With sabers in the air they sped toward the 1st Virginia. They collided with a stone and rail fence. The Union horsemen at the rear crashed into those halted in front; on the other side, the Virginians dismounted and fired revolvers and carbines into the Michiganders’ faces. The men of the 7th fired back, over and under fence rails, slashing across the barrier with their sabers. A group managed to tear apart a section of the fence; mounted federal cavalrymen crammed through, only to meet a counterattack.
Custer and a group of men who followed him had kept clear of the fence. He could see a disaster emerging. Amid the confusion, he got the 7th Michigan to disengage from the enemy with assistance from the 5th. They fell back, allowing their artillery crews to fire on the now-exposed Confederates. Then it began again.53
Wade Hampton, the richest man in South Carolina, led an oversized brigade of Confederate cavalry. He led it well. He and his men had pulverized the Union charge at Hunterstown, nearly taking Custer’s life. Now he led parts of three brigades down Cress’s Ridge on horseback—a mass of men, animals, and steel that dwarfed the single-regiment attacks of the fight so far. “A grander spectacle than their advance has rarely been beheld,” one Union cavalryman wrote. “They marched with well-aligned fronts and steady reins. Their polished saber-blades dazzled in the sun. All eyes turned upon them.” They aimed at Custer’s artillery, the key to victory for either side.54
“To meet this overwhelming force I had but one available regiment—the 1st Michigan Cavalry, and the fire of battery M, 2d regular artillery,” Custer reported. He rode over and found the 1st Michigan mounted and ready to charge, having received orders from Gregg to do so. Col. Charles Town commanded the regiment; despite being very sick, he insisted on being helped into his saddle to attack with his men. “The gallant body of men advanced to the attack of a force outnumbering them five to one,” Custer wrote. Once again, he rode at the head of his men.55
“On came the rebel cavalry, yelling like demons right toward the battery,” wrote the Michigan cavalryman James Kidd.56 The federal guns blasted them with canister, gigantic shotgun rounds that spread metal balls through the oncoming ranks, slaughtering men and horses. The enemy came faster.
Custer trotted ahead of his outnumbered regiment. At a distance of a hundred yards he ordered a full gallop. Once again he shouted, “Come on, you Wolverines!” The Union troopers roared and smashed their horses into the rebel ranks, “sabering all who came within reach,” Custer reported. “So sudden and violent was the collision that many of the horses were turned end over end and crushed the riders beneath them,” recalled a witness. “The clashing of sabers, the firing of pistols, the demands for surrender, and cries of the combatants now filled the air.”57
Custer fought in the center of the struggling mass, immersed in clashing swords, revolver blasts, horses stumbling and colliding. A rallying point and a target, he rode Roanoke, his best horse. “I never intend to ride him into battle,” he had written to his sister. “He is too valuable.” Now Roanoke took a bullet to the foreleg, and staggered and fell. Custer got clear, pulled himself onto a riderless horse, and rejoined the fight.
He and the 1st Michigan drove into the Confederate formation, splitting it apart. Gregg’s division supported the attack; elements of other regiments charged as well. Hampton suffered sword cuts to his head. “For a moment,” Custer wrote, “but only a moment, that long, heavy column stood its ground; then, unable to withstand the impetuosity of our attack, it gave way into a disorderly rout.” The rebels raced back to their ridge, and did not attack again. The Union cavalry had won.58
—
CUSTER WROTE HIS REPORT more than six weeks after the battle, yet he still could not conceal his pride. “The 1st, being masters of the field, had the proud satisfaction of seeing the much-vaunted [Confederate] ‘chivalry,’ led by their favorite commander, seek safety in headlong flight,” he wrote.59
Why wouldn’t he be proud? In command less than a week, self-conscious of his youth, aware that he had been promoted through favoritism as well as merit, he found himself at a crucial point at a critical moment—and he had succeeded. The Confederate horsemen had long stood supreme, as Custer acknowledged with his taunt, but at Gettysburg he and his men had defeated them. They did not crush the enemy, of course; as in the infantry battle, it was a defensive victory, yet a victory nonetheless. The rebels had to break the federal line or run back home; by foiling them, the Union won.
