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

by Stiles, T. J.

  At Five Forks, he had joined Armstrong in the forefront of the fighting. On April 3, Tom accompanied Wells’s brigade as it confronted three rebel cavalry regiments dug in at Namozine Church. Tom joined in the assault. Jumping his horse over enemy breastworks, he charged at a rebel color bearer and yanked the flag out of his hands. Tom leveled his revolver and ordered the nearby rebels to surrender. Three officers and eleven enlisted men threw up their hands. He later received a Medal of Honor for his valor that day.68

  The chase continued. On April 6, at Sayler’s Creek (called Sailor’s Creek in Union reports), Custer threw his division into a battle between the Union VI Corps and the Confederate corps commanded by Lt. Gen. Richard S. Ewell. During the fighting, a prisoner hailed one of Custer’s staff officers. He was Maj. Gen. Joseph B. Kershaw. “I look upon General Custer as one of the best cavalry officers that this or any other country has produced. I shall, indeed, consider it an honor to surrender my sword to him,” Kershaw said. “All through today’s battle I directed my men to concentrate their fire upon his headquarters flag.…I knew it was my only hope.”

  The battle raged on. Custer’s horse was shot. His color bearer was killed by a bullet. The rising sound of gunfire indicated that VI Corps was attacking, and Custer ordered a final charge. Tom led the galloping line up and over the works. Again he spurred after a flag, but as he tried to wrestle it away the Confederate who held it fired his pistol, sending a bullet ripping through Tom’s cheek. The muzzle pressed so close to his face that the blast burned him and threw him back. Tom righted himself in his saddle, grabbed the staff, shoved the revolver in his left hand into the rebel’s chest, and fired. The enemy soldier fell dead. Tom reined around and rode for his brother, blood streaming down his face and neck. He had earned his second Medal of Honor.

  The rebel line collapsed. Ewell and his corps surrendered en masse. That night Custer entertained Confederates Kershaw and Col. Frank Huger at his headquarters tent—and ostentatiously displayed the battle flags he had captured.69

  On April 8, Custer’s division captured three railroad trains carrying badly needed supplies for the Confederate army. During the dash into the railroad station, Custer’s surgeon later wrote, two young women ran out from “a large and elegant mansion.” They were frantic. They are robbing and trying to murder us, they yelled at Custer. He dismounted, ran up to the house, and encountered a Union soldier coming out the front door. Custer punched him in the face and knocked him down. Darting through the house, he saw a second man heading for the back door. “Catching up an axe, he threw it, hitting the brute in the back of the head.…In a moment he was in his saddle again, and after hurriedly directing Captain Lee, the provost marshal, to place a guard on the premises, he charged down the road at terrific speed.” If the story is true, Custer’s ferocity makes one wonder if the women said the men were raping, not robbing. (Other men in the cavalry had been executed for “insulting women.”)70

  Other divisions came forward, cornering the Army of Northern Virginia at nearby Appomattox Court House. On April 9, as the rest of the Army of the Potomac moved into position, Sheridan ordered a general assault. But first a Confederate officer rode forward under a white flag and asked for a truce. Custer sent his chief of staff back with him to discuss the Confederate proposal. He waited. Not long afterward he decided to ride ahead under his own flag of truce. A rebel guard brought him to Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, Lee’s senior subordinate. “In the name of General Sheridan I demand the unconditional surrender of this army,” Custer said, speaking in “a brusk [sic], excited manner,” according to Longstreet.

