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

by Stiles, T. J.

  Brown knew all this. She lived in the world of contrabands as much as that of the Michigan Brigade, and collected information that passed quickly through their uprooted community. She had narrowly evaded capture a number of times. But she had continued to serve the general. She was undeniably attached to him, but she had her own reasons for serving. “I set in to see the war, beginning and end,” she told Libbie at one point. “I was all ready to step to the front whenever I was called upon, even if I didn’t shoulder the musket.” She would do what she could to punish her enslavers.54

  Now she stood surrounded by them. They snatched Custer’s valise from her, but allowed her to retrieve her own small bag before they drove off with the carriage. With battle raging nearby, the rebels began to move the captured wagons and contrabands to safety. One of them ordered Brown to mount a horse he led behind him.

  “I don’t see it,” she said.

  “Ain’t she damned impudent,” the soldier remarked to his fellows. Impudent might apply if she accepted her place in their racial hierarchy. But she did not. Defiant would have been the correct word. They could do anything they liked to her, without repercussions, and she knew it. Yet she defied them.55

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  CUSTER DID NOT LOSE his toothbrush. He kept that with him at all times, because he brushed after every meal. He washed his hands frequently as well. “I always laugh at him for this,” his wife wrote. Of course, these habits may have kept him alive in an age in which microbes towered over humans in the food chain, in a war in which far more soldiers died of disease than of battle wounds.56

  On June 11, 1864, battle wounds were the greater threat. Custer committed two of the gravest mistakes of his career that day, and followed with his greatest display of valor and ability. The first mistake was his failure to react to an unexpected appearance of the enemy before he broke camp. According to the historian who has studied these events most thoroughly, the Union command from Sheridan on down seemed unaware that a Confederate cavalry division under Gen. Wade Hampton held Trevilian Station, southwest of the federal camps, or that another division under Gen. Fitzhugh Lee camped at Louisa Court House, directly to the south. With some 9,300 men, Sheridan unwittingly faced most of the cavalry of the Army of Northern Virginia, about 6,500 men—less than a decisive advantage under the best circumstances.

  Before dawn, Brigadier General Torbert ordered Custer to march down the Louisa Court House road, then turn southwest down the path through the woods. He was to “connect with [the rest of the 1st Division] at the station,” as Custer reported. It was supposed to be an unopposed march. Instead, before 5 a.m. he was attacked from the direction of Louisa Court House by what he believed to be a full brigade of enemy cavalry.57 They were the first enemy soldiers Custer’s men had seen since the raid began, one trooper wrote. The assault “told us that the rebels had not only overtaken us, but had gotten around in our front.” Yet apparently Custer never informed Torbert or Sheridan. He held his ground until the Confederates withdrew, then advanced to the southwest as ordered, leaving a large enemy force off to his left. In essence, he outflanked himself and told no one.

  He made his second mistake when he emerged from the woods into a clearing east of Trevilian Station. He encountered General Hampton’s wagon train and the horses being held for his men, who were fighting Torbert’s two other brigades in the dense woods north of the station. Even if Custer did not hear the firing, these wagons and horses indicated a large enemy force nearby—and he knew that at least a brigade of Confederates lurked in his rear. It was a moment for discretion. He needed to get all his men out of the woods and into a compact formation, ready to fight. But he gave in to the temptation to take prizes. He sent the 5th Michigan to seize the wagon train before his other regiments arrived.58

  The men of the 5th captured the wagons, but soon were engulfed in an enemy counterattack led by Custer’s old friend Tom Rosser, commander of Hampton’s reserve brigade. The twenty-seven-year-old son of a Texas cotton planter, the burly Rosser stood six feet two inches tall, with a full face, full beard, and thick black hair. He struck an aristocratic pose in his double-breasted gray general’s uniform, and he fought well, winning praise from J. E. B. Stuart and Robert E. Lee.59 Rosser captured nearly half of the 5th before the rest of Custer’s brigade arrived. Col. James H. Kidd appeared with the 6th Michigan and found Custer and his aides blasting away at the advancing enemy with their revolvers. “Custer never lost his nerve under any circumstances,” Kidd recalled. “He was, however, unmistakably excited.” He had a simple order: “Charge them.” Kidd added dryly, “It was repeated with emphasis.” Kidd immediately charged, only to be cut off by the enemy, captured, and then rescued by a follow-up attack.60

