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

by Stiles, T. J.

  Amid this attention, Custer grew callously self-indulgent. He wrote to Libbie that he and old West Point friends visited “pretty-girl-waitress saloons. We also had considerable sport with females we met on the street—‘Nymphes du Pavé’ they are called.” He added, “Sport alone was our object. At no time did I forget you.” It was hardly reassuring; his descriptions of alluring women seemed a deliberate provocation, especially since Libbie remained at home to tend to her ailing father. At one party, he wrote, he sat on a sofa next to a baroness in a very low-cut satin dress. “I have not seen such sights since I was weaned.” He said it did not make his “passions rise, nor nuthin else,” but added, “What I saw went far to convince me that a Baroness is formed very much like all other persons of the same sex.”16

  One day he went to a clairvoyant with Wesley Merritt and some “girls” whom he did not name to Libbie. A fad for spiritualism had grown in America ever since two young girls claimed in 1848 to be able to communicate with a spirit through knocking sounds. With the great loss of life during the war, many survivors sought to contact the dead; even some intellectuals took clairvoyants and mediums seriously. “I was told many wonderful things, among others the year I was sick with typhoid fever, the year I was married, the year I was appointed to West Point, also the year I was promoted to Brig Genl. You were described accurately,” Custer wrote to Libbie. The woman said he would have four children; the first would die young. He had had narrow escapes from death, but would live to old age and die of natural causes. She also said, Custer reported, “I was always fortunate since the hour of my birth and always would be.” The group found her so spooky that the women refused to participate.

  The clairvoyant also said “I was thinking of changing my business and thought of engaging in one of two things, Railroading or Mining.” Custer added, “(Strictly true.)” Money filled his mind as he considered his future path. As he had said, he would have to make a great deal to live in the center of things, in New York. He labored over the new race history and pedigree for Don Juan, citing horse-racing publications, to replace the original, which implicated him in a theft. In Washington he had talked with Grant about taking a year’s leave of absence to fight for Benito Juárez in his revolution against France’s puppet emperor in Mexico, Maximilian I.

  Grant wrote a letter of recommendation, though he interposed Sheridan between them. Custer “rendered such distinguished service as a cavalry officer during the war. There was no officer in that branch of service who had the confidence of Gen. Sheridan to a greater degree than Gen. C. and there is no officer in whose judgment I have greater faith than in Sheridan’s.” Then, as if he realized what he was doing, he added, “Please understand that I mean by this to endorse Gen. Custer to a high degree.”17

  This period is often described as an interregnum in Custer’s life—a period of vacillation before he set out on his proper path. To the contrary, he revealed elements of his true self. It was a time when he pursued some of his deepest interests and indulged in some of his greatest pleasures. He loved New York, and always would. The things he chased there—money, culture, society, women, and politics—mattered to him. Soon he, too, would enter the political conflict. “I long to become wealthy,” he wrote to Libbie from New York, “not for wealth alone but for the power it brings.”18

  —

  DANIEL BACON WAS SICK. Over the winter of 1865–66, he wrote to his sister, “I have been quite unwell…have had dysentery & with something like the ague.” After losing ten pounds, he recovered, and felt positively healthy. It proved a brief reprieve. Libbie tended to him, but he grew worse. Even Emmanuel Custer came to stay with the family, a sign that all believed the end was near. Bacon thought so. “He seemed triumphantly happy, so near Heaven, so contented with regard to me,” Libbie wrote. He remarked, “Elizabeth has married entirely to her own satisfaction and to mine. No man could wish for a son-in-law more highly thought of!” To the very end, he viewed Custer through the lens of reputation and respectability. And he insisted that Libbie submerge her identity in her husband’s, telling her, “Ignore self.” Custer rushed home, but “when he returned it was too late,” Libbie wrote. Bacon died on May 18, 1866.19

  “Our house is not the same,” she wrote. Armstrong now stood as her emotional pillar—supplying strength, but overshadowing her as well. “I should be far more miserable but for Armstrong’s care. He keeps me out of doors as much as he can. I do not wear deep mourning. He is opposed to it.” Yet she asserted herself. She told him not to go to Mexico, despite “handsome inducements” offered by the revolutionary Juaristas—reportedly $10,000 in gold. “I do not want him ever to go into battle again.”

