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

by Stiles, T. J.

  Custer declared that his accomplishments should have rendered such lobbying unnecessary. This was disingenuous enough to be a joke. “Politics runs the thing,” James Kidd wrote in early 1864. “Without political friends you are nowhere.” No one knew this better than Custer, of course, who had cultivated patrons and political connections since before he left West Point.38

  Just three days after this burst of letters, Custer heard that Howard opposed his confirmation because “I was not a Michigan Man but from Ohio and that my confirmation would interfere with aspirants from Michigan. This is not the first intimation that I have had of this kind, but I supposed that Senator H. was one of my surest advocates.” He begged Christiancy to “bring influence to bear with both Howard & Chandler which would carry their votes in my favor.”39 Christiancy complied, inducing Howard to reply directly to Custer.

  Custer later summarized Howard’s letter. “It was reported to him that I was a ‘Copperhead’ and a strong opponent of the Administration and the present war policy.” The charge was based on the fact that he had served on McClellan’s staff. He suspected it came from Governor Austin Blair, an enemy of McClellan’s.40

  Custer contemplated Howard’s letter at his desk on the first floor of an eighteenth-century house called Clover Hill that he had appropriated as his headquarters, a two-story, L-shaped building with a steep roof and white-painted porch near Stevensburg, Virginia. Outside, a hard winter rain pounded the earth into deep mud, like a layer of glue that sucked at wheels, hooves, and boots. With campaigning at an end for the season, wives and girlfriends came to visit officers in the brigade—some seventeen women, by one soldier’s count. For Custer, this period of quiet and domesticity seemed as dangerous as any battle.

  Howard asked for a statement of his political views. It was a difficult assignment, given the political gulf between Custer and the Radical Republican Howard, who called for a sweeping reconstruction of the South. “The people of the North are not such fools as to fight through such a war as this,” Howard said, “and then turn around and say to the traitors, ‘All you have to do is to come back into the councils of the nation and take an oath that henceforth you will be true to the Government.’ ”41 He wanted Custer to renounce McClellan, which would mean an implicit rejection of Emmanuel as well. The price of advancement was personal betrayal.

  Custer composed “a brief expression of my views regarding the war policy of the administration.” It is worth quoting this letter at length, because it is one of the most shocking things he would ever write. “I have undertaken to be a soldier, and not a politician,” he wrote. “So far has this sentiment controlled me that, at the last presidential election…I never expressed nor entertained a preference.”

  As a soldier, it was his duty to support the president’s policies, and he did support them. “But I do not stop here,” he wrote.

  All his acts, proclamations, and decisions embraced in his war policy have received not only my support but my most hearty, earnest, and cordial approval.…I seldom discuss political questions, but my friends who have heard me can testify that I have insisted that so long as a single slave was held in bondage, I for one was opposed to peace on any terms. And to show that my acts agree with my words, I can boast of having liberated more slaves from their masters than any other general in this Army.…And rather than that we should accept peace, except on our own terms, I would, and do, favor a war of extermination. I would hang every human being who possesses a drop of rebel blood in their veins whether they be men women or children. Then, after having freed the country from the presence of every rebel, I would settle the whole southern country with a population loyal and patriotic who would not soon forget their obligations to the country.…I think the more rebels we kill the fewer [there] will be to pardon and the better for us. Another question which has excited considerable discussion is that of military arrests in states where the rebellion does not exist. If the President has erred at all it has been in making too few arrests.…

  I will now explain how and why the rumors arose which have reached you, to the effect that I was an opponent of the administration. I was promoted and appointed on the staff of Gen. McClellan for an act of gallantry, and at a time when I was almost a total stranger with McClellan, he having seen me but twice before and never had spoken twenty words to me. During the time McClellan was in command I, as any soldier would, supported him, but I have never allowed my personal obligation to him for his kindness and favor towards me to interfere with my duty.…There are those who desire to see me defeated and no effort has been spared to bring influence to bear with you and Hon. Z. Chandler to prejudice my case.…To vouch for its [this letter’s] correctness I can refer you to Hon. I.P. Christiancy.42

  It was all a lie. It was aggressively false, breathtakingly false, a great, ramshackle house of lies. He was in fact a highly partisan Democrat, at least formerly proslavery, who had passionately opposed Lincoln’s election in 1860. Far from wanting “extermination,” he maintained friendships in the enemy ranks, and, as we’ve seen, even stood as best man in a Confederate wedding. Admittedly, war had hardened him, and he desired victory with a ferocity alien to McClellan.43 But he had never advocated anything like the policies listed in this letter. It was as if he had written a parody of Radical views.

