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

by Stiles, T. J.

  Grant had other matters on his mind. The political crisis had grown still more treacherous—in part because of his own ambitions. In 1867 his chief of staff and close friend John Rawlins had told John Forney, editor of the Washington Chronicle, that Grant “thinks the Republican party may need him, and he believes, as their candidate [for president], he can be elected and re-elected.” Forney wrote up a long story about how Grant would make a fine Republican president; he gave it to Rawlins, who told him the general in chief approved. Grant all but declared himself to be Johnson’s rival.16

  On January 13, 1868, the Senate reinstated Stanton as secretary of war. The next day Grant moved out of the War Department and back to his old office. He refused to be Johnson’s tool for confronting the Republican Congress. At a cabinet meeting that same day, the president looked at Grant and demanded a report from the secretary of war. Grant said he no longer held that office. “Johnson, after two and a half years of wooing Ulysses Grant, tore into him not with a wild tirade, but much more tellingly, with an icy dressing-down,” writes William McFeely. Johnson leaked word that Grant had lied to him; two days later the National Intelligencer published the accusation.17

  Humiliated—though undiminished in public opinion—Grant stood by as Johnson dismissed Stanton again on February 21, defying the Tenure of Office Act. On February 24, the House of Representatives impeached the president for the first time in American history. It had been coming for more than a year, as Johnson challenged Congress on every point of Reconstruction. On March 4, the trial began in the Senate.

  Amid these great events, Holt’s charge and specifications against Custer sat on Grant’s desk, neither approved nor denied. One reason might have been Custer’s past support of Johnson. If Grant allowed another court-martial to proceed so soon after the latest one, it might seem as if he were purging the army of the president’s loyalists.18 Or he may have been preoccupied, or wanted to wait for further provocations by Custer before prosecuting him again. Besides, Custer was now Sheridan’s problem.

  Sheridan had visited Fort Leavenworth to relieve Hancock of command. As an icon of Union victory, he was familiar to all, with his narrow eyes, mustache, stubby figure, and emphatic manner. He and his staff departed after only a few days for New York and Washington, not to return for months. But he sent signals of his support for Custer. When the Custers were forced to vacate military quarters for the duration of the suspension, he loaned them the large house at Fort Leavenworth assigned for his use. Sheridan was loyal to the man who had served him so well in the war, and liked him.19

  But he was not blind. Regular Army in gristle and bone, Sheridan knew that Custer had violated both military law and culture. On March 2, 1868, he returned to Fort Leavenworth. Soon after, he brought up Custer’s case with Grant. “I feel a great sympathy for General G. A. Custer,” he wrote on April 15. “Custer has done many things which I do not approve of—especially the letter he wrote and had published, reflecting on the court which tried him—but I would be exceedingly gratified if the General could have him pardoned.” He pleaded on the grounds of Custer’s past, his potential for improvement, and pity.

  He feels very sensibly [i.e., deeply] his punishment, and I think would, if he were re-instated, make a better officer than if the sentence were carried out to its full extent. He held high command during the Rebellion and had difficulty in adapting himself to his altered position. There was no one with me whom I more highly appreciated than General Custer. He never failed me, and if his late misdeeds could be forgotten, or overlooked on account of his gallantry and faithfulness in the past, it would be gratifying to him and to myself, and a benefit to the service.20

  Difficulty in adapting himself to his altered position. Sheridan stated the obvious: Custer was a man of the past, unable to find a place in the world he had helped make.

  But was it a valid reason for mercy? Custer himself had been an unforgiving commander, shaving heads and shooting deserters, even whipping volunteers in Texas, as Grant knew. And Grant soon learned that Custer had been no more merciful during the Civil War. On May 8, Holt reported that Lt. A. V. Burnham had applied for “the revocation of orders dishonorably dismissing [him] from the service.” During the war, Burnham, a soldier under Custer’s command, had left his reserve post, far from the enemy, for five minutes to purchase a canteen of milk. “It appears that charges were preferred against him, and that for the purpose of making an example Gen. Custer recommended his summary dismissal.” Holt supported Burnham’s appeal.21

  The irony could not be more obvious. Custer believed he had done nothing wrong by riding hundreds of miles away from his command, in the face of hostile forces, to see his wife—but he had dishonorably discharged a man for leaving a quiet post for five minutes to obtain food. Grant never missed such evidence of a man’s character. He let Sheridan’s petition sit as the trial of the president played out.

