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

by Stiles, T. J.

  Despite a marked advantage in numbers, the Union army had a hard task in attacking Early’s army. One rebel wrote, “I thout we could whipe the world we was so well fortifide.” On the far northern edge of the battlefield, Custer struggled to force his way across Locke’s Ford, suffering a repulse before he won the western bank.28 The din of battle rose from the south and continued through the morning. Sheridan had hoped to isolate and crush the Confederate division led by Gen. Stephen Ramseur, but a traffic jam had stalled the passage of his infantry through Berryville Canyon, giving Early time to reinforce the threatened part of his line. Attacks and counterattacks resolved into a grinding, inconclusive firefight.29

  To the north, Custer waited. Having crossed the creek, the Union cavalry encountered fortified infantry, which held them back for nearly four hours. Around 12:30 p.m., Early—hard pressed by Sheridan’s infantry—shifted his foot soldiers away from his northern flank, leaving the defense there to cavalry commanded by Fitzhugh Lee. Custer observed the rebel withdrawal and moved forward, linking up with Averell’s division on his right. With a continuous front established, they advanced.30

  Future generations would read omniscient histories of the battle and scan maps covered in neat lines, rectangles, and arrows. But Custer saw events horizontally, from one particular viewpoint. With his field glass he peered at flitting figures on hills, shadows in tree lines, and dim shapes hunched in ravines. He identified his own troops by their regimental flags and the fluttering red neckties they wore in honor of his own costume. Men milled about, bringing casualties back and ammunition forward. Dust rose from the hooves of countless horses saddled with soldiers or hauling wagons, ambulances, artillery pieces, and caissons. The gray smoke of erupting gunpowder drifted above the ground, along with the cacophony of guns, bugles, and bands. Fetid rivers of urine ran between piles of manure deposited by horses and men. Where the fighting was there was blood, and bodies, and pieces of bodies. That the commanders maintained any control at all was a tribute to army organization, the elaborately tiered pyramid of responsibility that made the military the model of corporate organization.

  Surrounded by his staff, Custer listened to reports, dispatched aides with orders and messages, rode here and there to investigate, consult, and inspire. He was a professional and acted like one, maintaining his place in the great articulated whole. But if that was all, he would not have been Custer.

  “The line of brigades as they advanced across the open country, the bands playing the national airs, presented in the sunlight one moving mass of glittering sabers,” he wrote in his after-action report. “This, combined with the various and bright-colored banners and battle-flags, intermingled here and there with the plain blue uniforms of the troops, furnished one of the most inspiring as well as imposing scenes of martial grandeur ever witnessed upon a battlefield.”31

  On Custer’s left, he saw the infantry lines engage in pitched combat. Sheridan had sent Brig. Gen. George Crook, commanding the reserve of two infantry divisions, toward his right; Crook had converted the movement into a flanking attack that bent back the left of the Confederate line. Fierce resistance stalled Crook’s advance. Fitzhugh Lee attacked the Union cavalry. “The enemy relied wholly upon the carbine and pistol,” Custer wrote. “My men preferred the saber. A short but closely contested struggle ensued, which resulted in the repulse of the enemy.” The rebels in front of Custer’s brigade rallied in a ditch; he ordered a general charge that broke their hastily formed line. Onward he galloped, until the retreating enemy reached the protection of their artillery and infantry.32

  Hard pressed, Early contracted his lines. Custer carefully followed, and hid his men behind a “small crest within 500 yards of the enemy’s position.” He faced an enemy infantry division behind a stone wall—a formidable foe for mere cavalry.

  An aide to Custer’s division commander, Wesley Merritt, rode up with orders from Sheridan himself to attack. But Custer had examined the enemy line carefully. “Knowing that a heavy force of the enemy was lying down behind their works, facts of which I knew the division commander was ignorant, I respectfully requested that I might be allowed to select my own time for making the charge,” he wrote. If Custer attacked immediately, he would be sending his men headlong against a fortified, well-prepared defensive line. It would be suicidal. But he expected the pressure of the Union infantry attacks to induce the Confederates to shift troops away from this sector, which was currently quiet. Merritt gave him permission. So he watched. As he hoped, the enemy troops stood up and began to move. Custer gave the order. His 500 men charged, followed by the Union brigades on his right and left.