The Union cavalry suffered roughly 250 casualties in this fight, nearly 90 percent in the Michigan Brigade. Gregg had commanded, and commanded well, but Custer had led, in person and in the place of crisis. Somehow he survived without a wound, despite his plunge into the heaviest fighting and changing horses, too.60
The cavalry battle mattered. Stuart was a superb combat leader; if he had been able to reach the rear of the Union line during the rebel infantry attack (known in popular memory as Pickett’s Charge), the story of Gettysburg would have taken a different course. This is not to exaggerate: the Union infantry and artillery crushed the main Confederate attack, and if Stuart’s cavalrymen had broken through they would have been worn down and short of ammunition after their struggle against the Union troopers. Custer did not win the Battle of Gettysburg. Yet Gregg and others on the ground took Stuart’s threat seriously. No army could afford to have a formidable enemy force in its rear during a struggle for its existence. Stuart’s arrival there might have had an unsettling impact on Meade’s frame of mind, if not his actual line of battle.
Custer’s taunt about Southern “chivalry” reveals more than well-earned self-satisfaction. This was the same man who once had repeated the political arguments of secessionist fire-eaters, who had served as best man in a Confederate officer’s wedding, who had lingered in a rebel camp to write letters to old friends who now fought against him. In many ways he identified with Southern chivalry—until it came to fighting. Then he wanted to win. With a saber in hand, the killer momentarily negated the conservative in his soul.
But not the romantic. Galloping onto the field, swinging his sword, arrayed in dramatic costume, long blond hair flying from under his rebel hat, he embodied the archaic fantasies of the lads who had marched to war in 1861, dreaming of personal combat with naked steel. Custer’s charge succeeded due to the tactical conditions, a battle of cavalry against cavalry. That very success reinforced his illusions—the image of a heedless, dashing hero he cultivated for himself as much as for others. The Yankee press seized on that image, hailing him as the “Boy General of the Golden Locks.”
Yet the moment of his triumph was rich—or perhaps we should say heavy—with irony. Another heedless, dashing hero with long curly hair and a carefully chosen costume led an equally dramatic charge almost simultaneously with Custer’s—but it ended in disaster. Confederate general Pickett embodied antebellum Southern chivalry; he “looked like a cross between a Cavalier dandy and a riverboat gambler,” writes James McPherson. “He affected the romantic style of Sir Walter Scott’s heroes and was eager to win everlasting glory at Gettysburg.” The attack spearheaded by his division made a stunning display of the traditional martial virtues: 12,000 men stepping in neat lines behind rows of regimental flags, bravely hurling themselves at the very center of the federal line on the aptly named Cemetery Ridge. But massed cannon and rifle fire annihilated them. Just half the rebel host came back; Pickett lost two out of three men from his own division.61 It was bitterly disillusioning, even for witnesses on the Union side. Valor could not defeat the machinery of war. Firepower crushed courage. What glory could there possibly be amid industrialized slaughter?
This was a lesson the Civil War taught men who endured the hell of pitched infantry combat—men such as the young Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., shot through the neck at Antietam; or Ambrose Bierce, who later recalled how, in his first fight, his regiment had been marched to just within enemy artillery range and ordered to lie down, where solid shot ricocheted through their ranks, horrifically teari
ng apart bodies; or William T. Sherman, who after the terrors of Shiloh and other battles declared that “glory is all moonshine.” Custer, on the other hand, as a horseman fighting against horsemen, lived within an exception to the rule. The question was whether he would ever understand how, and why, the war darkened some of the best minds of his generation.
