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

by Stiles, T. J.

  Awash in praise, McClellan relished his reputation for genius—what a less admiring officer called his “claimed extraordinary judgment.” He compared himself to George Washington, noting that he, too, had critics: “All now see that he was right, & I trust that the time will come when it will be equally evident to all that I was right in doing as I did.” He even considered himself the hand of God. “I can almost think of myself as a chosen instrument to carry out his schemes,” he admitted to General Burnside. “I feel that God has placed a great work in my hands,” he wrote Ellen. “My previous life seems to have been unwittingly directed to this great end.”7

  Ironically, his belief that he was a tool of the Almighty reflected fatalism, a sense that he lacked any control over his future. His fears exaggerated his methodical approach to warfare, for he was an engineer by both instinct and training. If Custer never seemed to consider the risks of his actions, McClellan thought of little else.8

  The movement to the Peninsula looked brilliant on the map—a grand outflanking of the Confederate army that put Union troops within easy striking distance of the enemy capital. But even this maneuver emerged out of McClellan’s caution. If beaten, he argued, the Army of the Potomac would enjoy “a perfectly safe retreat down the Peninsula…with our flanks perfectly covered by the fleet.” Forced to take the offensive, he conducted it as an engineering exercise, a methodical advance from one fortified position to another, relying upon heavy artillery.9

  His aides shared his idiosyncratic combination of technical competence and near paranoia. They organized, equipped, and supplied an army vastly larger than any the United States had operated prior to the Civil War. In this they took advantage of the Regular Army’s highly professional Quartermaster’s Department.10

  But dread always lurked. It was personified by the private detective Allan Pinkerton. McClellan hired him to collect intelligence on the enemy. Pinkerton provided plenty of it, all wildly inaccurate. When the rebel army occupied the Yorktown line, it numbered 56,500, but Pinkerton counted 100,000 to 120,000. In late May, reinforcements raised enemy numbers to 75,000; Pinkerton listed 150,000. But all blame cannot be placed on the detective. For McClellan, enemy superiority had become a fixed idea. “All accounts report their numbers as greatly exceeding our own,” he wrote to President Lincoln on May 21. Even when promised 41,000 more troops under General McDowell, he felt doomed.11

  His fears made him angry. All his life he had bristled at those in authority over him; now his very proximity to the highest point of power magnified his resentments. He called Secretary of War Stanton “without exception the vilest man I ever knew or heard of.” He scorned Lincoln as “an idiot,” a “gorilla,” or, when feeling generous, “a well meaning baboon.” The day after Custer joined his staff, McClellan wrote to his wife about Lincoln. “It is perfectly sickening to deal with such people & you may rest assured that I will lose as little time as possible in breaking off all connection with them.”12

  Breaking off all connection with them: it was a strange thing to say, as he had no plans to resign. McClellan spent a great deal of time writing furtive letters to certain politicians in New York, even as his inner circle cultivated newspaper editors. They were preparing a second campaign, not against Richmond but against Washington.

  Already the results could be seen in the partisan newspapers read by Emmanuel Custer, who once had voiced disappointment in McClellan. They sent a message, and Emmanuel understood it. “I am a Mcleland man,” he wrote to Armstrong, “and I want to have him tryumph over all his enemys.”13

  —

  THE CONFEDERATE LOOKS RESIGNED in the photograph. He sits erect in a short, gray, single-breasted jacket with dark piping and shoulder straps—the jacket of a junior officer. His legs are spread apart, feet and calves clad in long cavalry boots, and a forage cap slouches on his head. He looks with sad dignity into the distance. On his left sits a self-consciously jaunty figure in a short, blue, single-breasted jacket with shoulder straps—also the jacket of a junior officer—with a tie tufting out over the collar. One fist rests on the second man’s right thigh, elbow up, and he leans slightly forward, his left forearm thrown across the other thigh; he too wears cavalry boots. He sits on a box turned up on its side. He has no hat on his head of curly blond hair, no beard on his chin below a continuous crescent of mustache and cheek whiskers. Looking confident, even cocky, he stares directly at the camera with light blue eyes.

