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

by Stiles, T. J.

  Friends and enemies alike described her as the queen of the court that surrounded Armstrong. She played the social leader grandly. It suited her, and she knew the importance of the role at such a remote post as Fort Abraham Lincoln, a place with few women and virtually no entertainment.

  “I like Mrs. Custer very much. She is quite young and rather pretty,” wrote Leonard Herbert Swett—known as Bert or Bertie. He was the son of Lincoln’s old law partner Leonard Swett and his wife, Laura. Now residents of Chicago, the couple had befriended Libbie in Washington during the war; recently the senior Swett had renewed their acquaintance on a visit to Dakota. Their son was just sixteen. He had dropped out of Phillips Exeter Academy because of anxiety. The Custers offered to take him for the summer; outdoor exercise might help his condition. Armstrong picked him up in Chicago on his return from New York at the end of May. After a stop in Minnesota to see Minnehaha Falls, they arrived at Fort Abraham Lincoln on June 2.50

  “The Gen. has got a beautifull [sic] house with five servants and they live in high style,” Bert wrote. He often played billiards with Armstrong, Libbie, Tom Custer, and Boston Custer, all of whom lived together. He went horseback riding every morning, played cards, read, watched the cavalry drill, “and loaf the rest of the time,” he told his parents. “In the evenings the house is crowded with company and they have dancing in the parlor.” He noticed that Libbie often hosted social affairs—costume parties, dances, and plays—but her husband isolated himself. “The Gen. does not care very much about company,” Bert wrote to his mother, “and he keeps himself locked in his private room when there is much company here (outsiders I mean).”51

  “My son…is delighted with his trip and I can tell you how thankful I am to you for the kindness which you have extended to him. His head is full of going on an expedition with you,” Leonard Swett wrote to Custer. Bert felt all the thrill of frontier life but faced little of the danger. He carried a revolver he had purchased for $13.50, went hunting, rode out with the Custer clan for a grand camping trip to the Little Heart River, and witnessed a council that Armstrong hosted to prevent fighting between the Sioux on one side and the Arikaras and Mandans on the other.

  For Custer, the summer proved less satisfying. Bert wrote that he had said they might yet go to the Black Hills, but “by the way he talks he does not expect us to go, I think.” They never did go.52

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  AS CUSTER STEEPED IN HIS POST, hundreds of prospectors set out for the Black Hills in illegal mining expeditions. Captain Benteen reported that he caught forty-five prospectors. More slipped past the patrols. On August 16 the New York Tribune reported that a group on French Creek voted to create the town of Custer, electing Ellis Albert Swearengen as chairman. Soon thousands staked out claims.53

  The frenzy caught the attention of the Western transportation entrepreneur Ben Holladay and his close friend Rufus Ingalls, Grant’s old West Point roommate. Custer knew them both. He may have first met Ingalls as early as the Peninsula Campaign, but the origin of his ties to Holladay are unclear. A fifty-seven-year-old Kentuckian, Holladay had started the largest stagecoach line in the country in San Francisco, sold it to Wells Fargo for $1.5 million, and emerged as the leading shipping and railroad man in Oregon—the “steamship king of the Pacific,” as the New York Times called him. As a mail contractor, he had learned how to lobby Congress; the secret was to forgo all scruples. But the Panic of 1873 hit him hard. In 1874 he was forced to go to Europe to explain his railroad’s troubles to German bondholders, and he slid inexorably toward losing control. He was eager to find new opportunities.54

  Holladay foresaw the opening of the Black Hills to white settlement, and he wanted to profit from it. On August 22, 1875, Ingalls sent Custer a cryptic letter on the subject. “How long I have waited to be able to write positively, but even now I cannot!” He referred to Holladay as “Ben,” a sign that Custer knew him well. “We want to do a big thing in the Black Hills,” he wrote. “Ben wants to put in stages and be sutler in new forts. He has promise of [the Department of the] Interior of an Indian trade[rship].” (The secretary of the interior named Indian agency traders.) “Now, what think you? Ben counts much on you.…What should he do to be in right place, right time?”