  Longstreet looked at the twenty-five-year-old brigadier general with “flaxen locks flowing over his shoulders,” and told him that he, Longstreet, did not command the Army of Northern Virginia, nor would he ever surrender it to Sheridan. Custer, he noted, “was within the lines of the enemy without authority, addressing a superior officer, and in disrespect to General Grant as well as myself.” Custer calmed down, Longstreet recalled, and was satisfied to learn that Lee would discuss surrender with Grant; another Confederate claimed that the rebuff left Custer “with his tail between his legs.” Certainly he had overreached. Ending the war rather exceeded his authority.71

  But it did end at Appomattox Court House—in the conventional sense. Grant and Lee met at the home of William McLean, who had previously lived on the battlefield of First Bull Run. “There in McLean’s parlor the son of an Ohio tanner dictated surrender terms to the scion of a First Family of Virginia,” writes the historian James McPherson. The meeting was brief, as were the terms that Grant drew up on an oval wooden table. He guaranteed that Lee’s men would not be prosecuted for treason. He allowed them to go home, taking their own horses and side arms. Lee accepted. Afterward he noticed Ely Parker, Grant’s military secretary, an American Indian of the Seneca nation. “I am glad to see one real American here,” Lee said to him. Parker answered, “We are all Americans.”72

  “I never needed rest so much as I do now,” Custer later wrote to his sister. “I have been working very hard for the past six weeks with but little cessation. However I feel more than repaid for all my risk and labor.” A mood of relief or satisfaction rather than revelry prevailed when Lee surrendered, particularly as Grant prohibited celebrations. Custer’s friend and West Point classmate John “Gimlet” Lea came to see him. It was a day of reunions.73

  “Only time to write a word,” Custer wrote to Libbie. “My heart is too full for utterance. Thank God peace is at hand and thank God the 3rd Div has performed the most important duty of the company and achieved almost all the glory that has been won.” In a campaign of maximum effort by the Army of the Potomac, he went much too far to claim “almost all the glory” for his one division. And yet, who could say he had not distinguished himself? “I now have nearly 40 battle flags,” he wrote to his wife. “Oh I have so much to tell you but no time.…Hurrah for peace and my little durl.”74

  He did take time to draft a congratulatory letter to his division. “The record established by your indomitable courage is unparalleled in the annals of war. Your prowess has won for you even the respect and admiration of your enemies,” he wrote. He went on to enumerate their captures and victories. “And now, speaking for myself alone, when the war is ended and the task of the historian begins…I only ask that my name be written as that of the Commander of the Third Cavalry Division.” The official copy was prepared by Jacob Greene, who had returned as Custer’s adjutant in these final days.75

  On April 10, Sheridan showed his feelings by sending a gift to Libbie: the writing table used by Grant to draft the surrender terms. Sheridan had purchased it from William McLean for $20. “Permit me to say Madam that there is scarcely an individual in our service who has contributed more to bring about this desirable result than your very gallant husband.” At his urging, Custer finally won promotion to the full service rank of major general of U.S. Volunteers. He also received a promotion to brevet major general of the Regular Army, which would give him seniority of others of the same rank for the rest of his career.76

  Custer ended the Civil War far from where he began. He had left West Point at the bottom of his class, court-martialed and convicted, the Regular Army’s lowest ranking second lieutenant in its least-respected branch. Under the standard institutional processes, he had had the grimmest prospects. But the war disrupted everything standard and institutional. It consisted of successive crises that allowed Custer to distinguish himself. His energy, courage, and tactical skill propelled him upward.

  But Custer never trusted to merit alone, and for good reason. The most important wartime development, in terms of his advancement, was the creation of the U.S. Volunteers. The Volunteers, with their state-raised regiments and politically appointed officers, made the military more like antebellum America’s highly political, semi-corrupt society. Custer flattered, cultivated, and begged for favors from powerful sponsors within the army and government. Patronage gave him the chance to show
his merit, and patronage sustained him.

  But could he survive his success? Could he play the peacetime officer’s role of technical expert, institutional professional, organizational man? Could he make his way in the nation he had helped to remake—one without slavery, overseen by a federal government expanded and empowered by war, increasingly dominated by the great corporations emerging in the triumphant North? How would his old-fashioned romanticism fare in a nation traumatized by at least three-quarters of a million dead?77

  Custer was only twenty-five, and he held the second-highest rank in the army (disregarding seniority). He had killed men and won battles. He was a celebrity. His success taught him many lessons about himself and the world. And he would spend the rest of his life learning that they were all wrong.

