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

by Stiles, T. J.

  More than once he began to speak of feelings for her, only to have her change the subject. When he pressed, she said it would be wrong for her to listen. With the new year, he managed to say that he loved her. Nobody else, he told her, could keep him entertained for more than an hour without his feeling “lonely.” He would “sacrifice every earthly hope to gain [her] love,” he said. She replied that she would give it to him if she could, adding, “Forget me.”

  I “never could forget” you, he said. Libbie responded that she could not forget him either, but wanted simply to be “his true friend through life.” He wanted nothing less, he said, than for her to be his wife.9

  Was he sincere? The boundary between love and lust is not always clear, but it is especially vague in this man who overflowed with both. He spoke fluently a language often regarded as feminine, words of feeling and romance. In each of his previous relationships—with Mollie, Mariah, and Nellie—he had talked earnestly of love and had raised the possibility of marriage. He may have been sincere in each instance, for he was a man who lived fiercely in the present, engaging everything with passion, with aggressive immediacy. On the other hand, he knew that such talk served as an effective means toward an end: the “great sleep,” in his words, or getting “spooney,” as McCrea and others called it. Just the impression of an engagement had induced some women to let him into their beds—and he married none of them. Yet this does not mean he was deliberately manipulative. He wanted love, and may not have distinguished it from sexual attraction. After all, sex itself is not merely a matter of pleasure, but an experience of being wanted, admired, desired. It was an antidote to his insecurities.10

  His true heart remains opaque. What is known is his response to Libbie’s rebuff. He promptly changed his target to her longtime school rival, the vivacious Fannie Fifield. This appealing young woman, with a (heavily draped) figure that men admired, had recently come back to Monroe after a December trip. Custer cultivated her as soon as she returned, perhaps even before he declared his love to Libbie. He occasionally saw another woman as well, but he appeared in the streets and parlors of Monroe mainly with Fannie, the daughter of a prosperous merchant, railway and express agent, and steamboat owner. She reveled in the attention of men—even flirted with them when they were out in public with her friends—and she seemed to enjoy Custer’s attention in particular.

  Not many days after Libbie told Custer to forget her, he ran into her at a party at a home in Monroe. It was attended by the circle he and Bacon shared, the young men of town, including Jacob Greene, and seminary students and graduates such as Helen and Kate Wing—and Fannie Fifield. The group played blind-man’s bluff and other games; all the while Custer flirted with Fannie, even taking her hand. When he had a moment alone, though, he sat next to Libbie. He spoke to her quietly, and she handed him a ring. Afterward he went back to Fifield. In public, Fannie basted him with affection; in private, the town gossiped, she gave him everything he desired.11

  So the early weeks of 1863 passed as Custer lingered in Monroe, lacking orders. In February he learned that Libbie was going to take a train to Toledo to stay with a friend. He showed up at the station and brushed past her glaring father to carry her bags, daring even to touch her elbow as she climbed the steps into the car. When she returned, he began to hear from her through her friend Nettie Humphrey, whose family owned the Humphrey House hotel in Monroe. Nettie helped to arrange seemingly chance encounters with Libbie in the hotel parlor, and delivered a photograph of Libbie, with instructions to keep it secret.

  One Friday evening he took Fifield to an oyster dinner at a family home in town, and saw Bacon there. He found a moment to slip out with Libbie to a side room, and they sat in a love seat facing each other. She seemed self-conscious. Looking in a mirror, she said that the image of the two of them reminded her of “books and pictures I’ve seen.” She leaned into him. He tried to kiss her. She pulled away. She wasn’t Fannie Fifield, she snapped, or “Helen W.,” another name that came up in gossip about Custer. He replied that he never equated her with such women.

  He found her to be increasingly infuriating. She had welcomed his company on the street, then rebuffed his expression of love, then surreptitiously pursued him through her friend Nettie, then refused a simple kiss. She pestered him about her photograph, saying that his niece had been heard talking about it. Was he not keeping it secret, as she had asked? What if her father should learn of their relationship? He denied showing off the picture—unconvincingly, because he had.

