He didn’t explain how he would happen to have that history if he had captured Don Juan in the midst of a campaign. It was a conundrum. The pedigree was key to the sale price—Custer’s one great chance at profiting from the war. But his possession of it undermined his alibi; it implicated him in precisely the theft the owner alleged.25
As June turned into July, Custer lingered in Alexandria, preparing his column for its march to Houston. All the while Gaines pressed his claim to Don Juan. The matter rose to the attention of Grant, who sent a direct order to Sheridan that Custer must deliver up the horse. But Sheridan put him off, repeating Custer’s defense. “At the time the horse was taken I had given orders to take horses wherever found in the country through which I was then passing,” Sheridan told Grant. “If this horse is returned so should every horse taken be returned.” As the pressure continued to mount, Custer’s protector was now implicated in his lie.26
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“HE WAS A STRICT disciplinarian, and perhaps did not distinguish sufficiently between the volunteer who ‘enlisted for the war’ and the soldier who serves in time of peace,” Grant wrote. “One embraced men who risked life for a principle, and often men of social standing, competence, or wealth and independence of character. The other includes, as a rule, only men who could not do as well in any other occupation.”27
He wrote of Gen. Don Carlos Buell, but he could have been describing Custer, marshaling his force in western Louisiana. The observation points to a critical difference between the two men. Grant possessed an unusual “readiness to command by consent rather than diktat…that made him a master of people’s war,” John Keegan wrote in The Mask of Command.28 Grant’s approach reflected hard-won wisdom about himself as well as his fellow man—his knowledge, after a life of setbacks, that he could contend with the resistance of others and prevail. Custer had risen as suddenly as a volcanic eruption, and had no such understanding of himself or others. During the war he had taken his units immediately into battle upon assuming command; he had never needed to cultivate his men, to listen to them, to build a relationship upon anything other than shared danger and victory. He had never learned to win consent. Now, with no more battles, with all new troops, facing a vendetta over a horse and his own guilty conscience, Custer’s mask of command grew hard and brittle.
“The cavalry here was very much scattered and the regiments were unknown to me,” Sheridan wrote to Grant’s chief of staff; but thanks to the “admirable system of inspection I was at once enabled to select the best regiments and to collect together two of the handsomest columns of cavalry that have been organized during the present war, one under General Merritt which moves from Shreveport, the other under Genl Custer.” As mentioned, five of these highly praised regiments gathered under Custer’s command for the march to Houston: the 1st Iowa, 7th Indiana, 5th and 12th Illinois, and 2nd Wisconsin cavalry. They included some 4,500 men, all proud veterans.29
The orders to join the expedition to Texas did not go over well with these men. Already the troops of the 2nd Wisconsin had petitioned to be mustered out of service as soon as possible. “There was growing discontent among the soldiers at being sent further south, when, as they supposed, the war was over,” recalled a soldier of the 7th Indiana. A member of the 1st Iowa reported “outspoken dissatisfaction.” Wives barraged the War Department with requests to release their soldier husbands so they could come home and support their families. Resignations of volunteer officers piled up in Custer’s headquarters. An orderly summarized them in a large ledger book. “The war being closed thinks his services might be dispensed with,” reads a typical entry. “Has for four years devoted his time to the service of his country to the great neglect of private business which now demands his immediate attention.” Custer tersely replied, “The Government is the judge of the necessity of retaining this Officer’s services.”30
Still worse, they were short on supplies, from horses to horseshoes, and especially food. Plagued by diarrhea and fevers, the men had to pool their money to buy quinine. Rations consisted of wormy hard bread and hogs’ jowls. “The jowls had about one-fifth of the hair still on them, and out of which tusks were taken measuring seven and one-half inches in length,” one Iowan recalled. Some resorted to eating corn reserved for their horses. Despite all the fighting and suffering the men had endured, wrote another Iowa trooper, “until after the war had closed and we entered Custer’s division, the real hardships of camp life had never stared us in our faces.”31
“Had all the vegetables and fruit we wanted,” Libbie wrote home. “I get so tired of meat that I sometimes get Eliza to make me a little cake.” The Custers and their circle went on horseback through the country, Libbie wearing a special riding habit, the men hunting. Jacob Greene irritated even the Custers with his extravagance, as he threw away money on expensive hats and other frivolities; when an enlisted man entrusted him with $100, he spent it. Armstrong ordered his men to prepare a special ambulance so Libbie could accompany him to Houston. And they resented it.32
Custer knew of the supply problems. “It was almost impossible to procure good rations…hard bread and vegetables being entirely unfit for use,” he explained to Sheridan several weeks later. Instead of tact, though, he offered the troops only discipline. “He was only twenty-five years of age, and had the usual egotism and self-importance of a young man,” a soldier of the 7th Indiana thought. “He did not distinguish between a regular soldier and a volunteer. He did not stop to consider that the latter were citizens…men who had left their homes and families, to meet a crisis in the history of their country, and when the crisis was passed, they had the right to return to their homes. He had no sympathy in common with the private soldiers.”33
