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

by Stiles, T. J.

  35. Sears, Gettysburg, 99–101; Longacre, Lincoln’s Cavalrymen, 172–74; Alfred Pleasonton to General Farnsworth, June 23, 1863, Alfred Pleasonton Papers, LOC.

  36. Sears, Gettysburg, 121–31.

  37. Wert, 80–82; GAC to Judge Christiancy, July 26, 1863, insert in Henry Clay Christiancy Diary, Folder 3, Box 1, Christiancy and Pickett Families’ Papers, LOC; OR, Series 1, Vol. 27, Part 3: 373; Extract of Special Orders No. 175, June 28, 1863, Special Orders No. 2, June 29, 1863, and GAC to Sister, July 26, 1863, GAC Correspondence, LBH.

  38. GAC to Judge Christiancy, July 26, 1863, Christiancy and Pickett Families’ Papers, LOC; GAC to Sister, July 26, 1863, GAC Correspondence, LBH; OR, Series 1, Vol. 27, Part 3: 373, 376. GAC was not, as he believed, the youngest Union general in the war, but he was certainly one of the youngest.

  39. GAC to Sister, July 26, 1863, GAC Correspondence, LBH.

  40. Merington, 58–61; Gregory J. W. Urwin, Custer Victorious: The Civil War Battles of General George Armstrong Custer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 57–58; Whittaker, 169. My analysis echoes that of Wert, to whom much credit belongs, 82–83.

  41. Crary, 214.

  42. George R. Agassiz, ed., Meade’s Headquarters, 1863–1865: Letters of Colonel Theodore Lyman, from the Wilderness to Appomattox (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1922), 14.

  43. Entry for June 29, 1863, Henry Clay Christiancy Diary, Folder 3, Box 1, Christiancy and Pickett Families’ Papers, LOC.

  44. Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 62–115.

  45. Of the many studies of the attitudes of average soldiers, perhaps the best and most accessible is James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). I base my characterization not only on McPherson’s book but on conclusions drawn from soldiers’ letters and diaries, newspaper accounts, memoirs, and other sources I have read over the years.

  46. Wert, 85–87; Longacre, Cavalry at Gettysburg, 172–78; Edward G. Longacre, Custer and His Wolverines: The Michigan Cavalry Brigade, 1861–1865 (Conshohocken, Pa.: Combined Publishing, 1997), 132–38; Eric J. Wittenberg, ed., At Custer’s Side: The Civil War Writings of James Harvey Kidd (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2001), 6–11; John Robertson, ed., Michigan in the War: Revised Edition (Lansing, Mich.: W. S. George and Co., 1882), 583. Quote from Victor E. Comte to Elise, July 7, 1863, Victor E. Comte Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich. Comte’s quote refers specifically to another battle a few days later, but he was describing the general effect of the Spencer rifle on the Confederates. I have substituted “reload” for “charge” in the translation of Comte’s letter, which was written originally in French.

  47. William E. Miller, “The Cavalry Battle Near Gettysburg,” B&L 3: 397–406 (quote on 399).

  48. Charles Francis Adams Jr. to his mother, May 12, 1863, Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861–1865, vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), 3–5.

  49. Longacre, Cavalry at Gettysburg, 198–201; Longacre, Custer and His Wolverines, 138–42; Michigan in the War, 586–87; Wert, 88–89. Troy Hartman, “Hunterstown: North Cavalry Field of Gettysburg,” in John P. Hart, ed., Custer and His Times: Book Five (Dexter, Mich.: Little Big Horn Associates, 2008), 25–34, argues that GAC charged merely to bait a trap, to draw the Confederate counterattack into the fire of his dismounted men and artillery. I find no evidence of planning a trap at Hunterstown. Deploying a supporting line on foot was standard tactical doctrine by July 1863. And his charge at the head of a handful of men would have seemed suicidal, as it nearly was, if he had had any notion of how many Confederates he faced.

  50. Urwin, 68; Longacre, Cavalry at Gettysburg, 222–25.

  51. GAC’s report, August 22, 1863, in Michigan in the War, 582–84; OR, Series 1, Vol. 27, Part 1: 956–57; Longacre, Cavalry at Gettysburg, 222–25. Cress’s Ridge is also known as Cress Ridge.

  52. GAC’s report, August 22, 1863, in Michigan in the War, 582–84; OR, Series 1, Vol. 27, Part 1: 956–57; Longacre, Cavalry at Gettysburg, 222–25; McPherson, 661–62.

  53. GAC’s report, August 22, 1863, in Michigan in the War, 582–84; OR Series 1, Vol. 27, Part 1: 956–57; Longacre, Cavalry at Gettysburg, 225–39; Longacre, Custer and His Wolverines, 147–54; Wert, 91–95.

