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

by Stiles, T. J.

  “I would not lose my individuality, but would be, as a wife should be, a part of her husband, a life within a life,” she wrote later that year. “I was never an admirer of a submissive wife, but I wish to look to my husband as superior in judgment and experience and to be guided by him in all things.” Without children, this tension—ambivalence, perhaps?—tended to strain. Why submerge herself within another, if not for offspring? How much individuality must she surrender? And yet, she loved and needed him, who left her alone in a strange city at the outset of their life together.

  Armstrong recovered. In late July the couple boarded a train so that he could return to his brigade and Libbie could return to her lonely, barren life among drunken congressmen, unfaithful officers’ wives, and the army of the wounded and the dead.2

  —

  VICTOR COMTE WAS DEAD. The funny, humane little Frenchman of the 5th Michigan Cavalry Regiment succumbed to wounds on July 11, 1864. “Do you think I’m foolish enough to get killed?” he had written to his wife. “I enlisted to kill Rebels and not to get killed. Besides, where’s the danger? Out of 100 who go to battle maybe 10 are killed or wounded. Of those 10 wounded ones one dies. You must remember that I am small and the bullets find more room around me than on me.” Such thoughts helped soldiers and their families endure. They were true for Comte until a bullet made them lies.3

  There were almost more Victor Comtes than the nation could bear. “The people wildly laud Grant to the skies and call McClellan a traitor, for the one has been continually fighting—‘being in earnest,’ they call it—while the other would only fight when he saw some prospect of success,” Col. Charles S. Wainwright complained in his diary. He was a conservative—a McClellan supporter—but he gave voice to a spreading disgust at the mounting casualties. “The army…do not appreciate the beauty of 3,000 or 4,000 of their number being stretched out on the ground, when there is merely a bare chance that something may come of it.” By one estimate, the Union army suffered about 65,000 killed, wounded, and captured in the seven weeks following the first shots of the battle of the Wilderness; the Confederates lost some 35,000, proportionately about the same. After almost two months of this, the public began to pose difficult, despairing questions. “What is all this struggling and fighting for?” one Union general’s wife asked. “This ruin and death to thousands of families?”4

  There was a point to the constant bloodshed. If Grant had relinquished his grip on Lee, his gifted opponent would have regained the initiative and launched one of his famous counterstrokes. “We must destroy this army of Grant’s before it gets to the James River,” Lee had said in May. “If he gets there it will become a siege, and then it will be a mere question of time.” After the Wilderness, though, Lee never again found an opportunity to strike at Grant, who kept him entirely on the defensive.

  Grant bludgeoned, but not blindly. Again and again he sought a tactical advantage, attempting to outflank the Army of Northern Virginia or assaulting its lines with new tactics developed by young Emory Upton. The reason he failed was Lee himself, who skillfully blocked each maneuver—until Grant surprised him by crossing the James. By then, though, the Union troops were so afraid of another slaughter that they hesitated to charge into Petersburg, the key to Richmond. Lee gained just enough time to man its fortifications. Still, the campaign had ended in precisely the situation Lee feared: a siege. The two armies dug trenches and slowly bled as time ran out.5

  But for whom? The North clearly had greater resources, but public resolve depended upon a sense of progress—evidence that the deaths brought the end of the war closer. There was little of it. Sherman’s armies still had not captured Atlanta. Grant still had not captured Richmond. The main Confederate armies remained intact and dangerous. And the casualties kept rising. If the rebels could hold out until the U.S. presidential election in the fall—if the Democrats defeated Lincoln in his quest for a second term—Confederate independence seemed likely.

  Lee made one last attempt to seize the initiative. In June, he detached the 2nd Corps and sent it under Lt. Gen. Jubal Early to the Shenandoah Valley, a rich source of food and supplies, to fight the Union army there under Maj. Gen. David Hunter. Lee also sent a cavalry division under his nephew Fitzhugh Lee. As Early advanced, Hunter withdrew west out of “the Valley,” as the men who served there called it, leaving the road north wide open. Early took some 15,000 men across the Potomac on July 6, and descended on Washington on July 11. Grant sent VI Corps from the front to reinforce Washington’s defenses, and Early withdrew. On July 24, though, Early defeated Hunter’s Army of West Virginia and launched cavalry raids across the Potomac, burning Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, on July 30.

