A Terrible Glory

by James Donovan

  To lead these troops, Sheridan could call on a handful of former Civil War Generals who were vying for the few top-ranking positions in the shrunken postwar army. Chief among them were George Crook, Nelson Miles, John Pope, John Gibbon, Eugene Carr, Wesley Merritt, and Ranald Mackenzie. And then there was his favorite, the man who had been his peerless troubleshooter and attack dog (“Sheridan’s pet,” said some) during the latter days of the Civil War; the man who had blazed the “Thieves’ Road” through the Black Hills, the heart of the Lakota holy country: George Armstrong Custer.

  TWO

  “The Boy General of the Golden Lock”

  G. A. Custer, Lieutenant-Colonel Seventh Cavalry, is young, very brave, even to rashness, a good trait for a cavalry officer.

  WILLIAM T. SHERMAN

  George Armstrong Custer’s first charge as a General, on the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg, was a disaster, and he barely managed to escape with his hide (though not his horse). His final charge, against a large Plains Indian village on the banks of a winding river, was also calamitous. Between the two, he led a charmed life, attributable by some to chance — “Custer’s luck,” as he and both friends and enemies termed it — and by others to good fortune’s true components: preparation, analysis, confidence, and decisive action.

  His detractors claimed that he loved nothing better than a charge. They were right. They also accused him of recklessness, of acting without thought or deliberation. They were wrong about that. Custer had an uncanny ability to process what he saw, what he heard, and what he knew — the intelligence available in a situation — and then make a considered decision in an incredibly short amount of time. “He was certainly the model of a light cavalry officer,” said one of General Wesley Merritt’s staff members, “quick in observation, clear in judgment, and resolute and determined in execution.”1 Time and again in the last two years of the Civil War, after his promotion to Brigadier General, his subordinate officers observed “the Boy General” decide on a split-second course of action that turned out to be the right thing to do at the time. It did not take more than a charge or two to make a believer out of nearly anyone. By war’s end, only a few skeptics remained, and they tended to be resentful officers who were older and less successful. The men who served under Custer swore by him and claimed that they would follow him into hell itself.

  FROM THE BEGINNING of his life, Custer never lacked for confidence. Its source, as with anyone, can only be guessed at — what a man is born with, what he develops, what he is accorded — but a good portion of Custer’s share of that attribute likely was his upbringing. A middle child of a large family, he was loved, encouraged, and admired by his parents and all of his siblings.

  Custer was born on December 5, 1839, in the western Ohio hamlet of New Rumley to Emmanuel Custer and his new wife, Maria Kirkpatrick. Both Emmanuel and Maria had been married before (both of their spouses had passed away), and each had brought young children to the marriage. Their first two children conceived together died soon after birth, so George Armstrong — or “Autie,” as his family called him after his own toddler mispronunciation of his middle name — became the instant darling of the blended family and his father’s constant companion.2 Emmanuel Custer was a blacksmith of German stock, from Maryland originally, and a staunch Jacksonian Democrat who loved to talk politics. He and his selfless wife added four more children after Armstrong, and all of them mixed together as one mutually supportive clan. The family that lived in the plain, two-story, clapboard house was a rambunctious, happy one in which horseplay and practical jokes were as common as kisses and conveyed the same message. Armstrong became the new brood’s leader, though his younger brother Tom was always to be found nearby.3 Half sister Lydia Ann, fourteen years his senior, helped her frail mother raise the bunch, and young Autie became especially close to her.

  Emmanuel Custer attended New Rumley militia meetings religiously — he had been elected Captain4 — and often brought along little Armstrong. Clad in a soldier’s uniform made by his mother, Autie would march along with the militia, his father beaming as he went through the manual of arms with his toy musket on his shoulder. The elder Custer had in mind a clergyman’s life for his son, but Armstrong never cottoned to that dream.5 Like most young boys of the day, he was raised on tales of chivalry and knights of old, and thus dreamed of a soldier’s glory.