  In early April, Custer was sitting in the Fifield family parlor when Libbie and Nettie appeared at the door and were welcomed inside. In the presence of Fannie, he could not contain his irritation at Libbie. He criticized her for drinking a little beer at the Humphrey House. She angrily defended herself. Later the party sat at a table to play euchre. With a soldier’s proverbial passion for cards, Custer plunged into the game, turning away from his hand only to make sarcastic comments about Libbie.12

  From the depths of the courageous and loyal Custer, the carefully cultivated Custer, there boiled over the ugly Custer—the self-involved young man who scrawled sarcastic complaints to friends and relatives for neglecting him, who had nearly destroyed his career before it began, who flared in verbose self-righteousness when challenged. In a single evening he terminated his painstaking courtship of Miss Bacon. Orders came to report to Washington, and he departed Monroe as Fanny Fifield’s man.

  —

  ARMSTRONG ENTERED THE DOMESTIC CIRCLE. Sometime after seven in the evening on Saturday, April 11, he walked into a handsome four-story town house at 22 East 31st Street, in the fashionable New York neighborhood east of Fifth Avenue. Ellen McClellan welcomed him inside, as did her husband, George.

  The young captain had reported to the War Department on April 10, only to learn that he had been assigned to assist McClellan in writing his final, comprehensive report. The report was McClellan’s idea. He had asked for the help of a number of his aides by name, though not Custer at first. He had added, “It is probable that the services of a few other officers late of my staff…may also be necessary to me.”13

  Custer was flattered to be found necessary. The general said he would have asked for him long before, Custer wrote to his sister, “but he was ignorant of my whereabouts & my long letter to him had miscarried.” Now he found himself in McClellan’s own home, the gift of the general’s Democratic sponsors, Aspinwall, Barlow, John Jacob Astor, and William B. Duncan. “I wish you could see the house which was presented to Mrs. McClellan,” Custer wrote. “It is the most magnificently furnished house I was ever in.”

  He worked at McClellan’s side from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon. The general’s circle of dazzling friends left him feeling insecure—and poor. “I fear I will be compelled to purchase a new suit of citizen’s clothes,” he wrote. “I am living at great expense. My board is $3.75 per day…I breakfast at half past 9 or ten and dine at six. These are the fashionable hours here.” He sent love to his sister’s children, and to someone else. “Tell Rily Em & Aut I send them a kiss and tell Emma to tell Fannie I send her one also.”14

  At night he returned to the Metropolitan Hotel, an enormous five-story edifice that stretched for a block along Broadway from a corner on Prince Street. There ladies sat in “sky parlors” to watch the display of fashion among the pedestrians in the masonry canyon of Broadway. Next door was Niblo’s Garden, a famous theater. In the morning he joined the throngs who hailed hackney cabs or clambered aboard horse-drawn omnibuses or simply walked to work, and he journeyed a mile and three-quarters to the McClellan house.15

  Yet each day damaged him. He had planned to survive McClellan’s fall by obtaining command of one of the new cavalry regiments recently raised in Michigan, in particular the 5th Michigan Cavalry. State governors appointed colonels to lead new volunteer regiments—but Michigan’s Austin Blair was a Republican. Custer sounded out his original Republican patron, Congressman John A. Bingham of
Ohio, who still supported him, but he needed someone with influence in the party in Michigan. He turned to Isaac Christiancy, who immediately wrote to Blair.

  The governor replied bluntly. “Custer is using you to his advantage, just as he used Bingham.” The press attention given to the exploits of the young officer now worked against him, for the governor was well aware of his connections. “His people are Rebel Democrats. He himself is a McClellan man; indeed McClellan’s fair-haired boy, I should say. Sorry, your honor, but I cannot place myself in such a compromising position, whatever his qualifications. No, I have nothing for him.”16

  Blair was right. Though Custer’s family were not “rebels,” he was a partisan Democrat and son of a partisan Democrat. He was a “McClellan man,” even his “fair-haired boy.” The governor’s response reflected his responsibilities, which were not military but political. He had to reward those who desired total victory over the South, an attribute he naturally found in his own party. In his eyes, partisanship was a useful tool in separating reliable Unionists from disloyal “Copperheads” or halfhearted conservatives. Custer’s soldierly merits did not enter into his calculation.

