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

by Stiles, T. J.

  Custer visited a military-supply store to buy the equipment expected of a second lieutenant in the United States Cavalry—“sabre, revolver, sash, spurs, etc.,” as he later listed them. A few hours later he returned to the Hudson riverfront to take a ferry to the railroad terminals in New Jersey. The British journalist William Russell made the same trip in 1861, “to a large wooden shed covered with inscriptions respecting routes and destinations on the bank of the river, which as far as the eye could see, was bordered by similar establishments.” Custer crossed the river and boarded a passenger car on the evening train to Washington—“with a double row of most uncomfortable seats, and a passage down the middle,” as Russell described one, “with an immense iron stove in the centre of the car.” Any attempt to sleep was interrupted by the train bell, the conductor, and boys shouting, “N’York Heddle!”—referring to the copies of the New York Herald they had for sale, along with gumdrops, tobacco, apples, and cakes.3

  “I found the cars crowded with troops, officers and men, hastening to the capital,” Custer later wrote. “At each station we passed on the road at which a halt was made, crowds of citizens…received us with cheers and cheered us in parting.”

  He traveled all night, changing trains twice in the dark. At dawn on Saturday, April 20, he arrived in Washington. The view out the left window was dominated by the Capitol, enthroned in marble on a hilltop, scaffolding and cranes clustered around the unfinished dome. But most of this drab city consisted of “fields studded with wooden sheds and huts,” Russell wrote, “rudimentary streets of small red brick houses, and some church-spires among them.” Specialized to serve the seasonal gathering of Congress, home to very few year-round bureaucrats, Washington was dominated by hotels, restaurants, boardinghouses, and barbershops. Like a bellows, it expanded when congressmen arrived and contracted when they left for their many months in recess.4

  Once off the train Custer saw slaves everywhere, driving teams of horses, cooking and serving food, shaving and clipping in barbershops, laboring on the Capitol itself. He had never been in so Southern a place, with such a proportionally large black population. Washington was his gateway not only to the Civil War, but also to a new stage in his life, defined by slavery and its consequences.5

  He went first to the Ebbitt House, a well-regarded hotel where he expected to find some of his classmates. At the front desk he learned that his old roommate James Parker had checked in. Custer went to his door and woke him up.6

  Parker told him that the federal army of hastily assembled volunteers, under the field command of Gen. Irwin McDowell, had already marched south from the capital. Any moment they expected to hear of a battle with the rebel army under Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard, posted near Manassas, Virginia. Custer asked what he planned to do. Parker was from Missouri, a border state divided in its loyalties, and had supported secession. He pointed to an official document lying on a table. It was an order from the War Department, dismissing 2nd Lt. James P. Parker from the army “for having tendered his resignation in the face of the enemy.” The two friends said good-bye. Parker set out for Richmond to accept a commission as a Confederate officer, and Custer reported to the adjutant general’s office.7

  There he waited in “bewilderment,” he recalled, as officials bustled about and messengers rushed in and out with stacks of overstuffed envelopes. It was after midnight when the adjutant general finally called him forward. The officer began to tell a subordinate to write out orders for the young West Pointer, then turned back and asked, “Perhaps you would like to be presented to General Scott, Mr. Custer?”

  Custer was the most junior officer in the Regular Army of the United States, having graduated at the bottom of the most recent West Point class. Yet here he was being asked if he would like to meet General in Chief Winfield Scott. Yes, Custer recalled answering, “joyfully.”

  He followed the officer into another room and saw General Scott “seated at a table over which were spread maps and other documents.” Congressmen gathered around it, discussing the approaching battle near Manassas. Scott was old, especially by the standards of 1861, but still impressive. A hero of the War of 1812, mastermind of the daring campaign that won the Mexican War, he was seventy-five and infirm, six feet five inches tall and weighing some 300 pounds. Pleased with fame, accustomed to others’ deference, he was almost self-consciously lofty in his fine double-breasted uniform with huge gold epaulets that seemed to be the size of dinner plates.8

  “General, this is Lieutenant Custer of the Second Cavalry; he has just reported from West Point,” the adjutant general said (as Custer later recalled).