  The chaotic exchange of charges and countercharges turned into a desperate struggle to survive. Hampton sent more men to support Rosser’s attack. Fitzhugh Lee advanced westward from Louisa Court House and attacked Custer in the rear. Custer dismounted most of his men and pulled them back into a position that he later described as a circle, though others have called it a triangle. He ordered them to pile up rails in order to improvise a fortification. The enemy pressed so close on every side that it worked to Custer’s advantage, since the rebels sometimes had to hold their fire to avoid hitting their own men on the far side of the Michigan Brigade. Custer moved his guns again and again to meet the most dangerous threats. He gathered a hodgepodge of men to form a mounted reserve, and countercharged the enemy when they attempted to break his line.

  “Custer was everywhere,” Kidd later wrote. He rode back and forth constantly, giving orders, reconnoitering, fighting in person. Even the enemy thought him “gallant and manly,” Rosser wrote. “Sitting on his horse in the midst of his advanced platoons, and near enough to be easily recognized by me, he encouraged and inspired his men by appeal as well as by example.”61

  A brief description of the battle cannot evoke the intensity of the experience, which lasted more than three hours. There was the unending noise of rifles and guns firing, shells exploding, bugles tooting, men screaming. There was the smell of burnt gunpowder, sweat, blood, urine, and feces. Smoke and dust clouded the air. Hunger and dehydration on this hot summer day drained the combatants, making mouths dry and gummy. Not least was the claustrophobia, the awareness of being surrounded in a constricted position. Custer kept them fighting.62

  He seemed to be invulnerable. A spent bullet hit his shoulder and bounced off, merely bruising him. Another bullet hit his arm, but it too was spent. He spotted a trooper shot down in an exposed position, bullets kicking up dust around him. Custer ran out and picked him up, only to be hit again—a round that merely grazed his head, briefly stunning him.

  Lt. Alexander Pennington, his gifted artillery commander, announced, “General, they have taken one of my guns!”

  “No! I’ll be damned if they have!” Custer replied. “Come on!” He drew his saber and led a scratch force in a charge. They were forced back, then charged again, driving the Confederates away from the cannon. They rode through revolver fire from Rosser’s own staff. The rebels missed Custer but hit Sgt. Mitchell Beloir, his flag bearer. “General, they have killed me,” the sergeant said. “Take the flag!” Custer ripped it from its staff and shoved it inside the front of his uniform.63

  He lost the wagons he had captured plus his own little wagon train, including Eliza Brown and Johnny Cisco. He lost his Monroe friend and adjutant general, Capt. Jacob Greene, who wrote that he had gone in search of the wagons only to find himself “completely surrounded and facing more pistols and carbines at my head than were at all suggestive of long life.” Greene met Confederate friends of Custer’s, who promised to return Custer’s commission as a brigadier general and his personal baggage, found in his headquarters wagon.64

  Custer blamed Torbert, who he thought was tardy in getting to Trevilian Station. Kidd wrote that the Michigan Brigade “fought the entire force single-handed for three hours.” In fact, Torbert pushed south all morning, figh
ting through thick woods toward Custer’s position. Around midday, Brig. Gen. Wesley Merritt finally broke the siege. Custer said, “Merritt, they had me in a tight place that time.” Sheridan arrived and asked Custer if the rebels had captured his headquarters flag. “Not by a damned sight!” Custer replied. He reached inside his uniform and pulled it out. “There it is!”65

  The breakthrough turned looming disaster into a triumph. Sheridan’s soldiers defeated and drove Hampton’s men to the west—badly wounding Rosser in the leg—and Fitzhugh Lee’s men to the east. But the fighting devastated the Michigan Brigade. As Lee’s division pulled back, Custer did lead one last mounted charge aimed at its wagon train. “I recaptured two caissons, three ambulances, and several wagons,” he reported. The caissons had no ammunition, and he did not recover his headquarters wagon, nor the carriage with Eliza Brown and Johnny Cisco.66

