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

by Stiles, T. J.

  Into the shadows between the flat-faced buildings that shouldered together on Wall Street came George Armstrong Custer.

  —

  HE WENT TO SEE a man about a mine. George B. McClellan, it appears, recommended that he start with August Belmont. Belmont, fifty-six at the time, had come to America as the representative of the Rothschilds, but his German accent had faded after thirty-three years in the United States, and he had succeeded to a remarkable extent in overcoming the social taint of his Jewish ancestry. An eminent financier in his own right, he had crowded in among New York’s patricians and politicians. He was a prominent member of the “silk-stocking” Democrats who belonged to the Manhattan Club, the center of Democratic opposition to the corrupt ring led by William M. Tweed.

  Custer should have known all this. Belmont, William H. Aspinwall, and Samuel L. M. Barlow—all wealthy and influential New York Democrats—had advised McClellan back when Custer served on his staff. With money, political influence, and connections, Belmont was the ideal man to help Custer with his business.42

  His enterprise was the Stevens Lode Silver Mine, located near Georgetown in the Rocky Mountains west of Denver. The origin of his connection to the mine remains obscure. He had traveled to Denver in mid-1870, a trip that may indicate the start of his involvement. The property included the eastern half of a large vein of silver, as yet undeveloped; the Crescent Silver Mining Company owned the western half and had started to dig. His partner was Jairus W. Hall, colonel of the 4th Michigan Infantry during the war, who frequently corresponded with him about the mine.

  What Custer and Hall needed from Belmont and others was money—they had little of their own—and the credit that would flow from their goodwill. They needed it simply to begin operations—to dig for silver, crush and refine the ore, and sell it—and to try to create and ride a great updraft on Wall Street. If they convinced Belmont and his peers to invest, their support would generate confidence on the Street, automatically increasing the value of the property. Then they could sell out, if that’s what they wished to do. “In no other theater of speculation [than mining stocks] did promoters reap more success with the airy products of their fancy,” wrote an early Wall Street chronicler. “The public bore enthusiastic testimony to the maxim that it delights to be humbugged.”43

  Belmont initially proved cautious. So did Levi P. Morton of Morton, Bliss & Co., a forty-six-year-old New Englander who had risen from a lowly job as clerk to become the principal of a prestigious banking and brokerage firm in New York. Unlike Belmont, or Custer, for that matter, he was a Republican, and would in later years serve a term as vice president of the United States. Regardless, he admired the Boy General and wished to help him.

  Two problems stood in the way. The first was the uncertainty of the unopened mine. The second was its size. “It is a small thing,” Commodore Vanderbilt said of the Harlem Railroad in 1869, “with a little capital of only about $6,000,000.” By contrast, Custer planned a par capitalization of $200,000, divided into 2,000 shares. (The par value of a corporation was supposed to equal the expenditure it made on land, buildings, equipment, and other real property.) Compared to the Harlem, the Stevens Lode Mine was microscopic.

  Morton sent a letter of introduction to yet another Wall Street man, Joseph Seligman. Custer, he wrote, “has a good thing in that way, he thinks, & will be glad to have you look into it. You are ‘up’ mining enterprises & can judge.” Seligman, though, offered no help.44

  The search for investors proved frustrating. Custer wrote to Libbie that he “often…approached a capitalist and he threw cold water over my scheme.” Hall grew discouraged. So did McClellan, whom Custer had made a partner as well, indicating how close he remained to his old hero.45

  As the hunt dragged on, Custer took care to preserve his place in the army. He had spent his entire adult life within this institution, and, even as he bucked against it, he found security and structure within it. His current experience in New York underscored the uncertainty of the marketplace. He applied to army headquarters to extend his leave another thirty days beyond its expiration on January 11, then applied for another extension, and another, and another. “My reasons…are wholly of a business character. A large amount of property is involved,” he wrote from New York. On another application he stated his calculations explicitly. “My reason for requesting the delay is that…my presence in this city…will probably secure to me the sum of about thirty thousand dollars which I am liable to lose if called away at the expiration of my present leave.”46

