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

by Stiles, T. J.

  Custer led them. His sword rested loosely on his lap and over his left arm, with which he held the reins. His horse seemed “restive and, at times, ungovernable,” thought a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. It was Don Juan, the powerful, beautiful, stolen stallion. Custer had had only a month with the horse, which had been raised solely to sprint down a track and to mate. Neither capacity particularly suited it to the cacophony and distractions of the Grand Review.

  The crowd roared for Custer—the champion, the hero, gallantry incarnate. Women threw flowers to him. As he approached the reviewing stand, a young lady hurled a wreath of blossoms at him. He caught it with his free hand—and Don Juan panicked. “His charger took fright, reared, plunged and dashed away with his rider at an almost breakneck speed,” a reporter wrote. Custer’s hat flew off. His sword toppled to the street. “The whole affair was witnessed by thousands of spectators, who were enchained breathlessly by the thrilling event, and, for a time, the perilous position of the brave officer,” the Tribune reported. He held the wreath in his right hand as he fought for control with the reins in his left. Finally he yanked Don Juan to a halt, “to the great relief of the excited audience, who gave the gallant general three cheers,” wrote the New York Tribune. “As he rode back to the head of his column,” the Chicago Tribune reported, “round upon round of hearty applause greeted him, the reviewing officers joining in.”

  To the Harrisburg Weekly Patriot & Union, the incident said something about the mismatch of the man and the times. His ride on the runaway horse was “like the charge of a Sioux chieftain,” the newspaper stated. The cheers when he regained control were “the involuntary homage of the every-day heart to the man of romance. Gen. Custar [sic] should have lived in a less sordid age.”

  It was a splendid display of horsemanship, but also an embarrassing break in decorum. An orderly had to fetch his hat and sword off the street. He sat astride his sin, and it had nearly proved too much for him.8

  —

  THE SEAMS IN TIME appear obvious to us: a graduation, a wedding, a victory parade. Yet the seams are never stitched in time itself. Human beings are hurled from one day into the next, from circumstance to circumstance. We distinguish endings from beginnings, contrasting now and then, to find meaning in time. Yet we rarely alter our inner selves in pace with the clock.

  The Grand Review offered as distinct a demarcation in time as one could imagine. It was a boundary, a living river of men separating the shores of war and peace, slavery and freedom, dying and living. But there is nothing like an ending to reveal the incompleteness of things.

  Philip Sheridan was absent from the climactic parade, and Custer knew the reason. The state of Texas remained unconquered by Union forces. Isolated from the main body of the Confederacy after the fall of Vicksburg, the region was nicknamed Kirby Smithdom, after the rebel general Edmund Kirby Smith, who had not surrendered. The Union army might have to fight Smith’s troops. Certainly it would have to occupy Texas, which posed special problems. Slavery continued in force there, never having been eroded by invading armies; and the population had no visceral sense of the South’s defeat. Civilians might resist emancipation and federal authority.

  Then there was the French occupation of Mexico. Emperor Napoleon III had taken advantage of the Civil War to invade and install the brother of Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I as a puppet ruler, grandly titled Emperor Maximilian I. The U.S. administration—and especially General Grant—wanted to aid the Mexican rebels and intimidate the French into leaving.

  As early as May 7 Sheridan knew that he would lead a mission to Texas. “Would you like to go with me should I go?” he asked Custer. The answer, apparently, was yes. On May 24, as the Western armies marched on the second and final day of the Grand Review, Custer said farewell to the 3rd Cavalry Division. Along with his wife, his staff, and Eliza Brown, he boarded a train, heading first to Baltimore.9

  “The appointment of Gen. Custer to this Department has created great surprise,” a special correspondent to the New York Tribune wrote from St. Louis. “The official order defining the appointment is looked for with anxiety by everybody.” Some of this was ordinary bureaucratic scuffling and confusion. Where exactly would Custer be posted? Whom would he replace? But there was more to it than that.