  He sacrificed his mentor. It was purely opportunistic. “Autie adored General McClellan,” Libbie later wrote. “It was the hero worship of a boy and [even] when three years of responsibility had matured him…I think the worship of McClellan was still with him.” As a general Custer was quite the opposite of McClellan, yet his admiration never dimmed, and they shared the same politics. He still blamed the Radicals for his hero’s downfall. “General McClellan was a martyr in his eyes.”44

  Howard forced him to choose between his heart and his ambition, and Custer chose ambition. Judge for yourself, Custer wrote, if anything in his letter “can be considered as any endorsement of McClellan’s policy.” He distanced himself with such words as “stranger” and “any soldier,” barely admitting his “personal obligation.”45

  His career was at risk, of course—and with it the romantic story he crafted for himself. To descend into sudden obscurity due to political intrigue would be shattering. Military success was the lever that had pried Judge Bacon out of resistance to his marrying Libbie—that had moved her to call him “my own particular star.” A match with a fallen former general would be unacceptable; as Libbie once reminded him, “You are not marrying a girl entirely unknown in this State and elsewhere.”46

  Judge Bacon heard rumors about opposition in the Senate and wrote to Custer in alarm. Custer replied that “the subject…has caused me no little anxiety for the past few weeks.” He assured Bacon that it was a misunderstanding, and he had cleared it all up. “But there are now no charges against me which have not been completely refuted and I have no anxiety about whatever in regard to my confirmation.”47

  He had, in fact, received reassurances from Kellogg, who said that both Howard and Chandler now stood behind him. Nothing was certain, of course; months would pass before the Senate voted. For the moment, though, Custer had done enough.48

  —

  “THE LABOR AND EXPENSE of passing through a wedding at this age of the world,” Daniel Bacon wrote to his sister, “is no small thing. I never engaged in an enterprise with more cheerfulness, and yet a good deal was useless and largely extravagant.”49

  At six o’clock on the evening of Tuesday, February 9, 1864, the grim-faced and heavy-jawed Bacon had walked up the eastern aisle of the Presbyterian Church in Monroe, his only child’s arm in his, she leaning on him as if she could not walk that final distance alone. In the western aisle, Armstrong supported Bacon’s wife, Rhoda, still weak from a long illness, as they paced slowly forward. Between them, bodies crammed every available space, taking up the galleries above, the aisles, the vestibule—“filled almost to suffocation,” the Monroe Commercial noted. Amstrong had cut his hair short, to the
disappointment of many, and Libbie wore a silk dress with a long veil suspended from the customary orange-blossom wreath atop her head. The service ended within an hour. Judge Bacon dryly noted, “There were no mistakes made.”

  The wedding party led some 300 guests to the Bacon home, where the reception went on for the next three hours. Everyone seemed to enjoy it, the judge noted, expressing dismay at the cost and pride in the result. The Commercial wrote, “We noticed among the wedding presents to the bride, a large and elegant silver tea set, from the 1st Vermont Cavalry, and a beautiful set of plain, solid silver, presented by the 7th Michigan Cavalry.” The Bacons gave the sober gifts of a Bible and a watch.