  Custer did not write of putting his business on a sound footing and deriving steady dividends. He saw his mine purely in terms of speculation. “Can it be,” he wrote his wife, “that my little standby and I who have long wished to possess a small fortune, are about to have our hopes and wishes realized?” It was, he wrote, “the stepping stone to larger and more profitable undertakings.” Having recast himself as a frontiersman, he ironically gained credibility in New York. Morton wrote to Seligman, “As you are aware [Custer] has been in command on the plains for several years & is personally familiar with the mining districts.” His buckskins gave him the authority to transform wilderness into greenbacks and literally capitalize on his image.47

  To sway the men with money, Custer circulated in society—what a later generation would call networking. He dined at Delmonico’s. He went to parties. He stayed out all night. He had a horse shipped from Leavenworth as a gift to Jim Fisk. Vice president of the giant Erie Railway, the brash, corpulent, mustachioed Fisk was the partner of Jay Gould, the line’s president. Reporters loved to hear Fisk joke and declaim about the pair’s latest thrust and parry with Commodore Vanderbilt, their perennial enemy. Fisk stashed his mistress, Josephine Mansfield, in an apartment near the Erie’s offices, and kept a national guard regiment as a pet. Custer wrote, “Fisk’s regiment is going on an excursion to Boston next month and a fine looking horse accustomed to the band of soldiers was in demand.”48

  With months to spend in his favorite city, Custer indulged himself. He saw his friend Lawrence Barrett and watched performances by Barrett’s colleague Edwin Booth, one of the great actors of the age and brother of Lincoln’s assassin. Armstrong tormented Libbie with detailed accounts of his encounters with women. He went often to the Academy of Music to see the young Clara Louise Kellogg, an acclaimed young soprano. “Miss Kellogg also expects me behind the scenes,” he wrote to Libbie. He began to call on her. They went for strolls together on Broadway, and he joined her in her private box at the opera house when she was not performing. He told Libbie that he waited for her in her changing room or at her house as she dressed. “I could hear her moving about overhead, and it reminded me of you in Monroe days when I sat in the parlor below, waiting.”49

  Was that supposed to be reassuring? He bragged about a young woman who told him, “Oh, why are you married?” He mentioned a blond teenager who lived across the street from Belmont and tried to get his attention on the street. “Twice for sport I followed her,” he wrote. He described a married friend who took him to see his married mistress, confiding to him that she had had an abortion after he had impregnated her.50

  Custer’s agonized letter to Libbie, admitting his “wild or unseemly…conduct,” preceded these events—yet his letters from this period show no remorse. To the contrary, he returned to the flaunting manner of his earliest correspondence to her from the city. There was an element of cruelty in it. And his letters spoke to his never-ending insecurity. Even if he remained faithful, he craved female attention; it affirmed a self-image that he was never quite sure was real.51

  There was good reason for Libbie to be suspicious. Recently Custer had received the romantic letter from “Anna,” very likely Anna Darrah. A Hattie Mitchell wrote to him from Virginia; he had asked her to mask her identity with the pseudonym “Gloria.” These or other letters may have been delivered to Libbie during Armstrong’s absence in New York. Morton wrote a note to Custer in which he offered to do “anyt
hing to make your visit to New York agreeable to Mrs. Custer as well as yourself.” Perhaps Custer had introduced a mistress as his wife, as he claimed Wesley Merritt had done.

  Libbie wrote to Armstrong in New York and demanded to know if he had mentioned his wife to one of the young women he bragged about. “I told her I love you and you alone,” he responded. “She frankly said she would only ask me to love her next to you, which I did not consent to do.” Then he mentioned another woman “who so far forgot herself as to make the advances.”52

  Married, respectable men carried on affairs all around Libbie, and she knew it. She grasped how much her husband liked—even needed—the admiration of women. She also knew that he did indeed love her. He followed every boast of flirtation with an avowal of his dedication to her. There’s no reason to think he was insincere. His history with Fannie Fifield proved that he could believe two irreconcilable ideas simultaneously—he could pursue a flirtation or a mistress and still convince himself that he remained true to Libbie in his heart.

  The question Libbie faced was not so much factual—was he cheating?—but emotional: Could she endure his behavior? Was she willing to push their marriage to a crisis to stop him? Or would she be happy with what he gave her, knowing that he felt more passion for her than most husbands for their wives, even if he were unfaithful?

