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

by Stiles, T. J.

  Of course, Christiancy was the public, in that he was a very influential civilian. That was why Custer whispered to him. McClellan-like, he plunged again into insubordination, violating the chain of command to intrigue with his political sponsor.

  To be fair, Meade’s caution did spark controversy.15 But Custer was a general, not a private soldier. If his letter reached the wrong desk, it might destroy him. He also exaggerated his place in the larger drama. As one of scores of brigadier generals in the Army of the Potomac, it is extremely unlikely that he possessed inside information about the highest levels of command. He rewrote his minor part into the lead. The true main characters remained offstage, unaware of Custer’s wild claims. He never suffered the repercussions he feared. But this was not an isolated case. He possessed a self-destructive impulse that, in moments of indignation, drove him to assail the very highest authorities. And he would do it again, with consequences.

  He was in a dark mood. He had learned that his friend Leroy Elbert had died of a fever on a steamboat on the Mississippi; the body was tossed onto the shore, where it was identified only by accident.16 But the real provocation had come late in the Bristoe Station Campaign, as the Cavalry Corps pursued the retreating Confederates.

  On the cold, wet morning of October 19, Kilpatrick pushed his division southwest from Gainesville, Virginia, with Custer’s brigade in the advance. A strong enemy force stopped them near Buckland Mills, at a bridge over steep-banked Broad Run. Custer outflanked the Confederates, who retreated—a bit too easily.17 Kilpatrick ordered Custer to give chase immediately. He refused. His men had not eaten since the day before, he said. He ordered his troops to unsaddle on the newly captured side of Broad Run. He was wary. He sent out scouts, and deployed the 6th Michigan under Maj. James H. Kidd to guard his vulnerable left flank, facing south. Impatient, Kilpatrick left Custer behind and took the 1st Brigade on a hunt to the southwest after the retreating foe, toward the town of Warrenton. Kidd’s regiment advanced on foot to the edge of an open field. Confederate troops opened fire from the tree line beyond. They belonged to Fitzhugh Lee’s division of cavalry, also on foot. The attack swelled quickly. A Union chaplain heard the famous rebel yell, “something between the shriek of a woman and the scream of a panther.”

  Kilpatrick had led the division into a trap. J. E. B. Stuart had lured the Union cavalry forward, ordering Lee to encircle and destroy the Union division by cutting off its retreat over Broad Run. Custer waged a hard, chaotic fight, one brigade against a division, to bring his men back across the stream. “Contrabands and camp followers were careering by in a state of panic,” wrote the chaplain, who rode with the wagon train. “The pursuing enemy was now closing upon us from all sides.…It seems that they put to death at once all blacks taken while employed in any capacity in our service.” Custer held off the Confederates long enough to escape. His long delay at the crossing had spoiled Stuart’s trap. As Kidd wrote to his parents, “Dinner saved us.”

  Even so, the rebels smashed up the 3rd Division. Once Lee attacked, Stuart struck Kilpatrick and the 1st Brigade, which dissolved in a frantic gallop back to Buckland Mills. The rebels laughingly called the battle the Buckland Races.18

  “Yesterday, October 19, was the most disastrous this division has ever passed through,” Custer wrote to Nettie Humphrey. “All would have been well had General K. been content to leave well enough alone.” He was about to follow Kilpatrick “when the enemy made a vigorous attack from the direction I had prophecied [sic] they would.”19

  Custer embellished. Kidd believed “that he was entirely unaware of the presence of a [sic] enemy in our immediate neighborhood.” Ironically, he comes off better because he lacked perfect knowledge of the enemy’s intentions. Acting on little more than a hunch, he halted at the crossing, despite the irritation of his commander, and took precautions against a surprise attack. It was the right hunch.20

  Custer lost his headquarters wagon with all his papers. He blamed Kilpatrick, whose aide had redirected it. His brigade suffered 214 casualties in the campaign. Again he blamed Kilpatrick, who had detached a battalion from the 5th Michigan without Custer’s knowledge. It was wiped out, reducing the regiment by a fifth or more.21 “Yesterday was not a gala day for me,” he wrote in his letter to Nettie. For a man so inclined to congratulate himself, this was a revealing admission. “My only consolation is that I am in no way responsible for the mishap, but on the contrary urged General K. not to take the step which brought it upon us, and the only success gained by us was gained by me.”22