  “I yielded her cheerfuly [sic], not perhaps so much on my own judgment as a desire to gratify her ardent desire and wishes,” Judge Bacon wrote his sister. “They both feel they have the highest possible treasure.” He was both happy for Libbie and afraid for Libbie. She told him that day, “I have proved my admiration for your belief in self-made men by marrying one.” It gratified him. But still he worried. He wrote, “What awaits Custer no one can say. Libbie may be a widow or have a maimed husband.”50

  —

  WHAT WAS FORBIDDEN was now required. Knowledge denied to her now defined her. She had long known of it without knowing it; her husband, not she, had had the experience. Now, in the dark, he initiated her.

  Not on the night of the wedding, though: there was no time for it then. After the reception ended, Libbie and Armstrong had changed into travel clothes—she in a brown dress of wool empress cloth with white buttons—and were driven to the railroad station, accompanied by friends, family (including Tom Custer, home on leave), and Custer’s staff—many of them Monroe boys—most of whom had come home with him for the ceremony. The six bridesmaids and groomsmen boarded the midnight train to Cleveland with them. General and Mrs. Custer checked into the Waddell House hotel on arriving in the morning. Another reception ensued, and another party.51

  Finally, more than twenty-four hours after the wedding, the couple were alone and in bed. A year later, Armstrong would tease Libbie about that night. “As that lady remarked in reference to piercing ears &c., There are a great many ways of doing things, some of which I believe are not generally known,” he would write. “I know a certain young lady who had never worn ear rings, and when the piercing was about to be performed was quite reluctant as to both the time and manner of doing such things. How I smile sometimes when riding along as I think of the simplicity with which certain queries were proposed by an anxious searcher after information.”52

  It was their first truly private moment: the held breath of the first undressing, the sight of pale skin, the encounter of a confident, experienced lover and curious, hesitant virgin, stripped bare of her withering wit and sarcastic edge. But most of all, her questions reveal the truth of the instant. She was comfortable enough to ask, to speak of things she had never been allowed to speak of before. It was not an evening of mere resignation on her part—not of awkward silence, a forcible “piercing,” and animal noises. Instead, they spoke. They asked and answered. Their physical intimacy began in emotional intimacy. It is no small thing that they began so well.

  The next day, they continued east. In Buffalo, they went to the theater, where, figuratively and literally, they would live their lives. For Libbie, it had been forbidden; she had never seen a play. There (or perhaps in Rochester, immediately afterward, where they also went to the theater) Armstrong took her to a performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The various dramatic adaptations of the novel comprised the single most popular play in America at the time. With African Americans played by white actors in blackface and characters simplified to heroes, martyrs, and villains, it reduced the searing sins and political complexities of slavery to a melodrama. And so, ironically, Armstrong introduced Libbie to the worldly stage, so reviled by evangelists, through a schematic story of good and evil. She loved it.53

  Physically, culturally, geographically, she journeyed out of her existence and into his—out of the fenced-in yard of the small-town seminary, out of the house of a nervous and protective father, and into the world. They clattered along the New York Central Railroad, stopping in Onondaga to visit her aunt’s family. They transferred to the Hudson River Railroad and chuffed south. They crossed the frozen river on foot to West Point—a hired man pulling Libbie on a sled as Armstrong pushed. Faculty and senior officers honored the academy’s prodigal son, and Libbie was delighted.

  When they left, Libbie found Armstrong incensed. An old professor had kissed her. A group of cadets had walked her alone down a shaded path called Lover’s Walk. She tried to explain, but he steeped in anger and said nothing. He knew that “school-boys,” as she called the cadets, could be cunning and lecherous. They visited brothels. They joked about “wet dreams” and “jerking off.” They lied to girls to sleep with them, then discarded them. (Did Custer see Mariah?) In the past she had flaunted the men who pursued her and reveled in her desirability; now his jealousy bubbled.

  They crossed the river and boarded a train for New York in silence. Why wouldn’t he talk? she asked. He claimed that he had formed the habit in his many hours of confinement and guard duty at West Point. Years later she wrote, “There were many silent seasons which I learned to understand and respect.” The most telling word is “learned.” It points to the awkwardness, the distance, that he could suddenly inject into their otherwise intimate relationship. She confronted an unreachable place within him; she agonized over it, but it defeated her. So she pretended it was a harmless quirk. On the page, at least, she would never reflect on what would have caused such dark withdrawals: the suspicion and jealousy that lurked behind his exuberance, the stress of his constant struggle to present an image of himself, his struggle to live up to the image, the constant biting of his insecurities. He was a mountain of explosive emotions. A volcano must sometimes collapse on itself.54

  —

  THE SIGHT OF LIBBIE surprised Ellen McClellan. She had read that Custer had married a widow. But that’s impossible, she said. Libbie was too fresh, too young.