  When it came to politics, where did the young captain stand? A man so partisan, so opinionated, must have written something about the great issues of the day, particularly the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet the public archives contain no contemporary letters on the subject. This conspicuous silence raises suspicions that some letters were deliberately hidden or destroyed in later years, when emancipation would prove far more popular and far less controversial than it was in 1862. Enough material survives to confirm that he shared McClellan’s politics—and to suggest that he opposed the proclamation. By Blair’s logic, Custer did not deserve a regiment.

  —

  FOUR BLANKETS, ONE LINED COAT, and one pair of lined trousers: A quartermaster in Washington handed these items over to Custer on April 22, the tangible signs that the young man was just a first lieutenant once more, with orders to take charge of a company in the 5th U.S. Cavalry. He set out for the Army of the Potomac, camped north of Fredericksburg, Virginia.17

  Fredericksburg is where the army had suffered a crushing defeat during his absence, on December 13, 1862, under Burnside. By the time Custer arrived, President Lincoln had replaced Burnside with Joseph Hooker, who had revived the army with sweeping reforms. He created a Bureau of Military Information that revolutionized intelligence gathering, introduced a new furlough system, and created badges for each corps to instill pride. He ordered the regular issue of vegetables, fresh potatoes and onions, and soft bread in place of mere hardtack and salted meat. And he united the widely dispersed horsemen into a Cavalry Corps under Brig. Gen. George Stoneman.18

  On arriving at the army, Custer sought out Brigadier General Pleasonton. Both men were friends of McClellan’s, and they had formed a bond during the Maryland Campaign. Even after the Battle of Antietam Custer had joined Pleasonton on missions until just before his departure in November. The general seemed happy to see him.

  Custer’s appearance coincided with the start of a Union offensive. On April 29, the Cavalry Corps rode out on a great raid behind Confederate lines. Pleasonton stayed behind with a single brigade. So did Custer. Perhaps he arrived too late, or perhaps Pleasonton contrived to keep him close as Hooker moved against Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.19

  On the morning of May 6, Custer summarized the results of Hooker’s offensive in a letter to McClellan. “My dear General, I know you must be anxious to know how your army is, and has been, doing,” he wrote. “We are defeated, driven back on the left bank of the Rappahannock with a loss which I suppose will exceed our entire loss during the seven days battles.” The disastrous battle would be named Chancellorsville, after the crossroads that Hooker occupied after crossing the Rapidan and Rappahannock rivers—the crossroads where Lee had launched the boldest counterattack of his career, crushing Hooker’s right flank.

  Grimly satisfied at Hooker’s humiliation, Custer echoed McClellan’s earlier hopes for Pope’s defeat at Second Bull Run. “To say that everything is gloomy and discouraging does not express the state of affairs here,” he wrote. “Between Pope’s and Hooker’s reputation in this army, as a general thing, I would not give a straw for the difference.” He even turned to gossip. Reportedly an exploding shell dazed Hooker, he wrote, but Custer doubted it. “If anything except his lack of ability interfered or prevented him from succeeding it was a wound he received from a projectile which requires a cork to be drawn before it is serviceable. I do not know this from personal observation, but two officers…informed me that Hooker was ‘groggy’ during the fight.” Hooker had claimed before the battle that he had the enemy in his “vest pocket,” Custer added. “It seems however that he forgot to button his vest pocket.”

  This was insubordination—the kind of intrigue that had characterized McClellan’s own headquarters. “You will not be surprised when I inform you that the universal cry is ‘Give us McClellan,’ ” he wrote. “If I am not mistaken there will be such a howl go up from the conservative press and people of the North which will leave but one course open for the Administration to pursue.”20

  Pleasonton knew of Custer’s nearly mutinous letter, which was written on the stationery of his division headquarters. Custer added, “Genl Pleasonton desires to be remembered to you.” Pleasonton had heard the talk that McClellan would return to command, and chose to keep his channels open.