  The devastating blow of Bacon’s death did not stop Custer from moving forward with his plans—though Libbie’s opposition made him cautious. He consulted with Sheridan, who had rushed to the Rio Grande from his headquarters in New Orleans to monitor the collapse of imperial power in Mexico. Sheridan thanked Custer for his commentary on politics in Washington, and sketched the French defeats at the hands of the Juaristas. “If you conclude to go you would have my warmest support. But I do not advise the introduction of Americans,” he wrote. “If you do anything it will be necessary to do it soon.”20

  He did not go to Mexico. Secretary of State William Seward prevented it. Instead, Custer took Don Juan to the Michigan State Fair. After the last horse race on June 23, he rode Don Juan “at full speed past the stand, the horse displaying great speed and power,” the Chicago Tribune reported. “His appearance was greeted with tremendous applause.” Judges awarded Don Juan first prize over six thoroughbred rivals. With this rousing appearance, national press attention, and the re-created pedigree, Custer now felt certain that he could sell him for $10,000, an enormous sum. One month later Don Juan died of a stroke. Custer was left with nothing.21

  He still had the army, of course. On July 28, Congress passed an act that authorized a maximum of 54,302 troops; the actual number settled out at 2,835 officers and 48,081 enlisted men. This was triple the size of the antebellum Regular Army, though smaller than Custer had expected. It wrecked his dream of becoming a general, especially given the flood of applicants for officer commissions and the equal allocation of ranks of captain and above to regulars and veterans of the U.S. Volunteers.

  The act also created the Regular Army’s first regiments of black soldiers, four of infantry and two of cavalry. During the Civil War the Union army had fielded some 179,000 U.S. Colored soldiers (as they were officially designated), who had served only for the duration of the conflict. The new regiments were permanent, with black troops and white officers. “I trust your influence may be used to secure [officers]…who always did and do yet believe that the negro could fight, and that he ‘has some rights,’ &c.,” Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts wrote to Grant, listing Adelbert Ames as an example.22

  During this period of reorganization, Grant felt the pressure of the demand for troops in the West. The Regular Army had largely withdrawn from the Great Plains during the Civil War, but the Sioux Uprising of 1862 in Minnesota had led to fighting in the Dakota Territory, and an atrocity carried out by volunteer troops at Sand Creek in the Colorado Territory in 1864 had sparked warfare with the Cheyennes. Grant suggested that the new black regiments be organized and deployed immediately. Therefore he had to place officers quickly. Each regiment would be led by a colonel, assisted by a lieutenant colonel. On August 2 Grant sent Stanton “my recommendations for the appointments of field officers for colored troops,” including “Capt. & Bvt Maj. Gen. G.A. Custer to be lieutenant colonel.” He would serve in the 9th U.S. Cavalry, Colored. Wesley Merritt received the lieutenant colonelcy of the 7th U.S. Cavalry.23

  As Grant drew up his list, Custer went back to Washington. He wrote to the adjutant general of the army and asked for duty in Michigan, due to the death of his father-in-law—impossible if he were assigned to a black regiment on the Great Plains. Grant suggested Custer might swap his post with an officer in
a white regiment.

  That was precisely what Custer wanted. Ignoring the chain of command, he contacted Stanton, and even approached President Johnson for help. He asked Johnson that “I may be appointed Colonel of one of the new infantry regiments, provided I cannot be appointed Col. of Cavalry, but in what ever branch of the service I may be assigned I most respectfully request to be attached to an organization composed of White troops as I have served and wish to serve with no other class.”24

  Custer’s appeal to the president changed the course of his career. While Grant and the War Department debated the propriety of transferring him to a white regiment, Custer won the attention of Johnson and his advisers. They could see that he shared their racial views, and they knew he could be very useful in the great political struggle.

