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

by Stiles, T. J.

  They were close. Nettie believed that Libbie “belonged to me as much as to anybody.” Libbie talked to Nettie about love and courtship as she did with no one else. She “raved about Francis C’s beautiful mouth,” Nettie wrote to her, “and wondered how you should dispose of ‘that Capt. Custer!’ ”12

  This New Year’s Eve showed twenty-year-old Bacon on the threshold between childhood and maturity, with her schoolgirl’s custom, adolescent attractions, and adult’s concern with manners and marriage. In the year ahead she would face decisions that would direct the course of the rest of her life, and she was not sure she was ready.13

  Her existence to that point had been both sheltered and precarious. She had been born in Monroe on April 8, 1842, to Sophia and Daniel Bacon, who named her Elizabeth Clift Bacon, though Sophia always called her Libbie. Daniel, born on December 12, 1798, was a broad, balding, rather dour-faced man. He had been active in the Whig Party as long as it existed, serving in the state senate and on the circuit court. He survived the depression that began in 1837, and invested in real estate and other enterprises in partnership with Nettie’s father.

  But death struck the family again and again. When Libbie was three, her four-month-old sister, Sophia, died. When she was about five, her older brother Edward fell through a broken step; he spent a year confined to his bed, then died of illness just after Libbie’s sixth birthday. The next year another sister, Harriett, died when only six months old. Later cholera burned through Monroe, taking many lives. In 1852 she wrote in her diary about what she planned to do “if I am permitted to live to become a woman.” At ten years old, an early death seemed to her as likely as life.14

  Beset with these losses, the devout Sophia guided the family into a deeper engagement with the Presbyterian Church. Piety, she learned, also made a potent tool for parenting. On one occasion she punished Libbie by sending her to bed early. The girl fell asleep and awoke to find her mother ardently praying for her and over her. Sophia had planted shame and it grew. “Oh! I am very wicked. I feel it,” Libbie later wrote in her diary, “a typical lament,” her biographer Shirley Leckie notes.15

  In August 1854, Sophia contracted “bloody dysentery.” It proved fatal. “I stood by that open grave and felt—oh! God only knows what anguish filled my heart,” Libbie told her diary.16 From that moment onward, she would be sheltered precisely because she had lost so much, because her life had been so uncertain. “My daughter was commited [sic] to my care and protection at the age of twelve years,” Daniel Bacon wrote. Her dying mother told him, “I want you to be a mother as well as a father to Elizabeth.” Almost a decade later he remarked, “I have ever felt the force of these words.…I feel the responsibility beyond anything in my life before or since.”17

  Libbie herself held tightly to childhood. Though she never forgot her grief, she learned how to exploit her loss. “How shamelessly I traded on…[being] poor motherless Libbie Bacon,” she later recalled. “What an excuse I made of it!” Sent to a boarding school in Auburn, New York, she described her ambivalence about the maturity that seemed forced on her by circumstances. “I like being a little girl,” she wrote to her father. “I dread being a young lady so much.…I like acting free and girl like Not being so prim and particular about what I say and do!”18

  In 1859 Libbie’s father remarried, wedding a widow named Rhoda Wells Pitts. Over the next few years, he believed, she came to be Libbie’s “adviser and protector.” Libbie returned to Monroe, underwent the conversion expected of all believers, even those raised in the church, and enrolled at the Young Ladies’ Seminary and Collegiate Institute. Two official visitors inspected the school in the spring of 1862, when Libbie graduated as valedictorian, and came away impressed. “The pupils had learned how to study, to obtain control of their own minds, so that their entire energies might be concentrated upon any subject,” they reported. “Some schools have too much of the stuffing process—going over a great amount, and crowding into the young brain as much of this and that as possible.…Young girls, especially, are often ruined in health for life by being pressed beyond measure in this way.” By contrast, Libbie and her peers were so well taught “that Algebra becomes a plaything.…Their essays on commencement day were of great merit.” The Detroit Free Press praised Libbie’s valedictory address as “one of the best.”19

  But she could not escape the internal tides of adolescence and young adulthood. She would later write to her stepmother, “Mother I haven’t uttered a cross word [for some time]. Now isn’t that pretty well for me?” She would comment acidly on others, even her own father; when she was talking to him, she noted, he had a tendency to “walk away downtown, leaving me to finish a sentence to the wall.”20

  More than temper, though, her trouble was desire—and being desired. Men admired her thick dark hair and soft dark eyes when she was barely a teenager; she once slapped a doctor who kissed her when she was only thirteen. She pushed men back but also felt a secret pleasure; as Leckie writes, “nothing delighted her more than attracting men.”

