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

by Stiles, T. J.

  On May 4 he carried out another such reconnaissance in the early hours of the morning and noticed large flames near Yorktown. He heard distant explosions, like cannons, as might be made by abandoned gunpowder catching fire. As the sun rose, he swept the line with his field glass and saw no movement.

  The lieutenant descended and reported to Brig. Gen. William F. Smith, a thirty-eight-year-old West Point graduate. He was nicknamed “Baldy,” a joke on his vanity as much as his lack of hair, since he carefully combed some thin strands across the top of his head. The chief of the topographical engineers had detailed Custer to Smith, who commanded a division in Gen. Edwin “Bull” Sumner’s II Corps.

  Custer found Smith with two escaped slaves, known as “contrabands.” (The Union army refused to return runaways to their secessionist owners, calling them “contraband of war.”) The pair had already delivered the news. The Confederate line, which the Union army had spent weeks preparing to attack, had been evacuated overnight. The enemy was withdrawing up the Peninsula toward Williamsburg.43

  Custer confirmed the report and joined the stumbling pursuit. Smith’s division advanced over rutted roads that snaked through dense woods. The Union column crept forward, halted, crept forward; confusion reigned. Riding at the forefront, Custer came to Skiffe’s Creek, spanned by a burning bridge. He shot at Confederate cavalry on the far side and tried to smother the flames, burning his hands. More Union horsemen helped drive off the enemy and save the bridge.44

  The road Custer traveled was booby-trapped with torpedoes—hidden or buried artillery shells—known to later generations as land mines. The devices killed a handful of Union soldiers and wounded a dozen more. The outraged federals forced Confederate prisoners to clear them.45

  Smith gave Custer permission to accompany Brig. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, who commanded the division’s lead brigade. Hancock was a handsome man with thick, dark, wavy hair, a strong nose, and the seemingly inevitable heavy mustache and goatee. A thirty-eight-year-old West Point graduate and Mexican War veteran, he struck virtually everyone as a consummate professional. The next day he turned down a road to the right, diverging from the main Union advance, guided by contraband reports that the Confederates had abandoned the works on the left of their line. Custer rode ahead of the brigade as they advanced through a steady rain. Guns booming to their left told them that they had arrived on the Confederates’ flank.46

  Hancock moved past the abandoned rebel works and deployed his 3,400 men and eighteen guns. Soldiers in sodden blue uniforms spread out into firing lines, two deep, shoulder to shoulder, in open fields. Crews unlimbered cannons, led horses aside, turned muzzles toward the enemy, broke ammunition out of caissons. Bugles blew, drums pattered, regimental flags moved left and right as units took their places. Hancock sent a staff officer to Smith’s headquarters to describe his exposed but advantageous position and request additional troops. The man returned with orders to fall back. But Hancock noticed something through the heavy mist that followed the rain—enemy troops moving in his direction. He told his men to stand their ground and dispatched his last aide to plead for reinforcements.

  Custer stepped in to assist Hancock. Together they saw the Confederates approach, lines of figures who clutched four-and-a-half-foot rifled muskets waving like marsh reeds in the wind. Hancock’s artillery opened fire, blowing holes in the advancing mass. The Confederates reached a rail fence less than a hundred yards away; the obstacle stalled them amid Union fire. They wavered. Hancock ordered a counterattack. His troops fired two volleys and rushed forward cheering.

  Custer plunged forward on horseback along with the infantrymen. The enemy line disintegrated in panic. Custer rode up on a captain and five men, who all surrendered to him—a testament to their demoralization. Eventually it became clear that it was over. The Yankees counted the casualties: 500 enemy dead, wounded, and captured, compared to just 100 for themselves. In the otherwise uncoordinated and indecisive Battle of Williamsburg, Hancock had triumphed.47

  Custer was just twenty-two. He was lean in his single-breasted junior officer’s uniform, with a column of brass buttons rising up the center of his torso to his neck, his curly blond hair cut to a moderate length and parted on the left, his chin bare as he cultivated a mustache-and-cheek-whiskers combination that would soon be associated with Gen. Ambrose Burnside. Externally, Custer was the archetype of an eager young officer. Internally, he was many things.