  Historians have argued over whether the letter shows that Custer took part in a corrupt ring run by Ingalls and Holladay. It suggests prior business discussions, but also shows that Ingalls and Holladay had spoken of nothing specific. Left unexplained is precisely what Holladay counted on him to do. Custer had no influence over the appointment of sutlers, a power concentrated in the hands of the secretary of war since 1870. Ingalls knew this, for he was the army’s acting quartermaster general while Montgomery Meigs was in Europe for several months. Ingalls also had a personal connection to President Grant. By contrast, Custer found himself rather isolated in 1875. When Libbie later examined her husband’s estate, she would see neither profits from Holladay nor debts in connection with this matter. Ingalls also mentioned he might get “control over the whole subject of horse shoes,” and asked Custer to serve as head of a board that would choose a supplier; but no such board came to be. Weaknesses in the case for Custer’s role in any ring, though, do not prove his moral rectitude. He had talked of some kind of business deal with them, knowing Ingalls’s taste for graft.55

  In September, Secretary of War William W. Belknap stopped briefly at Fort Abraham Lincoln. A broad-faced man, six feet tall and some 200 pounds, he filled a room whether standing or sitting. Born ten years before Custer, educated at Princeton and Georgetown, he had risen as a volunteer in the Civil War from major to brigadier general, fighting at Shiloh and marching to the sea with Sherman, who had recommended him for his cabinet post. Once in office, though, Belknap had maneuvered Sherman out of any real power.

  Custer, sick with dysentery, rose from his bed to greet the secretary of war. He had heard the rumors about Belknap—stories that centered on the last two of his three wives. The first had died during the Civil War. The second, Carrie Tomlinson Belknap, had been a lovely woman, fond of luxury. Tuberculosis killed her in late 1870, and her sister Amanda—undeterred by precedent—married Belknap next. Even more beautiful than her sister, she possessed “charming grace and manner,” according to an acquaintance. Amanda Belknap and First Lady Julia Dent Grant were “friendly rivals” in throwing the most elegant New Year’s Day reception in Washington, according to William McFeely. The rumors explained that elegance as the fruits of graft, saying Belknap took payoffs from post traders for their lucrative concessions.56

  Custer tended to believe rumors that reinforced his prejudices, and he was emphatically prejudiced against Belknap. Effective July 1, 1874, Belknap had replaced the Fort Lincoln sutler with Robert C. Seip, who immediately raised already high prices. Custer had told his officers to go across the river to Bismarck to buy goods for themselves and the men. Seip had insisted that he possessed a legal monopoly on the troops’ business. Custer recalled, “I have known the post-trader at Fort Lincoln to go out and stop an officer’s wagon, driven by his servant, and inspect the wagon…and threaten to use his influence with the Secretary of War because we trade with a town five miles distant, where we got things at about half his prices.” Custer had wired a protest to the War Department. Belknap had backed Seip.

  Custer curtly returned to Seip the wine and cigars that the trader had provided for the secretary’s entertainment. “I was just as suspicious of the Secretary as I was of the sutler,” he later explained, but he treated Belknap correctly. He mentioned that Seip “was trying to hold a whip over the officers’ heads by asserting that he would bring his influence to bear upon the Secretary of War,” implying that it was “improper” in some way. Belknap waved it off, saying, “You must not believe all you hear.”

  Custer later asked Seip about his affairs. The sutler said he paid a tax to two political brokers, John Hedrick and Elliott Rice, who had arranged his appointment. That was why he raised his prices and insisted on a
monopoly. He cleared a profit of $15,000 a year, he said, but after paying off the fixers he kept less than $3,000.57

  Did Custer press Holladay’s case with Belknap? He never mentioned any such discussion, which would have been premature. Most likely he said nothing about it, or Belknap would have revealed it when he and Custer met in open battle in March 1876.

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  BELKNAP LEFT, AND SO DID the Custers. Armstrong, Libbie, and Tom all boarded an eastbound train. Libbie went to Michigan; Armstrong went to New York. He arrived at the end of September and rented an apartment at 222 Fifth Avenue between 26th and 27th streets, across from the Hotel Brunswick, where he took his meals and mail.