  The fighting on June 11 cost the Union cavalry 699 casualties: 53 killed, 274 wounded, 372 captured. This was 7.5 percent of Sheridan’s total force. The Confederates suffered nearly as many—530 casualties—which came to more than 8 percent of their entire force. Catastrophe had loomed for much of the day. But Custer had managed to hold on until relieved, and defeat turned into a rousing victory.67

  As Custer sat at his campfire with Pennington, he heard cheers. They grew louder and closer. “What does that mean?” one asked the other. They got up and went toward the road, lined with happy men from Michigan, and saw for themselves.68

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  ELIZA BROWN COULD DO NOTHING for Johnny Cisco, because the rebels had separated them. Brown rode behind her enslavers on a horse led by a cavalry trooper, moving east toward Louisa Court House. A mile passed, and another, and another. The column turned off the road. A rail fence blocked their way. White men in the Confederate army never liked doing physical labor when slaves were at hand. They told Brown to dismount and take down the rails. She walked over, her bag strapped on her back or held in her hand or in the crook of her arm. She hefted the lowest rail loose and dropped it—then sprinted under and ran for the woods. Before her captors could get through the fence, she had disappeared.

  It grew late. She did not know these woods. But she found her way back to the road and headed west. The cheer began when the first Michigan soldiers saw her. Others ran up and joined in. They had poked fun at her as the “Queen of Sheba,” but had come to respect her. When the men went into battle, they trusted her with their money and personal items. When the fighting drew near, she always remained calm. And here she was, having engineered her own escape. She greeted Custer, found a tent for herself, and cooked him breakfast in the morning.69

  Custer’s heroic feat at Trevilian Station instantly became an iconic moment in his life. Coming close behind Yellow Tavern, it sealed his place as Sheridan’s favorite. Historians and biographers would delight in calling it “Custer’s First Stand” or his “First Last Stand.” Like Custer himself, many would spend little time analyzing his mistakes that made his situation worse. And few would dwell on the next day, June 12, a day of clear defeat.

  In the morning the Union cavalrymen fueled huge fires with the wooden railway ties, threw the rails on top, and heated them until they could be twisted and rendered unusable. Meanwhile the two widely separated Confederate divisions united west of the station. Sheridan decided to attack, hoping to break through and unite with the army in the Shenandoah, as ordered. The strongly posted rebels repelled assault after assault. The rebels counterattacked and outflanked the Union attackers, who withdrew.

  Sheridan concluded that he could not complete his mission. He was burdened with hundreds of prisoners and casualties, slowed by men whose horses had given out or died, and followed by some 2,000 contrabands. He faced a large enemy force in his front, and had learned that the Union army he was supposed to join was not as close as planned. Rations and ammunition were dwindling. He turned east.70

  Hampton too suffered heavy losses. The depleted Confederate force was unable to inhibit the slow Union retreat. And the raid still served Grant’s strategy. It drew the rebel cavalry away, allowing him to cross the wide James River before Lee could react. He then besieged Petersburg, the vital rail center south of Richmond. More important, the raid led to a pitched battle that eroded enemy cavalry strength. This was consistent with Grant’s general approach: to find as many opportunities as possible to land heavy blows. He liked Sheridan not because he was a gifted tactician or strategist, but because he was a fighter. At Trevilian Station, he fought. It was Grant’s way.

  “One witnesses in this Army as it moves along all the results of a victory, when in fact it has done only barren fighting,” wrote Charles Francis Adams Jr., posted at the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac. “For it has done the one thing needful before the enemy—it has advanced.”

  A sophisticated, Harvard-educated observer, Adams was sardonic by nature, but the war fostered a grim realism in him, as in so many other soldiers. It made him an admirer of Grant’s ability and manner. “It would require some study to find in his appearance material for hero worship,” Adams told his father. “He sits a horse well, but in walking he leans forward and toddles.” And yet, he wrote, “he is a remarkable man. He handles those around him so quietly and well, he so evidently has the faculty of disposing of work and managing men, he is cool and quiet.…He is a man of the most exquisite judgment and tact.”71

  Adams could not have conceived a description more precisely the opposite of Custer. Grant did not lead, but managed. He did not craft brilliant tactics, but disposed of work. He even looked funny—no material for hero worship. Was there room for Custer in the era of generalship as management, of industrialized slaughter as warfare? Just enough. But Trevilian Station brought him closer than ever to the nihilistic hell of the infantry battles of Spotsylvania or Cold Harbor, where fatalistic foot soldiers pinned their addresses to their uniforms so their families would learn of their deaths. His ordeal made him bitter. It threatened his illusions about glory and heroism.

