrote, “is an old goosey idiot. Now his wife is away he is drunk all the time. And O, so silly.”42

  She visited the Capitol, reminding congressmen of both her husband and her beauty. Colfax greeted her warmly “and oh he said lovely things about you,” she wrote to Armstrong. “I like him best of all here, he is so polite and not a bit of a flirt,” she added, in an implicit contrast with the rest of Congress. Stepping outside, she encountered Kellogg. “We are going to make him a major general, Mrs. Custer,” he proclaimed.

  “Scarcely anybody here likes Mr. K,” she wrote, referring to Kellogg. “Some say he is dishonest and licentious. It makes no difference to me. I see nothing but a gentleman and a kind friend.�
�� Note that she did not dispute the characterization; she took a practical view, and indeed her husband urged her to stay close to the man. Kellogg shamelessly traded favors, webbing the Capitol with his influence. But he certainly was licentious. One evening he called on Libbie, alone, at her boardinghouse. He was “very cordial,” she wrote. “Too much so.” He moved in to kiss her, and she adroitly slipped aside, offering him her chair. She remained calm, and he pretended nothing had happened. “Any lady can get that man to do anything,” she remarked.

  His wife shocked Libbie more. “She is a flirt.” She stopped by Libbie’s boardinghouse with a friend, not to see Libbie, but a colonel who also lived there. “It was very bold. She is an intense woman.” Libbie had never known prominent, purportedly respectable women to behave so freely.43

  Grant’s campaign progressed, impossible to forget. The wounded and dead rattled into the city by ambulance and wagon by the thousands. “We see so many crippled soldiers and bandaged up for wounds—men with one arm—one leg—walking about the streets.” Funerals became constant; embalming establishments proliferated. Libbie visited the hospitals, crowded with men with infected wounds, the sick who vomited and fouled their beds with diarrhea, the piles of limbs cast off by surgeons. The stench was “horrible,” she wrote. She went to see Custer’s men, and they praised him, telling her they could not believe his luck at surviving. It did not reassure her.44

  Libbie followed her husband’s progress with rising anxiety. After Yellow Tavern, his brigade fell into the grinding combat that characterized the campaign. First came a hard battle through woods, on foot, against Hampton’s cavalry at Haw’s Shop, Virginia. It was followed by Cold Harbor, where Custer’s dismounted troopers stormed defensive works and held off counterattacks. A far costlier infantry battle followed.45

  Jim Christiancy arrived in Washington—carried there, for he could not walk. At Haw’s Shop, he had ridden along the line with Custer and Jacob Greene as the troops ducked below enemy fire. A Confederate bullet killed Custer’s horse. Another struck Greene in the head—painful, but the round’s energy was “spent,” in the language of the day, having lost its force by flying too far or passing through brush, and he suffered no serious injury. Christiancy, though, was hit in the thumb and, more seriously, the thigh.

  Libbie refused to leave him in a hospital. She brought him back to her boardinghouse. She changed his bandages and cleaned his wound, which each day oozed pieces of his pants, driven into his thigh by the bullet. Already friends, they grew closer. When she cried over a letter, he did too. When she pricked her finger sewing, he fretted “as if it were a battle wound.” She spoke frankly to him about his alcoholism; he needed a good wife, she said. She remarked that people treated her kindly because she was Mrs. General Custer; he said it was because she was Libbie Bacon. But no one saw anything suspicious in such close contact.

  She feared for Armstrong, but she did not regret her choice. She wrote her aunt, “I believe if ever God sends men into the world for a special purpose Armstrong was born to be a soldier.”46

  —

  ON MAY 30, BETWEEN the bitter battles of Haw’s Shop and Cold Harbor, Custer rode up to a farmhouse northeast of Richmond and dismounted. He had been invited. A woman on the porch rose from her chair, handed a baby to an older child, and took both his hands. She told him he was nearly as welcome as if “the Confederate army [had come] to rescue us.”

  They were the family of an old West Point friend. He had intervened to protect them from foraging Union soldiers once before, probably during the Peninsula Campaign. It was easy to do so then, in McClellan’s army; it was harder now. One group of Union soldiers after another dug up onions, beheaded chickens, collected meat hanging in the smokehouse, gathered strawberries and peas, and grazed their horses. To the family, the Yankees were “an army of devils.” The woman who welcomed Custer wrote in her diary that she hoped every last Union soldier would die. When one set of Northern troops treated them kindly and returned some food, she wrote, “I felt so grateful, and thanked them warmly, though it made me feel humiliated to be under obligation for our own property to such a set of creatures.”

