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

by Stiles, T. J.

  28. Rosa, 140–57; GAC, My Life on the Plains, 34.

  29. Brian C. Pohanka, ed., A Summer on the Plains with Custer’s 7th Cavalry: The 1870 Diary of Annie Gibson Roberts (Lynchburg, Va.: Schroeder Publications, 2004), 8–17, 150–51.

  30. Pohanka, ed., 35–41, 50–51, 56–60, 66–67.

  31. 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]), 373–76, also stresses GAC’s attraction to New York, writing, “He consistently elected to go east rather than west in search of opportunity.” But I argue that he would fail in the role Slotkin ascribes to him, as “an early type of organization man,” whether in New York or in the army. He was attracted to the metropolitan center without truly belonging to it or mastering its ways.

  32. New York Herald, December 16, 1870; Certification, James M. Millan, February 15, 1871, Other Sources, LBH; GAC to William T. Sherman, May 30, 1870, James Calhoun Records, Dr. Lawrence A. Frost Collection, MCLS; Merington, 232–33; Pohanka, ed., 104–05; Wert, 289–93; Leckie, 125–28.

  33. Merington, 232–33.

  34. Merington, 232; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 672; GAC to Edward D. Townsend, March 5, 1871, Personnel Files, CRM; Stiles, First Tycoon, 515.

  35. Stiles, First Tycoon, 505–06.

  36. Stiles, First Tycoon, 127, 363–75.

  37. Stiles, First Tycoon, 370–507.

  38. New York Times, November 10, 1866; Harper’s Weekly, December 15, 1866; Cleveland Leader, January 27, 1867; Round Table, February 9, 1867; Charles Francis Adams Jr., “A Chapter of Erie,” North American Review (July 1869); Stiles, First Tycoon, 365–401, 431–45.

  39. Stiles, First Tycoon, 372–80, 391–98, 487–95.

  40. Stiles, First Tycoon, 398–99, 421–22, 442–43, 449–65, 521–22; David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie (New York: Penguin, 2006), 61–63.

  41. Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 332.

  42. Unknown to GAC, n.d., 1870, Other Sources, LBH; 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, 381, 415–16.

  43. Slotkin, 405–06; “The Stevens Lode,” prospectus, n.d., Broadsides, Clippings, and Memorabilia, LBH; Jairus W. Hall to GAC, November 29, 1870, Other Sources, LBH; Erl H. Ellis and Carrie Scott Ellis, The Saga of Upper Clear Creek (Frederick, Colo.: Jende-Hagan, 1983), 96–102; Alexander N. Easton, The New York Stock Exchange: Its History, Its Contribution to National Prosperity, and Its Relation to American Finance at the Outset of the Twentieth Century (New York: Stock Exchange Historical Company, 1905), 159. On Jairus W. Hall as colonel of the 4th Michigan Infantry Regiment, see OR, Series 1, Vol. 45, Part 2: 584, and Official Army Register of the Volunteer Force of the United States Army for the Years 1861, ’62, ’63, ’64, ’65: Part V, Ohio, Michigan (Washington, D.C.: Adjutant General’s Office, 1865), 298. GAC visited Denver in mid-1870; see entry for September 9, 10, 1870, Winfield S. Harvey Diary, 1868–71, Box 6, Edward S. Godfrey Papers, LOC.

  44. “The Stevens Lode,” prospectus, n.d., Broadsides, Clippings, and Memorabilia, LBH; Jairus W. Hall to GAC, November 29, 1870, L. P. Morton to Joseph Seligman, February 6, 1871, L. P. Morton to GAC, February 9, 1871, Other Sources, LBH; James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, eds., Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 4 (New York: D. Appleton, 1900), 431.

  45. Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 191–92.

  46. Special Orders No. 100, March 11, 1871, Special Orders No. 137, April 5, 1871, Special Orders No. 171, April 27, 1871, Special Orders No. 244, June 21, 1871, Other Sources, LBH; Endorsement, March 20, 1871, GAC to Edward D. Townsend, March 22, 28, April 15, 1871, Personnel Files, CRM.

  47. L. P. Morton to Joseph Seligman, February 6, 1871, Other Sources, LBH; Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 191–92; Leckie, 128.

  48. GAC to EBC, April 13, 1871, Folder 8, Box 4, MMP; Merington, 232–39; Stiles, First Tycoon, 452, 456, 460–65, 508–09, 522; Maury Klein, The Life and Legend of Jay Gould (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 79–122.

  49. New York Times, February 28, March 20, 1861, January 17, 1871, May 14, 1916; Merington, 232–35; Leckie, 125–31.

  50. Merington, 232–39; Leckie, 125–31.

  51. Leckie, 125–26, 128–31; Wert, 291–92.

  52. Leckie, 116; Merington, 238–39; L. P. Morton to GAC, February 9, 1871, Other Sources, LBH.

  53. Entry for September 7, 1870, Pohanka, ed., 97–98; Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 192–93; Leckie, 125–31.