  54. William E. Miller, “The Cavalry Battle Near Gettysburg,” B&L 3: 397–406.

  55. GAC’s report, August 22, 1863, in Michigan in the War, 582–84; OR, Series 1, Vol. 27, Part 1: 956–57; Longacre, Cavalry at Gettysburg, 225–39; Longacre, Custer and His Wolverines, 147–54; Wert, 91–95.

  56. James H. Kidd to Father and Mother, July 9, 1863, James H. Kidd Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich.

  57. GAC’s report, August 22, 1863, in Michigan in the War, 582–84; Miller, “The Cavalry Battle Near Gettysburg”; OR, Series 1, Vol. 27, Part 1: 956–57; Longacre, Cavalry at Gettysburg, 225–39; Longacre, Custer and His Wolverines, 147–54; Wert, 91–95.

  58. GAC’s report, August 22, 1863, in Michigan in the War, 582–84; OR, Series 1, Vol. 27, Part 1: 956–57; GAC to Sister, May 27 and July 26, 1863, GAC Correspondence, LBH; James H. Kidd to Father and Mother, July 9, 1863, James H. Kidd Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich.; Longacre, Cavalry at Gettysburg, 225–39; Longacre, Custer and His Wolverines, 147–54; Wert, 91–95.

  59. GAC’s report, August 22, 1863, in Michigan in the War, 582–84.

  60. Longacre, Custer and His Wolverines, 154. See also OR, Series 1, Vol. 27, Part 1: 186. GAC’s brigade’s aggregate losses in the Gettysburg Campaign as a whole, 355, compare to fifty-six for Gregg’s entire division.

  61. McPherson, 662.

  62. Quoted in Wert, 102.

  Five: The Women

  1. LAR’s obituary in the Monroe Democrat, July 6, 1906, notes that she was “never very robust.…Always deeply religious, quiet, and unostentatious.…She cared little for the world’s pleasure, but found her chief enjoyment in church.” On the role of women as moral and religious guardians, see, for example, Nina Silber, Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 6, 103. For an image of LAR, see Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 31.

  2. LAR to GAC, August 13, 1862, Folder 21, Box 1, LAFCC; Whittaker, 122.

  3. LAR to GAC, June 23, 1863, Folder 11, Box 2, LAFCC; Monroe Democrat, July 6, 1906.

  4. GAC to Sister, May 16, 1863, GAC Correspondence, LBH; LAR to GAC, June 23, 1863, Folder 11, Box 2, LAFCC.

  5. LAR to GAC, Jul 25, 1863, Folder 11, Box 2, LAFCC; Leckie, 31. Whittaker, 156–59, describes the picture and reproduces the engraving made from the sketch.

  6. Leckie, 31.

  7. LAR to GAC, Jul 25, 1863, Folder 11, Box 2, LAFCC. David Reed seems to have derived much of his income from farming. He owned a two-horse carriage and had a live-in female domestic servant and a live-in male farmhand. The 1860 census listed him as a “farmer” with $5,000 worth of real estate and a personal estate valued at $3,000. By contrast Daniel Bacon, listed as a “miller,” had real estate worth $17,500 and the same-sized personal estate, along with a live-in domestic servant from Germany. See returns for 1st Ward, City of Monroe, Michigan, 1860 U.S. Census, and Tax Assessment List, Division 10, District 1, Michigan, 1862, Internal Revenue Bureau, NA.

  8. LAR to GAC, August 5, 1863, Folder 11, Box 2, LAFCC.

  9. LAR to GAC, August 5 and 24, 1863, Folder 11, Box 2, LAFCC.

  10. LAR to GAC, August 5 and 24, 1863, Folder 11, Box 2, LAFCC; GAC to LAR, July 25, 1863, GAC Correspondence, LBH.

  11. Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 62.

  12. Nettie Humphrey [Greene] to EBC, December 31, 1863, December 31, 1864, Folder 8, Box 2, LAFCC; Leckie, 6, 16.

  13. Leckie makes this point after
a thorough reading of EBC’s now-unavailable diary—her uncertainty, self-doubt, desire to remain carefree, and fears “that she was useless and idle.” She called herself “a little girl.” See Leckie, 28–29, 36.

  14. Leckie, 6–9; Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 5, 15.

  15. Leckie, 7, 14–15.

  16. Leckie, 9–10.

  17. DSB to GAC, October 22, 1863, Folder 1, Box 1, LAFCC.

  18. Leckie, 9–11, 15–16; Merington, 38; Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 31, 37.

  19. DSB to GAC, October 22, 1863, Folder 1, Box 1, LAFCC; Leckie, 16–20; Governor’s Message to the Legislature of the State of Michigan, in Session, January 7, 1868 (Lansing, Mich.: John A. Kerr, 1863), 58–60.