  The line of screaming horsemen galloped toward the Confederates, who turned and fired one volley before the cavalry crested their works and plunged in among them. One trooper saw Custer in the forefront, slashing with his saber. A rebel just a few feet away raised his rifle and aimed; Custer yanked hard on the reins, his horse reared on its hind legs, and the bullet missed. “Then a terrible sword stroke descends upon the infantryman’s head, and he sinks to the ground a lifeless corpse,” the witness recalled.33

  “Boot to boot these brave horsemen rode in. The enemy’s line broke into a thousand fragments under the shock,” Merritt reported. A Confederate soldier wrote to his cousin, “That was one of the awfull times for us I ever saw and I hope to never see another such a time with our army. It was a perfect skidaddle every man fore him self.”

  The cavalry charge, timed and led by Custer, delivered the final blow that turned a drawn-out struggle into a crushing Union victory. It was almost unprecedented in the Civil War. As a rebel officer wrote in his diary, “It is the first time that I have ever seen cavalry very effective in a general engagement.” Custer claimed his charge “stands unequaled, valued according to its daring and success, in the history of this war.” He boasted, but he did not exaggerate. “Major,” he said laughingly to Charles Deane of the 6th Michigan, “this is the bulliest day since Christ was born.”

  Men of both North and South agreed that only nightfall saved Early’s army from complete destruction in the battle (called Third Winchester or, in the official federal designation, Opequon). Confederate casualties amounted to a quarter, perhaps as much as a third, of Early’s army—more than twice the Union toll as a percentage. Many of the rebel losses were taken as prisoners, particularly by Custer’s brigade. “My command, which entered the charge about 500 strong,” he reported, “captured over 700 prisoners, including 52 officers, also 7 battle-flags, 2 caissons, and a large number of small-arms.”34

  On September 22, just three days after the battle, Sheridan smashed Early’s army again at Fisher’s Hill. He intended for the cavalry to cut off the rebels’ escape; it failed to do so. Sheridan blamed Torbert and especially Averell; he removed the latter from command and turned his division over to Custer. But not for long: just a few days later, James Wilson gave up the 3rd Division to take over a new command in another theater, and Sheridan gave it to Custer. It gave him special pleasure; now he could outshine Wilson with his rival’s own, and Custer’s old, division. “He got his Division by merit, not by hinting and begging,” Libbie wrote to her parents—a sign of how thoroughly and persistently her husband despised Wilson.35

  But he had to abandon the Michigan Brigade. When he said farewell to his officers and men, he told them that Sheridan had promised that he could later swap one of his brigades for his old command. “Some of the officers said they would resign if the exchange was not made,” Custer wrote to his wife. “Major Drew said some actually cried.” Kidd later remarked that the Michigan Brigade without Custer was like Hamlet without Hamlet. In Custer’s very first command, he had learned what it was like to be loved by his men. The memory of it would shape his expectations as an officer for the rest of his career.36

  Yet the promotion delighted him. He told Libbie, “I have a tent almost as large as a circus tent.” Soldiers typically view new commanders with skepticism, but not in the 3rd Division.
Colonel William Wells wrote home, “Think you will hear better accounts of us now we have a gallant leader.” One man said they “welcomed the change, though they knew it meant mounted charges, instead of dismounted skirmishing, and a foremost place in every fight.” The word though suggests a hint of ambivalence. Under Custer, they expected to win, perhaps to become heroes—but they knew it would cost them.37

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  “THE HEAVENS ARE AGLOW with the flames from burning barns,” a soldier wrote in his diary. With Early’s army driven far to the south, Sheridan spread his men out and ordered them to turn the Valley into a “barren waste.” They marched slowly north, driving in livestock and setting fires. They limited the burning to crops, barns full of the harvest, mills, factories, and railroad tracks, leaving residences alone—until partisans ambushed and shot Lt. John R. Miegs, Sheridan’s chief engineer and the son of Gen. Montgomery Meigs, chief quartermaster for the U.S. Army. Sheridan took Miegs’s death personally. He commanded that all buildings within five miles of the killing be torched. Seventeen houses were burned down.