  “Humiliation and disaster,” wrote George Templeton Strong in his diary. A patrician Wall Street lawyer, he reflected the opinion of the most influential men in the country. After three years of war, the Confederacy could still penetrate the North.6

  Grant had no choice. He had to occupy the Shenandoah, eliminate it as a supply source for Lee’s army, and decisively crush the rebel army there, ending the threat of invasion. After consultations with the administration, he put Sheridan in command. His orders were simple: Destroy Early. Destroy the Valley. He gave Sheridan a large force, including the 1st and 3rd Cavalry Divisions. And so Custer went to the Valley. The Union had to win there, or possibly lose the entire war.7

  —

  THE BULLET DRILLED through the air toward Custer’s head. In the turmoil of battle, the shooter may not have aimed at this particular skull, but that was where it went. During its flight, any number of forces acted upon it, from gusts of wind to gravity, altering its course. The target surely moved in and out of the bullet’s path—a turn of his neck, a sneeze, his horse shifting its weight. With surgical precision, the spinning projectile severed several strands of hair on the right side of his head and flew on, leaving the skin untouched.

  It was August 16, 1864. The field was on Crooked Run, near Front Royal in the Valley. Custer handled his men brilliantly that day, by all accounts. He threw back two Confederate brigades and captured scores of prisoners—hundreds, depending on the report. Yet the battle barely receives a mention in histories of the campaign.8

  It was like that in the weeks following Custer’s arrival at Harper’s Ferry on August 9. Grant and especially the War Department warned Sheridan that Lee had reinforced Early’s army—and made it clear that the Union cause could not afford another defeat in the Valley. So Sheridan marched his 35,000 infantry and artillerymen—three divisions of VI Corps, two divisions of XIX Corps, two divisions of the Army of West Virginia, and twelve batteries of artillery—forward and back, up and down the Valley, maneuvering for an advantage over Early’s roughly 15,000 Confederates. The cavalry handled all of the combat. This was not the stuff of a war-winning campaign, though the men did not mind. “If [Sheridan’s goals] can be accomplished without fighting I think all parties ought to be satisfied. We certainly shall be,” wrote James Kidd to his parents.9

  In any event, it was out of Custer’s control. He seemed to have little say in any aspect of his life. For example, he had planned for Libbie to wait for him in Washington. But the capital alienated and bored her. She tried to compensate by spending. “Of the $500 you so generously gave me I have spent $300 for myself apart from board,” she wrote to Armstrong on September 6. “It seems a great deal but as I had to have a whole new summer outfit it was not extravagant. Mrs. T. spent $600.”10

  When he sent for her in early September, she immediately boarded a train to Harper’s Ferry. He met her and brought her to camp for a brief visit. She returned to Washington, then came back, lodging at a boardinghouse. “I knew nothing of her coming until I heard she was at Harper’s Ferry. It is all I can do to keep her from coming right out to camp,” Armstrong wrote to his sister. She was lonely—for her husband and the children who refused to come.11

  Everywhere she saw others bear children whether they wanted them or not. At her husband’s camp she g
reeted Eliza Brown, for example. Libbie would later refer to Brown’s “two nameless children whose parentage I would soon learn to ignore.” Armstrong wrote to his sister that “I thought of sending Eliza’s daughter to you.” This cryptic, passing comment may refer to a different Eliza, but it suggests that even Brown managed to have or at least maintain children amid a struggle to survive, yet Libbie could not.12

  During these busy early weeks in the Shenandoah, Custer balanced his marriage and incessant skirmishing with Early’s army with career maneuvering. He had supported James Kidd’s successful campaign to be named colonel of the 6th Michigan, and asked Kidd to return the favor by requesting that Governor Blair appoint Tom Custer to the 6th. That would allow Custer to select Tom for his staff. Kidd obliged, but so far Armstrong had had no success.13