  “I tried to prevent this,” Custer told her, but the guard he had sent had gotten lost. “The General came in and paid us quite a nice visit,” she wrote in her diary. (Unfortunately her name has been lost.) “He seemed too honest and high toned, to mingle with the mass of that Abolition army of Lincoln’s. Truly he is ‘among them but not of them.’ ” After they had talked for some time, Custer said that she would turn him into a rebel if he listened any longer. “How I wish he was one, and then I could esteem and admire him as I do our own gallant leaders,” she wrote. When he left, he sent a guard—as well as two photographs, one of himself and one of him with Libbie.47

  There was nothing unusual about a Union general putting a halt to pillaging. Grant himself, ever the realist, tried to stop “marauding” because of “its impact on military efficiency,” as the historian Mark Grimsley writes.48 Custer, though, still faced rumors that he was a Copperhead, in part because of his close ties to Southerners. He had fought very hard to establish that he held Radical views about the prosecution of the war. Yet here was an outspoken rebel who identified him with her culture and her cause, an identification that flattered him. His conservatism lingered on.

  Custer acted out of sincere kindness, but also an antebellum sense of gallantry. He wished to be seen as the embodiment of manly virtues—the noble soldier who confronts his foe and protects the weak. All around him, though, were the soldiers this war had created: pitiless veterans, eager to take whatever comforts they could find, by force if necessary, men who had thrown away their romantic notions about combat.

  A few days after Custer’s initial visit, the woman deigned to treat a Yankee badly wounded in the nightmare Battle of Cold Harbor. He told her that his regiment had lost all but fifteen men. “If they ever get us into those [enemy] entrenchments it will be worse still,” he said, “but the men in power that have made the war don’t care how many of us are killed.” She did not realize it, but she had just met a modern man.49

  —

  BEFORE THE FIRST CONFEDERATE TROOPER appeared in front of the carriage, Eliza Brown knew disaster loomed. She had accompanied Custer on June 7 when the 1st and 2nd Cavalry Divisions had set out from the Army of the Potomac on a raid, under Sheridan’s personal command. Grant wanted Sheridan to devastate the Virginia Central Railroad, one of Lee’s primary supply lines, and then link up with the Union army under Maj. Gen. David Hunter in the strategic Shenandoah Valley. Grant may also have hoped that Sheridan would draw the Confederate cavalry after him.50

  Brown had driven Custer’s carriage-turned-rolling mess on the hot, dry march northwest. The column of perhaps 9,000 horsemen had kicked up clouds of gritty dust, mixed with horsehair, which plastered everyone’s skin, clothing, and hair. The countryside offered little to eat or drink, having been scoured already. Horses broke down in large numbers, unable to carry their riders. On Sheridan’s orders, the cavalrymen shot them and tossed their saddles and equipment into wagons.51

  On the night of June 10, the raiders had bivouacked around a crossroads called Clayton’s Store. One road branched out from there to the southwest, in the direction of Trevilian Station, and another to the south, toward Louisa Court House. Brown had cooked dinner for Custer in the southernmost of the Union camps, on the Louisa Court House road. Sometime near dawn, she had heard firing. After an hour, the Michigan Brigade had started south, then turned to the right off the road, entering a rough track through the woods, leading toward the vicinity of Trevilian Station. Brown had loaded her cookware into the carriage and followed.

  She emerged into a clearing and encountered mayhem. Custer’s brigade fought amid a sea of enemy soldiers—bullets cracking overhead, artillery shells exploding, mounted Confederates charging here and there with sabers swinging. The wagon master approached Custer and asked if he could lead the wagon train to the rear.
Custer looked around and said, “Where in hell is the rear?”

  The wagon master thought he knew. Eliza in her carriage followed the little train—several caissons, the artillery wagon, some captured vehicles, and Custer’s headquarters wagon, which contained everything from his underwear to his letters from Libbie. The frightened wagon master led them all into a field that soon swarmed with enemy soldiers. Brown dismounted and ran to the headquarters wagon. She seized one of Custer’s traveling bags and turned to flee. The rebels cut her off.52

  The U.S. Army had no language for what she now endured. As a civilian, she would not be designated as “captured” or “missing.” In any event, those words did not describe what she faced—what no white soldier faced. Under standing orders from General Lee, the Army of Northern Virginia enslaved any and all black persons it could seize—in Virginia, Maryland, even Pennsylvania during the Gettysburg Campaign. It made no distinctions between those who had escaped during the war, those born free, or those freed before the war under the laws of Southern states. If they were black, the men in gray took them as property.

  Under official Confederate procedure, the captors were supposed to enter the names of the enslaved on a list and then send them to slave depots. There they might be claimed by their previous masters, sold to slave traders, or put to work for the Southern war effort. Not all went through such an orderly (if brutal) process. Sometimes the soldiers did with them as they liked. As one rebel wrote during the Gettysburg Campaign, “We took a lot of negroes yesterday. I was offered my choice.” Eliza Brown could expect to be raped, repeatedly. All black captives could reasonably fear retaliation, including torture and murder.53