  “Certainly this Department offers no field for the peculiar talents of Gen. Custer, and it is hardly expected that he will assume an office purely executive while there is any fighting to be done under Phil. Sheridan down in Texas,” the correspondent wrote. Peculiar talents: in two words, the writer swept up Custer’s flamboyance and gallantry, his identity as a combat commander and leader of saber charges, and consigned them to another time and place, which might never come again.

  Only days after Custer’s apotheosis as the Union army’s battlefield hero, it seemed natural to ask how the “fighting” man would fare when an “executive” was needed. These doubts came despite the fact that bloodshed plagued the West; as reported in the same article, Missouri’s Confederate guerrillas continued to kill, and warfare with American Indians had flared on the Great Plains. Yet the patient work of pacification seemed ill-suited to Custer’s “peculiar talents.” This anonymous writer saw Custer moving toward a frontier—a frontier in time—and wondered if he would remain stuck on one side.10

  —

  ELIZA BROWN LEFT THE SOUTH. She boarded a train along with the Custers (including Tom) and Armstrong’s staff, breakfasted in Baltimore, then headed north to Michigan.11

  In Monroe, Brown’s employer and his wife enjoyed visits by leading citizens, a serenade by a band, and “a delightful little party at the Humphrey House” in their honor, the Monroe Commercial reported. But Brown herself faced awkwardness and embarrassment. In Virginia, she had been mistreated and oppressed, but she had a home in the large African American population there, part of the continuum of black culture across the South. In Michigan she was seen as alien, exotic, not entirely human. During the war Custer’s own mother had asked him to send an African American child home as a gift, as had his friend Marie Miller, who jokingly demanded “a perfect negress.” Even Libbie marveled at Brown’s strangeness, as Libbie saw it—her “carefully braided wool,” or hair, and her “charming” dialect. Eliza had survived slavery and war with courage and cunning, only to be regarded as a curiosity.12

  Yet Libbie was her most sympathetic audience, and the closest thing she had to an ally in Custer’s circle. The two women joined Custer and his “military family” of staff officers on a train to Louisville, Brown sitting apart by the door. Men had to accompany a female to enter the less crowded ladies’ car, and so the soldiers pretended to offer assistance to the young black woman, laughing at the preposterous joke. When they stopped to eat in Ohio, Custer insisted that she join them in the restaurant, since there was no assigned place for servants. The owner of the restaurant “told the General that no colored folks could be allowed at his table,” Libbie later wrote. Custer insisted; his staff gathered threateningly behind him; the owner relented.

  Custer did not intend to integrate the dining halls of Ohio. It was a lack of segregated facilities that provoked him. He did not stand up for African Americans in general, but for his cook. His staff declared, “The woman shall have food,” not, “Blacks have the same rights as whites.” He was a major general—how dare some civilian deny his servant a meal!

  Libbie watched Eliza, who “uneasily and nervously tried to go,” she wrote. “A position so unusual, and to her so totally out of place, made her appetite waver.…Eliza hung her embarrassed head, and her mistress [Libbie] idly twirled her useless fork—while the proprietor made $1.50 clear gain on two women that were too frightened to swallow a mouthful.”13

  Writing years later, she interpreted Brown’s reaction through her own experience. It was the breach of decorum, she thought, that made the situation so difficult for this “best-bred of maids.” She did not consider that, in Virginia, Custer’s action might have ended in violence—and the
black cook, not the white major general, would be the victim. But Libbie sympathized with Brown’s powerlessness. Custer did not consult her when he defended her, even though she faced the repercussions.

  From Louisville they all embarked on a steamboat that sailed down the Ohio and into the Mississippi. It was a new experience for all of them—the slow journey past snags, sandbars, and levees on the wedding-cake paddle wheeler, with its fine food, black waiters in white jackets, and lower deck low to the water. Excited to learn that Confederate General John B. Hood had come aboard, Custer spent hours talking to him, as if the two old enemies were old friends.