  She herself glowed when men admired her. She was lively and social, and immensely charming. In the summer of 1870, Annie Roberts observed that Libbie was “incessantly funny” and enjoyed the company of many of the 7th Cavalry’s officers. Armstrong grew jealous when she corresponded with them; as Leckie writes, he enforced a double standard in their marriage. He wrote from New York that he might think she was unfaithful, “were I of a suspicious disposition”—thereby demonstrating a suspicious disposition. “The fewer notes or letters of yours, no matter how ordinary, that get into gentlemen’s hands the better for your reputation.” Yet he remained in New York, month after month, looking for money at all the best parties.53

  —

  HE FOUND HIS GUIDE. Custer needed a native scout to lead him through this cutthroat wilderness, like the Osages who worked for the army on the plains. To his good fortune, the man who chose to help him was William R. Travers. He had long been a partner of Leonard W. Jerome, one of a pair of brothers renowned as brokers, bankers, and men of leisure. “Both Jerome and his partner, the shrewd, witty, and admired William R. Travers, were men of wide social prominence and possessed of a fondness for manly sports,” wrote a contemporary observer of Wall Street. “They were leaders in club life and pleasure-loving society.” Travers particularly liked horses, and took a leading role in building the racetrack at Saratoga Springs, alongside John Morrissey and Commodore Vanderbilt.

  A clean-shaven man with a ruddy face, Travers stood tall and thin, and never smiled. And yet the brokers of Wall Street celebrated his cutting wit, delivered through a pronounced stutter. “You seem to stutter more in New York than you did here, Mr. Travers,” a friend remarked during a visit to Baltimore, his old home. Travers replied, “Have to—it’s a bigger place.” After an endless monologue by an insufferable British guest at a dinner on his yacht, Travers loudly declared, “It is now a debatable point among scientists as to whether or not the oyster has brains. I think the oyster must have b-b-brains because it knows when to sh-sh-shut up.” Once, in the mob on the curb outside the stock exchange, he bought shares from a dealer known to be Jewish, then humiliated him by demanding that he give his “C-C-C-Christian” name, “whereat the crowd was convulsed,” reported William W. Fowler, a contemporary. Anti-semitism aside, Fowler wrote, “he bears the reputation of an honorable business man, a kind friend. His judgment is called in to decide bets.” A highly social man with Southern connections and thought to be worth $3 million, he was Custer’s ideal mentor.54

  With Travers to advise him, Custer prepared a prospectus and personally subscribed for 700 of the 2,000 shares at $50 each. This was 50 percent of the par or face value. Custer hoped to create confidence with his announced $35,000 investment, showing that he risked his own money. He possessed no such sum.55

  Custer met the appropriately named James H. Banker, one of the most important figures on Wall Street. Vice president of the venerable Bank of New York, founded by Alexander Hamilton, Banker belonged to Vanderbilt’s inner circle. He had often served as the Commodore’s personal representative (“He is true & will not deceive us this is certain,” Vanderbilt once wrote to a colleague), and hosted him in the Bank of New York offices during his successful campaign to stifle the panic of 1869. Together with Augustus Schell, a financier and leading Democrat, and Horace F. Clark, Vanderbilt’s son-in-law, Banker ran the Lake Shore railway on Vanderbilt’s behalf. The trio speculated on their own; they bought control of Western Union, for example, and set about reforming the telegraph monopoly’s finances. The press called Banker “the prime mover in all the current cliques and contrivances that move the Street, and the biggest man known around brokers’ offices.” He built a mansion on Fifth Avenue, bought $1.5 million in real estate, and ordered a custom-made yacht.56

  The “prime mover” agreed to buy 200 shares at $50 each—a critical success in Custer’s campaign, sure to influence others. And yet, despite the minuscule scale of the mine compared to Banker’s other investments, he demanded extremely favorable terms. He received a 50 percent discount on the par value, but he did not pay even that much. In the nineteenth century, initial investors often paid a small percentage of the share price, providing more as needed. Further payments might be contingent upon progress in business operations. It appears that Banker delivered barely $1,000.