  —

  CUSTER DID NOT understand his peril. On May 2, 1868, he wrote from Fort Leavenworth to a friend that he had learned of the court’s petition to Grant to order his prosecution over his letter to the Sandusky Register. “I…hope most earnestly he will,” Custer wrote; he could “substantiate and make good” everything in it. As his West Point roommate once said, he was too clever for his own good.

  “As it is now I am like Micawber waiting for something to turn up,” he added. That was not quite true. He had made an agreement with Harper and Bros. for his wartime memoirs, which he hoped to finish by the beginning of August. It was another sign of his ambition to become a literary figure. What he was really waiting for was the next set of charges, which he suspected would come after his suspension ended.22

  Libbie, at least, seemed content. Armstrong was with her and behaving as well as a husband should. Anna Darrah remained with them at Fort Leavenworth. Libbie’s beloved cousin, Rebecca Richmond, visited, along with her sister Mary Richmond Kendall and her new husband, Charles Kendall. All of them gathered in the front parlor to receive callers on New Year’s Day, 1868, in keeping with the genteel American custom. Some forty men paid their respects and browsed at the refreshment table, from Tom Custer to Colonel Smith, from Barnitz to Capt. George Yates, an old Monroe friend for whom Armstrong had long served as patron and had maneuvered into the 7th Cavalry. One of the officers brought some sheet music and led an impromptu chorus. The Custers endured Armstrong’s trial for murder, attended parties, and threw their own through the winter and spring.23

  During the interregnum at Fort Leavenworth, Emmanuel Custer wrote to Armstrong that he had received a mysterious package, purporting to come from a group of Confederate sympathizers. “I doant correspond with Rebels, and I do not appreciate his Package vary highly,” Emmanuel wrote. He suspected it was a trap, an attempt to expose himself as a Copperhead, though perhaps it was just a taunt. He denounced the Radicals, wrote that Grant would be “a Beat man” if he ran for president on a Radical platform, and praised Johnson’s “back bone and nerve.”24

  The mailing may have been a response to his son’s support of the president. Now that Armstrong was a public figure, his actions affected his family. His little sister Maggie sent him the bill for her next quarter at Boyd’s Seminary in Monroe. “Autie I do not know how I shall ever be able to repay you for your kindness to me,” she wrote. Now that he had lost his salary for a year, how could he continue to support her, his parents, and his own domestic establishment?25

  Tom Custer, of course, remained on duty with the 7th Cavalry. After years of pressuring Armstrong to help his brother, Emmanuel was happy for once.26

  May passed. The impeachment trial in the Senate ended with Johnson’s acquittal by one vote. June arrived. The Custers made the long train trip back to Monroe. No word came from Washington of another court-martial.

  The presidential campaign began. The New York leaders of the Democratic Party ignored Johnson and secured the nomination of New York governor Horatio Seymour for president and Missouri’s Frank Blair Jr. for v
ice president. The Republicans nominated Grant. Blair in particular was just the man for Emmanuel Custer: a Union general, son of one of Andrew Jackson’s closest allies, and a vicious racist. He denounced African Americans as “a semi-barbarous race of blacks who are worshippers of fetishes, and poligamists.” He would have the White House “allow the white people to reorganize their own governments.”27

  Custer went to New York for Independence Day. He attended a “grand ratification meeting” at Tammany Hall to endorse Seymour and Blair, and he gave a speech. As in the past, the Democrats used his standing as a Union hero to refute Republican charges of disloyalty. The Des Moines State Register saw him differently. “It is announced with a grand flourish that Custer supports Seymour. We are glad of it,” it wrote. “No officer that ever treated soldiers as Custer did, should be anything else except a Johnson man and a Seymour man. The men of the 1st Iowa Cavalry remember this Custer. His memory will be a stench in their nostrils, and that of their ‘children’s children to the remotest generation.’ ”28