  The family was far from well-to-do, but Emmanuel was a hardworking provider, and he eventually saved enough to sell his shop and buy an eighty-acre farm when Armstrong was nine. Between chores and school, Armstrong honed his riding skills. A cousin remembered that “he would show what a good horseman he was by riding standing up on the horse and running it around in a circle in the barnyard.”6 At twelve, after finishing the customary six years of basic lessons, Armstrong was sent to live with Lydia, who had married David Reed and moved to Monroe, Michigan, 120 miles northwest. She was lonely for her family, and the Custers would be hard-pressed to pay for any further schooling for Autie. While in Michigan, he attended the well-regarded Stebbins Academy for Boys. He was no scholar, preferring mischief and practical jokes, but he learned to read well enough to devour popular novels in class during lessons, his head buried under his raised desk lid.7 He was usually the leader of any disruptive behavior, though seldom the one to be punished for it.

  In 1855, when Armstrong was fifteen, the Stebbins Academy closed, and he returned to the family farm in New Rumley. Intelligent and curious, he was reluctant to become a farmer. He continued his education at a local school designed to train teachers, and before he was sixteen, he accepted a teaching position at a township seventy-five miles away while continuing his studies. He also began courting young women, particularly Mollie Holland, with whose family he boarded for a while.

  In the spring of 1856, Custer tried to obtain an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. Not only would this serve his fondness for the military, but the academy’s scholastic reputation was excellent, and he would likely be able to land a good position in the private sector after his service. Then sixteen, he wrote to John A. Bingham, the local Congressman, who had the power to make such appointments, usually as rewards for political patronage. Custer had been raised by his father as a die-hard Democrat, and Bingham was a Republican, a member of the new party barely two years old. Armstrong boldly — or foolishly, or both — made his political affiliation clear in his letter. Fortunately for him, Mollie Holland’s father was determined to put a stop to his daughter’s romance, and he likely interceded on Custer’s behalf with Bingham, who happened to be his friend. The Congressman requested the appointment, and it was granted in January 1857. Armstrong’s father gave his permission, borrowed the $200 required for admission, and in June, with the rest of the family, saw him off on a train bound for New York.

  SINCE ITS FOUNDING in 1802, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point had seen its share of lollygaggers. Armstrong Custer would put them all to shame.

  The education a young man received at the Point was as good as or better than that received at most of the young country’s universities. The Corps of Engineers ran the school, and it turned out top engineers — essential to an expanding nation. But the academy’s primary goal was to build military officers out of the rough materials provided. To that end, discipline and drill reigned, and even slight transgressions of the countless rules and codes earned cadets demerits. These demerits, or “skins,” were closely tabulated. If a cadet earned two hundred a year, he would probably be expelled. Custer, whose curly golden hair earned him the nickname “Fanny,” quickly began compiling skins at a record rate. Most of them were for seemingly insignificant infractions, such as tardiness, an untidy uniform, inattention, or boyish conduct. Others were the result of mischief making, and several southern boys in his circle (most of his close acquaintances were from the South) were his coconspirators. One, a Virginia-born Texan named Thomas Rosser, was likely his best friend.

  Though the cause of muc
h annoyance to his instructors, Custer soon became one of the most popular cadets ever to attend the academy. His sunny disposition and love of a good laugh proved magnetic, and though some judged him an unlikely soldier, “we all loved him,” said one classmate.8 Custer ignored rules and schoolwork and reveled in after-dark adventures, some to Benny Havens’s tavern in a small town a mile away. He became a genius at managing his demerits; when he approached the limit, he would straighten up until term’s end. He would also walk endless extra-duty guard tours to remove some minor breaches from his record. Still, by the time he graduated in 1861, he possessed more skins than anyone else in his class. Somewhat inexplicably, he avoided expulsion. When thirty-three cadets were declared academically deficient in January 1861, they were allowed to take a reexamination; only Custer was reinstated. Though Custer gained a reputation for cleverness, it was only for his inventive pranks; his grades were almost never better than average and frequently worse. (One day in Spanish class, he asked the instructor to translate “class is dismissed” into Spanish. When the teacher complied, Custer led his classmates out of the room.) But he read voraciously — mostly martial romances, Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, and James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales — and began a lifelong habit of unceasing correspondence with friends and family that reflected his steady improvement as a writer. (He particularly enjoyed writing poetry to girlfriends back home, for he had acquired a healthy fondness for the fairer sex, judging from the fact that he was treated for gonorrhea in August 1859 after returning to the Point from a two-month furlough.)9