  Custer relaxed as they steamed deeper into the warm, humid air of the South. “We have enjoyed our trip down the Mississippi very much,” he wrote to his sister. On landing in New Orleans, he grew “enthusiastic over the city,” Libbie wrote. They splurged in hat shops on Canal Street, dined in French restaurants, and paid a visit to the aged Gen. Winfield Scott, who lodged at their hotel. Custer “was so pleased with the picturesque costumes of the servants that Eliza was put into a turban at his entreaty,” Libbie recalled. Again, powerlessness: Custer treated Brown like a prop so he could play the “creole grandee.”14

  Custer found orders from General Sheridan waiting for him in New Orleans. He was to go up the Red River to Alexandria, Louisiana, where he would organize five cavalry regiments into a division. He would march to Houston. He expected no fighting, but establishing order could prove challenging. Edmund Kirby Smith had now surrendered, but his troops had dispersed, and he himself had fled to Mexico. Grant told Sheridan, “The whole State should be scoured to pick up Kirby Smith’s men and the arms carried home by them.”15

  Brown followed the Custers and staff onto the Mittie Stephens, which steamed into the Red River. “The river was ugliness itself,” Libbie wrote. “The tree trunks, far up, were gray and slimy,” strewn with hanging moss. The boat slowly wound up the crooked channel, past red-clay banks overgrown with underbrush. Custer spent hours at the rail, firing his rifle at alligators on the sandbars. Finally they arrived in Alexandria. The town was near the farthest Union advance during the war, and much of it had been burned, leaving isolated chimneys and scorched walls.16

  The Custers took up residence in half of a fine old house on a sugar plantation. Brown sought out the slave quarters. She found only the elderly and infirm, the young and fit having “made a mighty scatter,” as she told Libbie. They were in poor condition, possibly even starving. Brown insisted that Libbie see for herself.

  Libbie went to the double row of shanties, and was so moved that she came back with Armstrong. One bedridden woman, whom they estimated at about 100 years old, asked Libbie, “And, missey, is it really true that I is free?” On being assured that it was so, she “blessed the Lord for letting her live to see the day,” Libbie wrote. Her husband ceased to complain about Brown’s custom of doling out food from the general’s mess. “Our kitchen could be full of grizzly, tottering old wrecks, and he only smiled.”

  Eliza Brown won her point. Under her guidance, Armstrong came to see that “every plantation had its Simon Legree,” as he wrote to his father-in-law. “In the mansion where I now write is a young negro woman whose back bears the scars of five hundred lashes.” America would forever owe a debt to the Civil War, he added, for eliminating “this evil” of slavery.17

  But Brown contended with her employers’ deeply ingrained prejudice. The old woman surprised Libbie as being “intelligent for one of her race.” At a black prayer meeting, Libbie found it “rather difficult to keep back a smile at the grotesqueness of the scene.” The Custers laughed when Brown was tormented by “the soldiers, who loved to frighten her.” The superstitious, comically frightened Negro was a familiar figure in popular entertainment, and they accepted it as truth.18

  In Alexandria, the couple mingled with white planters, including, by chance, the only Southerner Libbie had ever met before the war. Amid this company they fell back into old racial assumptions. Libbie wrote, “The town and camp swarmed with the colored people, lazily lying around waiting for the Government to take care of them.” She and Armstrong concluded that “the negroes of the Red River country were not an easy class to manage,” that “the colored man [was] inflated with freedom and reveling in idleness.” It did not occur to them that whites made the same complaint from Kentucky to South Carolina. When old slaveholders saw their former “property” assert themselves, they interpreted it as mere shiftlessness.

  The Custers did not realize that freedom, if it were to have any meaning at all, must mean an escape from those who had whipped and raped and sold off children, who had shadowed every hour of the slave’s life. They did not consider that African Americans did not wish to be managed. As a keen observer wrote, “The sole ambition of the freedman…appears to be to become the owner of a little piece of land, there to erect a humble home, and to dwell in peace and security at his own free will and pleasure…to be able to do that free from any outside control.” This would be obvious if one considered blacks and whites equally human, but that lay beyond the imagination of Armstrong and Libbie. The freedom they envisioned involved freed slaves returning to (paid) gang labor under the direction of old masters.

