Custer took risks in opposing Reconstruction, but the political momentum decisively turned in his direction within a year of his departure from Kentucky. Ames’s fate shows that Custer chose the safer side, in terms of his career and personal safety. And yet, on the September day when Ames faced Jesse James, Custer was already dead.
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“THE JANUARY MAGAZINES are beginning to make their appearance, freighted with rich promise for the coming year,” the Chicago Tribune commented on December 20, 1871. Like many newspapers, the Tribune previewed the monthly offerings in the exploding medium of magazines. “Foremost among them all is the Atlantic—fresher, more brilliant, more entertaining than ever before.” It featured a Longfellow poem, a posthumous work by Hawthorne, and contributions from Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry James. The paper surveyed others, too, including a fairly new magazine called the Galaxy. It serialized Anthony Trollope’s novel The Eustace Diamonds, but the Tribune found little to like. It “makes no very striking announcements for the new year, except of a serial by General Custer, under the title, ‘My Life on the Plains.’ ”31
Writing filled Custer’s time in Kentucky, when he wasn’t gambling, attending races, or sullenly assigning his men to assist the deputy marshals. He wrote five articles on horses for Turf, Field and Farm, published between December 1, 1871 and January 10, 1873. He reached a wider audience with his Galaxy pieces. They comprised a monthly memoir of the Indian wars in Kansas, starting with the Hancock Expedition of 1867. Apart from his silver mine, it was his most serious attempt to ride the changing times, and appeared to be the most successful by far. But appearances often do not equal reality.32
Print culture in the United States began with newspapers. Like the passenger pigeon, they appeared everywhere in mind-boggling numbers. Whenever Americans paused in the same spot long enough to set up a printing press, a newspaper began—more than one, usually, each with its own political stance. Magazines lagged behind. Technical improvements to printing in 1825 made production cheaper, multiplying the number of publications, but most focused on narrow topics. The commercial general-interest magazine originated as a phenomenon only in the 1850s. Harper’s New Monthly started in 1850, for example, followed by Putnam’s Monthly in 1853 and the Atlantic and Harper’s Weekly in 1857.
A truly national, and nationwide, periodical literary culture emerged much more slowly than magazines themselves. The United States did not recognize foreign copyright, and so the vast output of British publications could be pirated without penalty. Writers have never been paid well, but when editors saw that they could pay nothing instead of a little, they chose to pay nothing. George Palmer Putnam recalled in his memoirs that “magazines were either very local in their character, or, like Harper’s [New] Monthly…were dependent for their contents chiefly on material which had been selected, that is to say appropriated, from British periodicals.” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine made a choice to pay American writers for original content, a culturally profound but financially difficult policy.33
A new generation of magazines erupted onto the cultural landscape after the Civil War. By 1870, 1,200 titles circulated in America, up from 700 in 1855. The tally rose to 2,400 by 1880 and 3,300 by 1885. Many were specialized—such as Turf, Field and Farm—but others fostered a national discussion of literature, science, and politics, much as Putnam’s, the Atlantic, and the venerable North American Review had before the war. Now the Nation, Lippincott’s, Scribner’s, and the Galaxy joined those older titles. As the United States modernized, “the magazine industry became an enormous mirror, reflecting these changes, from the grandiose to the minute,” write two historians.34
Simply by writing for the Galaxy, Custer joined in this transformation. But he had larger ambitions, as revealed in his first two contributions. He knew that he embodied the spirit of adventure in American culture—the daring soldier, the intrepid frontiersman. He wanted to be a public intellectual as well. When his first pages arrived at the Galaxy offices at 40 Park Row in New York, across from City Hall Park, the editor Francis Church found not a ripping adventure tale but a geographical, environmental, and anthropological exposition on the Great Plains.