  20. EBC to Parents, March 20 [1864], Folder 14, Box 4, MMP; Leckie, 35.

  21. Leckie, 14, 20–21.

  22. Leckie, 19–20; Silber, 6, 44–46, 19, 168–72.

  23. Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 39–41; Leckie, 21–22.

  24. Leckie, 21–22.

  25. New York Herald, May 16, 1864, reprinted in Chicago Tribune, May 20, 1864.

  26. Leckie, 22–23; Nettie Humphrey to EBC, December 31, 1863, Folder 8, Box 2, LAFCC.

  27. Leckie, 24–25.

  28. DSB to GAC, October 22, 1863, Folder 1, Box 1, NHG to GAC, August 24, 1863, and Nettie Humphrey [Greene] to EBC, December 31, 1863, Folder 8, Box 2, LAFCC.

  29. Entry for December 17, 1862, Elizabeth Bacon’s Journal, Shirley A. Leckie Notes, Privately Held; Leckie, 25; Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 56–58, 62–63.

  30. Leckie, 25; Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 59.

  31. Leckie, 25–26.

  32. Leckie, 26. My account of GAC and EBC’s budding relationship tracks Leckie’s closely. Not only has she written a very fine biography of EBC, but she had access to primary sources that are no longer publicly accessible, especially EBC’s diary, as mentioned previously in the notes.

  33. Leckie, 27, 36; Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 60; Reynolds, 72. On free-love advocacy, see, for example, Austin Kent, Free Love: Or, a Philosophical Demonstration of the Non-Exclusive Nature of Connubial Love (Hopkinton, N.Y.: Published by the author, 1857).

  34. Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 62–63; Leckie, 30–32.

  35. Monroe Commercial, July 2, 1863.

  36. Leckie, 30–32; Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 72–74.

  37. Monroe Commercial, July 23, 1863.

  38. Leckie, 30–32; Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 72–74. For a photograph of David Reed, see Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 32.

  39. Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2003), 24–26, 31; Nancy P. Allan, “Standing Up for Liberty: Eliza Brown Davison and the Custers,” Research Review: The Journal of the Little Bighorn Association 17, no. 1 (winter 2003): 2–12; 1860 United States Census: Rappahannock County, Virginia, 55, and Slave Schedules, 19.

  40. 1880 United States Census: District No. 4, Village of Athens, Athens County, Ohio, 17; Allan, “Standing Up”; Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 160–61, 182–83.

  41. Stevenson, 176–87, 197; Deborah Gray White, “Female Slaves: Sex Roles and Status in the Antebellum Plantation South,” in Catherine Clinton, ed., Half Sisters of History: Southern Women and the American Past (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 56–75.

  42. Hahn, 16–36, 41–42; Stevenson, 228–29.

  43. Hahn, 40–42; Stevenson, 227–39; White, “Female Slaves.”

  44. Stevenson, 160–61, 203, 205, 227–39, 251.

  45. White, “Female Slaves”; Hahn, 14–19; Reynolds, 45–48; EBC, Tenting on the Plains, 40. See also Allan, “Standing Up.”

  46. Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York: Penguin, 1988), 162–64; Allan, “Standing Up.”

  47. Hahn, 15, 41; James M. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted During the War for the Union (New York: Pantheon, 1965), 62.

  48. Victor E. Comte to Elise, July 30, 1863, Victor E. Comte Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich.

  49. Reporting to Pleasonton, GAC noted the precise time that the division occupied Amissville; OR, Series 1, Vol. 27, Part 3: 753.

  50. EBC, Tenting on the Plains, 40–41. At different times Eliza Brown answered the question of why she fled the Pierce farm with a different emphasis, stressing the lack of food after armies marched through. The two answers are hardly incompatible, but I believe she had learned to tailor her responses to the expectations of white audiences. The exasperation expressed in this quote strikes me as authentic.

  51. Reynolds, 45; Hahn, 22. Glenn David Brasher argues effectively that the insistence of the enslaved on seizing freedom altered the course of the war and pressed the issue of emancipation to the point where it became federal policy; see Brasher’s The Peninsula Campaign & the Necessity of Emancipation: African Americans and the Fight for Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

  52. Edward G. Longacre, Lincoln’s Cavalrymen: A History of the Mounted Forces of the Army of the Potomac (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 2000), 203–06.

  53. Victor E. Comte to Elise, July 7, 1863, Victor E. Comte Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich.

  54. Eric J. Wittenberg, J. David Petruzzi, and Michael F. Nugent, One Continuous Fight: The Retreat from Gettysburg and the Pursuit of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, July 4–14 (New York: Savas Beatie, 2008), 3–121; Longacre, Lincoln’s Cavalrymen, 208–12; Longacre, Custer and His Wolverines, 156–58.