  His inability to adapt to life after the war had converted at least some of his celebrity into notoriety. Notoriety was a weight, and Libbie carried it too. Kansas, she would write a year later, “is entirely unfitting me for the restraints of Monroe society, as I found the everlasting ‘they say’ troubled me somewhat” during her return home in 1868. She would blame it on her new disregard of “style,” but hometown gossips had much more to chatter about, with Armstrong’s controversies and conviction. After his appearance at Tammany Hall, they put down the burden and lived quietly in Monroe.29

  The 1st of August came and went. Custer did not complete his Civil War memoirs, as he had anticipated. For whatever reason, his work on the book stalled.30

  Then something turned up. On September 24, Sheridan wired him from Fort Hays. “Gen Sherman and myself and nearly all of the officers of your regiment have asked for you and hope the application will be successful,” he wrote. “Can you come at once. Eleven (11) companies of your regiment will move about the first of October against the hostile Indians from Medicine Lodge Creek towards the Wichita Mountains.”31

  For months Grant had let the appeal for a new court-martial sit alongside Sheridan’s request for commutation, acting on neither. As the presidential campaign accelerated, he gave in to Sheridan’s wishes. Sherman urged him to, writing that he had asked the army’s adjutant general for “the remission of the balance of his sentence but have no answer. Cannot you expedate [sic] that also as Sheridan wants Custar [sic] now [and] I want to give him everything he asks for.”32 Returning Custer to duty also conveniently removed him from politics. Grant gave Custer what he wanted most—a chance at redemption.

  —

  DURING CUSTER’S ARREST AND TRIAL, federal relations with the high-plains nations underwent a legal transformation. Congress voted on July 20, 1867, to establish a peace commission. Nathaniel G. Taylor, commissioner of Indian affairs, led the group, which included Generals Sherman, Alfred H. Terry, and William S. Harney (retired), the humanitarians Samuel F. Tappan and John B. Sanborn, and Senator John B. Henderson of Missouri. On October 19, the group held a grand conference with representatives of the Southern Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche tribes, at a traditional council site on Medicine Lodge Creek in southern Kansas. (General Christopher C. Augur temporarily replaced Sherman.)

  Thousands of native people camped nearby. The band associated with Black Kettle—an advocate of accommodation even after surviving the Sand Creek Massacre—put up some sixty lodges near the council grounds. The militant Dog Soldiers and others gathered a few miles away. The separation reflected a philosophical split. At one point Tall Bull demanded that Black Kettle come to the Dog Soldier camp to make the case for peace, threatening to kill all his horses if he refused. He came.33

  Divisions existed on the government side as well. Robert Utley writes, in a mixed metaphor, that Indian Commissioner Taylor “made the peace pipe the keystone of his administration.” Sherman spoke for most army officers when he told Grant, “I am convinced that somehow we must whip these Indians terribly to make them fear & respect us.” And yet, as Utley also notes, the white advocates of peace and war merely debated the means toward the same sequential goals: clearing the main rail, stagecoach, and wagon routes across Nebraska and Kansas, opening the rest of those two states to settlement, and coercing the Indians into abandoning nomadic culture. The Comanche leader Ten Bears told the commission, “I love the open prairie, and I wish you would not insist on putting us on a reservation.” Senator Henderson said the buffalo were doomed. “The Indian must change the road his father trod.”34

  To the nations represented at Medicine Lodge Creek, the commission offered a reservation in the Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), with broad hunting rights south of the Arkansas River so long as bison herds still existed. The Southern Cheyennes and Arapahoes would have to give up their hard-won territory between the Arkansas and the Platte. “The terms pushed hard toward the ‘civilized’ life of farmers and stockraisers,” writes the historian Elliott West. “Children would be educated in traditional schoolhouses; women would be issued flannel skirts and men given pantaloons, hats, and homemade socks.” The commission stacked up immediate gifts for the bands that signed, with the promise of annuities for the next three decades. On October 28, leaders of the assembled peoples signed the treaty.35

  “The Cheyennes were with great difficulty persuaded to sign the treaty,” Barnitz wrote in his journal. “They have no idea that they are giving up, or that they have ever given up the country which they claim as their own, the country north of the Arkansas.” The latter sentence has often been quoted by historians, yet it contradicts Barnitz’s first observation, and was far too condescending to be true. They faced an impossible situation, and they knew it. They could not reverse demographic and environmental reality. They were vastly outnumbered. The passage of migrants slowly rendered their lands uninhabitable. The Southern Cheyennes and their allies signed in anger, not ignorance. When Bull Bear took the pen, he stabbed clear through the sheet.36

