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

by Stiles, T. J.

  20. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, stresses the practical thinking behind much of the burgeoning antislavery sentiment in the army.

  21. Sears, To the Gates, 21; Slotkin, Long Road to Antietam, 47; GBM to Randolph B. Marcy, August 20, 1865, Roll 36, GBM Papers, LOC.

  22. GBM to Samuel L. M. Barlow, November 8, 1861, in Sears, Civil War Papers, 127–28.

  23. Allan Nevins, ed., A Diary of Battle: The Personal Journals of Colonel Charles S. Wainwright, 1861–1865 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 9. Throughout Battle Cry of Freedom, James M. McPherson offers a clear but nuanced account of Lincoln’s handling of slavery as a war aim; see, for example, McPherson, 352–64.

  24. James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, eds., Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 1 (New York: D. Appleton, 1888), 112, 167, 231; Stiles, First Tycoon, 176, 192, 281, 322, 326. See also Sears, George B. McClellan, 51; Slotkin, Long Road to Antietam, 26.

  25. Sears, To the Gates, 107–08; Sears, Civil War Papers, 288, 306; Stiles, First Tycoon, 338.

  26. François Joinville to Edward Everett, November 9, 1864, Abraham Lincoln Papers, LOC; GAC to Brother and Sister, July 13, 1862, GAC Correspondence, LBH. On GAC’s exposure to the conservative-financier wing of the Democratic Party, see Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994 [orig. pub. 1985]), 382.

  27. All quotes in Sears, George B. McClellan, 203–04. See also Stephen W. Sears, Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam (New Haven, Conn.: Ticknor and Field, 1983), 35–36; Sears, To the Gates, 160–61.

  28. Sears, George B. McClellan, 203–04; Sears, To the Gates, 160–61.

  29. GAC to Brother and Sister, July 13, 1862, GAC Correspondence, LBH. David Reed and LAR were on the Peninsula as recently as June 23, 1862, when Henry Clay Christiancy noted Reed’s visit in his diary; Henry Clay Christiancy Diary, Folder 1, Box 3, Christiancy and Pickett Families’ Papers, LOC.

  30. GAC to Brother and Sister, July 13, 1862, GAC Correspondence, LBH; Sears, To the Gates, 201–03.

  31. GAC to Brother and Sister, July 13, 1862, GAC Correspondence, LBH; Sears, George B. McClellan, 205–06; Joinville, 63; McPherson, 464; William W. Averell, “With the Cavalry on the Peninsula,” B&L 2, 430.

  32. GAC to Brother and Sister, July 13, 1862, GAC Correspondence, LBH.

  33. Sears, To the Gates, 202–04; Sears, George B. McClellan, 206–09.

  34. OR, Series 1, Vol. 11, Part 1: 117.

  35. Sears, To the Gates, 210–11; Sears, George B. McClellan, 205–06; McPherson, 464–68; Slotkin, Long Road to Antietam, 51–52.

  36. Sears, To the Gates, 224–35; OR, Series 1, Vol. 11, Part 2: 75–76; McPherson, 464–68. Rafuse offers a more generous reading of Confederate numbers, actually claiming a slight Confederate numerical superiority, but even if correct GBM faced nothing like the numbers in his own estimates of enemy strength.

  37. OR, Series 1, Vol. 11, Part 2: 75–76; GAC to Brother and Sister, July 13, 1862, GAC Correspondence, LBH; Philip St. George Cooke, “The Charge of Cooke’s Cavalry at Gaines’s Mill,” B&L 2: 344–46.

  38. GAC to Brother and Sister, July 13, 1862, GAC Correspondence, LBH; Entry 1950, Cullum 2: 559.

  39. McPherson, 462–72.

  40. GAC to Brother and Sister, July 13, 1862, GAC Correspondence, LBH; Slotkin, Long Road to Antietam, 54; McPherson, 470.

  41. McPherson, 471.

  42. GAC to Brother and Sister, July 13, 1862, GAC Correspondence, LBH; GBM, McClellan’s Own Story (New York: Charles L. Webster and Co., 1887), 364; Entry 1950, Cullum 2: 559.