  “Welcome, my young friend, I am glad to welcome you to the service at this critical time. Our country has need of the strong arms of all her loyal sons in this emergency,” Scott said. The adjutant general informed him that Custer was assigned to Company G of the 2nd Cavalry, now with McDowell’s army. “Now what can I do for you?” Scott asked. Did he want to join other West Pointers in training volunteers, “or is your desire for something more active?” Custer wanted to join his regiment and face the enemy. “A very commendable resolution, young man,” the general replied.

  “Go and provide yourself with a horse if possible,” Scott said, “and call here at seven o’clock this evening. I desire to send some dispatches to General McDowell.”

  Custer hurried out onto the street. He went from stable to stable, but found them empty. It seemed as if every quadruped had been taken by the army or congressmen going to see the battle. With a regiment to reach, a battle to catch, and messages to carry from General Scott himself, Custer feared he would fail at everything for lack of a horse.

  Dejected, he walked down Pennsylvania Avenue, where he encountered an acquaintance. He served in an artillery battery led by Capt. Charles Griffin, now with McDowell’s army, and had been sent back to Washington to retrieve a horse. The man agreed to let Custer ride the horse back to the army with him and, reluctantly, to wait until Custer gathered Scott’s dispatches at seven o’clock.

  That evening they rode their horses across the Long Bridge over the Potomac and headed south. Hours passed in the darkness. Custer’s friend described the camp of tens of thousands of Union soldiers near Centreville, Virginia, and an opening skirmish at Blackburn’s Ford. Sometime after two in the morning they glimpsed the scattered campfires and dim shapes that indicated the penumbra of the Union army. Soldiers were already awake, some aligning into columns, some “standing in small groups,” Custer recalled, “smoking and chatting,” others lying down on the ground, fully dressed, napping. Custer guided his horse through the mass of bodies, following his comrade to General McDowell’s headquarters.

  They arrived at a cluster of tents, “near which a large log fire was blazing,” Custer wrote. He reluctantly handed over his dispatches to a staff officer rather than McDowell himself, whom he glimpsed through an open tent flap. Everyone in Washington was waiting for news from the army, Custer told the officer. “Well, I guess they will not have to wait much longer,” he replied. “The entire army is under arms, and moving to attack the enemy today.”

  Custer sat by the general’s fire and ate a breakfast of steak, corn bread, and coffee. It was the last meal he would have for another thirty hours.9 He remounted, apparently keeping his borrowed horse, and searched for his company under a clear night sky, the moon almost full, its blue light throwing shadows on the dark ground. Finally he found his unit and introduced himself to the other officers.10

  Slowly, agonizingly, the army moved forward as the sun rose. All but a few soldiers were volunteers; many had enlisted for just three months of service. Scarcely trained, often led by equally inexperienced officers, they took hours to sort themselves out on the marching route and get into attacking position.

  This was a fight for infantry and artillery, not cavalry. Custer and the other horsemen held back as the lines advanced. “We could hear the battle raging a short distance in our front,” he recalled. “A staff officer of Gen. McDowel
l’s came galloping down to where the cavalry was waiting, saying that the General desired us to move across the stream and up the ridge beyond, where we were to support a battery.”

  It was Griffin’s Battery. Up on Henry House Hill above the cavalry, the artillerymen—including Custer’s friend—rolled their heavy dark cannons on great wooden wheels into line with the federal infantry and opened fire.

  Roar of battle is a cliché, but roar is too weak a word. This was the crackling of thousands of muskets, the booming of dozens of cannons, not to mention countless bugles and drums, shouting officers, creaking caissons (two-wheeled carts carrying artillery ammunition), tramping feet, and thumping hooves. Above the din, Custer noticed “the strange hissing and exceedingly vicious sound of the first cannon shot I heard,” as solid metal balls passed over their targets and flew near the cavalry behind the hill’s crest. Custer had often heard guns fired in practice at West Point, “but a man listens with changed interest when the direction of the balls is toward instead of away from him.”11

  The cavalry did not stand by the artillery. Instead, the 11th and 14th New York infantry regiments hustled up the hill—the 11th wearing the baggy red pants of Zouaves, patterned after Algerian troops serving in the French army and something of a craze in America in 1861. The federal line moved forward; the Confederates seemed to be falling back. The New Yorkers suffered from enemy fire, but another regiment approached from the right, apparently coming to aid Griffin’s Battery.