  During an art lesson she had to scramble out of the grasp of her teacher, though not without a sense of triumph. At an exhibition in Toledo, a high school principal “talked and looked me through!” she wrote in her diary. “I guess he knew I had ruffles on my drawers.…The exhibition was fine but the Principal finer.”21

  Older men surrounded her in part because the war carried so many young men away. The year 1861 had seen the organization of the 4th Michigan Infantry Regiment in town, mass meetings, flags and bunting everywhere. Libbie and Rhoda sewed and baked for the troops, as countless other women did. The war pulled them into a public role, supporting the military through individual efforts and aid societies, yet mostly in terms that defined middle-class women’s lives—the “cult of domesticity,” as historians would call it. This was the part that Libbie was expected to fill—to devote herself to domestic and religious chores, regardless of her education, intelligence, and natural independence. She craved love, expected marriage, but dreaded confinement.22

  In late 1861, Libbie sat in church one Sunday, utterly bored. She sketched a caricature of the man in the pulpit. After the service a minister named Dutton scolded her—then began to call frequently at the Bacon house. He courted her, and her father and stepmother approved. In April he kissed her. “I knew then he loved me,” she wrote in her diary, “but no love was in my bosom for him, only admiration for his intellect.”23

  She was more taken with her dreams. Two were particularly vivid, coming to her on successive nights, in which she married a soldier, “the dear man who forms the subject of my journal so often.” Dutton was not that man. Neither was the lawyer who wooed her before him, nor the railroad clerk who came after.24

  Thanksgiving of 1862 came. The Boyds, principals of the Young Ladies’ Seminary, hosted their holiday party. There she accepted an introduction to a lean young man in a captain’s uniform named George Armstrong Custer. He did not look like an ordinary soldier, with his keen blue eyes, red-gold mustache, and curly uncut hair—and he seemed to know it. One reporter wrote that he had “a very slight impediment in his speech,” later described as a stammer, particularly pronounced when he grew excited.25 He was rather excited now. But she was amused as well as attracted by his affectations and swagger; as she had written earlier that year in her diary, “I do so hate [airs] in anybody.”

  As small as Monroe was, the two did not know each other. He had spent only odd patches of his life in Monroe, between his years in Ohio, West Point, and service in the army. She, too, had spent months away and years cloistered in the seminary. On meeting, a current sparked between them, and Custer felt it. Nettie Humphrey later called her friend Libbie the “spirit of mischief”—echoing Custer’s description of himself as “full of mischief.” She was not only beautiful, she was alive.26

  So began his siege of her doorstep, his patrol of her routine, his penetration of her diary. “I admire him,” she wrote, for suffering sleet and rain “soldie
rlike” to hold an umbrella for her. He passed by her house “forty times a day,” she noted with pleasure. His courtship was “in too much haste tho’ I admire his perseverance.”

  The word “soldierlike” embodied her attraction. He was a creature of duty, discipline, endurance, and strength. Even his aggressiveness appealed to her—though it was “too much.” A soldier’s virtues and vices did not sit easily in the drawing room. Soldiers gambled and swore among themselves and did worse with women. They killed and they died. In the midst of the great war, soldiers were both the national heroes and the national tragedy. Custer was young, handsome, and far more interesting than the lawyer, railroad clerk, or depressed minister who had pursued her. He was also dangerous. For both reasons he brought intrigue and romance into her life.27

  Judge Bacon dismissed Custer as “that mustached fellow.” The young captain came from the wrong family, the wrong party, the wrong profession. And he had been seen drunk in the street. Public standing mattered a great deal to the judge. With Libbie, he later declared, he had “guarded her reputation with intense parental solicitude.” A union—even a dalliance—with Custer would do her reputation no good.28