  The school’s rigorous curriculum offered classes in all of the major subjects, such as mathematics, English, history, art, philosophy, and geography, and was supplemented by French, Spanish, ethics, astronomy, dancing, and much more. Military subjects ranged from infantry, artillery, and cavalry tactics to ordnance, gunnery, fortification, swordsmanship, and horsemanship (at which Custer excelled). Despite his mediocre grades, some of the learning stuck with him, and Armstrong was aware of its importance. To his older sister he wrote, “I would not leave this place for any amount of money, for I would rather have a good education and no money than a fortune and be ignorant.”10 Overall, however, he scraped by, noting later, “My career as a cadet had but little to commend it to the study of those who came after me, unless as an example to be carefully avoided.” He seemed content with his class rank, and almost proud of it. He told one classmate that there were only two positions in a class worth noting, and since he was not interested in the “head,” he had aspired to the “foot.”

  Armstrong’s strongest attribute was a valuable one: more than anything else, he excelled at making friends. Upon arriving in 1859, one plebe remembered hearing the crowd around him shout, “Here comes Custer!” and turning to see the object of everyone’s attention — a slim fellow with a gangly walk. “He was beyond a doubt the most popular man in his class,” remembered one friend at the Point. One of his roommates called him “one of the best-hearted and cleverest men that I ever knew,” but added, “The great difficulty is that he is too clever for his own good.”11

  After Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency in November 1860, several cadets departed the Point. Even more resigned when South Carolina seceded on December 20, 1860, to be followed by six other states (Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas) in the next few weeks. In February 1861, the Confederate States of America was formed, and that prompted the departure of most of the remaining southerners, who returned to their home states to take up positions in volunteer units. In all, thirty-two cadets separated from the academy because of the war, almost half of the graduating class.12 Custer, still a staunch Democrat like his father, sympathized with his southern classmates, but he would remain loyal to the oath he had taken more than four years earlier and to his home state, Ohio. When Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861, hostilities seemed imminent. Six weeks later, Confederate cannon bombarded Fort Sumter. The President issued a call for 75,000 volunteers, and the nation entered a civil war.

  At that time, the Point’s course of studies lasted for five years. The class of 1861 graduated several weeks ahead of schedule in early May. Custer’s class of 1862 was supposed to graduate thirteen months later, but there was a great demand for trained officers, even untested ones, to drill the tens of thousands of enlistees. Most believed this would be a short war, maybe even nothing more than one decisive battle. As a result, it was decided that the class of 1862’s course work would be accelerated and its members graduated as soon as possible. On May 6, 1861, they began an abbreviated slate of classes that compressed an entire year’s worth of instruction into little more than a month. The exhausted cadets studied in and out of the classroom almost around the clock, but their hard work was rewarded: they graduated on June 24 as the second class of 1861. There were thirty-four graduates. Final examinations put George Armstrong Custer at the bottom of his class. He earned his worst grades in cavalry tactics.13

  Earlier, Custer had written to the governor of Ohio offering his service in the volunteer army, hoping for a temporary transfer from the regular army and a higher rank.14 Nothing had come of that, and now, appointed a Second Lieutenant along with his classmates, he awaited his orders at the Point as the rest of his class left for their assignments. After a brief delay — he was court-martialed and reprimanded for not breaking up a fight while he was officer of the day — he received his orders and hopped a train for Washington on July 18. He stopped in New York just long enough to buy a uniform, a saber, and a revolver, and he reached the capital two days later, to find the city seething with activity. Arriving at the Adjutant General’s office at the War Department for his orders, he found he was assigned to the Second Cavalry, which was with General Irvin McDowell’s army in Centreville, Virginia. The army was located just east of a steep-banked creek called Bull Run, the likely location of an impending battle.