  If those illusions survived it was because he survived, and if he survived it was because of luck. Generals died in the Civil War, and those closest to the fighting—the brigade commanders—died at an extraordinary rate. “Custer luck,” as he and his friends called it, kept him alive.72 Bullets did not pierce his skin. Exploding shells sent shards of metal everywhere but into him. So he continued to fight, a living contradiction at the dawn of modern warfare.

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  “DARKEYS HAVE TAKEN POSSESSION of the city,” Libbie Custer wrote to her parents. She marveled that the city’s African Americans were so “orderly” in celebrating Independence Day. Having spent her life in whitest Michigan, she found them exotic, though condescension ran through everything she wrote about them. “There are processions of them, ranging in color from pale to sooty black, all dressed in the gaudiest colors,” she wrote. And yet, she implied, it was the black population that was loyal “in this half-rebel city.”73

  Soon afterward she went to City Point, the James River landing that served as a supply depot for the Army of the Potomac. Congressman Kellogg had arranged the trip on a luxurious steamboat, bringing not only Libbie but Senators Chandler and Howard as well. “The Cavalry after two months…have a little rest given them now and I am resting too from the wearing anxiety I have endured,” Libbie wrote to an aunt.74

  Armstrong waited on the dock for her and the politicians on board. As soon as the Trevilian raid ended, he had written to Chandler “to invite you to pay us a visit.…I will be most happy to give you a review of the Michigan Cavalry Brigade.” This was more than just a courtesy. “The Cavalry Corps is to be reorganized,” he told Chandler. He wanted his men to be “recognized as they deserve”—and, by implication, that he should be recognized, and promoted.75

  When the boat moored, Sheridan came aboard with him, as did a band, which played on deck in the evening. Sheridan was “short and so bright,” Libbie wrote. He danced terribly, “but he enters into it with his whole s
oul.” In the distance, the siege guns ringing Petersburg could be heard thundering. They distracted Libbie. But her husband and his fellow officers ignored them, immersed in something other than war.

  When the boat steamed back to Washington, Custer remained aboard. The next day he said good-bye to Libbie and returned to his brigade. Three days later, as she sat in her room reading, “up the stairs came someone with such a bounding step as no one else has,” she wrote. It was her husband.76

  He was sick. On July 11, the surgeon for the Michigan Brigade submitted a report that explained his sudden return to Washington: “I hereby certify that I have carefully examined this officer and find him suffering from remittent fever and diarrhea.”77 One of the filthiest, most unpleasant ailments a soldier could suffer, diarrhea killed countless men. After so many narrow escapes in battle, Custer was struck down by his stool. Colonel Kidd, his friend and admirer, believed the situation to be grave. “Gen Custer is sick and has got a 20 days leave,” he wrote to his parents. “I could not imagine a greater disaster to our brigade if he does not return before we take the field again.”78

  Eight

  * * *

  THE VICTOR

  “I THINK OF THE DAYS of peace when little children’s voices will call to us. I can hardly wait for my little boy or girl.” Libbie Custer wrote these words to her husband amid their long separation during the Overland Campaign. But she saw no sign of pregnancy, despite their sexual intensity after their wedding.

  Sex gave her pleasure. After her letters were captured along with Armstrong’s headquarters wagon at Trevilian Station, he had warned her to “be more careful herafter in the use of the double entendre.”1 But sex did not give her children. During Armstrong’s sick leave, they left sad and vulgar Washington for Monroe, a place suffused with children and grandparents, Thanksgiving and Christmas, all the things that had gone out of her life. They had twenty days to spend with each other, yet still no swelling, no quickening within her. She could only sketch a pair of imaginary children.