  Custer’s attention flattered Libbie, but she took it no more seriously than the “beautiful mouth” of Francis Chandler. Whenever he snared her on the street, she avoided any discussion of his feelings. Toward the end of 1862, he finally spoke to her with purpose. “Nobody could entertain him but me over an hour without his being lonely,” Libbie wrote in her diary. “He tells me he would sacrifice every earthly hope to gain my love and I tell him if I could I would give it to him.”29

  What Custer did not realize was how fiercely Judge Bacon opposed him. After Custer appeared at the train station to see Libbie off on her February trip, Bacon sent an angry letter to her, insisting that she had grown too close to Custer; the whole town was gossiping. She replied that she had repelled his advances. “I did it all for you. I like him very well,” she wrote. “You have never been a girl, Father, and you cannot tell how hard a trial this was for me.” The idea that she was the subject of public talk stung her. “And Monroe people will please mind their own business, and let me alone,” she wrote. “I wish the gossipers sunk in the sea.”30

  After her rebuff, Custer turned his attention to Fannie Fifield, Libbie’s friend, classmate, and competitor all through her school years. Together with her father’s heightened opposition, it had the perverse effect of inciting Libbie to take Custer more seriously. When his attention came easily, she had treated it as a trivial thing; now she wanted it dearly. “Fan is trying to get him to be her devoted and all the time I know how he feels toward me,” she reassured herself in her diary. She recruited Nettie to be her secret messenger, supplying an ambrotype portrait of herself for him. Libbie arranged seemingly chance encounters with him at the Humphrey House parlor.31

  Yet Libbie remained trapped in a quintessential dilemma for a middle-class woman of the mid-1800s. She was to be desired, yet could not desire; or, at least, she could not pursue whom she wanted. She could not break the rules of middle-class respectability. She could not risk her all-important reputation—not only for her own sake but for that of her father. Fannie’s disregard for her own public standing was both an advantage and a disadvantage; it gave Fannie more freedom to act, yet made her less valuable. Fannie could see him openly, Libbie told herself, “but I think my reputation is of more account and so I am content tho’ the chain frets me often.” When Libbie refused Custer’s kiss in the love seat before the mirror, she told him that she belonged to a different category of woman than Fifield, and Armstrong hastily agreed. And so she rebounded between furtively expressing affection for him and guarding her reputation—interrogating him, for example, about showing off her picture to his niece.

  Unaware of Libbie’s turmoil, underestimating the trap that held her, Custer lashed out at her that evening at the Fifield home, when he played cards and ladled her with sarcasm. “I am glad I saw him last night as I did,” she wrote in her diary. “I know he fibs, for the matter of the ambrotype shows it.” And yet, and yet—“some traits he has are splendid and I have never seen them so fully developed in any other.”

  Even on the night he turned on her, she still asked him to keep in contact by writing to Nettie. As Custer departed Monroe in the spring of 1863, she told herself that he was not one for “transient love.”32

  This was an argument more than a judgment—an argument with herself. Her diary became an ongoing attempt to persuade herself to disregard his duplicity with Fannie, that her moral superiority was a romantic advantage. Fannie believed they were engaged, but Libbie considered it ridiculous that “C—— knowing the low-minded girl as he does, should wish to marry her. He, like others, takes all she gives which I sometimes think is everything, but when a man has all he desires in one he rarely desires the girl for his wife,” she wrote.

  This internal conversation mired her in contradictions and conflicting standards. She never considered that Armstrong was as “low-minded” as Fannie if the two were having sex. Despite the rise of radical “Free Love” advocates, despite calls for women’s sexual freedom, Libbie accepted that she must remain chaste but that a single man—especially a soldier—would seize what sex he could. Armstrong described how Fannie sat on his lap and “he kissed her as he liked.” Yet he also insisted upon a woman’s virginity, often remarking that he would never marry a widow because he refused to have the “left-over remains” of another man.