Custer’s first essay attacked the “geographical myth” that the Great Plains were the Great American Desert. “Instead of what had been regarded as a sterile and unfruitful tract of land…there existed the fairest and richest portion of the national domain.” He described the elevation, the topography, soil and water, grass cover, and environmental impact of fires lit by American Indians. He used the Latin names of the tree species, explored bison (“buffalo”) behavior, surveyed insects, birds, game, and the mirage.35
It was an intelligent discussion, reflecting Custer’s sincere scientific interests. He developed a fascination with natural history, and collected fossils in the West. He paid attention to new thinking about the geological origins of the earth and the theory of evolution, as presented by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species in 1859.36 But his essays were also the work of an amateur, a gentleman hobbyist of the old school. He wrote enthusiastically about the colors of the plains, comparing the scenery to the landscape paintings of Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church. He declared his sophistication with this reference, but also revealed the romanticism that mingled with the scientific in his view of the world.
Toward the end of his first contribution he introduced the subject of his second: the American Indian. He criticized “well-meaning but mistaken philanthropists” for accepting James Fenimore Cooper’s depiction, which was “more romance than reality.” He used the words “real” or “reality” again and again, with unintentional irony. Yet his own views were divided. The Indian “is, and, so far as all knowledge goes, as he ever has been, a savage in every sense of the word; not worse, perhaps, than his white brother would be similarly born and bred, but one whose cruel and ferocious nature far exceeds that of any wild beast of the desert.”
Did he believe that native peoples were inherently “savage,” or that circumstances made them so? Custer went back and forth on the question, as if trying to discover his own mind on the page. He wrote that it was equally wrong to cast them as either “simple-minded ‘sons of nature,’ ” or as a “a creature possessing the human form but divested of all other attributes of humanity, and whose traits…and savage customs disqualify him from the exercise of all rights and privileges.” But neither did he believe that they were the same as white people. He called them “a race incapable of being judged by the rules or laws applicable to any other known race of men.”37
Custer’s apparent confusion had roots in the so-called science of race developed decades earlier in the United States. Its pioneer was Samuel George Morton, “the most famous anthropologist of his day,” writes Louis Menand. Morton devoted his life to confirming his racial prejudices with superficially scientific methods. He published his first study of skull measurements in 1839; ten years later he produced a comprehensive study of the skulls of various races, ranking them by the size of their brain pans. Morton tweaked his unrepresentative data—or rather wrenched them with both hands—to fit his preconceptions. Not surprisingly, he found the Caucasian race had the biggest brains, then Mongolian, Malay, American Indian, and Negro. Among whites, Anglo-Americans stood supreme; among everyone else, American blacks had among the smallest. Morton attributed various characteristics to each race, depicting Native Americans as inherently hostile to farming and prone to war and revenge.
Morton theorized that the different races emerged separately, a theory known as polygenism. His follower Louis Agassiz announced that Negroes were an entirely different (and inferior) species from whites. In 1854, Josiah Nott and George Gliddon published the influential Types of Mankind, which expanded on Morton and Agassiz’s work. “The leading theme of the volume was the supremacy of the white race,” Menand observes; “the servitude of Negroes and the extinction of Native Americans were explained as natural outcomes, scientifically confirmed, of hum
an history.”38
Directly or indirectly, these theories influenced Custer. He agreed completely when it came to African Americans. But he struggled with the purported inferiority of American Indians. He had, after all, engaged with their leaders as equals. In his serialized memoir, he would tell the story of how they had outsmarted and outmaneuvered him again and again. How could he account for that if their brains were so small and disposition so irrational? On the other hand, he had witnessed the ferocity of warfare on the plains—the victims who were burned to death and mutilated. On the question of “savagery,” he had no doubts. “Stripped of the beautiful romances with which we have been so long willing to envelop him,” he wrote, “the Indian forfeits his claim to the appellation of the ‘noble red man.’ ”
In his second article, he expressed frank admiration for the Indian as “the fearless hunter, matchless horseman, and warrior of the Plains.” He presented a long list of qualities: “his remarkable taciturnity, his deep dissimulation, the perseverance with which he follows his plans of revenge or conquest, his concealment and apparent lack of curiosity, his stoical courage when in the power of his enemies, his cunning, his caution, and last, but not least, the wonderful power and subtlety of his senses.” He praised the “eloquence and able arguments” of Red Cloud, Red Jacket, Osceola, and Tecumseh, along with a Kiowa leader Custer himself had encountered. “Sa-tant-ta is a remarkable man—remarkable for his powers of oratory, his determined warfare against the advances of civilization,” he wrote. Custer then arrived at the most quoted passage in his serialized memoir: “If I were an Indian, I often think that I would greatly prefer to cast my lot among those of my people who adhered to the free open plains, rather than submit to the confined limits of a reservation.”