  His own advancement seemed more promising. In late August Torbert, now chief of cavalry in Sheridan’s army, offered him command of Gen. Alfred Duffié’s division. But Sheridan canceled the transfer, ostensibly because the division was in poor shape and might harm Custer’s reputation. More likely the problem was that it belonged to the Army of West Virginia, meaning that Custer would not remain under Sheridan’s command after this campaign.14

  The press still loved him. “Future writers of fiction will find in Brig. Gen. Custer most of the qualities which go to make up a first-class hero,” the New York Tribune wrote on August 22. “Gen. Custer is as gallant a cavalier as one would wish to see.” The story captured his mix of traditional and modern, of romanticism and professionalism. “Always circumspect, never rash, and viewing the circumstances under which he is placed as coolly as a chess player observes his game, Gen. Custer always sees the ‘vantage of the ground’ at a glance.…Frank and independent in his demeanor, Gen. C. unites the qualities of the true gentleman with the accomplished and fearless soldier.”15

  Popular or not, Custer soon faced a threat to his career. On August 31, the delegates to the Democratic Party convention nominated George B. McClellan for president. In his acceptance letter, he implicitly rejected emancipation, writing, “The Union is the one condition of peace. We ask no more.” He formally committed himself to continuing the war, though most believed he intended to halt the fighting. His chief political adviser, Samuel L. M. Barlow, said, “The General is for peace, not war.” McClellan himself remarked, shortly before his nomination, “I will recommend an immediate armistice and a call for a convention of all the states and insist upon exhausting all and every means to secure peace without further bloodshed.”16

  McClellan’s nomination placed Custer in a treacherous position. He had suffered before because of their well-known ties. He knew that neither the administration nor the military could tolerate support for McClellan. Libbie saw the danger clearly. When an officer asked her about Armstrong’s politics, she told her husband, “I said if you had any I didn’t know them, but I am for Abraham.” Even in letters to him she was careful, as if fearful that someone else might read her words. She wrote, “People will think I am repeating your sentiments—and I don’t even know them.” He replied, “My doctrine has ever been that a soldier should not meddle in politics.”17

  Almost none of this was true. Her comments in unguarded moments showed that she and her husband had the same politics. And Custer still idolized his old chief. “I found the hottest discussions were going on regarding General McClellan and sometimes the vehemence of his admirers got them into trouble, for feeling ran so high it broke friendships and made an officer the target for persecution,” Libbie later wrote.18

  Back in Monroe, David Reed wrote to Armstrong, “There is a great inquiry how you are going to vote.” One prominent Democrat “says you will make all your men vote for McClellan.” Emmanuel campaigned loudly for the Democratic candidate. “I cant be quiet let me know my son what you think about the Army vote,” he wrote. He even suggested that Armstrong could give McClellan political advice. “I am down on the present Administration from Abraham down to the last.…It has been nothing but ruin and distruction ever since they came into power.”19

  Armstrong decided that he had to act. On September 6, he wrote a letter to his political patron, Judge Christiancy, that he clearly intended for public release. “The Peace Commissioners I am in favor of are those sent from the cannon’s mouth. The only armistice I would yield to would be that forced by the points of our bayonets.” They could not stop now. Sherman had just captured Atlanta, he noted, and Rear Adml. David Farragut had won a major victory at Mobile Bay in August.20

  He wrote the letter out of calculation, but events had indeed carried him away from his old hero. Custer very much wanted to win. His craving for victory had grown stronger in fourteen months of leading men on the battlefield. For all his sympathy for Southerners, he had abandoned McClellan’s notion of a limited war. In the Valley, he found himself plagued by guerrillas (called “partisan rangers”) under Col. John Singleton Mosby, who ambushed wagon trains and isolated soldiers with the support of the civilian population. On August 21, some thirty of Custer’s men set out on a mission to burn crops and barns; the guerrillas ambushed them and executed the survivors. One wounded man pretended to be dead and lived to tell the story of what had happened. Custer ordered all homes in the immediate vicinity to be torched, along with the houses of ten “of the most prominent secessionists.” When federal cavalry executed some of Mosby’s men, Mosby blamed Custer (inaccurately) and vowed vengeance. Custer saw no alternative to a hard war.21