Custer’s soldiers, though, began to love him for precisely those traits that seemed so obsolete in Pickett’s Charge. Only days before, they had laughed at his girlish curls, his foppish outfit, his preposterous youth. But when he plunged into battle, they saw how he fought. Some of his men might well have reflected on the unwisdom of his leading charges. He was a brigadier general, responsible for thousands of lives. He could not control his regiments amid a melee, and if he died in battle, as so many officers did, confusion could prevail and imperil the entire brigade. But the men saw a general who led by example. He “was not afraid to fight like a private soldier,” one reflected, and “was ever in front and would never ask them to go where he would not lead.” He fought with skill, too, and they admired him for it.62
Most important, Custer was not reckless with the lives of his soldiers, however much he was with his own. Though an aggressive commander, he had not attacked blindly. He made the most of the new technology of the repeating Spencer rifle by deploying many of his soldiers on foot, and he put his well-manned artillery to good use. He chose the right moments to charge, essentially counterpunching after his opponent committed himself. At Gettysburg, Gregg confirmed his judgment by ordering charges at the same time he did. Insecure in some respects, he was confident in his own courage and fighting ability, or he never would have worn such an attention-getting getup. Many things may be said about the contradictory Custer, but one of the most important is that he understood the battlefield. There he was at ease.
For the men of the Michigan Brigade, their assessment of Custer came down to one thing. He gave them what they wanted most: victory.
Five
* * *
THE WOMEN
SHE GUARDED THE DOORWAY between worlds. On one side was the world of now and on the other the world to come. The passage between them was governed by rules, beliefs, and rituals that Lydia Ann Reed kept for her family, as did many women of her time and place. Dark-haired with wide, sad eyes and a long, thin face, fourteen years older than Armstrong, she stood as sentinel of the faith, reminding her men to mind eternity. Sealed inside a frail frame, denied the powers of the earth because of her sex, she had this one grim dark role to play, beyond the maternal and matrimonial.1
“Your vary welcome letter was I was going to say read with much pleasure it made me feel sad to hear that you had to kill that man,” she wrote to her brother on August 13, 1862. She had just received his account of the first time he knew for certain he had taken a life, shooting an escaping Confederate officer in the back. She did not write that she was proud of him or grateful for his survival; she said she was troubled. Even in war, killing challenged her faith, in which God alone could determine the end of days and apportion suffering for his own purposes. As a soldier, her brother embodied a conundrum: he did his duty to his fellow men yet invited divine retribution, for as Jesus said, “All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” Without stopping for punctuation she moved from regret to fear. “I am afraid the next thing I hear you will get shot you are so venturesome,” she added. “Oh the horrors of war when will this cruel war be over and many loved ones return home.”2
Her prayer was a common one in those days. “I feel very ancious about you all the time,” she wrote on June 23, 1863, with her customary erratic spelling. “I don’t know what day I may have some bad news from you.” She feared for his soul as much as his body, uncertain where he would go if he went through the door. She insisted that the invisible was more real than the visible, and called on him to repent. “My Dear Brother O how much I wish you was a christian,” she wrote. “You have often said you was happy. I don’t think thare is any true happyness in the world with out religion.” It would later be said of her, “She cared little for the world’s pleasure, but found her chief enjoyment in the church.” For Armstrong, the opposite was true, yet he too had been raised on scripture. She gave voice to admonitions that lingered inside his skull.3
Armstrong remained a creature of the senses, not the spirit. He filled his heart with temporal things, with fighting, promotion, friendship, music, dancing, gambling, and love—and lust. And he demanded that Ann play a temporal role for him as his intermediary for his romantic affairs. It unsettled her. One Friday morning in June 1863, Fannie Fifield stopped by and mentioned that Armstrong had sent her a letter. Soon after she called again in company with Nettie Humphrey, Libbie Bacon’s closest friend. It placed Ann in a difficult position.
Her discomfort surfaced in her letters to Armstrong, as she alternated worries about his health with non sequiturs about the women he desired. She wrote on June 23, “Oh that this cruel war was over. I saw Libbie…with a young gentleman and two young ladies. Thare was quite a number of strangers [in town for a Methodist meeting]. Fannie said she had five girls at her house.” By juxtaposing Armstrong’s love interests with her fears for his safety, she seemed to ramble with inchoate stress at being caught in the middle of his romantic entanglements.4
Three weeks after Gettysburg, Ann complained that she had not heard from him despite her many letters. Then she turned to the women. “Fannie has gone east with her Father and Mother,” she wrote. “She braught a letter over to send [to Armstrong] with mine. She looked vary nice. She had a beautiful dress on and was as happy as a bee. She enjoys life. There was a concert at the Seminary last Thursday evening. Edward Thurbur the Minister took Libbie.” Weary of her role, she complained that she couldn’t give him any news about his friends and peers. She was happier describing her children. Her daughter Emma said she wanted to send Armstrong a bowl of gravy; she thought he would like it.