  A Herald reporter found him and posed a few questions. “What do you think, General, of this morning’s news about the Black Hills negotiations?” he asked. A conference between a federal commission and Sioux leaders for the purchase of the Black Hills had broken down. The Sioux were divided, but the only terms they proposed were seen as outrageous by the commissioners. Just what he had expected, Custer said. “It is the result of holding the council right in the heart of the Indian country, where the chiefs had the squaw men (the whites married to squaws) to advise them.”

  The interviewer brought up corruption at the Indian agencies. “Breaking up the monopoly” of assigned traders would solve much of the economic mistreatment of the Indians, he said. The reporter asked about recent articles in the Herald on graft at the Fort Berthold agency. “They are just what is wanted, and the correspondent who wrote them deserves credit, as he took his life in his hands, venturing to expose the frauds of the Indian ring when right in their midst. He must have worked hard.” It seems Custer kept a straight face, though the Herald reporter Ralph Meeker had just written to him about a $50 payment for information that Custer had provided for those very stories.58

  Money, politics, and pleasure: he chased all three in New York. He saw Bennett. He saw Belmont. And he returned to the office of Emil Justh, where he pursued his short-selling speculations in the stock market. The volume of transactions, as officially measured, mounted rapidly: thousands of dollars, then tens of thousands, a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand. With Justh financing his gambling, Custer pressed on. Some bets paid off; others failed. Then more failed.59

  He faced the consequences of old sins, and new virtues could not compensate. The Atlantic Publishing Company sued him in Marine Court—a kind of small-claims court in New York. The dispute was probably over the war memoir he had contracted to write in 1867 but never delivered. The process server found him in the office of the Hotel Brunswick. Custer refused to accept any papers. Finally he told the court that he had a “good & substantial defence on the merits,” but refused to make it as he didn’t live in New York and the suit was improper. Pressed for cash on several fronts, he asked Sheldon & Company on November 10 to pay him for My Life on the Plains. They had promised him a flat fee in return for the copyright instead of paying royalties. Isaac Sheldon, son of the company’s founder, replied that they owed him $171.22 minus various charges, leaving $131.94, “for which we will send you a check.” It was not enough to save him from his Wall Street reverses or pay a lawyer.60

  Libbie joined him in the city. She felt the restraints on their finances. “The holidays have been rainy, gloomy,” she wrote to Tom in late December. “I did not have half the fun I had anticipated, looking in at the shop windows. On Christmas morning I went to church, but came back, weary, disgruntled.” And yet her husband’s name gave them access to a world they could not refuse. They saw Lawrence Barrett star in Julius Caesar at Booth’s Theatre, a block away from their rooms, free of charge. They often dined with Barrett and his wife. They attended a dinner at the Lotos Club, a social hub for writers and artists; had lunch with the artist Albert Bierstadt in his studio; saw exhibitions; and ate at Delmonico’s.61

  Bert Swett came to Manhattan and went to the Hotel Brunswick to find Custer. He happened upon him as he picked up his mail. Custer told him he had agreed to write his war memoirs for the Galaxy, and lodged across the street so he would not be annoyed by constant visitors. They went to get Libbie, and the three traveled to Union Square to see a performance of trained fleas. Afterward they went down Broadway to a phrenologist to have Bert’s head examined. “Mrs. Custer played the part of mother for me very well,” he wrote. The phrenologist pored over Bert’s skull, feeling the bumps and swells, and described various aspects of Bert’s character—pausing each time to ask Libbie “if she did not think it was so.” When the day was done, she invited Bert to Fort Lincoln in the summer of 1876, and he promised he would come. He said good-bye.

