Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America
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“I am not the same man (may not have quite the same ideas),” Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote to his father during the Overland Campaign in 1864. On the back of the envelope he wrote, just before the Battle of Cold Harbor, “It is still kill—kill—all the time.” He joined the Union army filled with high ideals. At some point the idealism bled out of him, perhaps out of the bullet hole through his neck at Antietam or in the mental and physical exhaustion that wrecked him after the Wilderness. He had no use for sentimentality or moral righteousness. As Louis Menand observes, Holmes learned one clear lesson in the kill—kill of the Civil War: “Certitude leads to violence.” He resolved to be a realist. As a judge, he saw his duty as allowing contending forces in society to fight without imposing his own understanding or wisdom. He believed in progress, but without any of the romantic or heroic notions of the antebellum era. “To many of the men who had been through the war, the values of professionalism and expertise were attractive,” Menand writes; “they implied impersonality, respect for institutions as effective organizers of enterprise, and a modern and scientific attitude—the opposites of the individualism, humanitarianism, and moralism that characterized Northern intellectual life before the war.”48
Charles Francis Adams Jr. took this realism to the level of cynicism. Unlike his brother Henry, he served in the Union army. As a cavalry officer he had mocked the lyrical language so often sprinkled on military operations (by Custer, among others). The truth, he wrote, “would knock the romance out of you.” It knocked it out of Adams himself. Promoted to command black troops, he scorned them as “nigs” but harbored even grimmer views of whites, writing, “I have little hope for them in their eternal contact with a race like ours.” The stupidity of superiors and the filthy brutality of the army dismayed him. His early enthusiasm turned into “a Dead Sea apple,” he wrote. By the end, “We were so sick of the whole thing!…The life had become hateful.”49
With peace he devoted himself to the study of the defining feature of modernity: the railroad. It brought industrial technology into daily life, drove the rise of finance, connected communities, disrupted local economies, and pioneered the institutionalization of society. He emerged as perhaps the foremost writer on the subject. He wrote influential articles for the Boston-based North American Review, paying particular attention to the stock market. In July 1869, he published his masterpiece, “A Chapter of Erie.” It vividly told the story of the bribery-driven battle for control of the Erie Railway, expressing deep disgust with financiers, the courts, and elected government. “Individuals and corporations of late not unfrequently have found [legislators to be] commodities for sale in the market. So with judicial venality.” Market-manipulating capitalists ruled finance, and corrupt officeholders ruled politics.
Adams’s cynicism turned him against democracy itself. The Erie Ring, he wrote, united Tammany Hall and stock speculators Jay Gould and Jim Fisk; it “represents the combination of the corporation and the hired proletariat of a great city.” Like other liberal reformers, he favored a professional, nonpartisan civil service to replace the system of politically appointed government workers. In part this reflected his respect for professionalism, in part his distrust of the mob. Adams wrote, “Universal suffrage can only mean in plain English the government of ignorance and vice.”50
To be sure, these early modernists did not typify national culture. Drew Gilpin Faust vividly describes the “era’s romanticization of death.” She shows how the public clung to sentimentality amid war’s horrors. Americans held to a moral order, a divine order, that made sense of suffering and promised a final reward in death. Bierce and the others, she writes, were “dissenting” against their generation.51
But Custer cannot be dismissed as merely a typical American. He aspired to be a public intellectual; he placed himself in the company of thinkers. He can only be understood in the context of the leading edge of change as well as the inert mass. Clearly he was not an antisentimentalist like Holmes, nor a cynic like Adams, nor an apostle of professionalism, as both men were. He possessed none of Twain’s sardonic distaste for nonsense, let alone Bierce’s obsession with realism and death. Custer could not have written “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” if someone had put a gun to Libbie’s head and ordered him to write the darkest story imaginable.
Why did the war affect him so differently? Custer had endured just as much combat as these other men; indeed, he may have spent more days fighting than any of them. It cannot be explained by lack of education, lack of interest in intellectual pursuits, or a religious disposition. A few possibilities do suggest themselves. His war had been very different from that of Holmes or Bierce. As a staff officer, he had flitted in and out of combat; he was not mired in a rifle pit or firing line. As a cavalryman, he had primarily fought other cavalrymen. The numbers of troops involved tended to be much smaller. Firepower mattered less. Cavalrymen fought with sabers, or pistols and carbines that had far shorter effective ranges than infantry rifles. Foot soldiers tended to face more artillery as well, suffering the unpredictable slaughter of shell fire and solid shot.
In cavalry clashes, Custer had swirled around the field on horseback instead of standing in a file of men who were gunned down in blasts of flying metal. He had led charges, galloping at the enemy and fighting with a sword like a medieval knight. Combat with saber and pistol required personal skill. Instead of facing random death, Custer had survived and won in part because of his personal prowess.
That sense of control meant everything. Having power over one’s fate vaccinates against cynicism, even if the power is illusory. His early promotion to brigadier general cemented his belief that he mastered his own destiny. As a brigade and then division commander, he had directed events. His decisions had shaped his fate.