  Tension with an immediate superior placed Custer in a dangerous position. Fortunately for him, Kilpatrick had the more controversial reputation, heard in his nickname “Kill-Cavalry.” Even Pleasonton reprimanded him for “a very great want of discipline.”23

  Pleasonton’s reliability as a friend was decisive in Custer’s career calculations. After the Bristoe Station Campaign, he contemplated a transfer to the West, where he might command a division. He would have to establish his reputation anew, he told Nettie, so he had to weigh the strength of his existing support from Meade and Pleasonton against the anticipated friendship of Gen. George Thomas, commander of the Army of the Cumberland. Thomas “could scarcely do more for me, however, than Genl. Meade and Genl. Pleasonton are willing to do,” particularly the latter. “I do not believe a father could love his son more than Genl. Pleasonton loves me,” he wrote. After a battle he often said to Custer, “Well, boy, I am glad to see you back. I was anxious about you.”24

  He chose the angel he knew. He remained in the Army of the Potomac. He did his best to control his anger at Kilpatrick, but trusted Pleasonton to watch over him.

  —

  “THE HAND OF THE LORD has been over you and around you. Nothing els could have saved you,” Emmanuel Custer wrote to his son on October 25. “We should look and trust in him and be vary thankful for his goodness and mercy shoan to wards us.”

  Later accounts would depict Emmanuel as a fun-loving prankster, much like Armstrong, but his letters reveal a serious man living a hard life, who cajoled, implored, and moralized. His method was to manipulate his son with guilt. In this letter, he turned from gratitude to a sermon aimed at his son’s lack of piety. He never asked for money, but detailed his financial distress. He implied that Armstrong should use his influence to help his younger brother Tom, who served in the Western theater. “I would be glad if this war was over doant forget to write to pore Tom give him al the comfort that you can,” he wrote. “I would be glad to here that Thomas had been trasnfired to the Patomac Army.”25

  Emmanuel clearly loved his children, but his guilt-inducing moral pressure heightened Armstrong’s volatility. He responded to his parents’ poverty by indulging in luxuries he could not afford. He relished wartime perks, boasting of the “elegant house” he had seized as his headquarters. He simply ignored the calls to repent. Yet he loved his family as much as they loved him, and began to work on transferring Tom into his own brigade.26

  Again and again, Custer adopted father figures.27 He wanted guidance, friendship, approval, and the prestige of proximity to important men. He also wanted the benefits they might bestow. In this he was merely traditional. On one hand, the public celebrated the market economy, with its values of competition and entrepreneurship. Competition—in business or in war—focuses every effort on victory, which highlights the importance of real ability. Yet Americans still organized public life through personal connections, through networks of patrons and supplicants. The organizational society, with its impersonal standards and systematic assessments, had barely begun to sprout. So it was perfectly ordinary for Custer to seek patronage, but the obligations he owed in return could be complicated.

  As a favor to Judge Christiancy, he brought his son James onto his staff. It embroiled him in a tormented relationship. The judge believed drink was destroying Jim. “Strict discipline & constant employment may sober him; if not, he is lost,” Christiancy wrote. He urged Custer to fire him if he di
d not meet expectations. “He marches straight to the Devil.…Poor Jim! I have spent many a sleepless night in consequence of his errors. May God direct him. I have tried and failed.”28

  It may be impossible for a soldier in war to walk the path of righteousness. It may be impossible for a twenty-three-year-old commander to meet both the demands of combat leadership and the murky moral duties of a mentor and friend. Safely at home in Monroe, Emmanuel and Isaac did not know the dread, adrenaline, and kinetic chaos of the battlefield, or the tedium of camp life. The fathers of Monroe issued their judgments, and Custer did what he could.