But then she returned to Libbie. Armstrong had recently sent Ann and David Reed a drawing by Alfred Waud, the famous battlefield artist. Waud had drawn Custer himself at the Battle of Aldie, showing him out in front of the charging line of Union cavalry, his black horse in full gallop, long hair and wide-brimmed slouch hat on his head, his sword held high. “Don’t you know David took that picture you sent and went and called on Libbie,” Ann wrote, “and showed it to her and had quite a talk with her.”5
Ann’s letter suggests that David visited Libbie on his own initiative. In fact, Armstrong had specifically asked his brother-in-law to show the portrait to Fannie and Libbie, and to deliver a letter to the latter.6 But David made a bitter rebuke that Armstrong had not written to him, suggesting a growing irritation with Armstrong’s assumption that David and Ann should be his agents.
Socially, the Reeds ranked lower than Judge Bacon and his family. To be sure, this small Michigan town was far from the status-obsessed Manhattan fictionalized by Edith Wharton, but ideas of respectability and rank flourished here as well. Ann was the uneducated daughter of a tavern keeper’s widow, stepdaughter of a poor and barely literate blacksmith, and wife of a farmer who—though prosperous—hauled stuff around in wagons. She revealed her self-consciousness to Armstrong in the same letter. “You will see I make a grate many mistakes this evening. I don’t know how a General can read such a letter as this. Some of the folks think you will hardly speak to common folks now.”7 She didn’t really worry about her brother putting on airs, but she certainly classed herself with the “common folks.” Fannie Fifield and Libbie Bacon, on the other hand, were daughters of a wealthy businessman and a judge, respectively. Their manners were refined, their schooling elevated, their sense of fashion acute.
Morally, too, Ann felt deeply uncomfortable as her brother pursued two women at once. Her correspondence with him shows that he was sincere in his courtship of Fannie. But his continuing interest in Libbie made things awkward for Ann, especially given the social gap between them. One night in the summe
r of 1863, Ann went to a shop owned by a woman named Avery. As she turned to leave she came face-to-face with “Miss Libbie B.,” as Ann called her. “She bowed vary pleasantly. I don’t know wether she bowed to me or Miss Avery. I did not return the bow,” Ann wrote. “If she did bow to me she will think I was rather cool.”8 Was she, in fact, being cool? If so, it was not Libbie but her brother’s lack of fidelity that left her cold.
After David’s visit, Ann seemed to know more about Armstrong’s covert communication with Libbie through Nettie Humphrey. She reported to him about Fannie, then grew rather curt, even sarcastic, when it came to Libbie. She heard Libbie’s stepmother was going away on a trip, but “I don’t know wether Libbie is going or not. Perhaps you know all about it.…I suppose Nettie keeps you pretty well posted.”9
Each letter Armstrong sent to Ann seemed to bear witness to his carelessness and callousness. On July 25, he wrote, “I asked General Pleasonton for a leave of absence in Aug or Sep. He says I can have a leave but only on the condition viz. that I marry Fannie Fifield. Shall I come?” Less than a month after that, Ann was forced to doubt his sincerity toward Fifield. She wrote, “Fannie…said she did not know but you was displeased at her. I told her I thought not that you had sent your love to her in my letter. I see I am mistaken you wished to be remembered to her.”10
Custer was hardly the first man to let opportunism govern his relations with women. “I know girls better than you,” he once told Libbie, and he believed he could manipulate them.11 His true emotions, though, remained a mystery to those who knew him best, and perhaps to himself. The day was coming when he would have to know.
—
ON NEW YEAR’S EVE, the last day of 1862, Libbie Bacon sat on the floor of her room with Nettie Humphrey as each read a letter the other had written the year before. As a band played outside, the two young women took sheets of paper and wrote new letters to each other, to be opened a year later. It was their private tradition for greeting the new year. After they read messages from the past and sent them to the future, they would sleep beside each other as the calendar turned over.
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