  Young Swett was only a few years too old to be the Custers’ own child. For a brief spell in 1875, he gave them the gift of a glimpse into the lives they would never have. Libbie played the part of mother for him not only in the phrenologist’s office, but in all their time together, from their tents on the Little Heart River to their rooms on Fifth Avenue. Bert’s own mother sensed something of their relationship and grew jealous. “You say ‘I am afraid I should lose my boy [to] Mrs. Custer,’ ” Bert wrote to her. “Mrs. Custer…has my highest respect and admiration as a truely [sic] lovely woman.” As a teenage boy, he may have felt a furtive, half-sublimated attraction to Libbie. But what he allowed her to feel was something rare indeed.62

  For all the pleasures of New York, money and politics clouded Armstrong’s months in Manhattan more than Libbie realized. Meeker sent a note urging him to go to Washington in 1876 to watch the new Congress in action. “The Democrats will make things lively, and we expect to have lots of fun before the season is over,” he wrote. He observed with satisfaction that the Indian agent they had exposed at Berthold was gone, and he alluded to Custer’s tales of corruption in the appointment of sutlers—that is, Belknap’s corruption. “If this thing is investigated during the coming session there will be weeping and wailing around the White House.”63

  Custer wanted to see the Democrats punish Grant’s administration, but money consumed him. He wrote to the Redpath Lyceum Bureau in Boston. The leading lecture agency in the country, it represented the famous biographer James Parton, P. T. Barnum, Charles Francis Adams Jr., and Frederick Douglass, among others. The manager wrote back with good news. “I have been considerably interested in your lecture prospects. I believe we can do something for you.” Custer chattered happily about the possibilities, noting that Thomas Nast earned $20,000 in a single season, and he was told that he could keep going for a decade “or as long as I could stand it.” The problem was that the bureau wanted him to start in the spring, “but I declined as I desired longer time to make any preparations,” Custer wrote.64

  This income lay in the uncertain future, but his finances demanded immediate action. By now he had carried out $398,983 in stock trades through Emil Justh. He had lost $8,578. It’s rather remarkable that he lost such a small percentage of the total, but in absolute terms it represented an immense amount of money for Custer. It was larger than the annual salaries of major railroad presidents. It was far more than he could pay. And he wanted to keep the debt secret from Libbie.

  On February 10, 1876, three days after he heard from the lecture bureau, he wrote a promissory note—an IOU—for $8,500, made out to himself to disguise the debt and endorsed to Justh. He dated it six months in the future, and agreed to a heavy 7 percent interest. By that time, he hoped, he would have started his speaking tour, bringing in enough money to pay off or renew the note. But Justh no longer trusted him; he demanded a cosigner to guarantee the debt. Custer went to Ben Holladay, the steamship king, the mail contractor, the manipulator who wanted inside help with his Black Hills scheme—this, at the same time that Custer fed information of graft to the Herald. Holladay endorsed the note.65 Financially, even morally, Custer had brought disaster down upon himself over the past year. Things would get worse.

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  PITY THE PRESIDENTS, FOR THEY enter the White House imagining tha
t they have attained the height of power, only to discover a special kind of powerlessness. Lincoln famously said that events controlled him, not the other way around, but the public never believes it, which makes it even worse. Political considerations dilute each dose of policy; the need to balance priorities inhibits strong measures. The president finds himself trapped within the cabinet, his ability to act mediated by his secretaries. He loses touch with the world through the layers of bureaucracy surrounding him.

  Even in the 1870s, when those layers were far fewer and thinner, Grant felt the difference between his office as general in chief, where he commanded, and the mummy-wrapped presidency, entombed in reasons to do nothing. Someone was sure to mock him whether he failed, as with the annexation of Santo Domingo, or succeeded, as with the Treaty of Washington, settling Civil War claims with Britain. When he intervened in the South, he found himself blamed for half measures by one side and tyrannical overreach by the other. In this era before the Secret Service erected ramparts around the president, supplicants ambushed him daily, asking for favors.

  Such was the presidency. But Grant cut the ribbon on a new kind of White House hell, which has become a defining feature of modern political battles: the congressional investigation. There had been many in the past, the evidence and reports printed in the fat volumes of the Congressional Serial Set. But now it was different. After the 44th Congress began its first session in December 1875, the Democratic House of Representatives opened investigations of every department.66 They honed scandal into a lethal partisan weapon, flaying the administration in an attempt to show that it was gangrenous with corruption. The Democrats believed it, but they also knew stories of graft supported their arguments about the dangers of an overlarge central government.