  The young Lieutenant found a horse in Washington, a near-impossible task (in the process of searching stables, he met an enlisted man he knew from West Point who had an extra mount), and rode most of the night twenty-five miles out to Centreville, joining his unit before dawn. The Second Cavalry spent the next day assigned to support artillery batteries in the rear. From a hill, Custer watched an apparent Yankee victory quickly become a rout when the Rebels, aided by fresh reinforcements in midafternoon, outflanked the Union army. All through the rainy night, he retreated with the rest of the bluecoats back to Washington. It was suddenly clear that the war would last longer than one battle.

  Custer’s company saw no action that day. Although he would later admit to the same fears that almost every soldier feels in his first engagement, Custer comported himself well while directing his men in a rearguard action and was cited for bravery. By all accounts, it appears he took to war like a duck to water. His regiment remained on duty in Washington, and he saw little of the hostilities that continued throughout the year. But he was not idle. West Point graduates were in great demand as staff officers, and Custer served as an aide to several minor Generals, learning leadership skills at their sides. Still, paperwork was not what Custer wanted, and throughout 1862 he volunteered for every chance for combat he could. He participated in the occasional skirmish and reconnaissance mission, and several commendations followed. In May 1862, his fearlessness in crossing a river to scout the enemy’s lines impressed Major General George B. McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac. Little Mac offered him a spot on his staff as aide-de-camp and a brevet, or temporary rank, of Captain.

  Custer seized the opportunity and quickly made himself indispensable to McClellan, whom he had worshipped from afar. The young Captain thrived in his new responsibilities, which sometimes involved acting as his commander’s representative with units in combat and gathering and relaying intelligence, often from reconnaissance he conducted himself. It was valuable experience for the twenty-two-year-old. But when McClellan was relieved of his command less than s
ix months later on November 7, Custer was left without a position. When winter conditions put an end to large-scale military operations on both sides, he spent most of that winter back in Monroe, flirting with the young ladies of the town and having a grand old time. He also met a dark-haired beauty named Elizabeth “Libbie” Bacon, the daughter of a judge who disapproved of the attentions paid her by a lowly blacksmith’s son. From their first meeting on Thanksgiving Day, Armstrong was entranced by her combination of sophistication, vivacity, and sensuousness. He began courting her the next day and continued through the holidays. Libbie was initially cool — she had plenty of better-appointed suitors — but she quickly warmed to him in spite of, or perhaps because of, her father’s opposition. Before the end of the year, they talked of marriage.

  When he returned to the Army of the Potomac in the spring of 1863 — his rank reverted to Lieutenant — the recent Union defeat at Fredericksburg had sparked another change in command. Major General Joseph Hooker had taken over from Major General Ambrose Burnside. Hooker would not last long either, but he did make some important organizational changes, particularly in regard to the cavalry. Up to this point, the Union horsemen had been ill used, performing chiefly in small units as couriers, escorts, and sentries for the infantry, with the occasional short-range reconnaissance mission thrown in. The Rebel cavalry — led by the daring James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart — had literally run rings around the Federal army. Operating as large strike forces, guided by daring and initiative, Southern cavalry units seemed to roam the Virginia countryside at will. But Brigadier General Alfred Pleasonton, a martinet with seventeen years’ dragoon experience, believed that, with the proper organization, training, and leadership, the Yankees could hold their own and more, and he recommended a unified cavalry corps comprising several divisions.