  Libbie’s recollection of their meeting suggests that it occurred shortly after the couple arrived in New York and checked into the Metropolitan Hotel, the five-story edifice that Custer knew well. It was easy to hire a horse-drawn cab on Broadway and Prince and ride to the McClellan town house at 22 East 31st Street. But it was also complicated. Less than a month had passed since the letter to Senator Howard. If McClellan learned of the letter, their relationship would be strained, if not broken; if word spread that Custer had visited him, any chance of confirmation might be ruined. Despite the risks, it is almost unthinkable that Custer would not bring his bride to meet his hero. “At that time General McClellan ran through our lives,” Libbie later wrote. “We talked of him incessantly.…Autie adored General McClellan.”55

  But why, Libbie thought, did Mrs. McClellan think she was a widow? “I sometimes wonder if one of [Custer’s] friends, who had often heard him announce that if he ever married…he did not care to have the ‘left-over remains’ of any man, had not inserted the hated word [into a press announcement] to play a joke on the ‘widow’ hater,” she wrote. His disdain for widows infuriated her, she noted. “There was always warfare over the subject.”

  Their “warfare” opens a window on Libbie’s attitude toward “the woman question,” as it was discussed in politics. On the surface, she epitomized antebellum middle-class culture. She trained to be a good wife—to use her fine education to better herself and her family, not pursue a career. But she flared at that phrase, “left-over remains.” It suggested that a woman had no life of her own. It reduced her to an item of consumption—like canned food, once the lid is removed what is left inside will rot. “I argued hotly for my sex and defended them by offering the fact that American women were illy prepared by their husbands to remain alone,” she wrote. Living in a confined age, she did not lead the way to a future of freedom—but she felt it coming.56
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br />   But conflict did not define their journey from Monroe. “I was supremely happy,” Armstrong later wrote to his father-in-law. Everyone who saw them remarked on their delight in each other, their intimacy. Libbie’s cousin Rebecca Richmond wrote that she “was most agreeably disappointed after the reports I had heard [about Armstrong].…He does not put on airs. He is a simple, frank, manly fellow. And he fairly idolizes Libbie.…She is the same gay, irrepressible spirit.”57

  Armstrong introduced Libbie to New York, the city he loved. There was so much to show her: Niblo’s Theater, Barnum’s museum, the bustle of oyster-cellar restaurants, the luxury of Delmonico’s, the ship-crowded slips, the grim Five Points, the Battery, the brownstones. If they drove north out of the built-up city, there was the high-walled reservoir on 42nd Street and the most uncentral Central Park, crowded with carriages. “We saw all that was to be seen in the time we had allotted,” Armstrong wrote.58

  This first visit together began to mark out the geography of their lives as a couple. New York would be one pole of their new existence together. They had been born into the traditional society of farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers, in which the greatest cultural conflict was between Old Light and New Light Presbyterianism. New York was dense, sophisticated, and worldly; the extremes of life were packed between the Hudson and East rivers. It was the metropolitan center of the entire nation. More than that, it was the future—the laboratory of institutional innovation and financial abstraction, the conjuror’s cauldron of capital, the training ground and garrison of writers and intellectuals who would celebrate, satirize, and critique what New York was making—the modern world.

  They did not want to leave it. On February 13, Armstrong wired Cavalry Corps headquarters to ask for a ten-day extension to his leave. He received the reply at the Metropolitan Hotel: request granted. From New York they traveled on to Washington, a swamp village by comparison. In its dingy streets crowded with soldiers and inelegant hotels, they found only one interesting feature: powerful men.