  The figure in gray is Lt. James B. Washington, and the man in blue is his West Point classmate, Custer. The photographer, James F. Gibson, an employee of Mathew Brady’s famous studio, encountered them chatting after the Battle of Fair Oaks (or Seven Pines, as the Confederates called it). The two were aides to the respective commanding generals—Custer to McClellan, Washington to Lt. Gen. Joseph E. Johnston. The results of the battle could be seen in their faces.

  Johnston had tried to cripple the Army of the Potomac before McClellan could move all of it over the Chickahominy and bring his enormous siege guns to bear on Richmond. On May 31, with Union forces still divided by the flooding river, Johnston had attacked the wing on the south side. Union reinforcements had struggled across and stopped the Confederates with heavy losses. A second attack on June 1 did no better. Johnston himself was wounded and his aide Washington captured.14

  Custer had not made a special friend of Washington at West Point, though he had warm relations with the Southern cadets. One reason for Custer’s outrage at John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry was that Brown had captured Washington’s father. And, as with Lea, it gave Custer pleasure to show kindness to a captured classmate.15

  The image of two officers from the opposing armies, both good-looking young men in smart new uniforms, appealed to the photographer, but he thought something—someone—was missing. Gibson brought this individual over and sat him on the ground between Washington’s boots, then took another photograph. This third figure looks uncomfortable; he is enduring this moment. He wears worn, dirty pants and a collarless shirt of coarse cloth. He has his fingers locked around his knees; a second pair of pants pokes out from under the cuffs of the outer pair. He has no shoes or socks. His right foot is bandaged. He looks down at his toes with his brow slightly furrowed, his black hair short-cropped. He looks no older than twelve. He leaves the impression that he has lived through a nightmare.16

  The third figure is a slave—an escaped slave, to be precise. The photograph of the three would circulate with the title “Both Sides and the Cause,” elevating the boy to the central role, but in the image he is no more than a prop. The two officers ignore him. And not merely in this photograph: Custer rarely mentioned black people in his surviving correspondence.

  “You must not run them down so they are a ‘splendid institution,’ ” wrote Marie Miller, a young woman in Monroe, to her friend Custer. Her comment is a fleeting but telling indication of how he viewed slaves, or African Americans in general. Marie no more considered them full-fledged human beings than Custer did. “Why of course I was in earnest asking you to send me a contraband,” she wrote, as if they were pets or souvenirs. “I want a girl, about 12 or 14, black as black can be, with long curly hair etc. in fact a perfect negress.”

  This was flippant chatter in a lighthearted note, of course. She and Custer teased and flirted, and she wanted to know more about his attraction to Nellie Van Wormer. “Tell me about her Armstrong. You know I am your ‘confidant’ now. Please tell me is she the one.” Yet her joke about the contraband speaks to the racial attitudes of Monroe and the North in general; she was not the only Northern woman who wrote of shipping a black girl home like livestock. Marie imagined a “negress” as an object, not a child with parents and hopes and needs and ambitions of her own.17

  Such views were common, even prevalent, in the Army of the Potomac. Enslaved people ran to freedom as soon as they could; they flooded Union camps, “leaving plows standing in the fields,” one historian writes. But contrabands often met hostility. There was
mockery; in the “game of astonishment” soldiers told wild lies in order to laugh at their credulity. There was exclusion; a newspaper published by the 5th Pennsylvania flatly stated that its “Union” and “Freedom” motto covered “white folks” only. There was cruelty, as seen in the 99th New York, rumored to be selling runaways back to their masters for $20 to $50 each, and in the ads for escaped slaves in soldier-run newspapers. And there was callousness, witnessed whenever troops grabbed a black child and tossed him or her in a blanket, just as upperclassmen deviled plebes at West Point. The men of the 5th Maryland did so one day, and discovered that the blanket was rotten when the boy they tossed fell straight through and broke his neck.18