  He was a loyal underling. His assignment to the topographical engineers seemed random, yet he carried out his duties promptly and well. His superiors’ reports offered no hint of the self-absorbed miscreant of West Point. And he was a serious professional. His letters home often included military analyses, some quite astute. At Williamsburg he studied Hancock’s performance—his self-possession and perfectly timed counterstroke. Custer later wrote an account of the battle that showed how much he appreciated the lesson.

  In one respect, though, he remained scarcely more than an adolescent. He lacked any real sense that something bad might happen to him. This is not to belittle his courage; moving toward well-armed men who are trying to kill you is a triumph of will, and should never be underrated. But in all his letters home, he never reflected on the terrible juxtapositions of war, on the unpredictability of death.

  As the rebel prisoners were gathered in, Custer saw his old West Point classmate and friend John Lea, a Mississippian nicknamed “Gimlet.” Once a partner in pranks and deviling plebes, Gimlet now wore an enemy uniform. A bullet or shell fragment had ripped into his leg. He was helpless.

  Lea recognized Custer as he approached. He threw his arms around his Yankee friend and wept. “We talked over old times and asked each other hundreds of questions concerning our classmates who were on opposite sides of the contest,” Custer wrote to his sister. He attended to the small needs that mattered enormously in the field, giving Lea new socks, hot food, and some money. At the sight of cash in Custer’s hand, Lea burst into tears once more. So much of his recent life had been virtually identical to Custer’s—yet here he was, wounded, captured, defeated, and offered charity. He “said it was more than he could stand,” Custer wrote. “He had never expected to be placed under such circumstances.” Lea asked for Custer’s notebook. He scribbled a message that described how well Custer had cared for him, “saying to me that I might happen to be taken prisoner sometime and wanted me to be treated as well as he had been.”

  Lea’s words were well meant, true kindness returned for true kindness—yet they challenged Custer. You might be gravely wounded. You might be taken prisoner. You might be placed in circumstances you never expect. It may be more than you can stand. Lea compressed into a few sentences the illusion-shattering power of war.48

  Custer passed over it without comment. He described the encounter to his sister, but did not reflect on any deeper meaning, at least not outwardly. Amid all his avowals of his willingness to die, never had he addressed the possibility of being shot in the leg, forced to surrender, and wagoned off to a prison camp. He had not pictured himself with an arm severed by a random shell, or dying of dysentery after days of having his bowels run out into his pants and boots and blanket and tent. Lea insisted, with his sad fate and friendly words, that Custer face up to the unpredictable death and illness and injury all around him. Custer saw it, he wrote of it, yet he could not bring himself to examine it, at least not in a way that the world could hear his thoughts. He knew, and yet he refused to know.

  —

  RAIN FELL. “The water comes down most tropically, in sheets instead of in detached drops,” wrote one Union officer, “turning the whole country into a sea of mud.” For soldiers who tented on the ground and dressed in wool, rain meant misery. Water pervaded everything. It rotted feet in sodden boots amid the pounding patter of continual downpour. Roads turned into creeks, fields into marshes. Carts and gun carriages sank up to their axles in the mire. In the weeks after Williamsburg, the Army of the Potomac splushed up the Peninsula at a pl
odding pace toward the Chickahominy, a stream that separated the Union force from Richmond.49

  In the early morning of May 24, Custer came sneaking up to the river through the dense Virginia woods behind the translucent screen of rain. He came with Lt. Nicolas Bowen, his superior in the topographical engineers. Bowen and Custer had been ordered to guide a squadron of cavalry and 500 men from the 4th Michigan Infantry—including some recruits from Monroe—on a reconnaissance in force ahead of the main body of the army. More senior officers came with them, but the two topographical engineers knew the terrain, having slipped out in recent days to probe the depth of the Chickahominy. They led the troops through the trees, moving toward a ford about half a mile above New Bridge, a crossing that would have to be seized before the assault on Richmond.50

  They reached the edge of the woods near the river. Custer rushed to the bank with thirty men from the 4th Michigan lumbering behind him, burdened with rifled muskets and cartridge boxes. He plunged into the water and emerged on the other side. Finding the ford unguarded, the infantrymen shook out into a line perpendicular to the river. Custer led them on a sweep toward New Bridge, advancing parallel to the troops remaining on the other bank.