  Part Two

  * * *

  FALL

  1865–1876

  I have utterly lost all the little confidence I ever had in his ability as an officer—and all admiration for his character as a man, and to speak the plain truth I am thoroughly disgusted with him!

  —Albert Barnitz, May 15, 1867

  Gen. Custer is, to those who know him intimately, the very beau ideal of the American cavalry officer. He is a magnificent rider, fearlessly brave, a capital revolver shot, and without a single objectionable habit.

  —New York Times, December 7, 1867

  Custer is not belying his reputation—which is that of a man selfishly indifferent to others, and ruthlessly determined to make himself conspicuous at all hazards.

  —Charles W. Larned, April 30, 1873

  It was impossible for Custer to appear otherwise than himself.

  —Lawrence Barrett, 1876

  Nine

  * * *

  THE EXECUTIONER

  ON APRIL 25, 1865, a black man named Junius Garland watched a group of Union cavalryman ride out of the woods and approach. Garland, a skilled groom, tended to a beautiful thoroughbred stallion: fifteen and a quarter hands high; solid bay with black legs, mane, and pert tail; and a proud, erect head. That’s Don Juan, the soldiers said, referring to the horse. We’ve been looking for him for days.

  Garland was illiterate, having spent his life in slavery, but he wasn’t stupid. He had been Don Juan’s groom for the past few years, and knew its value. In the days following Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, word had spread that Union troops were seizing good horses; Garland had received orders to hide Don Juan at a farm in the woods. But another freedman told the soldiers where to find it.

  The troopers harnessed Don Juan to a sulky, a light two-wheeled cart with little more than a driver’s seat. They demanded one more thing: Don Juan’s pedigree, printed in a handbill. They took it and drove the horse away.1

  Two weeks later, Dr. C. W. P. Brock visited the camp of the 3rd Cavalry Division, about five miles from Richmond. His own horse had been impounded by men from the unit, and he went to see Maj. Gen. George Armstrong Custer to ask for it. Custer received him, but he was distracted, excited. Have you heard of Don Juan? he asked Brock. Have you ever seen him? Brock said he only knew its reputation as “a thoroughbred race horse.” Custer and an unnamed lieutenant took Brock to a stable to see the famous stallion, which was “being curried down,” Brock recalled. “Gen. Custer said that that was the horse, that he had him, and that he also had his pedigree.”2

  Sixteen days after Lee’s surrender, ten days after Lincoln’s assassination, with all fighting at an end east of the Mississippi River, George Armstrong Custer stole a horse. He used his military authority to take what was not his, for no official purpose. Was it greed that corrupted him? A passion for fine horseflesh—common to most Americans in 1865, but particularly intense in this cavalryman? Was it power—the fact that he could take it? As John Keegan memorably wrote, “Generalship is bad for people.”3

  Custer was only twenty-five, an age more commonly associated with selfishness than self-reflection, and perhaps that explains it. But the theft was not impulsive. It had required investigation, planning, and henchmen. As peace began, all that was self-absorbed and self-destructive in Custer bubbled to the surface again.

  —

  “LIBBIE IS EVERY INCH a Genl’s wife,” wrote Rebecca Richmond, Libbie Custer’s cousin. Richmond had come to Washington in the closing days of the war and witnessed Libbie’s transformation into a public figure. E. A. Paul, war correspondent for the New York Times, hand-delivered mail to her. Senator Jacob Howard made a point of escorting her and Richmond to Secretary of War Stanton’s office so they could witness the presentation of flags captured by the 3rd Division. And Libbie mastered the subtle and treacherous ways of Washington society, governed by (among others) the lovely Kate Sprague, twenty-four-year-old daughter of Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase and bride of wealthy Rhode Island governor William Sprague. Libbie took Richmond to parties attended by Chase and his daughter, Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch, and John Hay, Lincoln’s private secretary.4

  In April, after Lee surrendered, Libbie joined her husband outside of Richmond. She passed from the parlors and ballrooms of the nation’s capital to the dirty white tents and sooty campfires of the 3rd Cavalry Division. She reunited not only with Armstrong but with old friends on his staff: Jacob Greene, Fred Nims, and Jim Christiancy, who had healed enough to resume his duties. (Tom Custer had gone to Washington to present captured flags and recuperate after being shot in the face.)