  Of course, such ideas were not unique to them. “Intense racism” suffused the Democratic worldview, writes the historian Jean Baker. It rested on the notion that sub-Saharan Africans comprised a distinct, inferior species. As one Democratic ideologue wrote of blacks, “The Creator has designed [that whites] should govern him,” for his own benefit. The war and career ambition had suppressed Custer’s politics; but here in the South it smoldered and flickered back to life.19

  Libbie was correct in one thing: the army exerted a gravitational pull on the freed people. As throughout the war, able-bodied former slaves approached the Union camps, sometimes traveling long distances to get there. Custer responded with an order dated July 1. “Since the recent advent of the United States forces into this vicinity, many of the freedmen of the surrounding country seemed to have imbibed the idea that they will be no longer required to labor for their own support,” he announced. “Such ideas cannot be tolerated.…Freedmen must not look upon military posts as places of idle resort, from which they can draw their means of support.”

  Having defined their search for work away from their old masters as “idleness,” he sentenced the freed people to what they saw as a virtual return to slavery. “The proper course is to obtain employment if possible upon the same plantations which they were previously employed.…Hereafter no freedman will be permitted to remain in the vicinity of the camps of this command.” The punishment would be arrest, imprisonment, and hard labor until civilian work was found for them. If a freed person violated the terms of his or her work contract—unreadable to most former slaves, who had been kept illiterate—the punishment was also imprisonment and hard labor. Then Custer delivered a final blow to any practical reality of freedom: “No freedman will be permitted to travel about the country unprovided with a pass from his employer. Those who do so will be punished as vagrants.”20

  So thoroughly had Custer absorbed the views of former slaveholders that he reproduced the infamous “black codes,” laws at the heart of a brewing political struggle in Washington. In May 1865, President Johnson had issued a series of proclamations that pardoned all but the wealthiest secessionists, appointed provisional governors for the rebel states, and ordered elections for conventions to organize new governments. The balloting would follow the state laws prevailing in 1861—which excluded black participation. “White men alone must manage the South,” Johnson said.

  Given virtually a free hand, white Southerners enacted laws to control freed slaves, first in local ordinances and then state legislation. Regulating everything from their right to marry to their right to move, these “black codes” largely restricted African Americans to working for their old masters. New vagrancy laws subjected the freed people on the roads to an inspection and arrest regime almos
t as severe as the patrol system during slavery. Some states gave judges the power to assign black orphan minors to whites as unpaid “apprentices.” Many adults were surprised to find themselves classified as orphans.21

  Other Union generals in the Southwest issued orders regulating black “vagrancy.” But many of them also established schools and medical care, reviewed labor contracts, and generally tried to protect the freed people from abuse and exploitation.22 It’s striking that Custer worked so hard to cultivate Radical Republicans, yet so disregarded their principles—even after living with an intelligent, independent black woman for nearly two years.

  —

  “A MAN WHO LIES to himself is often the first to take offense,” Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov. Lying to oneself is a nearly universal human trait, to one degree or another. But some consciousness of the truth usually lurks; reminders make the liar brittle and defensive.

  Richard Gaines pursued Custer’s lie with the truth about a horse. He was the principal owner of Don Juan. The very day of the Grand Review, Gaines took affidavits from himself, the former slave Junius Garland, and Dr. C. W. P. Brock to the War Department, which was receptive. “The government stalls here were unsuccessfully searched,” the Washington Star reported, “and the man finally ascertained that his horse had gone to New Orleans with the General. The disconsolate owner follows immediately.”23

  Custer could track his pursuer’s progress in the newspapers, which traced the hunt for the famous Don Juan. He had left the horse in Monroe, where it was safe for the time being. Technically it still belonged to the army, but Custer arranged for a board of officers to assess its value at $125, which he paid on July 1. He also claimed that the horse had been captured during one of Sheridan’s raids. “I expected the former owner would make an effort to recover the horse, he being so valuable,” Custer wrote to Judge Bacon. “He is the most valuable horse ever introduced into Mich.…I hope to get ($10,000) ten thousand for him.” He asked Bacon not to mention the absurdly low purchase price, and added that he had “a complete history of the horse.”24