  About 400 yards from the bridge, they came upon a camp of Confederates, who hardly expected an attack from their own bank of the river. Custer fired first, igniting a volley from his men. The enemy scrambled about in confusion before they finally aligned themselves into a firing line. Back across the Chickahominy, Col. Dwight Woodbury of the 4th Michigan sent part of his force directly across the river to help Custer’s detachment, while the rest sprinted down to the bridge to cut the rebels off. The span had been burned, forcing them to wade across. They killed or captured most of the rebels, then spread out in a ditch parallel to the river amid a heavy rain. Accumulated water rose to their knees, turning the ditch into a canal.

  Confederate reinforcements arrived and charged forward in a counterattack. The Union troops opened fire and drove them back. The enemy then rolled up artillery and began a bombardment. Colonel Woodbury suggested that it would be prudent to withdraw. They had captured the enemy camp at the bridge along with thirty-seven prisoners, and had killed twenty-eight Confederates. They lost one dead and seven wounded. The men recrossed the river in good order.

  The clash fed a hunger for good news in the army amid its long slog through the mud toward Richmond. One of the soldiers from Monroe sent a letter to a hometown newspaper about the fight. “Lieut. Custer deserves praise for his coolness and bravery,” he wrote. “It will do his friends in Monroe good to hear that he is already making his mark so soon after graduating.” Bowen wrote in his official report, “Lieutenant Custer was the first to cross the stream, the first to open fire upon the enemy, and one of the last to leave the field.” General McClellan himself praised the action in a message that evening to Edwin M. Stanton, the secretary of war: “A very gallant reconnaissance made by Lieutenants Bowen and Custer came upon the Louisiana Tigers, handled them terribly, taking some 50 prisoners and killing and wounding very large numbers.”51

  Not long after the skirmish, Custer received orders to report to McClellan. For the second time in his brief career, the second lieutenant met the most senior general in the U.S. Army (Scott having retired). “I thanked him for his gallantry,” McClellan recalled, “and asked what I could do for him.”

  Custer was taken aback. He was acutely self-conscious as he stood in his worn, muddy uniform within the clean white walls of the headquarters tent, before the impeccably dressed general and his aristocratic assistants. He said he didn’t want anything—he had done nothing to deserve a reward. “I then asked if he would like to serve on my personal staff as an aide-de-camp,” McClellan wrote. “Upon this he brightened up.”

  Custer said it was the best reward he could imagine.52

  * * *

  *1 “Army” can mean either the national military organization, the U.S. Army, or a specific field force in a defined theater (e.g., the Army of the Potomac).

  Three

  * * *

  THE PROTÉGÉ

  FOR THE REST OF Custer’s life, he would revere a man who was his opposite in every way but one. The single trait they shared would wreck one of their careers and nearly ruin the other.

  At twenty-two, Custer remained an outsider. To a certain extent, he did not mind. One of his West Point nicknames had been “Cinnamon,” from a bottle of scented hair oil he had brought to the academy; even after he stopped using it his roommate Tully McCrea could still write, “He is the most romantic of men and delights in something odd.” But he felt his negligible social status. Within the military, his reputation as a careless, carousing cadet lingered. He dragged along at the bottom of the Regulars’ promotion list, thanks to his class ranking. He had been placed in the cavalry, the least-respected branch. He had scarcely seen his regiment, thanks to temporary assignments that left him adrift in the Army of the Potomac.1

  At the opposite end of the officer corps stood Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan. Only thirty-five, he was a bit short—his nickname was “Little Mac”—and stocky, but powerfully built. He parted his great waves of dark hair on the left, above a broad face, large mustache, and a tuft of hair under his lower lip. His stern, arching eyebrows and hot stare gave the impression of disapproval.