  Civilians in the Valley called the campaign of arson “the Burning.” Both Union soldiers and Southerners exaggerated the completeness of the devastation. One study finds that the Valley’s Rockingham County lost the equivalent of a quarter of the production reported in 1860. Nor did the atrocities of the guerrilla struggle, even when heightened by the Burning, approach the intensity of Missouri, the scene of death squads, summary executions, massacres, mutilations, and mass banishment of civilians. But it was still immensely destructive. Sheridan reported that he seized or eliminated 3,772 horses, 10,918 head of cattle, 12,000 sheep, 15,000 hogs, 20,397 tons of hay, 435,802 bushels of wheat, 77,176 bushels of corn, 71 flour mills, and 1,200 barns. The suffering fell on women, children, and the elderly. “Heart-sickening,” a New Yorker wrote.

  To the astonishment of white Virginians, countless African Americans seized this opportunity to escape. It had been a long time coming. Union armies had penetrated deep into the South, but for three years the Confederates had stood triumphant in the Valley, so close to the North. Now, at last, the enslaved could safely free themselves.38

  Tom Rosser meant to stop it all—or at least to slow it down. The big, bearded twenty-eight-year-old called his 600-strong unit the Laurel Brigade, after the ancient symbol of victory. Laurel leaves adorned his troopers’ uniforms and regimental flags. He came to reinforce Early’s depleted army on October 5, and dubbed his men “the saviors of the valley.” The crusty Early despised this “ridiculous vaporing.” But Rosser and his brigade had an excellent record, and Early needed a good cavalry officer, since Fitzhugh Lee had been wounded at Winchester. So he attached the Laurel Brigade to Lee’s old division and gave Rosser command of the whole. His orders were to harass the Union horsemen and interrupt their arson as best he could.39

  Though a Texan himself, Rosser commanded Virginians, many from the Valley. As they followed “a smoky trail of desolation,” one officer wrote, they wanted revenge. From October 6 through 8, they lashed out at Custer’s rear guard amid blowing snow.

  Sheridan lost his temper. The skirmishing made it appear that the federal cavalry was running from the enemy. He later wrote, “That night I told Torbert [now chief of cavalry] I expected him either to give Rosser a drubbing the next morning or get whipped himself.” Sheridan would personally observe from Round Top Mountain.40

  At six o’clock on the morning of October 9, Custer marched his division south, accompanied by Merritt on his left. Cresting a hill on the north bank of Tom’s Brook, Custer saw that the Confederates had occupied “a high and abrupt ridge of hills running along the south bank,” he later reported. Six enemy guns on a mound known as Spiker’s Hill began to shell his men “with telling effect,” he wrote.41

  Putting his field glass to his eyes, Custer saw Rosser on Spiker’s Hill. The wound inflicted by Custer’s men at Trevilian Station, the last time the two generals fought, still seeped onto his pant leg, and it hurt. Rosser even wrote to his wife that he wished he were home. But he sat astride his horse, boasting “in a vaunting manner,” according to a subordinate, “I’ll drive them into Strasburg by 10 o’clock.”

  When Custer spotted Rosser, he galloped out in front of his line on his big black horse, recognizable to all. “Sweeping off his broad sombrero,” wrote Frederick Whittaker of the 6th New York Cavalry, “he threw it down to his knee in a profound salute to his honorable foe.”

  “That’s General Custer, the Yanks are so proud of,” Rosser told his staff, “and I intend to give him the best whipping today that he ever got. See if I don’t.”42

  Custer launched his attack, surprising Rosser with a flanking column. A short time later, one rebel soldier “saw fully six hundred veteran Confederate troops flying madly along the back road,” as Rosser’s division caved in. “His retreat soon became a demoralized rout,” Custer reported. “Never since the opening of this war has there been witnessed such a complete and decisive overthrow of the enemy’s cavalry.” On Custer’s left, Merritt routed a smaller Confederate cavalry division commanded by Maj. Gen. Lunsford Lomax. The Union cavalryman called the battle the Woodstock Races, after the village they reached at the end of a twenty-mile pursuit. They found among the loot an ambrotype portrait of Libbie, captured by the rebels at Trevilian Station.