  And she saw Eliza Brown again. How many contradictory emotions did she feel at the sight of this young woman, who had spent more days with her husband than Libbie had? She was the first black person Libbie had ever known as an individual, the first to confront her with the humanity of another race. “She was a marvel of courage,” Libbie later wrote.5 Yet Libbie was beginning to sense how skillfully Brown managed her with her comforting and attention, how she made the most of her position in the general’s headquarters.

  Brown presented an irony. The highly educated Mrs. Custer had complained of the restrictions placed on women, of the passive role expected of wives. In writing about her life in later years, she felt obliged to stress her own feminine frailty, her fearfulness and delicacy. In Eliza Brown she saw a woman born into slavery, denied education, judged by prevailing wisdom of the day to be servile and inferior by nature; yet Brown took charge of her fate, rebuked authority, and contrived to influence those who officially held all the power. Brown challenged the assumptions that Libbie had been taught not only about black people, but about herself as a woman. Here, in one person, Libbie faced the revolution of emancipation and glimpsed women’s future of equal rights. She didn’t know quite what to think of it.

  In this moment of celebration, though, there was no resentment. If Libbie did not see the escaped slave as her equal, she did see her as a person. “Eliza and Libbie are in the room where I am writing,” Armstrong wrote to his sister on April 21. “Libbie is listening to some of Eliza’s stories. Eliza is wishing she could see all the folks back home.” The old categories that separated the races were breaking down.6

  When the division marched to Washington in mid-May, Libbie decided to ride on horseback at the head of the column, alongside her husband and the wife of brigade commander Col. Alexander Pennington. They marched “through the long sought city of Richmond in parade style,” wrote one cavalryman. “How proud they all felt, few can realize but those who marched with them. Their toils were over and they were going home to be disbanded; that was in every one’s heart.…Every where the landscape was full of memories, sad and joyful, glorious or disastrous.”

  They went into camp south of the Potomac, and Libbie’s husband rode into the city to attend to his political support. He ordered Greene to loan a handsome cream horse to Senator Chandler and to send it in the care of “two or three well dressed orderlies,” along with a horse for General Grant’s daughter Nellie, to the National Hotel so the Custers could lead the distinguished guests on a pleasure ride. The great army of volunteers would soon be mustered out, and Custer
did not intend to remain merely a captain in the Regular Army.7

  —

  THE GRAND REVIEW OF THE Armies began on May 23. Tens of thousands of spectators crowded toward Pennsylvania Avenue for the great victory parade. A reviewing stand had been constructed at the White House for the commanding generals, key senators and congressmen (including Chandler), foreign diplomats, and Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson. Flags and bunting hung everywhere. The Capitol itself displayed a huge banner reading, “The only national debt we cannot pay is the debt we owe to the victorious Union soldiers.”

  The first day of the parade belonged to the Army of the Potomac. The legions of veterans formed up east of the Capitol, the men dressed as they had in the field, though now they were clean and tidy. Custer wore his wide-brimmed slouch hat over his long curly hair and the proper uniform of a major general. Sometime after nine o’clock in the morning the procession started. General Meade led the way, followed by the general staff and the leadership of the Cavalry Corps. The march of units began, led by the 3rd Cavalry Division, each man in a red necktie.

  Bands marched ahead of each brigade, filling the air with brass notes. Battle flags, battered and tattered by bullets, embroidered with the names of victories, rose on wooden staffs, a moving grove of memory. As the procession wound around the north side of the Capitol, it passed by thousands of schoolchildren who burst into song—the girls in white dresses, the boys in blue jackets. Down the wide avenue the horsemen rode, shoulder to shoulder, curb to curb.