  43. GAC to Brother and Sister, July 13, 1862, GAC Correspondence, LBH.

  44. Slotkin, Long Road to Antietam, 54–55.

  45. Slotkin and McPherson examine this telegram and its repercussions, though the most detailed discussion is by Sears, George B. McClellan, 231–15.

  46. Slotkin, Long Road to Antietam, 57–58; Sears, George B. McClellan, 226–28

  47. GBM, McClellan’s Own Story, 487–89.

  48. Sears, Civil War Papers, 349, 361, 351.

  49. McPherson, 499–510; Sears, George B. McClellan, 229–34; Chandler quoted in Gary W. Gallagher, “A Civil War Watershed: The 1862 Richmond Campaign in Perspective,” in Gary W. Gallagher, ed., The Richmond Campaign of 1862: The Peninsula and the Seven Days (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 3–27; GBM quoted in Sears, Civil War Papers, 369.

  50. Lincoln quoted in McPherson, 504.

  51. Whittaker, 128–29.

  52. Crary, 214–15.

  53. Whittaker, 122–23; Merington, 32–33; OR, Series 1, Vol. 11, Part 2: 946–48. GBM wrote to his wife, “Averell went out with 3 squadrons, met & thrashed an entire regiment, drove them to & through their camp, which he captured & leisurely destroyed”; Sears, Civil War Papers, 385.

  54. OR, Series 1, Vol. 11, Part 2: 954–55; Merington, 32–33; Whittaker, 122–23. Merington inaccurately paraphrases the GAC letter quoted here. I rely here on Whittaker, who quoted the entire document, apparently verbatim. For an excellent discussion of killing in the Civil War, see Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 32–60.

  55. Sears, Civil War Papers, 369, 374.

  56. Sears, Civil War Papers, 379; Slotkin, Long Road to Antietam, 45, 99–100, 102, 104, 176, 178. See also Sears, George B. McClellan, 237–38.

  57. Burnside quoted in Sears, George B. McClellan, 241; Kearny quoted in Slotkin, Long Road to Antietam, 100.

  58. Sears, George B. McClellan, 244–47, 253–55; McPherson, 524–33.

  59. Sears, Landscape Turned Red, 12–14; Slotkin, Long Road to Antietam, 131, 135; Sears, George B. McClellan, 257–60; McPherson, 533–35; Whittaker, 129.

  60. Sears, Landscape Turned Red, 15–16; Slotkin, Long Road to Antietam, 135–37; Sears, George B. McClellan, 257–60; McPherson, 533–35; GBM, McClellan’s Own Story, 535.

  61. OR, Series 1, Vol. 19, Part 1: 209–10 and Vol. 19, Part 2: 177; David L. Thompson, “In the Ranks to the Antietam,” 557–58, in B&L 2, 556–58.

  62. McPherson, 537–39; OR, Series 1, Vol. 19, Part 1: 209–10 and Vol. 19, Part 2: 177; Sears, Landscape Turned Red, 157–58.

  63. Stephen W. Sears, Controversies and Commanders: Dispatches from the Army of the Potomac (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000), 134; Slotkin, Long Road to Antietam, 135–36, 177–79.

  64. McPherson, 537; John Gibbon, Personal Recollections of the Civil War (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1928), 73.

  65. Slotkin, Long Road to Antietam, 182–83, 217; OR, Series 1, Vol. 19, Part 1: 209–10; Sears, Landscape Turned Red, 114–50, 157.

  66. Starr 1: 313–14; Slotkin, Long Road to Antietam, 174.

  67. OR, Series 1, Vol. 19, Part 1: 209–10; Starr 1: 313–16; R. L. T. Beale, History of the Ninth Virginia Cavalry in the War Between the States (Richmond, Va.: B. F. Johnson Publishing, 1899), 39–40; Abner Hard, History of the Eighth Cavalry Regiment, Illinois Volunteers, During the Great Rebellion (Aurora, Ill.: n.p., 1868), 178–79.