  “Let the public sentiment be the echo of that which is found in the heart of every soldier in the army, that we are fighting for human rights and liberty, for the preservation of a free people, a free government and having secured these privileges to ourselves we desire and intend to transmit them unsullied and untarnished to those who come after us in all time to come,” he wrote. Human rights and liberty resonated with the Radical program of abolition and greater racial equality. Yet these words could be read more in the context of “a free government,” which was under attack by secessionists who refused to abide by the results of elections. The same words might refer exclusively to the rights of white men. The ambiguity was clever, allowing him to sound as radical or moderate as the reader might choose to believe.22

  “The sentiments it breathes are worthy of a gallant soldier and a true patriot,” Christiancy replied. He asked permission to publish the letter, and cautioned that it had given Custer’s father “great anxiety.…But you know your father’s politics.” The judge warned that Emmanuel represented a threat to Armstrong. “Now it is not for me to say more than this, that the copperheads here will insist on claiming you to be one, and that this is a great injury to you.”23

  “My dear son with fealings of sorrow I pend these lines,” Emmanuel wrote. His letter revealed how deeply Armstrong’s declaration wounded him. “You are my darling son that I love you as I love my life.…Now what has caused my present truble of mind is the letter you wroat to Judg Christiancy.” Emmanuel learned of it only because Christiancy read it to him, making it doubly painful. It was well written, he admitted, but the judge had shown it to his Republican friends, who delighted in it. How, Emmanuel asked, could you turn against McClellan? “I know you thought more of him than any other man,” he wrote. “You doant know how I hate for a man to come up to me and ask me what I think of that letter.” If Armstrong had remained a loyal Democrat, he wrote, he would have a chance of one day winning the presidency, but siding with Republicans doomed him.24

  “You seem to disapprove of the sentiments I wrote in my letter to Judge Christiancy,” Armstrong replied. He wrote to his father on October 16, almost a month after Emmanuel’s agonized letter (which had been followed by at least one more on the same subject). The son took a cold tone with his father. “When I wrote that letter I endeavored to make my sentiments agree with my actions,” he wrote. “We have passed the point at which conciliation and compromise might have secured peace.” He would fight for the principles at stake for the rest of his
life, if necessary. Defying his father, he gave Christiancy permission to publish the letter. It was excerpted by the New York Times and other newspapers before the election.25

  Judge Christiancy and Emmanuel Custer represented deeper conflicts in Armstrong’s life than politics alone. Christiancy was a man of learning, influence, and economic success; he was the more measured and sophisticated of the two. Armstrong’s father was uneducated, provincial, poor, and volatile; he had once seen no better path for Armstrong than to apprentice him to a furniture maker. At some level, he embarrassed his son.26

  But the battle for Custer’s politics was not over, because his feelings were so closely tied to the war, and the war would end one day. For the moment, the question was when and how the end would come: through victory or appeasement?

  When Custer wrote to Christiancy, the capture of Atlanta had finally brought some hope to the despairing North. But the Union had yet to win in Virginia. By the time he wrote back to his father, that had changed. He had learned what it meant to be truly victorious in battle. And there was nothing like victory in battle.

  War gave Custer his greatest pleasure. It gave him purpose, praise, and the adoration of his men. Whatever would he do when peace returned?

  —

  ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 19, Custer ordered his brigade to march west to Locke’s Ford on Opequon Creek. Sheridan had finally ordered an assault on the Confederate army, having learned that the enemy had transferred troops out of the Valley. He sent his infantry west through narrow Berryville Canyon, led by Wilson’s cavalry. He directed his other cavalry divisions under Wesley Merritt (including Custer’s brigade) and William Averell to move forward on his right, aiming for the Valley Pike, a strategic road that ran north-south in the Confederates’ rear.27