  54. Easton, 192–94; Henry Clews, Twenty-eight Years on Wall Street (New York: Irving Publishing, 1888), 407–24; William W. Fowler, Ten Years in Wall Street: Or, Revelations of Inside Life and Experience on ’Change (Hartford, Conn.: Worthington, Dustin and Co., 1870), 218–21; Adlai E. Stevenson, Something of Men I Have Known (Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1909), 395–96; Charles E. Trevathan, The American Thoroughbred (New York: Macmillan, 1905), 313–14: Stiles, First Tycoon, 383–85.

  55. “The Stevens Lode,” prospectus, n.d., Broadsides, Clippings, and Memorabilia, LBH. For evidence of Travers’s close involvement, see Jairus W. Hall to GAC, June 14, July 15, 1872, Other Sources, LBH; Merington, 238–39. On par value of stock, see Stiles, First Tycoon, 439–40, 479–82.

  56. Stiles, First Tycoon, 383–84, 493–95, 516–17, 526–27; John Jacob Astor to GAC, April 7, 1871, Other Sources, LBH.

  57. John Jacob Astor to GAC, April 7, 1871, Other Sources, LBH; “The Stevens Lode,” prospectus, n.d., Broadsides, Clippings, and Memorabilia, LBH; Easton, 159–60, 269n, 287; Clews, 670–71; Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 191–92.

  58. Merington, 232, 234. Merington appears to have combined more than one letter under a single date, as she often did. She referred to James H. Banker as “Barker,” but I judge this to be a mistake, given my reading of the original documents and Banker’s centrality to Wall Street in 1871. Many writers have followed Merington in her error.

  59. New York World, April 24, 1871, in Columbus Enquirer, April 28, 1871; GAC to EBC, [April] 29th, 1871, Folder 8, Box 4, MMP; Jairus W. Hall to GAC, April 20, 27, and 30, 1871, General Orders No. 4, March 8, 1871, Other Sources, LBH; HED 1, Part 2, 2nd Session, 42nd Congress; Endorsement, March 20, 1871, and GAC to Edward D. Townsend, April 15, 1871, Personnel Files, CRM; Merington, 237.

  60. Philadelphia Inquirer, May 13, 1871; Kalamazoo Gazette, May 19, 1871; GAC to EBC, [April] 29, 1871, Folder 8, Box 4, MMP; GAC to Edward D. Townsend, June 10, 1871, Personnel Files, CRM; Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 192; Leckie, 130–31.

  61. New York Times, July 15, 1871; Stiles, First Tycoon, 414–25.

  62. Francis P. Church to GAC, March 8 [1871], GAC Correspondence, LBH; New York Times, May 24, 1917; Leckie, 131; Merington, 238–39.

  63. Jairus W. Hall to GAC, April 27, 30, 1871, Other Sources, LBH.

  64. Jairus W. Hall to GAC, April 20, 27, 30, 1871, August 8, 1872, Other Sources, LBH; GAC to EBC, [April] 29, 1871, Folder 8, Box 4, MMP.

  65. Jairus W. Hall to GAC, April 24, June 6, 14, July 15, August 8, 1872, Other Sources, LBH. On GAC’s purchase of his stake on credit, see Jairus W. Hall to GAC, August 19, 1874, same collection.

  66. Jairus W. Hall to GAC, July 26, 1872, Other Sources, LBH; Klein, 121–22.

  67. Jairus W. Hall to GAC, August 8, 1872, Other Sources, LBH; Slotkin, 405–06.

  68. Jairus W. Hall to GAC, August 13, 21, September 23, 1872, Theodore H. Lowe to Jairus W. Hall, August 14, 1872, Other Sources, LBH; Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 216. See especially Ellis and Ellis, 96–102, and Jairus W. Hall to William R. Travers, February 23, 1875, Other Sources, LBH.

  69. Hall’s correspondence with GAC disappears until August 19, 1874, when he wrote a letter that makes it clear that GAC paid little atten
tion to the mine, though he maintained a financial interest in it. See Jairus W. Hall to GAC, August 19, 1874, Other Sources, LBH.

  Fourteen: The Writer

  1. Theodore J. Crackel, “Custer’s Kentucky: General George Armstrong Custer and Elizabethtown, Kentucky, 1871–1873,” Filson Club History Quarterly 48 (April 1974): 144–55; GAC to EBC, n.d., Folder 14, Box 4, MMP; Merington, 240–41.

  2. HED 1, Part 2, 2nd Session, 42nd Congress; Brian W. Dippie, ed., Nomad: George A. Custer in Turf, Field and Farm (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), 73–81; See also Elizabethtown, Kentucky, Post 198, Vol. 1, Entry 7: Special Orders, Part 5, RG 393, NA; EBC, Boots and Saddles, 11.