  68. GAC to GBM, September 15, 1862, Roll 32, GBM Papers, LOC; Sears, Landscape Turned Red, 150, 157–59; Slotkin, Long Road to Antietam, 217.

  69. Sears, Landscape Turned Red, 158–59; Slotkin, Long Road to Antietam, 274; GAC to GBM, September 17 [sic], 1862, Roll 32, GBM Papers, LOC. This note from GAC was misdated by a later archivist as September 17. Sears transcribes “Cartersville” as “Potomac”; close inspection reveals that GAC made a phonetic error in repeating the name of Keedysville.

  70. Sears, Landscape Turned Red, 160–69.

  71. Sears, George B. McClellan, 307; Slotkin, Long Road to Antietam, 274.

  72. McPherson, 539–45; Sears, Landscape Turned Red, 303. McPherson, 544, includes the Spanish-American War in the casualty tally topped by Antietam.

  73. GAC, “War Memoirs,” Galaxy (June 1876).

  74. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “M
y Hunt After ‘The Captain,’ ” in Pages from an Old Volume of Life: A Collection of Essays, 1857–1881 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1891), 16–77. The essay originally appeared in Atlantic Monthly (December 1862).

  75. GAC to Sister, September 27, 1862, GAC Correspondence, LBH; James H. Wilson, Under the Old Flag, vol. 1 (New York: D. Appleton, 1912), 100–03; Entry 1852, Cullum 2: 498.

  76. McPherson, 557–58.

  77. Sears, Civil War Papers, 481; Slotkin, Long Road to Antietam, 371; Sears, Landscape Turned Red, 317–20.

  78. Sears, Civil War Papers, 482.

  79. Sears, Landscape Turned Red, 319–20; Slotkin, Long Road to Antietam, 372, 376–77.

  80. Slotkin, Long Road to Antietam, 380–83; Sears, Civil War Papers, 489–90; GAC to Cousin Augusta, October 3, 1862, transcript copy, GAC Papers, USMA.

  81. GAC to Cousin Augusta, October 3, 1862, Transcript Copy, GAC Papers, USMA.

  82. Slotkin, Long Road to Antietam, 380–83; Sears, Civil War Papers, 489–90.

  83. GAC to Sister, September 27, 1862, GAC Correspondence, LBH.

  84. Entry for November 10, 1862, Henry Clay Christiancy Diary, Folder 3, Box 1, Christiancy and Pickett Families’ Papers, LOC; Slotkin, Long Road to Antietam, 384–91; McPherson, 568–70; Sears, George B. McClellan, 340–43; “Statement of the Military Service of George A. Custer of the United States Army,” Adjutant General’s Office, June 14, 1922, HR 3328, CRM.

  Four: The Prodigy

  1. Stiles, First Tycoon, 241. The transition from a personal economy to an institutional, organizational one is a major theme of First Tycoon; see, for example, 365–69. As noted in chapter 1, Mark R. Wilson writes persuasively of the professionalization and systemization of procedures initiated by the antebellum Quartermaster’s Department in the U.S. Army in The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

  2. GAC to I. P. Christiancy, November 21, 1862, Box 1, GAC Papers, USMA; Monroe Commercial, May 29, 1862; Talcott E. Wing, ed., History of Monroe County Michigan (New York: Munsell and Co., 1890), 246–48, 260, 268, 277, 566.

  3. GAC to I. P. Christiancy, November 21, 1862, Box 1, GAC Papers, USMA. The contents of Christiancy’s letter must be deduced from GAC’s reply, as no copy has been preserved in publicly accessible archives.

  4. GAC to I. P. Christiancy, November 21, 1862, Box 1, GAC Papers, USMA.

  5. Twelfth Annual Catalogue of the Officers and Pupils of the Young Ladies’ Seminary and Collegiate Institute at Monroe City, Michigan, 1862 (Monroe, Mich.: Edward G. Morton, 1862), 4–7, 10–17; Merington, 46–47; Leckie, 22–23.

  6. Catherine S. Crary, ed., Dear Belle: Letters from a Cadet and Officer to His Sweetheart, 1858–1865 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1965), 215.