  He wanted one more father, of course, and his name was Daniel Bacon. The judge constantly mediated Libbie and Rhoda’s conflicting emotions regarding Custer. “My more than friend—at last,” Libbie wrote to Armstrong after her father approved their corresponding with each other. “I was surprised to hear how readily Father had consented to our correspondence. You have no idea how many dark hours your little girl has passed.” She and her father had sat together in front of the fireplace one Sunday night and talked about Custer until the fire died. She saw him warming.

  Her stepmother remained cold. Libbie wrote, “I love her dearly and respect her opinions, but not her prejudices.” That word prejudices speaks to the importance of respectability to the Bacons, and to the social distance between themselves and the dirty-nailed Custers. Stories of Armstrong’s promises to Fannie Fifield circulated in town—thanks to an angry Fifield. Judge Bacon asked his daughter how she would feel if Custer turned out to be false. Then she would be done with him, she said. That satisfied him. “When I say anything that would seem an impediment to my marrying Armstrong, Father is the one to explain it away,” she wrote in her diary. He dismissed Custer’s affairs, saying, “Why he was a boy then & never had been in society &c.”29

  She did not realize that her father had investigated the Boy General. Here Custer’s pursuit of patrons proved its value. Bacon interviewed Col. Frazy Winans and Col. Ira Grosevenor, discussed Custer with Christiancy, and obtained letters about him from other officers in the Army of the Potomac. Nor did Libbie know that Custer sent a package to her father on December 7. It contained the large, hand-colored photograph taken in Washington. Custer asked Judge Bacon to hang it in her room as a surprise, a Christmas present. And he asked for permission to marry her.

  “I can anticipate the strength of her lungs when [the portrait] shall meet her eye,” Bacon replied on December 12. Then he turned to the great question. “I feel that I have kept you in suspense quite too long.” She was his only child, he wrote, and his love and concern for her future delayed his reply. “I feel too that I have no right to impose terms over my daughter…or to make choices for her.” Custer’s “explanatory and excellent letter” had affected him. His inquiries, “as well as the wishes of my daughter, perfectly reconcile me to yield my hearty assent to the contemplated union.” One thing nagged at him: Custer was not a Christian. But he could not refuse Libbie, and he took pride in Armstrong’s “well earned military reputation.” He warned that he was not a wealthy man.30

  Armstrong replied immediately. Wordy, stilted, strenuously humble, his letter nevertheless rippled with his delight. A sample sentence: “I will endeavor throughout my future life to so shape my course, guided and activated by the principles of right, as will not only secure and promote the happiness of her who soon will become my wife, but I will also make it an aim of my life to make myself deserving of the high and sacred trust you have reposed in me, and I hope no act of mine will ever afford you the faintest foundation for supposing your confidence in my worth and integrity has been misplaced.” That is to say, “I’ll try to make her happy, do the right thing, and make you proud of me.” Custer’s sister, on the other hand, received a much chattier note. Armstrong asked if he and Libbie were the talk of the town yet, bragged that he got a $100 wedding coat as a present, and added, “Tell Pap I forgot to get his consent.”31

  “My dear ‘Beloved Star,’ ” Libbie wrote to Armstrong. “If loveing [sic] with one’s whole soul is insanity I am ripe for the asylum.” Fannie Fifield appeared in new furs, Libbie wrote, wearing a diamond ring from a wealthy Boston merchant, only to learn Libbie was the talk of Monroe. Fannie interrogated one of her friends: Were Libbie and Custer to be married? Was the diamond on her ring bigger than Fannie’s? It delighted Libbie, as everything did now. One day Emmanuel Custer rode up to her house on a fine horse that Armstrong had sent home. He told Judge Bacon that Libbie would have the “best of boys for a husband.” Bacon dryly replied that he thought Armstrong would like Libbie after he got to know her better. Libbie laughed.

  Now that her goal came within sight, she hesitated. “How I love my name Libbie BACON,” she wrote to Armstrong. “Libbie B-A-C-O-N. Bacon. Libbie Bacon.” Marriage challenged the identity she had forged in adversity and higher education; it threatened her sense of power over her own destiny. She wanted to delay the wedding for a year at least. “The very thought of marriage makes me tremble. Girls have so much fun. Marriage means trouble,” she wrote to him.32

  Her pause at becoming “his ‘little wife’ ” is noteworthy given social expectations and the strength of her own passion, shaped by the sensibilities of her era and class. “I read him in all my books,” she wrote that autumn. “When I take in the book heroes there comes dashing in with them my life hero my dear boy general.” Another time she wrote, “Every other man seems so ordinary beside my own particular star.” But the approaching reality sobered her. She criticized him, telling him that he had to stop swearing and gambling, and pressured him to profess faith in Christ.