  3. A. B. Cain to Asst. Adj. Gen., Dept. of the South, November 6, 1871, Elizabethtown, Kentucky, Post 198, Vol. 2: 134–35, Entry 1: Letters Sent, Part 5, RG 393, NA.

  4. GAC to Margaret Custer, November 29, 1871, Folder 8, Box 4, MMP.

  5. Special Orders No. 81, August 18, 1871, Elizabethtown, Kentucky, Post 198, Vol. 1: 55–56, Entry 7: Special Orders, Part 5, RG 393, NA; New York Times, September 10, 1874; George C. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865–1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule, and “Legal Lynchings” (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 26.

  6. Anne E. Marshall, Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 34–72; Aaron Astor, Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 156–58, 166, 209–14, 223–30; Wright, 21–25; Patrick A. Lewis, “The Democratic Partisan Militia and the Black Peril: The Kentucky Militia, Racial Violence, and the Fifteenth Amendment, 1870–1873,” Civil War History 56, no. 2 (June 2010): 145–74; Ross A. Webb, “Kentucky: ‘Pariah Among the Elect,’ ” in Richard O. Curry, ed., Radicalism, Racism, and Party Realignment: The Border States During Reconstruction (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), 105–45.

  7. Wright, 27, 48–58; Lewis, “The Democratic Partisan Militia and the Black Peril.”

  8. New York Times, September 10, 1874; Marshall, 63–64.

  9. Foner, 453–54.

  10. Foner, 454–55.

  11. William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 366–69.

  12. Benjamin H. Bristow to Amos T. Akerman, telegram August 8, 1871, G. C. Wharton to Benjamin H. Bristow, September 30, 1871, Returns for the Annual Report of the Attorney General, District of Kentucky, January 1, 1872, Letters Received by the Department of Justice from the State of Kentucky, Roll 1, Microfilm Publication M1362, NA II; HED 1, Part 2, 2nd Session, 42nd Congress; Headquarters Circular, Dept. of the South, April 3, 1871, Elizabethtown, Kentucky, Post 198, Vol. 2: 100, Entry 1: Letters Sent, and Post 198, Entry 3: Telegrams Sent and Received, Part 5, RG 393, NA.

  13. Special Orders Nos. 113, 115, November 12, 16, 1871, Elizabethtown, Kentucky, Post 198, Vol. 1: 77, 78, Special Orders Nos. 77, 83, June 24, July 12, 1872, Elizabethtown, Kentucky, Post 198, Vol. 2: 3, 7, Entry 7: Special Orders, Part 5, RG 393, NA; Returns for the Annual Report of the Attorney General, District of Kentucky, January 1, 1872, G. C. Wharton to AG George H. Williams, March 27, 1872, Letters Received by the Department of Justice from the State of Kentucky, Roll 1, Microfilm Publication M1362, NA II. See also A. B. Cain to Asst. Adj. Gen., Dept. of the South, March 20, 1872; 1st Lt. Ezekiel to Asst. Adj. Gen., Dept. of the South, May 21, 1872, GAC to Asst. Adj. Gen., Dept. of the South, June 29, 1872; GAC to Asst. Adj. Gen., Dept. of the South, July 22, 1872; all in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, Post 198, Vol. 1: 31, 44, 52, 61, Entry 1: Letters Sent, Part 5, RG 393, NA.

  14. Thomas Webb to Ulysses S. Grant, May 12, 1872, Thomas Webb to Ulysses S. Grant, May 12, 1872, W. D. Linkins to Ulysses S. Grant, May 29, 1872, Letters Received by the Department of Justice from the State of Kentucky, Roll 1, Microfilm Publication M1362, NA II.

  15. G. C. Wharton to George H. Williams, August 28, 1873, Special Report of H. C. Whitley to the Department of Justice on Outages in Kentucky, September 24, 1873, Letters Received by the Department of Justice from the State of Kentucky, Roll 1, Microfilm Publication M1362, NA II.

  16. McFeely, 372–73.

  17. Brian W. Dippie, ed., Nomad: George A. Custer in Turf, Field and Farm (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), 86–87. On the Louisville Courier-Journal’s campaign against the KKK, see, for example, the issue of August 25, 1873.

  18. Dippie, ed., 73–81; GAC to EBC, n.d., Thomas Custer to EBC, n.d., Folder 14, Box 4, MMP. The New York Times, October 28, 1872, reported that GAC spent $2,200 on a thoroughbred. See also Elizabethtown, Kentucky, Post 198, Entry 7, Vols. 1–2: Special Orders, Part 5, RG 393, NA.