  It was an accurate impression. A sense of superiority possessed him, the outgrowth of his status as an intellectual leader of the antebellum army. He had entered West Point at fifteen and graduated second in his class in 1846. He became an engineer—one of the army’s elite—and served in the campaign that captured Mexico City in 1847. He authored manuals for the cavalry and bayonet and designed the standard military saddle, which still bears his name. Adept with languages, he sailed to Sevastopol in 1855 as an official observer of the Crimean War and published an influential report. Impeccable in dress as in everything else, he often posed with his right hand tucked in his double-breasted uniform above his gold sword sash, in Napoleonic fashion. “Young Napoleon,” in fact, is what his admirers called him. He did not object.

  McClellan belonged to the inner circles of society, business, and politics. Born to a respectable Philadelphia family at a time when commercial upstarts were challenging social ranking, he brimmed with genteel prejudices. He left the army in the 1850s to serve as a railroad executive, and began to mingle with true patricians—New York’s most distinguished financiers. With his connections, list of achievements, and authentic military and managerial expertise, he had seemed a natural choice to organize the Army of the Potomac out of the jumble of regiments defeated at Bull Run in 1861.2

  Custer described his feelings for McClellan as “worship.” More than anything else, that secured his welcome on the general’s staff. The twenty or so men who served in headquarters belonged to spheres far removed from New Rumley. Here were foreign noblemen, including the Prince de Joinville and his nephews, Robert and Louis Philippe d’Orleans (the latter the pretender to the throne of France); John Jacob Astor III of New York; and McClellan’s own family—his younger brother, Arthur, and father-in-law, Brig. Gen. Randolph Marcy, an 1832 graduate of West Point who served as chief of staff. Yet all these men shared Custer’s devotion to their leader. To them, McClellan was power and glory personified, mastery and genius taken to perfection.3

  After the general rewarded Custer with a promotion, his staff began to circulate a distorted version of how it happened. This account appeared in Connecticut’s Hartford Courant a few weeks later, recounted by a correspondent who had learned of it from someone at headquarters. “It seems that Lieut. Custer…was riding along the banks of the Chickahominy, with Gen. McClellan and staff,” the story went. “The General expressed a desire to know the depth of the stream, when Lieut. Custer immediately slipped from his horse and waded across the river and back again. As he emerged dripping from the water, Gen. McClellan said, Lieut. Custer, consider yourself upon my own personal staff, with the rank of Captain.”4

 
This rendering stripped the young lieutenant of his actual heroics, his combat leadership in a daylong firefight, in order to place the general at the scene. (Prior to the skirmish Custer had, in fact, tested the depth of the river under the supervision of Brig. Gen. John Barnard, the Army of the Potomac’s chief engineer.) The revised anecdote pictured McClellan the way his staff imagined him, the way he imagined himself: the commanding general at the forefront of his army, confronting the enemy and natural obstacles. And it depicted him recognizing and rewarding valor in the field. “Thus you observe that, like Napoleon, our little General sometimes rewards merit upon the instant,” the correspondent declared. For McClellan and his aides, the important thing about promoting Custer was not Custer, but the act itself.5

  The staff’s identification with the general was natural, of course. In the idiom of the time, it was his “military family,” making him the father. And he was a genuinely charismatic, magnetic man. But neither he nor his aides tolerated dissent. As the historian Richard Slotkin writes, “McClellan’s headquarters was a closed circle, an echo chamber filled with followers and acolytes who praised his every decision as masterful.”6

  They reinforced the general’s considerable self-esteem by, for example, stage-managing his appearances before the army. “You have no idea how the men brighten up now, when I go among them—I can see every eye glisten,” McClellan wrote to his wife, Ellen. The staff traveled with a portable printing press to distribute his orders and exhortations, which bulged with histrionic phrases and exclamation points.