Quoted less often is the next sentence: “The Indians can never be permitted to view the question in this deliberate way.” The Indian may consider civilization an “insatiable monster,” he added, but when it demanded his lands he must submit, or “it will roll mercilessly over him, destroying as it advances. Destiny seems to have so willed it, and the world looks on and nods its approval.”
Having posited in his first essay that the white man might be just as savage under similar conditions, Custer now turned in a different direction, asserting an inherent distinction between the races. With the Indian, he claimed,
Civilization may and should do much for him, but it can never civilize him.…Nature intended him for a savage state; every instinct, every impulse of his soul inclines him to it. The white race might fall into a barbarous state, and afterward, subjected to the influence of civilization, be reclaimed and prosper. Not so the Indian. He cannot be himself and be civilized; he fades away and dies.
The Indian’s noble attributes were inseparable from his savagery, Custer argued. The plow “deprives him of his identity.” An education destroys his spontaneous, untutored eloquence. The arrival of civilization inevitably destroys him, whether it kills him in warfare or drains away his vitality by taking him out of his natural habitat.
And so Custer resolved his dilemma. By binding Indians’ positive attributes to their savage, hostile state, he preserved his racial scheme—and superiority—without denying the truth of his experiences. He justified their destruction without scorning their prowess, much as hunters esteemed the mountain lions even as they drove them nearly into extinction. “Study him, fight him, civilize him if you can, he remains the subject of your curiosity,” he wrote, “a type of man peculiar and undefined, subjecting himself to no known law of civilization, contending determinedly against all efforts to win him from his chosen mode of life.”39
“General G.A. Custer…administers a well-deserved rebuke to Fenimore Cooper,” the Independent wrote. The San Francisco Chronicle excerpted Custer’s second article at length. “The subject is narrowed down to the simple proposition, either the progress of civilization must be stayed or the red man must be driven away or exterminated,” it remarked. By justifying the public’s demand to strip Indian title to large tracts of land, Custer won general applause.40
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CUSTER’S ANALYSIS OF THE LAND and people of the plains bridged romanticism with a scientific—and pseudoscientific—outlook. He presented a seemingly modern study, yet it reaffirmed the traditional racial hierarchy. So did the Galaxy itself. In the March 1872 issue, this thoroughly modern magazine released the third installment of Custer’s memoir, along with “The Colored Member,” a “scathing satire” of black lawmakers in Southern legislatures, as the Literary World characterized it.
The Literary World also wrote that Custer told his story “not very interestingly.” After the first two months, his articles turned from analysis and argument to narrative, but the criticism continued. The New York Tribune observed, “Gen. Custer’s ‘My Life on the Plains’ has apparently no end.” Not every critic took such a dim view. Turf, Field and Farm predictably called it “stirring.” The Massachusetts Ploughman wrote that Custer “tells a story of adventure with great spirit, and in a way to command readers.” The Chicago Tribune excerpted Custer’s “pen-sketch” of Wild Bill Hickok.41
The mixed response reflected the changing style of American periodical literature. The editor E. L. Godkin of the Nation helped lead the way in the 1860s and ’70s, along with Putnam’s, the Atlantic, and, yes, the Galaxy. “The kind of eighteenth-century prose that had characterized periodicals before the war could still be seen in some magazines,” write two historians of the medium, “but a brighter, more journalistic kind of writing was infiltrating many of the others.” Crisp, sharp, and clear, the new prose took a paring knife to its subject, compared to the older style of smothering it with endless coils of sentences. “Strike out all superfluous words, and especially all needless adjectives,” Henry Adams advised his subordinates on taking command of the North American Review. Nothing could be more modern.42
By contrast, Custer could have written his articles in the antebellum era, so outdated and orotund was his style. His first sentence of his first article was so long that it seemed he must have started it before the Civil War in order to have finished by 1872: “As fitting introduction to some of the personal incidents and sketches which I shall hereafter present to the readers of ‘The Galaxy,’ a brief description of the country in which these events transpired may not be deemed inappropriate.” An antiquated sensibility echoes in this expanse of words. So too does Custer’s memory of being an obscure blacksmith’s son scraped off the underside of Ohio, afraid that he will not be taken seriously. The Galaxy editors realized he was trying too hard; Custer himself referred to their request to “boil down” his narrative.43
It’s not that he was a consistently bad writer. He knew how to build suspense and highlight the drama of events. He was not afraid of mocking himself, as in the notorious incident in which he killed his horse, Custis Lee. And his sketch of Wild Bill Hickok was indeed a deft portrait. His heart was in it, as shown by his far shorter sentences, each hitting its target as directly as a striking cobra.