  An electoral campaign gripped the country, unlike any other in the nation’s history. No midterm election came close to this one in its bitterness and intensity. It pitted contrary visions of Reconstruction against each other, the president’s and that of congressional Republicans, in a battle for the future of the country. The central issues were race, justice, and a new role for the federal government in protecting individual lives and liberty. Rank-and-file Republican voters did not turn into racial egalitarians, but they were appalled that Confederates might return to power and shocked by the violence inflicted on the freed people—the only truly loyal population in the South.

  White Southern hostility toward blacks was blatant. “If one had the power,” the Memphis Daily Appeal wrote, “it would be a solemn duty for him to annihilate the race.” On May 1, a three-day race riot erupted in that city, as policemen and firemen led white mobs on a rampage through black neighborhoods. Forty-six African Americans and two whites died; five black women were raped; ninety-one houses, twelve schools, and four churches were burned to the ground. On July 30, white police in New Orleans attacked delegates to a state constitutional convention called to enfranchise African Americans. They killed thirty-four blacks and three white Radicals, and wounded 119. Sheridan called the riot “an absolute massacre.”25

  The bloodshed outraged Republicans. Their solution outraged Democrats. It was a proposed Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, drafted to a great extent by Custer’s old sponsor, Representative John A. Bingham. It would extend citizenship to all born in the United States, regardless of race; prohibit states from infringing on individual rights or denying equal protection of the law; and reduce any state’s representation in Congress and the Electoral College proportionate to the percentage of the adult male population denied the right to vote, in order to coerce Southern states into enfranchising their large black populations. The amendment would be a profound and unprecedented step toward black equality and participation in government.

  The repercussions would extend far beyond African Americans. Previously the Bill of Rights had been construed to limit only federal action, leaving states free to suppress freedom of speech, religion, and all the liberties in the first eight amendments. Bingham declared on the floor of the House of Representatives that the Fourteenth Amendment “was simply a proposition to arm the Congress of the United States, by the consent of the people, with power to enforce the Bill of Rights”—against state and local governments. It would leap toward the modern American conception of individual rights and the central government’s role as their guarantor. “More than anything else,” writes Eric Foner, “the election became a referendum on the Fourteenth Amendment.”26

  Custer opposed it. He understood the importance, he wrote, of “times like the present, when a new political era is being inaugurated—an era which is destined to remodel and develop the character of our political structure.”27 He saw America standing at a doorway between past and future, and he wanted to close that door.

  —

  AT THIS DELICATE MOMENT, the president asked him for help. Johnson and his advisers planned to build a Northern conservative coalition to retake Congress, through a National Union convention in Philadelphia. Lincoln had run for reelection under the same party name, but now it would essentially be the Democratic Party in disguise. After the convention Johnson planned to break with tradition and campaign personally on a national speaking tour, accompanied by Grant, Adm. David Farragut, Secretary of State Seward, and Navy Secretary Gideon Welles. The president asked Custer to attend the convention and join him on his journey.28

  Libbie saw the risks more clearly than her husband. She had spent far more time on Capitol Hill, and understood the interplay of politics and personal relationships. She later cautioned, for example, that Senator Chandler “can be a very tenacious enemy,” and must be cultivated, not provoked. So when Armstrong told her of the president’s invitation, she advised against it. He insisted. “It is my wish to have Autie avoid politics but I can say nothing to prevent him because I know that he is so conscientious in what he is doing,” she wrote to her cousin Rebecca Richmond. “If such a Congress is allowed to dictate laws to our country as it did last winter, he believes men, soldiers & all should work to prevent it, and so I did not oppose his present movements.”