  And yet a countertrend slowly gained strength. “I thought I hated slavery as much as possible before I came here,” a Pennsylvania soldier wrote, “but here, where I can see some of its workings, I am more than ever convinced of the cruelty and inhumanity of the system.” Men from Massachusetts, the great hotbed of abolitionism, proved especially protective of runaways. Even the 8th Michigan “pounced” on a slaveholder, a lieutenant wrote. “He got well frightened, & I presume will think twice before he goes into a Camp of northern soldiers to reclaim biped property.”19

  Sincere compassion contributed to this growing antislavery feeling, but much of it was practical. The flow of contrabands drained the Confederates’ labor force and enhanced Union strength; many went to work for the army, freeing troops to fight. They provided valuable intelligence; every time Custer had encountered contrabands with information, they had been proved right. And many Union soldiers were concluding that the war would never end until slavery was destroyed.20

  But any hierarchical organization adopts the tone set by its leader, especially when that organization was what McClellan called “my army.” As Richard Slotkin writes, “The Army of the Potomac was McClellan’s hearth and refuge, a perfect social order created by himself, an extension of his identity.” His army absorbed his views, which were blunt. As he later told his father-in-law, “I confess to a prejudice in favor of my own race, & can’t learn to like the odor of either Billy Goats or Niggers.”21

  “Help me to dodge the nigger—we want nothing to do with him,” McClellan wrote early in the war. “I am fighting to preserve the integrity of the Union & the power of the Govt—on no other issue. To gain that end we cannot afford to raise up the negro question.” More than a personal declaration, this was a political statement about the goals of the war, one that accepted the legitimacy of human bondage.22

  It was a dangerous thing to say, though not because Lincoln had a different policy. The South seceded to protect slavery, but the federal government did not go to war to destroy it. It fought because one region of the country had rejected the results of a national election and rebelled; Lincoln defended not only America’s territorial integrity, but the integrity of the democratic process, the essence of free government itself. And the president had to preserve the loyalty of the border slave states—Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware—and conservative troops in the army. He wished to cultivate dormant Unionists in the South. Artilleryman Charles Wainwright captured the dilemma in his diary: if the president “makes it an abolition war, there will be an end to the Union party at the South, and I for one shall be sorry that I ever lent a hand to it.” Lincoln personally hated slavery, but he could not have disagreed with the policy expressed in McClellan’s crude statement.23

  What made McClellan’s letter dangerous was the man who received it: Samuel Latham Mitchell Barlow, one of a trio of friends McClellan had made during his years as a railroad executive in the 1850s, all aristocratic financiers who presided over Manhattan’s genteel society. Barlow was McClellan’s most active contact. Born in 1826, he collected rare books and served as a director and attorney for some of the largest corporations in the country. His specialty was diplomacy and the closed-room negotiation. A more powerful friend was William H. Aspinwall. Born in 1807, he dispatched square-rigged merchantmen over the world’s oceans, and was the organizing spirit behind the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, which (thanks to negotiations by Barlow) now shared a monopoly on traffic to California with Cornelius Vanderbilt. Aspinwall built one of the first private art galleries in Manhattan, as did the third member of the group, August Belmont. Born in Germany in 1816, Belmont had come to New York in 1837 as agent for the Rothschilds. A banker, corporate financier, and patron of the arts, he served as national chairman of the Democratic Party. All three men were leaders of the party, which was largely directed from New York.24

  When McClellan wrote to these men, he intrigued with the political opposition to the commander in chief of the armed forces of the United States. He wanted their help in controlling wartime policy, to maintain a limited conflict between formal armies with as little impact on Southern society as possible.25

  It’s an open question whether Custer, the junior officer on staff, knew anything about McClellan’s correspondence with Democratic leaders. He kept busy outside of headquarters, often going aloft in the observation balloon as the army crept closer to Richmond in the month after Seven Pines. His energy won over other members of the staff; the Prince de Joinville later wrote that he “entertained so high an opinion of him, from the first day I met him, that I am proud of his achievements.” Custer was far enough inside McClellan’s circle to see Pinkerton’s intelligence reports—and he shared his commander’s faith in them. And he and McClellan shared something deep in each of them: politics.26