  The oncoming troops were rebels. They halted and fired. The volley killed scores of horses, necessary to haul the guns, and decimated Griffin’s men. In Custer’s first battle, the battery he was assigned to protect was virtually wiped out before he could fire a shot or draw his saber. As for his benefactor, the man who had given him a horse and guided him to the front, his fate is unknown. Custer never mentioned him again.12

  The battle turned. Union soldiers panicked and fled, clogging the roads and fords across the stream. They had lost.

  —

  IN THE ENSUING DAYS, the young second lieutenant rewrote the story of disaster. In August, he wrote a twenty-four-page letter to his old roommate Tully McCrea, who was still at West Point. He narrated his long journey to the banks of Bull Run. Instead of describing the late arrival of a passive witness, he told a saga of courage in the face of peril. His post behind the line became a point of great danger. “He belonged to the cavalry that was General McDowell’s bodyguard,” McCrea wrote, describing Custer’s account, “and consequently was in the thickest of the fight.” The Union rout became Custer’s personal rear-guard action. He said he was last to leave the field, and narrowly escaped being cut off and captured. As his company retreated, he rode behind the men, between their backs and the enemy, to reassure and inspire them.13

  These claims range from flatly untrue to greatly exaggerated. And it’s doubtful that the professional soldiers of a Regular Army regiment were moved by being trailed off the field by a brand-new second lieutenant who had joined them just before the battle (called Bull Run by the federals and Manassas by the Confederates). He did not even have command of his company; he was a “subaltern,” as he called himself. Enlisted men knew which officers deserved respect. They knew nothing about Custer.14

  In many ways, Custer was living an adventure story. Luck rescued him from his drab existence in rural Ohio; luck saved him from expulsion from West Point; and luck preserved him at his court-martial. Instead of punishment, he met the nation’s commanding general, found a horse against all odds, delivered urgent dispatches to the army in the field, and rode toward the battle. But there the adventure ended. He did not even see most of the fighting, but simply listened. So Custer assumed authorship over his own tale. First in letters, later in magazine articles and books, he set out to shape and reshape his life, to impose his imagined self over a reality that was remarkable enough. He would not be content until others regarded him as he wished to regard himself.

  —

  ON MONDAY MORNING, July 22, after retreating all night, Custer’s regiment finally reached Alexandria, Virginia, just across the Potomac from Washington. Custer had hardly slept since leaving West Point almost four days earlier. He had been in the saddle with only short breaks since Saturday evening. He slid to the ground and collapsed in the mud under a tree, where he slept for hours in a steady rain. “When he was awakened he was so stiff and sore that he could scarcely move,” McCrea wrote.15

  Defeat at Bull Run destroyed the popular notion of a quick war. A new call went out for volunteers to serve for three years. The army based in Washington was reorganized and retrained.*1 Custer’s 2nd U.S. Cavalry Regiment was redesignated the 5th, though the personnel remained the same. Not that Custer got to know the personnel. Seeing an opportunity, he joined the staff of Brig. Gen. Philip Kearny, who commanded an infantry brigade of volunteers.16

  Custer’s decision surprised some of his friends, including Mariah, the young woman back at West Point who believed she was his fiancée. He had kept her belief alive, sending her a letter about Bull Run and Kearny’s staff even before he wrote to McCrea. Mariah was appalled. Accustomed to the company of West Point cadets and Regular Army officers, she had “a holy horror for the volunteers,” McCrea told Custer. The sentiment was reflected even among the recruits themselves. “If there was anything we volunteers early in the war had great reverence for,” one wrote, “it was a ‘regular’ officer. We looked on them as superior beings.”17