  John Jacob Astor Jr., prestigious heir to the fortune his father had accumulated in fur trading and real estate, asked for the same treatment. On April 7 he sent a note to Custer at his room at the Fifth Avenue Hotel: “My Dear General, You can put my name down on your list for $10,000.00 on the same terms & conditions as Mr. J. H. Banker.” Belmont, too, signed up for $15,000, or 300 shares, and Travers subscribed for $10,000. Like Banker, none paid anything close to the amounts written next to their names.

  Custer took Astor’s note to Delmonico’s, where he had lunch with broker Charles J. Osborn, one of his social companions in the city. Osborn and his partner Addison Cammack belonged to the influential “Twenty-third Street Party,” a clique of bearish stock operators that included Russell Sage, Frank Work, and Travers, too. He knew oil and mining stocks, which were traded on their own exchange, the Petroleum and Mining Board, organized in 1866. Another partner who attended this lunch said to Custer, “Oh General, you are bound to succeed now that you have gotten the names of those gentlemen, some of the best in New York.” Osborn, though, was more cautious; mining stocks had collapsed dramatically in the recent past, and he was a bear by nature, inclined to see the downward potential of any investment. He asked some questions and concluded, “Well, Custer, I want to see you further about this.”57

  The financiers overshadowed Custer in New York, and that was precisely the appeal of his Wall Street adventure. “Is it not strange to think of me meeting to confer with such men as Belmont, Astor, Banker, Morton and Bliss?” he wrote to Libbie. A mutual friend told him that “Mr. and Mrs. Belmont speak very highly of me, Mr. B. most encouragingly of my business prospects.” He found himself at a higher altitude of wealth and power than he had ever experienced, and he felt a certain light-headedness at it all. A small-town boy at the center of everything, he was impressed with himself for dining with the mighty, socializing with famous actors, discussing Albert Bierstadt’s paintings with a legendary singer. In his idiosyncratic mix of enthusiasm, vanity, and insecurity, he could not consider himself a peer, or else he could not be so pleased with himself. His thrill came from his sense that he had risen above his proper standing.58

  As Custer’s campaign advanced at last, Libbie left Kansas and returned to Monroe. Custer’s leave extensions were now approved by the Department of the South. On March 20, 18
71, most of the 7th Cavalry was shifted to Southern states. For now Custer remained in New York. He told Libbie that he had asked Travers to take over the stock sales so that he could see her, visit the mine in Colorado, or both. “He thought I should remain,” particularly with the first stockholders’ meeting imminent. So he did. He socialized with the McClellans, and at the Fifth Avenue Hotel he saw P. M. B. Young, his fellow West Point cadet and wartime foe. The two “greeted each other as old friends,” the New York World reported. He enjoyed more dinner parties, trips to gambling saloons (where, he swore, he spent hours not playing faro or baccarat), evenings at the theater, days and nights with Miss Kellogg. “Oh, the magnificence and the luxury!” he wrote.59

  In May he left New York for an Army of the Potomac reunion in Boston, apparently on a steamship provided by Jim Fisk. The writer Bret Harte submitted a grimly whimsical poem for the meeting, titled “The Old Major Explains.” Its narrator tells his “Colonel” that farmwork will prevent him from attending the reunion, “And my leg is getting troublesome; it laid me up last fall, / And the doctors—they have cut and hacked—and never found the ball.” The veterans thought it hilarious. Custer joined Generals Kilpatrick, Meade, Pleasonton—and Sheridan, back from observing the Franco-Prussian War. Custer finally returned to Monroe in June, saw Libbie, then left.60

  On July 15, the New York Times reported that he had arrived at Saratoga Springs, the summer resort of the nation’s elite, north of Albany, New York. Newport, Rhode Island, had begun its climb as the premiere “watering place,” where the wealthy built mansion-sized summer “cottages,” but Saratoga still thrived. It reflected the less lavish lifestyle of an older generation of the wealthy, who stayed in hotels rather than private houses. The New York Tribune described it as a place of “huge dining halls with walls of staring white…ball-rooms with the same shadowless surfaces, with blinding glare of gas [lights], and stifling atmosphere of odors.” The hotel dining rooms witnessed “a constant procession of over-dressed women, of flippant and loud-tongued men,” who scorned each other as they competed for social status.