  Pleasonton’s political style disgusted many of his troopers, who saw through his self-interested maneuvering. “He is pure and simple a newspaper humbug,” wrote Charles Francis Adams Jr. on May 12. Grandson of John Quincy Adams, Charles was a captain in the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry. “You always see his name in the papers, but to us who have served under him and seen him under fire he is notorious as a bully and a toady. He does nothing save with a view to a newspaper paragraph.” At Antietam, he said, Pleasonton sent his troops into fire while he hid and read a newspaper. “When we came back, we all saw him and laughed among ourselves. Yet mean and contemptible as Pleasonton is, he is always in at Head Quarters.”21

  McClellan did not return. Hooker remained in command—which turned out to be a lucky thing for Pleasonton, as Hooker lost patience with his other cavalry generals. On May 22, he placed Pleasonton in charge of the entire Cavalry Corps.

  Pleasonton brought Custer onto his staff. On May 16, Custer turned in his company’s equipment, from currycombs (for grooming horses) to carbines, and took up his new position.22 “I live with the General and he is very particular to have a good table when we are not moving,” he wrote to his sister Ann. He produced a long list of dishes, including “ripe tomotoes,” asparagus, mackerel, veal, pound cake, oranges, gingersnaps, and much more. What really surprised him was Pleasonton’s choice of servants. “The General has a negro woman and her husband to cook and wait on the table. They go with us when we march. The cook’s name is Hannah. I always call her ‘Aunt Hannah.’…She does not wear hoops and has a red handkerchief tied around her head like all negroes.” Custer was taken aback not because Pleasonton had private servants, but because Hannah was black and a woman. He guessed in his letter that his sister’s children would not eat the woman’s food, knowing her race.

  Excitement, delight, and marvel radiated from the page, expressing his relief at so swiftly escaping the drudgery of duty in a line company for the glamor of a general’s staff. He boasted of the “fine band” that played every morning and evening. But his joy ebbed as he turned to Libbie. “I am sorry to hear of Mrs. Bacon’s illness. It will be a severe blow to Libbie if she should lose her mother [in fact, stepmother],” he wrote to Ann. “Libbie is the most dutiful daughter I ever knew. She has a sweet disposition and is the most sensible young lady I ever met.” Then he abruptly reined in his emotions. “There are not more than a dozen girls in Monroe who I like better than Libbie and that is the truth.”23

  This resoundingly halfhearted praise was more
than he usually wrote of her. To his sister, at least, he tended to mention simply that he had heard from Nettie Humphrey, who despite everything remained his conduit to Libbie, who had said she would stay in touch with him. Where it might lead, though, was uncertain at best.24

  Fannie, on the other hand, aroused his enthusiasm. He reprimanded his sister for not returning Fifield’s call. He wanted Ann to sustain his connection to her, whom he wrote of again and again. “This morning I showed Fannie’s photograph (the full length one) to General Pleasonton,” he wrote on May 27. “He was most pleased with it and paid her some very high compliments.”25

  Having found a staff roost, he resumed his search for a regimental command. On May 17 he wrote a finely calibrated letter to Judge Christiancy, flatly contradicting what he had written to McClellan about Chancellorsville. “The men and officers are united in their refusal to acknowledge the late contest a defeat on our part,” he wrote. He criticized Hooker’s performance in temperate terms. Union losses would prove heavier than the Confederate, he said, “because, as a general rule,…the victorious party aim with much greater care and accuracy at the back of a man than at his face, particularly if the latter is aiming also.” He wrote from personal experience on the battlefield. He tactfully returned to his pursuit of a regiment. “My position is a desirable one to a person fond of excitement. I would rather be in command of the 5th Michigan Cavalry or the 8th Regiment if that were possible.”26