  This was a natural cultural divide between veterans and greenhorns, professionals and amateurs, but it was also an organizational distinction. As mentioned earlier, the Regular Army remained a separate institution from the U.S. Volunteers, who comprised essentially a second national army, existing only for the duration of the war. Regular officers retained their ranks in a separate roster, attached to specific Regular regiments as before the war. Volunteer officers held rank in their own organization. The system would grow rather bewildering as more and more Regular Army officers began to serve in Volunteer units, taking on a second rank—a Volunteer rank. One could be simultaneously a Regular Army captain and a major general of Volunteers; when the war ended and the Volunteers were mustered out of service, he would still be a captain but no longer a major general. Custer was a second lieutenant of the 5th U.S. Cavalry, but he would spend very little time with his unit.

  Proud of his West Point education, Custer was nevertheless ambitious. As he previously explained his request to serve with Ohio’s volunteers, “I could get a much higher office [than] in the regular army.”18 But he had hardly taken up his duties with Kearny when he fell sick—so sick that he believed he would die. Though the nature of the illness remains obscure, he made a reasonable supposition. Disease slaughtered far more Civil War soldiers than battle, the result of concentrating tens of thousands of men from all over the country in unsanitary camps. He was fortunate to depart the military hospital in October and return home on leave. For the first time in two years, he went to see his parents, now living in Wood County in northwest Ohio. He narrowly missed his younger brother Tom; just sixteen, Tom had joined the army and departed for a battlefront in the West.

  Armstrong recovered sufficiently to travel to Michigan and spend several weeks with Ann and her husband, David Reed. Now that his parents had left New Rumley, Monroe was the only hometown with which Custer still had close ties. He found the place transformed by the war. It was still home to a few thousand people, living on crisscrossing streets near the Raisin River. But many men were gone, serving in volunteer regiments, while their families supported themselves as best they could.

  As Custer recuperated at Ann’s house, he called on friends who had remained at home in the war. One night, after he went out with them, he returned to his sister’s house visibly drunk. Ann was appalled. The next day he swore he would never drink again.

  His avowal was not unusual. The early United States was an “alcoholic republic,” as the historian W. J. Rorabaugh has called it. That
gave rise to a countertrend. “A zestful, hearty drinking people became the world’s most zealous abstainers,” Rorabaugh writes. Temperance societies distributed millions of pamphlets and held public signing ceremonies for “the pledge”—the oath to abstain from alcohol. At West Point, a cadet could be excused for a drinking offense—grounds for expulsion—if his entire class took the pledge. Virtually every class in the 1850s did so.19

  But the incident was a painful reminder that he inhabited different worlds simultaneously. His behavior would have won him esteem within the stone-walled barracks at West Point; quite the opposite on the tree-lined streets of a quiet village, where it could be witnessed by his sister and uncle and brother-in-law and niece and nephews and countless others he valued. Whatever self-examination and self-discipline went into his pledge, it was precipitated by shame. His self-awareness was almost always couched in his sense of himself in society; and his standing in Monroe mattered to him. His letters itemized the many local elders he wrote to, the friends with whom he exchanged photographs, the young people he hoped would remember him. He yearned to be accepted, to be admired, to belong. If alcohol interfered, he would do without it.

  As he made his way back to Washington, his train pulled into Cleveland, where he would lay over until the next morning. He left his trunk at the depot and checked into a hotel, which was surprisingly crowded. A friend from West Point, now captain of a company posted in the city, came over and shook his hand. He insisted that Custer come to a dinner and grand ball being held that night at the same hotel. Custer agreed.

  It was nearly midnight before the meal ended and the band began to play. Custer met “several pretty ladies,” he wrote, “and danced nearly every dance until daylight.” As he was chatting with his friend, he spotted a familiar-looking man in a sergeant’s uniform. His name is McLish, the captain said. Then Custer remembered: McLish had once attended his sister’s church in Monroe. He drinks, the captain added.