  7. Twelfth Annual Catalogue, 7–8; Leckie, 18, 22.

  8. Leckie, 22–23; Merington, 46–47; Shirley A. Leckie, “The Civil War Partnership of Elizabeth and George A. Custer,” in Carol K. Bleser and Lesley J. Gordon, eds., Intimate Strategies of the Civil War: Military Commanders and Their Wives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 178–98 (to be called Leckie, “Partnership”).

  9. Entry for December 17, 1862, Elizabeth Bacon’s Journal, Shirley A. Leckie Notes, Privately Held; Leckie, 25; Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 56–58. Leckie relies on EBC’s journal for this period, as does Frost. Unfortunately this invaluable document, once owned by the Custer family, apparently has passed into the hands of private collectors. Leckie generously made her handwritten notes on this journal available to me, but I found that almost all material of interest in her notes appears in her published work.

  10. Crary, 215; Tully McCrea to GAC, August 13, 1861, GAC Correspondence, LBH. Leckie, “Partnership,” 179, speculates that gossip about his early affair with Mollie had traveled from Ohio to Monroe, which I find to be only remotely possible at best.

  11. GAC to Sister, May 27, 1863, GAC Correspondence, LBH; History of Monroe County, 314; Leckie, 25–26; Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 58. Leckie, “Partnership,” 179, notes that EBC wrote in her journal about GAC and Fifield, “He, like others, takes all she gives which I sometimes think is everything.” Frost, 58, quotes the journal as saying, “John Bulkley told Nan [Darrah] that GAC knew Fan as well as any of the boys do!” See also Merington, 48–49, although, as Leckie warns, Merington’s account incorrectly accepts EBC’s later justification that the Fifield courtship was a fake, concocted to divert gossips from GAC’s real love for EBC.

  12. Leckie, 24–26; Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 59–60.

  13. GBM to Adjutant General, December 9, 1862, Roll 35, GBM Papers, LOC; GAC to Sister, April 13, 1863, GAC Correspondence, LBH; Sears, George B. McClellan, 345.

  14. GAC to Sister, April 13, 1863, GAC Correspondence, LBH; Sears, George B. McClellan, 344–47.

  15. Edwin G. Burrow and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 565, 671–72, 974; GAC to Sister, April 13, 1863, GAC Correspondence, LBH.

  16. Erving E. Beauregard, Bingham of the Hills: Politician and Diplomat Extraordinary (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), 70. See also Tom O’Neil, “Two Men of Ohio: Custer & Bingham,” Research Review: The Journal of the Little Big Horn Associates 8, no. 1 (January 1994): 10–13. Christiancy shared this letter with Bingham, who reported the contents to an old law partner in the letter quoted here. Unfortunately the private letter collection from which this quote is taken has disappeared from public view, as explained to me by the Harrison County Historical Society of Cadiz, Ohio. Note, however, that more than a decade later Christiancy claimed that Blair could not help GAC merely because “the positions were filled.…[We] both regretted that he could not give you a place at the time.” See Isaac P. Christiancy to GAC, February 10, 1875, Folder 11, Box 4, MMP. I am not inclined to credit this recollection.

  17. Extract of Special Orders No. 169, April 13, 1863, and Invoice of Clothing, Camp, and Garrison Equipage, April 22, 1863, GAC Correspondence, LBH.

  18. Stephen W. Sears, Chancellorsville (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 67–73; Edward G. Longacre, Lincoln’s Cavalrymen: A History of the Mounted Forces of the Army of the Potomac (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 2000), 127–28.