Yet the passage also shows the distance between himself and the leading intellectuals of his generation. He mythologized Hickok, depicting him as an idealized frontiersman: “One of the most perfect types of physical manhood I ever saw. Of his courage there could be no question.…His skill in the use of the rifle and pistol was unerring.…[He] was entirely free from all bluster and bravado.”44 Critics would fault him for distorting events—Benteen sneered at his memoir as “My Lie on the Plains”—but he generally warped the facts in pursuit of just this kind of sentimentality.
He cast the captive Monahsetah in the role of the Indian princess, shy in civilization yet wise in the ways of the savage nomad. She agreed to go on a dangerous mission, he wrote, and he led her to her starting point, “she clinging to my hand with the natural timidity of a girl.” He romanticized the return of the two captives at Sweetwater Creek. The brother of one of the two girls dashed out and embraced her, and Custer “bade them a hearty welcome to
liberty. In a moment officers and men were struggling about them upon all sides, eager to take them by the hand, and testify the great joy felt at their deliverance from a life of captivity,” he wrote. “Men whom I have seen face death without quailing found their eyes filled with tears, unable to restrain the deep emotion produced by this joyful event.” He barely alluded to the women’s harrowed appearance or deeply traumatized demeanor, described by other witnesses.45
How different was the work of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., or Charles Francis Adams Jr. Irony was their mode, “a posture of distance and doubt in relation to experience,” as Drew Gilpin Faust writes. Twain, for example, was disgusted by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s bestselling The Gates Ajar, published in 1868. Phelps’s novel describes a war widow who develops a new understanding of heaven; she sees her dead husband as “not lost, nor asleep, nor annihilated,” but merely invisible and close at hand, sending his love. Twain said she “had imagined a mean little ten-cent heaven about the size of Rhode Island.” He wrote a parody in which the vast majority of American angels in heaven turn out to be Indians, making his dead protagonist “less than entirely comfortable in paradise,” as Faust writes.46
Twain witnessed only the tiniest fraction of the Civil War, yet his writing showed the impact of the war as Custer’s did not. The disillusioning hammer of mass killing shattered sentimentality. After Ambrose Bierce fought for four years in the infantry, he resolved, “Cultivate a taste for distasteful truths.…Most important of all, endeavor to see things as they are, not as they ought to be.”
Edmund Wilson wrote that “death itself is Bierce’s favorite character,” indeed, “his only real character.” Death ruled Bierce’s universe, proving its power daily as the “man-made God” of the Bible never did. It did not wait for man to offer sacrifices, but took them arbitrarily, for death was whimsically homicidal (to paraphrase Wilson). The randomness of killing and maiming in the war haunted Bierce. Human dreams, beliefs, and intentions became instantly meaningless when a shell exploded over a group of soldiers, killing the noble-hearted lad, slashing a leg off the regiment’s fastest runner, and leaving a cowardly scoundrel unharmed. In an essay about his first skirmish, he wrote of how his regiment was marched to within enemy artillery range and ordered to lie down. Solid shot ripped through their ranks. One cannonball lodged in the corpse of a fellow soldier; when removed from his torso they found it was stamped with a name, which happened to be the name of the soldier it struck. Death was a practical joker.47
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