  Libbie’s words—not to mention her husband’s actions—refute the idea that he was “a political innocent” who “allowed himself to be lured” into politics, as one of his best biographers writes. Even illiterate backwoodsmen understood and deeply felt the politics of this tumultuous year, and Custer was a well-educated man who had spent weeks on Capitol Hill, immersed in the struggle. But he did accede to his wife’s wishes on one point, she wrote. “He has positively declined running for Congress and will do so on no consideration—much to my delight.” Who asked him to run, we do not know. The president? Democratic leaders in New York? Michigan Democrats? Though Custer declined, it was a serious possibility.29

  It’s not as if he sought obscurity. At the state Union convention in Detroit on August 9, he was named a vice president of the Michigan delegation to the National Union convention. On August 14, he joined the throngs of conservatives from North and South who packed the Wigwam, a vast convention hall on Girard Avenue between 21st and 22nd streets in Philadelphia. Built specifically for this meeting, it was capable of holding 10,000 people in galleries and floor seating. Union General Darius Couch hooked his arm into that of Governor James L. Orr of South Carolina and led the delegates into the high-ceilinged amphitheater. The participants hailed the Boy General, whose presence helped them counter accusations that they were Copperheads. “There was Custer—how the nation loves and adores him!” wrote a New York Times reporter. “Custer!—the synonym of dashing gallantry and unfaltering fidelity!”

  Behind the scenes, the New York Times editor and conservative Republican Henry J. Raymond tried to include protections for the freed people in the convention platform. He failed. Many conservative and moderate Republicans, writes the historian Albert Castel, “who were otherwise sympathetic to the president, felt uneasy about the predominance of Democratic and Southern delegates; this was not their idea of a ‘national union’ movement.”30

  Custer appeared in his native state of exuberance. As Couch and Orr proceeded up the aisle, the band played “Dixie.” Custer stood on his seat, swung his hat in the air, and led three cheers for the Southern anthem. “Other men cheered and other men made fools of themselves, but the pre-eminence of this humiliating performance is freely conceded to Custer by everybody—to him alone belongs what honor comes from proposing a salute to the rebel flag,” wrote the Radical Chicago Tribune.31

  Republican newspapers ran editorials titled “Custer vs. Custer,” contrasting his new faith in the South’s loyalty and goodness with the evidence he gave to the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. The Chicago Tribune declared that Custer should decide which of his personas—the major general testifying under oath or the political delegate—“ought to feel the cheapest, and meanest, and let that one, which ever it may be, retire from the gaze of honorable men thereafter forever.”32

  Custer always grew brittle at challenges to his im
age. When John W. Forney made the same attack on him in the Washington Chronicle, he replied with a public letter, written in the ponderous, verbose manner he adopted whenever he felt vulnerable. He began, for example, with this endless, tortured sentence: “Departing from what I have ever considered a judicious custom, I deem it not only appropriate but incumbent upon me to correct the false impressions regarding my past and present position which at this time are being so assiduously disseminated throughout the country by a subsidized, unscrupulous, and fanatical press.” He said his testimony to Congress merely described the outlaw class in Texas, whereas the best men were loyal now. This characterization was simply false, though he may have convinced himself of its truth.

  He was more forthright in his defense of his decision to attend the convention. He declined to engage in the race baiting indulged in by Johnson, the Blairs, and many Democrats. “Duty, as well as interest, demands that this government shall be national; this cannot be as long as twenty-four States legislate for thirty-six States, and ten millions of our citizens are unrepresented,” he wrote. He had fought earnestly as a soldier. “With that same earnestness I still desire peace, that peace for which our armies contended.” Unfortunately he ignored the black citizens of the South, many of them Union army veterans, as the New York Tribune pointed out. They had fought as bravely as Custer, the paper noted, only to have their rights denied by Southern states and their lives taken in Memphis and New Orleans. “Is not the part you are playing toward these Black Union soldiers, your late compatriots in arms, intensely base and treacherous?”33