  19. Sears, Chancellorsville, 161-62; GAC to GBM, May 6, 1863, Roll 35, GBM Papers, LOC; Longacre, Lincoln’s Cavalrymen, 111, 140. On GAC and Pleasonton, see, for example, a report of GAC at Pleasonton’s side during a skirmish in Virginia on November 4, 1862, in Maine Farmer, November 27, 1862. GAC’s assignment in late April and early May is difficult to pinpoint. The GAC papers in the LBH collection show that he reached Washington no later than April 22, and was issued field equipment. His letter to GBM, May 6, 1863, clearly shows that he was not with the raid under Stoneman, and was written on the stationery of Pleasonton’s division headquarters, yet in it he declared that he commanded a company of the 5th U.S. Cavalry. Of course, he might not have been with his company during the raid. On May 16, 1863, he turned in a set of equipment appropriate for a company upon taking up duties as Pleasonton’s aide-de-camp, as shown in the GAC papers in the LBH collection.

  20. GAC to GBM, May 6, 1863, Roll 35, GBM Papers, LOC; Sears, Chancellorsville, 191, 266, 336–38; McPherson, 638–44.

  21. GAC to GBM, May 6, 1863, Roll 35, GBM Papers, LOC; Charles Francis Adams Jr. to his mother, May 12, 1863, in Ford, ed., A Cycle of Adams Letters, 2: 8.

  22. Longacre, Lincoln’s Cavalrymen, 142, 149–50; Sears, Chancellorsville, 439–440; Receipt of Equipment Received by Quartermaster, May 16, 1863, and Receipt for Equipment Received by Ordnance Officer, May 16, 1863, GAC Correspondence, LBH. On Hooker, Stoneman, and Pleasonton, and the transfer of corps command, see GAC to I. P. Christiancy, May 31, 1863, Box 1, GAC Papers, USMA.

  23. GAC to Sister, May 16, 1863, GAC Correspondence, LBH.

  24. Leckie, 26.

  25. GAC to Sister, May 16 and 27, 1863, GAC Correspondence, LBH.


  26. GAC to Judge I. P. Christiancy, May 17, 1863, insert in Henry Clay Christiancy Diary, Folder 3, Box 1, Christiancy and Pickett Families’ Papers, LOC.

  27. OR, Series 1, Vol. 25, Part 1: 1116 and Vol. 27, Part 3: 97–98; GAC to Sister, May 27, 1863, GAC Correspondence, LBH; GAC to I. P. Christiancy, May 31, 1863, Box 1, GAC Papers, USMA; GAC to James Barnes, June 22, 1864, Folder 9, Box 1, James Barnes Papers, Naval Historical Society Collection, NYHS; Whittaker, 149–51; Wert, 75–76. On the extent of GAC’s authority as aide-de-camp, see also GAC to Capt. Andrew J. Cohen, AAG, Cavalry Corps, May 28, 1863, ni 77, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.

  28. Samuel Harris, Personal Reminiscences (Chicago: Rogerson Press, 1897), 17, 23–24; GAC to I. P. Christiancy, May 31, 1863, Box 1, GAC Papers, USMA. See also GAC to Judge I. P. Christiancy, May 17, 1863, insert, and entry for June 3, 1863, Henry Clay Christiancy Diary, Folder 3, Box 1, Christiancy and Pickett Families’ Papers, LOC.

  29. GAC to I. P. Christiancy, May 31, 1863, Box 1, GAC Papers, USMA; Whittaker, 148–51.

  30. Stephen W. Sears, Gettysburg (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 60–61. The quote was from Hooker’s explanation to Lincoln of his orders to Pleasonton.

  31. OR, Series 1, Vol. 27, Part 1: 1046; Sears, Gettysburg, 64–74; Edward G. Longacre, The Cavalry at Gettysburg: A Tactical Study of Mounted Operations During the Civil War’s Pivotal Campaign, 9 June– 14 July 1863 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 61–64, 69; Wert, 78.

  32. Sears, Gettysburg, 72–74, 97; Longacre, Cavalry at Gettysburg, 66–91.

  33. Longacre, Cavalry at Gettysburg, 103–9; Sears, Gettysburg, 98–99; Whittaker, 157–59.

  34. Alfred Pleasonton to General Farnsworth, June 18, 1863, Alfred Pleasonton Papers, LOC. See also Longacre, Cavalry at Gettysburg, 109, and Lincoln’s Cavalrymen, 172–73, which also recounts Pleasonton’s relationship with Hooker, 147–73.