He had often witnessed the random brutality and brutal ironies of war, but the lesson did not take before he was elevated to McClellan’s staff. And so the lad who went to war never died. He ended the conflict as any boy at the outset would have imagined, having led charges over enemy works, having dueled with a sword and dispatched the foe, having shattered the enemy line and seized his guns and flags. And he was never seriously wounded, never struck dead by the diseases that killed hundreds of thousands. His illusions remained intact—more than intact, reinforced.
And that is one reason why so much of the public found him so admirable and endearing. They had struggled to maintain their own sentimentality amid so much death. They tried very hard to keep their illusions about heroism and gallantry, as soldiers returned home with missing limbs and abundant irony, as so many soldiers remained on battlefields, shoveled anonymously into trenches. These Americans needed Custer, the amateur, the enthusiast, the romantic. He was what they feared they could never be again.
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CUSTER LUCK BARRED HIM FROM joining the ranks of the most modern American intellectuals—his good fortune in having a happy experience in the nation’s saddest event. His intelligence won respect, his storytelling won an audience, but his pen could not win a living. His serialized memoir came out monthly, earning him $1,200 by the end of 1872. It was helpful but not enough for him to abandon the army.
He bided his time in Elizabethtown. Turf, Field and Farm announced his horse purchases. Lawrence Barrett corresponded with him: “Custer, still be my friend and the same good fellow I have always found you.” In January 1873 Custer wrote to Senator Chandler to ask for tickets for Libbie and himself to Grant’s second inauguration in March. But they would not be able to attend. In February Custer learned that the 7th Cavalry would be shifted to the Dakota Territory, starting March 1.52
Now began the routine so familiar to a military family in peacetime: his unanswered requests for information, the rapid packing, the movement of troops, horses, and supplies to railroad depots and steamboat landings. On April 1 the transports began to steam from Memphis and Louisville, paddling up the Mississippi and Missouri to the last home George Armstrong Custer would ever know.53
* * *
THE ENEMY
“I DON’T KNOW WHETHER I am glad or sorry that you are going so far away again,” Lawrence Barrett wrote to Custer on March 23, 1873. “My sorrow arises from the fear that we may not soon meet again, now that you are so far away.…I am glad again, my dear comrade, to know that you are on the service you like best.” Barrett wished he could join him—not for an outdoor life, which Barrett abhorred, but to “get free from the thralldom of dress coats and drawing room behavior.…To sit for hours thinking of nothing—no night of performance hanging over me—no costume—no Hamlet—no Cassius.”1
The Custers reached the faraway place on April 10, “with bags, dogs, and cages of canaries and mockingbirds,” writes Shirley Leckie. Much of the 7th Cavalry camped in the southeastern corner of the Dakota Territory, on the prairie outside Yankton, the capital. The census had counted barely 2,000 people in Yankton County in 1870, and just 11,319 white and 70 black residents in the entire Territory. This was Indian country. There were many indigenous peoples living here, but the army concerned itself with two in particular: the Northern Cheyennes and their allies, the Sioux. Custer would face them on an expedition to the Yellowstone River over the summer of 1873, and as the commander of a new post on the Missouri River, Fort Abraham Lincoln.2
Barrett imagined that the frontier assignment excited Custer, who “delights in riding to the death the startled game.” Libbie, too, wrote that “life in the saddle on the free open plain is his legitimate existence.” It was the truth. But it was not the entire truth. Custer also longed for the civilization that wearied Barrett. Later in 1873 he would write to Libbie, “What a delightful two years we have spent in the States.” He predicted a great future—looking east, not west. “I think it will not be long before my business and horse matters will be so arranged so as to require less looking after and instead of being a drain upon our resources…will be yielding us something. That is my plan.” Stock, livestock, and letters would make them rich—including, he hoped, the Stevens Mine, which lingered on, neither sold nor developed.3
He loved the West, but he was not of the West. He projected a new image of himself through the lens of the frontier, but he cast himself as the cosmopolitan sophisticate who mastered the wilderness, inserting knowing references to New York in essays about rattlesnake broiling, buffalo hunting, and Indian fighting. Buffalo Bill Cody was dramatizing his own frontier image, which would lead to his famous Wild West show. Underneath the spectacle, though, Cody was an authentic child of Kansas. He went east as Custer went west and mastered the world that Barnum made.
The only real master Custer recognized was his own ambition. “It is such a comfort to me to feel independent, much as I dote on my profession and earnestly as I am devoted to it,” he wrote to Libbie later in 1873. “Yet should accident cast me adrift and I be thrown upon my resources I have not a fear but that energy and willingness to put my shoulder to the wheel would carry me through triumphantly.” He gloried “in this country,” where a “modest education” opened up “many and varied…avenues to honorable employment.”4 The rising corporate economy slowly made that classic antebellum vision obsolete, as it narrowed the space for an independent, self-made life. Ironically Custer never found a way to sustain himself outside a large institution. He bristled against the army’s regimentation, yet he did as it demanded.