  The next day Custer amused his men by walking through camp with Rosser’s large coat draped preposterously on his wiry frame. He was happy. In a direct confrontation, on a battlefield of his opponent’s choosing, he had crushed his old friend and rival. He had done it only days after taking command of the 3rd Division from Wilson. In the comically oversized uniform, Custer personified the great turnabout he and his comrades had achieved. They had deflated the rebel cavalry, once vastly superior, and rendered it hollow, a plaything for the Yankees.43

  Just ten days later, disaster struck. Far from defeated, the Confederate commander engineered a stunning reversal. On the morning of October 19, Early launched a surprise attack on Sheridan’s sprawling bivouac on the eastern side of Cedar Creek. His four divisions swept the Union infantry out of their tents and drove the survivors northeast in chaos. Sheridan himself was absent, having gone to Washington for a conference. Custer withdrew his division to a line improvised by the VI Corps commander, Maj. Gen. Horatio Wright. The Union army had time to rally because the famished Confederates stopped to loot its camp.44

  Sheridan had spent the night in Winchester, eleven miles to the north, on his return from Washington. He rode south that morning with rising anger as he encountered fleeing soldiers. He cursed them to return and fight. Kidd wrote to his parents, “He came just at the time when we were all about to give up in despair.…You should have heard the cheers that went up when it was known that our glorious leader was again with us.”

  Dispatched to the right flank, Custer drove back Rosser’s division and turned south. To his left he could see the start of the infantry counterattack ordered by Sheridan. He had a choice: he could chase Rosser’s cavalry on his right, pursuing his private duel and gaining a certain victory, or he could assist the main assault by striking the enemy infantry. “For a moment I was undecided,” he reported. He detailed three regiments to guard against Rosser, then led a charge for a bridge over Cedar Creek, the choke point on the Confederate line of retreat. The enemy already wavered under the infantry assault; Custer’s thrust sparked a panic. “Prisoners were taken by hundreds, entire companies threw down their arms, and appeared glad when summoned to surrender,” he wrote. They captured five battle flags, the badly wounded General Ramseur, and forty-five pieces of artillery (out of forty-eight taken by the entire army), all but unprecedented in the Civil War.

  At about nine o’clock that evening, Custer rode to a stone house that served as Sheridan’s headquarters. He charged up to the little army commander, wrapped his arms around him, hefted him into the air, and spun him around. “By God, we’ve cleaned them out and got the guns!” He dropped Sheridan
, spotted Torbert, and seized him the same way. “There, there, old fellow,” the chief of cavalry said. “Don’t capture me!” Next the young general went to the bed where Ramseur, an old friend from West Point, lay wounded. Custer spoke to him warmly about their days together at the academy, but Ramseur was slipping away. He died the next day.45

  Cedar Creek capped an extraordinary string of victories in which Custer played a central role. Already a Union hero, he emerged from the Valley a national icon.

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  ON OCTOBER 22, CUSTER rode in a special train to Washington, D.C. Ten captured Confederate battle flags flapped from the windows as it pulled into the station. For both sides in the Civil War, the regimental flag held enormous practical and symbolic significance. The regiment was the army’s basic military unit; its flag oriented the men, signaled the advance or retreat, and provided a rallying point in moments of disorder. Soldiers came to see deeper meaning in it. They believed the flag was the soul of the regiment. No matter how badly defeated, the men would take extreme risks to keep it out of enemy hands. A captured flag was the ultimate trophy of victory. It showed that the enemy was not merely stymied, not merely pushed back, but crushed. Ten captured flags represented an epic victory.

  A presentation ceremony was scheduled at the War Department, but Secretary Edwin Stanton postponed it for a day, giving Custer time to take a train to Newark to collect Libbie, who was visiting her stepmother’s relatives. The couple returned and entered the War Department’s reception hall with the enlisted men who had seized the flags. One by one they came forward—Sgt. David Scofield, 5th New York Cavalry, presenting the flag of the 13th Virginia Infantry, Chief Bugler T. M. Wells, 6th New York Cavalry, presenting the flag of the 14th Georgia Infantry, and so on. The seventeen-year-old James Sweeney told Stanton how he captured General Ramseur in his ambulance; Custer explained that Sweeney had been wearing a gray jacket, fooling the driver.