  McClellan’s hostility to the White House pervaded his headquarters, as did his political intrigue. He “talked very freely of the way in which he had been treated,” Gen. George Meade wrote, after Lincoln diverted McDowell’s corps from the Army of the Potomac in order to cope with Confederate Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley. McClellan dispatched his most trusted subordinate, Gen. Fitz-John Porter, to encourage the editor of the New York World to challenge the administration. “I wish you would put the question,” Porter said. “Does the President…design to cause defeat here for the purpose of prolonging the war.” Prolonging the war, he implied, would turn it into an abolitionist crusade.27

  McClellan, supremely cautious in fighting the enemy, grew reckless in his struggle with his political superiors. What he may not have grasped was that he would have to win on the battlefield to win in Washington. And tied to his future was that of his youngest aide, George Armstrong Custer.28

  —

  CUSTER ROAMED THE VAST CITY that was the Army of the Potomac, riding alone as his master’s voice and his master’s eyes and ears. His position in headquarters allowed him to see the entire strategic picture. He grasped the importance of the Chickahominy, which flowed southeast, bisecting the Peninsula until it turned south to the James River, drawing an arc north and east of Richmond. He knew that four of the army’s five corps had now crossed to the south side of the Chickahominy, where they were preparing a line of redoubts for the siege of Richmond, and that Brig. Gen. Fitz-John Porter’s V Corps remained on the north bank to guard the supply line. When Ann and David Reed came to visit him (a sign of the army’s creeping pace), he hinted at his inside knowledge. “You know my rule has always been to disclose nothing whatever connected with future movements,” he said.29

  On June 26, he mounted his fine black horse and crossed to the north bank. There trains chuffed and clacked down the Richmond and York River Railroad from landings on the York and Pamunkey rivers, where flotillas of ships unloaded oats and hardtack and boots and belts and cookware and ammunition and all the other countless things an army needed in the field, mountained into Himalayan supply depots. Custer rode through V Corps’s sprawling boroughs of dirty white dog tents—inverted Vs of canvas on sticks—until he found the 1st Michigan Infantry camp, where he hoped to see friends.

  He heard gunfire. He rode toward it, west to Beaver Dam Creek, which shielded the western front of V Corps. Custer found the Pennsylvania Reserves, a division under Brig. G
en. George A. McCall, dug in on the eastern bank. Union pickets hustled back over the creek. They reported that the Confederates were approaching in force.30

  “The ball was opened,” Custer wrote—soldiers’ slang for the start of a battle. He rode to search for McClellan, and found him listening to the gunfire. I know what it means, he told Custer: the start of a rebel counteroffensive. A contraband had come into Union lines with news that Stonewall Jackson had arrived from the Shenandoah Valley with an overwhelming force, ready to attack the Union right flank. Of course he would, McClellan thought; without McDowell’s corps, he believed he lacked the strength to protect his exposed railroad supply line.31

  McClellan spoke briefly to Custer, who rode back across the Chickahominy to the Pennsylvania Reserves. He told General McCall that McClellan only wanted his men to hold until dark, and “expected them to maintain the honor of Pennsylvania in that fight.” McCall replied, “Tell the general he shall not be disappointed.” Custer then galloped to the creek and rode down the line, going from regiment to regiment to repeat McClellan’s appeal to their state’s honor. Cheers rose in response, cheers thrown up for the commanding general but caught by Custer.32

  In late afternoon, Confederate soldiers came out of the woods across the creek, stumbling over felled trees, and were slaughtered by Union fire. Wave after wave clambered forward, only to disintegrate in a torrent of bullet, shot, and shell. McClellan eventually joined Custer and McCall on the field and watched a victory unfold.33

  With the battle still raging, McClellan sent Custer to look for Gen. John Barnard, the army’s chief engineer. He found him a short distance to the rear. Earlier in the day, when McClellan still had no idea of how the battle might go, he had ordered Barnard to make plans for a much smaller bridgehead on the northern bank of the Chickahominy. Custer rode up and asked for Barnard’s map. With a pencil he drew a line enclosing high ground just past the home of a Dr. Gaines. Here, he said, General McClellan wants you to lay out defensive positions in this location.34