And so Armstrong and Libbie found themselves on the plain outside of Yankton. She later recalled that he fell sick on April 13, when snow began to fall. Soon “the air was so thick with whirling, tiny particles that it was almost impossible to see one’s hand held out before one.” The air was comparatively warm, hovering near freezing, making the snow heavy and wet. Fierce winds piled up drifts and blew down tents. Custer called the blizzard “the worst I remember.…Mrs. Custer and myself took shelter in an unoccupied and unfurnished house near camp where we have remained…without a particle of fire and with but little food.” The townsfolk helped the fugitive soldiers, lodging many in the hall of the Territorial legislature. Forty laundresses and their children remained in the wrecked camp as snow fell for forty-eight hours.5
“The first morning after the storm was bright, but cold and windy,” wrote 2nd Lt. Charles W. Larned. He had graduated from West Point in 1870, and had spent most of the time since in Louisville or on leave. Just twenty-three, this long-faced, sophisticated New Yorker had a talent for drawing and a sneer for almost everything.6
With ten of the regiments’ twelve companies collected at Yankton, Larned had his first opportunity to look down on the 7th Cavalry en masse. He disdained the food on a Missouri River steamer as “the most atrocious boat fare.” Most of the officers’ wives lodged in “the slovenly outrage they call a hotel.” After a few weeks together, the women “have succeeded in discovering each other’s failings with astonishing distinctness, and…made the atmosphere pretty warm.” He scorned a ball thrown by the town of Yankton for the officers as “a homespun affair.” The locals were proud of their well-organized fete, but he found it briefly amusing “to have seen the bumpkins and their sweethearts” dance. He mocked his fellow officers and their wives as “the fair bluebloods of our own patrician circle.”7
When he turned to the Custers, he put down his razor and picked up an ax. He started by chipping at Libbie. “She and the general seem to keep pretty close,” he wrote home on April 25. “She rather took me to task for lack of attention, the prerogative of her royal rank which she never forgets. There is an odor of much ineffable condescension about her stereotyped sweetness that I am bored by it and stay away from court.”8
He chopped Custer with full force. He “wears the men out by ceaseless and unnecessary labor,” Larned wrote. “He keeps himself aloof and spends his time in excogitating annoying, vexatious, and useless orders which visit us like the swarm of evils from Pandora’s box.” Later that spring, “Custer undertook to bully and insult” a court-martial on which Larned served. “He is making himself utterly detested by every line officer of the command, with the exception of one or two toadies, by his selfish, capricious, arbitrary, and unjust conduct.”9
“The army is a great school for grumblers,” Samuel Barrows wrote later that year. A correspondent for the New York Tribune, he spent months with the 7th Cavalry in 1873. (Larned liked him, “notwithstanding that he wears checked trousers.”) He continued, “There are more chronic grumblers in the army than anywhere else I know of. The officers are frequently as bad as the men.” Barrows’s observation puts Larned’s complaints in context, correcting some of the distortion resulting from Custer’s great notoriety. The 7th Cavalry is by far the most-studied unit in the nineteenth-century Regular Army; this narrow focus exaggerates the significance of spats and grievances, making routine friction appear as extraordinary dissension. In 1873 Custer aroused no public outcry, as in Texas in 1865, nor did the army move to punish him, as in Kansas in 1867. He remained within the limits of tolerable behavior. Larned’s remarks draw attention because he mastered the art of complaining.10
But he cannot be dismissed. At the very least, he revealed that Custer still took no interest in management, though it was now his primary duty. He was capable of tact, sympathy, and empathy, but he turned to them last in his official capacity. The verbs Larned chose to describe Custer’s treatment of his subordinates were specific and damning: “bully…insult…hector…annoy.” He also wrote something more significant, that spoke to Custer’s relationship to the army as an organization: “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.”11
The word reputation encapsulates the lasting consequences of past misbehavior. Larned spoke the institutional consensus about Custer, passed from man to man, from Fort Riley to San Francisco’s Presidio and New York’s Governors Island. Subordinates and superiors now approached him with a set of expectations, and not in Custer’s favor.
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nbsp; The antagonism was deeply rooted. Regular Army culture disdained pretension and self-promotion. Libbie later recalled that the wives of officers who had served before the Civil War were “a trifle condescending.…These women with experiences of a life with the Old Army (the latter phrase was emphasized)…called their husbands ‘Mister’ even when they were a Major General, and instantly held myself to account for having spoken of my husband, such a boy, as General.”12 In this atmosphere Armstrong earned widespread disapproval with his flamboyance, self-indulgence, misdeeds, and public letters.
His reputation afflicted him after he took command of the ten companies at Yankton. His orders required him to march some 400 miles north along the Missouri River to Fort Rice, the staging point for the foray to the Yellowstone River basin. The 7th Cavalry would form only one component of the expedition, which would be led by Col. David S. Stanley, who also commanded the 22nd Infantry, Fort Rice, and the Middle District of the Department of Dakota. Their mission was to escort surveyors for the Northern Pacific Railway, protecting them from Sioux attacks.