  He agreed to give up betting on cards and horses, but, as she would learn, he was often too quick to agree when it brought him closer to a goal. He never told Libbie how serious his affair with Fifield had been, and said nothing about Annie Jones, a young woman who had spent a week at his headquarters before he threw her out.33

  Libbie herself still enjoyed being desired, and liked to remind Armstrong that other men wanted her. He remarked that Pleasonton had urged him to marry her quickly, noting how many other suitors pursued her. She wrote back, “Genl. Pleasonton has placed the number very small,” and she listed them in detail. She told him of how a “handsome young man” stared at her in church, causing her to blush. “I am susceptible to admiration,” she wrote.34

  At a New Year’s Eve party at the seminary, she wrote to Armstrong, she “made a conquest”—a young man from New York who insisted on kissing her cheek. He was “fearfully impertinent,” she added. She liked it; as Nettie Humphrey noted, the New Yorker gave her “a ‘slight turn’ with his flatteries.” She deliberately provoked Armstrong by telling him of it, inflating her sense of her own value by inflicting him with insecurity. Armstrong himself, of course, had tormented women in the past in precisely the same way. But the incident showed that Libbie was not all humor and charm. Those who knew her felt an edge behind her buoyant manner. Her stepmother criticized her sarcasm and accused her of saying “the most withering things,” as she admitted.35

  But Nettie knew Libbie would joyously marry Armstrong. After the party that New Year’s Eve, the two friends went up to Libbie’s room and followed their tradition, writing letters that looked back over the preceding year, to be read on the last night of 1864. “Here we are, on the floor, as usual, having just finished the perusal of last year’s notes to each other,” Nettie wrote. “Shall we ever spend another New Year’s Eve together? You have just looked up from your writing to ask me the same question.” A year before, Libbie had obsessed over other men, and wondered how she “should dispose of ‘that Capt. Custer!’ ” And now, “Genl Custer’s portrait looks down upon me from your chamber walls.” Over the past twelve months, Libbie fell in love with Armstrong, and spent long days and nights believing “it utterly impossible that you could ever marry this dear man,” Nettie observed. She tried and failed to love other men. She stole sweet moments at the Humphrey House with Armstrong. An
d she finally overcame all obstacles between them.36

  —

  ON NEW YEAR’S DAY, 1864, things went Custer’s way. During the recent Mine Run Campaign, he had briefly led the 3rd Cavalry Division, quite capably. A crowd of Michigan foot soldiers begged to join his brigade. And he convinced the Bacons to agree to a wedding in February instead of months later. Libbie had resisted, not wanting to set a pattern of granting him all his demands. Her stepmother, Rhoda, of all people, took his side. She had agreed to an early wedding to her first husband, she said, yet “I always had my own way afterwards, in everything!” Libbie gave in.37

  His mood changed on January 4. A friend in Washington warned him of a campaign to block Senate confirmation of his appointment as brigadier general. He said it was led by Brig. Gen. Joseph Copeland, the first commander of the Michigan Brigade.

  Custer immediately wrote to Michigan’s U.S. senators, Zachariah Chandler and Jacob Howard, as well as Representative Francis W. Kellogg. As he later remarked, he knew that if his home-state congressmen did not back him, his confirmation would certainly be defeated. Custer reminded Howard that they had met in Detroit in the fall, when the senator had offered help if he should ever need it. He asked Howard to use his place on the Military Affairs Committee to speed up his confirmation. He was just as direct with Chandler, asking “to favor me with your influence to secure my confirmation.” He said he had heard of no other objection “than ‘extreme youth’ and that ‘older men wanted and should have had the place.’ This so far as I am informed is the extent of my crime. I am ‘too young’ consequently I am not slow enough.”