  This resentment exacerbated internal divisions. Young men from across the Southern Cheyenne nation called for resistance. Despite the treaty, the Dog Soldiers largely returned to “their beloved middle country” of central Kansas, as West calls it. But the Kansas Pacific Railroad continued to snake west and homesteaders began to plow up the grasslands along the lower Saline, Solomon, and Republican rivers—edging right into the “middle country.”37

  Even worse, Congress failed to fund the promised annuities until July 1868. A large body of Kiowas, Arapahoes, and Southern Cheyennes gathered on Pawnee Fork near Fort Larned “to make complaint of their condition,” Sherman wrote to his wife on July 15, 1868. He blamed Congress. “We kill them if they attempt to hunt, and if they keep within the Reservations they starve.” Their anger overflowed when Sheridan visited Fort Larned and held a council with them. The Cheyenne leader Stone Calf said to him, “Let your soldiers grow long hair, so that we can have some honor in killing them.” Sheridan issued them rations but prepared for hostilities.38

  The chain of events that pulled Custer back from suspension began slightly earlier, in June 1868. Southern Cheyenne warriors raided a Kaw village near Council Grove, Kansas, and stole some livestock. It was merely another skirmish in their decades-old war on the low-plains tribes. The Indian Bureau, though, saw it as a breach of the peace, and refused to issue arms and ammunition stipulated in the treaty.

  “The Cheyennes were furious at this,” writes the historian Paul Hutton. They saw their wars with other Indian nations as their own business, and “they had carefully avoided clashes with white men.” Their federal agent, Edward W. Wynkoop, agreed with Lt. Col. Alfred Sully, the new commander of the District of the Upper Arkansas, to distribute 160 revolvers and eighty old-style muzzle-loading rifles for hunting.39

  It didn’t help. The next day a raiding party of some 200 Cheyenne men rode to attack the Pawnees. They
changed their minds. They descended on the settlers in the Saline and Solomon valleys. They raped five women and murdered fifteen men. Little Rock, a Cheyenne leader, later told Wynkoop that two men in the group started the attacks without approval, but finally all “gave way, and all went in together.” Two army scouts, including Custer’s friend Medicine Bill Comstock, went to a Dog Soldiers camp to investigate the raids. The Cheyennes killed both of them.40

  Cheyennes ambushed and slaughtered a group of soldiers in the vicinity of Fort Dodge, stole sixty-five head of livestock near Fort Wallace, and attacked ranches and stagecoaches. In September Sully led nine companies of the 7th Cavalry south into the Indian Territory. Their opponents dragged lodge poles to create false trails that lured the cavalry into sand hills, where the terrain bogged them down amid heavy fighting. It broke Sully’s nerve, and he ordered a retreat to Fort Dodge.41

  Sully’s failure disheartened the 7th Cavalry, but it encouraged the fighters of the high-plains tribes. After a month of bloodshed, Sheridan counted “110 citizens killed, thirteen women raped, and more than one thousand head of livestock stolen,” writes the historian Jerome Greene. “Buildings, farmhouses, stagecoaches, wagon trains, and rolling stock had been lost to raiding Indians.” The raiders took captives, including Clara Blinn and her two-year-old son, Willie. They attacked fifty civilian scouts under Maj. George A. “Sandy” Forsyth who were searching the headwaters of the Republican River, and besieged them on a sandbar that Forsyth dubbed Beecher’s Island. The scouts suffered five dead and fifteen wounded before the 10th Cavalry rescued them. As Elliott West writes, “The Dog Soldiers still held the initiative in their homeland.”42

  In theory, Sheridan might negotiate for the surrender of the perpetrators of the initial attacks, and let the inexorable process of railroad construction, settlement, and environmental degradation continue to constrict nomadic culture and the attendant raids.43 But it is hard to imagine any army officer reacting to raids on civilians with restraint—particularly to rape and the abduction of women and children, which struck squarely at nineteenth-century masculine honor. But the best response was not obvious.