  55. Victor E. Comte to Elise, July 16, 1863, Victor E. Comte Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich.; Longacre, Custer and His Wolverines, 160–64.

  56. James H. Kidd to Father and Mother, July 16, 1863, James H. Kidd Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich.; Longacre, Custer and His Wolverines, 164–65.

  57. Longacre, Custer and His Wolverines, 164–65; Wittenberg et al., One Continuous Fight, 284–97; Victor E. Comte to Elise, July 16, 1863, Victor E. Comte Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich., and James H. Kidd to Father and Mother, July 16, 1863, James H. Kidd Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich.

  58. OR, Series 1, Vol. 27, Part 1: 1001–04 and Part 3: 741, 753–54; Victor E. Comte to Elise, July 20, 1863, Victor E. Comte Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich.

  59. OR, Series 1, Vol. 27, Part 1: 1001–03 and Part 3: 765–66. Longacre, in Custer and His Wolverines, 178–80, suggests that GAC hoped to delay the Confederates in time for an infantry attack, which never materialized. Even if this is accurate, GAC does not appear to have coordinated his movements with any other commander.

  60. GAC to LAR, July 26, 1863, LBH; OR, Series 1, Vol. 27, Part 3: 765–66. On the struggle to refit—in particular, to remount—the cavalry after the Gettysburg Campaign, see Starr 2: 3–19.

  61. OR, Series 1, Vol. 27, Part 3: 753–54; Victor E. Comte to Elise, July 20 and July 30, 1863, Victor E. Comte Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich. I have slightly altered the translation from French in the Comte Papers to provide a more idiomatic reading.

  62. OR, Series 1, Vol. 27, Part 1: 1001–02, Part 3: 830, Vol. 29, Part 2: 38–39, 63; James I. Christiancy to Father, August 21, 1863, Folder 4, Box 1, Christiancy and Pickett Families’ Papers, LOC; Longacre, Custer and His Wolverines, 180–81. On the guerrilla war in Missouri, see Part II of Stiles, Jesse James.

  63. GAC to John Bulkley, August 2, 1863, Folder 9, Box 1, GAC Collection, MCHMA.

  64. GAC to Isaac P. Christiancy, July 26, 1863, insert in Henry Clay Christiancy Diary, Christiancy and Pickett Families’ Papers, LOC; IPC to GAC, November 8, 1863, Folder 3,
and James J. David to S. Thomas, August 4, 1863, Folder 4, Box 1, LAFCC.

  65. OR, Series 1, Vol. 27, Part 1: 1004 and Vol. 27, Part 3: 775, 792. EBC later recalled hearing Eliza Brown say that she met GAC at Amissville in August; this appears unlikely from official records of the division’s movement. See EBC, Tenting on the Plains, 40–41.

  66. EBC, Tenting on the Plains, 40–42; Hahn, 73; Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 22–26, 47. EBC’s writings, most dating to two or more decades after these events, are our main source on Eliza Brown. It appears that she attempted to reproduce Brown’s speech accurately, and so quotations of Brown from EBC’s work generally will not standardize spelling. However EBC, like many nineteenth-century white writers who attempted phonetic transcriptions of African American speech, inexplicably changed the spelling of some words in a way that did not change their pronunciation—“cum” for “come,” “sez” for “says,” “wuz” for “was,” “wasen’t” for “wasn’t,” to name some examples. Since such spellings strike me as both uninformative and egregiously condescending, I have standardized them in such cases.

  67. Hahn, 73–74. Downs, 4–8, 22–28, 46–47, discusses the disruption of support networks caused by mass escapes.

  68. EBC, Tenting on the Plains, 40–42; Reynolds, 6, 44–45; Downs, 46–47.

  69. EBC, Tenting on the Plains, 40–42; Reynolds, 45.

  70. EBC, Tenting on the Plains, 40–42.

  71. Reynolds, 48, 59, 70.

  72. EBC, Tenting on the Plains, 40–42. Decades later, Frederick Benteen would claim that he had heard that GAC did sleep with Brown. Benteen did not know GAC during the Civil War, and hated him at the time he made this claim. His comments cannot be accepted as evidence.

  73. OR, Series 1, Vol. 27, Part 1: 1004 and Part 3: 792; Philadelphia Inquirer, quoted in Monroe Commercial, July 23, 1863; Victor E. Comte to Elise, August 1863, Victor E. Comte Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich.; Bruce Catton, The Army of the Potomac: A Stillness at Appomattox (New York: Anchor Books, 1990 [orig. pub. 1953]), 3–5; Longacre, Lincoln’s Cavalrymen, 225–26.