  19. Paul A. Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 212–16.

  20. New York Herald in Cincinnati Inquirer, January 18, 1872.

  21. Kansas City Journal of Commerce in Chicago Tribune, January 19, 1872; Hutton, 212–16.

  22. Louisville Courier-Journal in Cincinnati Commercial, February 4, 1872; Cincinnati Gazette, February 7, 1872. For an idea of the bond formed between GAC and Alexis, see Baron N. Schilling to EBC, March 25, 1877, Folder 13, Box 4, MMP, which states, “About your heroic husband,…the Grand Duke speaks always in terms of the highest esteem and admiration.”

  23. New York Times, August 23, 1872; New York Tribune, September 3, 1872; Atlanta Constitution, September 3, 1872.

  24. A. E. Smith to Asst. Adj. Gen., Dept. of the South, [?] 1871, Elizabethtown, Kentucky, Post 198, Vol. 1: 109, Entry 2: Letters Sent, Part 5, RG 393, NA; Frost, General Custer’s Libbie, 197.

  25. Margaret E. Custer and James Calhoun Marriage License, March 7, 1872, Margaret E. Custer Calhoun to LAR, April 5, 1872, James Calhoun Records, Dr. Lawrence A. Frost Collection, MCLS.

  26. Endorsement, June 22, 1872, Elizabethtown, Kentucky, Post 198, Vol. 2: 95, Entry 2: Endorsements, Part 5, RG 393, NA; EBC, Following the Guidon, 231–33.

  27. A. B. Cain to Asst. Adj. Gen., Dept. of the South, March 20, 1872; 1st Lt. Ezekiel to Asst. Adj. Gen., Dept. of the South, May 21, 1872, GAC to Asst. Adj. Gen., Dept. of the South, June 29, 1872; GAC to Asst. Adj. Gen., Dept. of the South, July 22, 1872; all in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, Post 198, Vol. 1: 31, 44, 52, 61, Entry 1: Letters Sent, Part 5, RG 393, NA; Special Orders Nos. 77, 83, 106, 112, 118, June 24, July 12, September 12, October 2, 22, 1872, Elizabethtown, Kentucky, Post 198, Vol. 2: 3, 7, 19, 23, 26, 29, Entry 7: Special Orders, Part 5, RG 393, NA. On the Alabama mission, see also John M. Carroll, ed., Custer’s Chief of Scouts: The Reminiscences of Charles A. Varnum (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 35–37.

  28. Samuel R. Graves to GAC, August 18, 1872, J. P. Ainsworth to GAC, January 5, 1873, Other Sources, LBH. On Graves, a member of Parliament for Liverpool, see Monroe Commercial, May 11, 1871.

  29. GAC to D. B. Sackett, Inspector General, U.S. Army, December 30, 1872, Elizabethtown, Kentucky, Post 198, Vol. 1: 83, Entry 1: Letters Sent, Part 5, RG 393, NA.

  30. This sketch of Adelbert Ames, in this paragraph and those that follow, draws from a number of sources, which are cited in detail in Stiles, Jesse James, 141–42, 307–35. These sources include Richard Nelson Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers: A Reinterpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Blanche Butler Ames, ed., Chronicles from the Nineteenth Century: Family Letters of Blanche Butler and Adelbert Ames, vols. 1–2 (Clinton, Mass.: n.p., 1957); Blanche Butler Ames, Adelbert Ames, 1835–1933: General, Senator, Governor (London: MacDonald, 1964); John R. Lynch, Reminiscences of an Active Life: The Reminiscences of John Roy Lynch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Mississippi in 1875: Report of the Select Committee to Inquire into the Mississippi Election of 1875, with the Testimony and Documentary Evidence, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1876), 1–16; Albert T. Morgan, Yazoo: Or, On the Picket Line of Freedom in the South, A Personal Narrative (Washington, D.C.: n.p., 1884); entries for Charles Caldwell and John
R. Lynch in Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 36, 138–39.

  31. Chicago Tribune, December 20, 1871.

  32. Dippie, ed., 73–101.

  33. Edwin G. Burrow and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 683–85; George Palmer Putnam, A Memoir (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), 171; John William Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America, 1741–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3–25. See also Jeffrey L. Pasley, The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001).

  34. Tebbel and Zuckerman, 57–59.

  35. GAC, “My Life on the Plains,” Galaxy (January 1872).

  36. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 172–73. On GAC’s fascination with fossils and geology, see, for example, GAC to EBC, July 19, 1873, Folder 9, Box 4, MMP. For an important analysis of these articles, 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]), 409–12.

  37. GAC, “My Life on the Plains,” Galaxy (January 1872).

  38. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 97–114.

  39. GAC, “My Life on the Plains: Origin and Decay of the Indians,” Galaxy (February 1872). Richard Slotkin writes that GAC “here applies the orthodox tests of racialist science,” The Fatal Environment, 410–11, though I do not believe our analyses are identical.

  40. Independent, January 4, 1872; San Francisco Chronicle, January 30, 1872.