  In the end, the difference she saw between herself and Fannie was less moral than tactical. Libbie wanted what Fannie wanted. She kept Custer at a distance “more from principle than from inclination,” she wrote. “I know the reason he loved me [was] because I wouldn’t let him kiss me and treat me as if we were engaged.”33

  But Armstrong himself kept confounding her attempts to trim their romance to fit the pages of the books she read. One moment she reflected on how “devoted” he was, how interested he was in her, by contrast with her other suitors. “C—— has quite spoiled me,” she wrote. “Everything I said or did was remembered or treasured by him.” Then Fannie bragged about Custer’s romantic letters to her, remarking that he had left a farewell note when he departed Monroe. Libbie replied, “Captain Custer loves me too much to go away and never say good bye to me!”

  “Yes, he does like you but I guess he thinks you don’t like him much,” Fannie answered, making it appear that Armstrong had told her how Libbie had spurned his kiss. Libbie tried to convince herself that Armstrong was “flirting desperately” merely so he could “jilt such a renowned flirt.”34

  As the duel between the two women played out, the war approached a crisis. Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania dominated the newspapers, and Custer’s name appeared in the Monroe Commercial. “We have not a more gallant man in the field,” it declared on July 2; “whenever there is a daring expedition to be undertaken or hard fighting to be done, he is ever among the foremost.”35

  Fannie now declared that Custer would marry her that autumn. She even asked Libbie and Nettie to be her bridesmaids. Fannie said that Custer had shown her his photograph of Libbie. She described it and smirked, “You look so careless like.”

  “He had no business to write the passionate messages he has about me & to me when he has been writing so constantly & lovelike to Fan,” Libbie told her diary. “He is nothing to me. He never will be.”36

  But she secretly clung to him as he rose from noted local boy to national hero. His sudden promotion stunned the town. “Upon first appearance of the report that Captain Custer had been made a Brigadier General of Cavalry, we were in some doubt as to its genuineness,” the Commercial admitted later that month. “He had fairly earned his promotion…and it is an honor which Monroe citizens should be proud of.” The paper went on to quote the Philadelphia Inquirer’s enthusiastic account of his performance at Gettysburg. It called him “conspicuous among the bravest of the brave. Young, dashing, and impulsive, his gol
den, curly locks, and gay velvet undress jacket, made him a shining mark for the Rebel sharp-shooters; but he came out of the fire unscathed and unharmed. This young officer has a bright future before him.”37

  On July 5, Libbie received a visit from David Reed at her family’s home. A bald man with a Lincoln beard, sloping shoulders, and bright blue eyes, he opportunely appeared while Judge Bacon was away, and presented the drawing of Custer at Aldie. The image overwhelmed her. It took the young man she knew only on a quiet street, a domestic parlor, and placed him on the savage battlefield. She noted the wild and dangerous details later in her diary—“an old slouch reb hat, a brigand jacket…old forlorn pants & boots over them.”

  Reed told her Custer had insisted that she should see it. He gave her the letter from him and they chatted briefly. As he walked to the door, Libbie remarked that she had heard Custer would marry Fannie later that year. “Do you think so?” he said, turning toward her. “If you don’t know his feelings, he doesn’t know.” His manner convinced her, she told her diary, that “C—— loves me devotedly.”38

  Her impression may well have been true. Reed may have been telling her to trust her heart. But his reply can be read in a way Libbie did not consider: “If you don’t know his feelings, he doesn’t know.” These same words could mean that Custer himself did not understand his true emotions.

  As suggested before, it is too categorical to assume that Custer was being purely duplicitous by pursuing both women, or that he merely used Fannie to make Libbie jealous (as Libbie concluded). Human beings possess an astonishing capacity for believing contradictory ideas when convenient. He could love Fannie or Libbie, Fannie and Libbie, juggling irreconcilable passions as long as he was not forced to choose. Being desired by more than one woman was a heady experience, and he did not want to let it go. But he was a man now—a general, in fact, and a famous one. Between his family’s piety, the judgment of Monroe society, and his new public status, he could not play the cad much longer. He would have to choose between them, which meant he would have to stop fooling himself.