“Numerous complaints [have] reached these headquarters of depredations having been committed [on civilians] by persons belonging to this command,” Custer declared in General Orders No. 2, soon after arriving in Alexandria. Indeed, there may have been incidents of hungry soldiers shooting cattle and visiting farmhouses. Yet he did not consider that his men might not be to blame. “After Kirby-Smith’s surrender, all authority inside Texas collapsed,” notes one historian. “The state was swept by chaos and anarchy.…Dejected Texas troops roamed the countryside. The soldiers degenerated into disorganized mobs.” This situation extended into western Louisiana; in Shreveport, civilians greeted Union troops “enthusiastically, glad to be rid of the looting Texans, who had fled westward.”34
Instead, Custer implied that his own men were the cause of all problems. There was “no necessity for foraging,” since they had a supply train, he wrote, without acknowledging the inedible food. He who stole from civilians “will have his head shaved, and in addition will receive twenty-five lashes upon his back, well laid on.” It would be summary punishment. Trials were too inconvenient, he ruled, “owing to the delays of court martials, and their impracticability when the command is unsettled.”35 The edict stunned the volunteers—the assumption of guilt, the humiliating punishments, the abandonment of legal process. Some noted that Congress had banned flogging in 1861. “It is hard on a good soldier,” one wrote, in the very mildest reaction.36
Custer did think court-martials worthwhile in the case of desertion. In late July, Pvt. William A. Wilson of the 5th Illinois Cavalry attempted to flee and was captured after a gunfight. A court-martial pronounced him guilty of theft of government property and desertion, and sentenced him “to be shot to death by musketry.” At the time, Custer explained, “desertions became numerous and of daily occurrence.…As many as twelve have deserted from the same regiment in one night. Unless some action had been adopted which would check the system of desertion…the entire command would have in a short time dissapeared [sic].” Wilson was the first deserter they caught; he would serve as an example. Custer approved the execution.37
At 5 p.m. on July 28, Custer ordered the 4,500 men of his division to stand in a special formation, forming three sides of a hollow square, facing the interior. A firing sq
uad stood within the open space, accompanied by Custer and his staff. They faced two open graves, fifteen feet apart. A cart entered the open side, carrying two condemned prisoners seated on their coffins, their hands tied behind them. It rattled slowly past the troops to allow each regiment a close look at the doomed men. A band played a funeral march; a muffled drum rolled. Finally the wagon halted at the center. The guard placed the coffins beside the graves, blindfolded the prisoners, and sat them on their coffins again, facing the firing squad.
One of the condemned was Wilson, and the other was Lt. L. L. Lancaster of the 2nd Wisconsin Cavalry. Lancaster’s presence stemmed from the unpopularity of the 2nd Wisconsin’s commander, Lt. Col. N. H. Dale. Lancaster had circulated a petition among the men, asking Dale to resign. “Instead of resigning, he took the matter to Custer, who issued an order placing all the commissioned officers who signed it under arrest,” wrote a member of the regiment. Everyone retracted his signature except Lancaster. Custer had him tried for inciting mutiny. He was sentenced to death.
Lancaster was a popular man in the regiment, where his crime hardly seemed like mutiny. Petitions were a universal feature of American life, and were frequently circulated in the 2nd Wisconsin; indeed, Dale himself circulated a petition asking for leniency for Lancaster. Custer had promised to consider it, but here Lancaster rolled around the square on his coffin.
Now came the well-known sequence of orders for the firing squad. “Ready!”—carbines cocked. “Aim!”—barrels raised. Before the next order, the provost marshal put his hand on Lancaster’s shoulder and pulled him aside. Custer had commuted his sentence to ten years at hard labor in the military prison in the Dry Tortugas, a desolate island over the horizon from Key West. “Fire!” The carbines cracked, and the deserter fell dead. The blindfolded Lancaster fainted.38
In the twenty-first century, the army bans mock executions as a form of torture.39
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TWO WEEKS LATER THE LONG-PLANNED march to Houston began. Custer’s column crossed 240 miles of impoverished pine forest in nineteen days. Drinkable water was scarce. Horses starved. “Nothing but the ‘United States’ can force…me to take another trip through Texas and especially under the guardian care of Gen. Custer,” one Iowa trooper wrote to a friend. “It has been hotter weather, less forage, more timber, millions of ‘ticks and chiggers,’ thousands of ‘centipedes and tarantulas,’ scorpions common, and the most poorly equipped and supplied with rations of any expedition I ever saw.” To prevent foraging, or even private purchase of food, Custer ordered the regiments to march end to end, without spacing, forcing the men to ride in choking dust in the August heat.40
Libbie Custer in her smart riding habit filled a saddle beside her husband or rested in a specially outfitted wagon pulled by four gray horses, one of only seventeen ambulances in the division. The sick—and there were many, many sick—filled ten of them. Seven were allotted to Custer’s headquarters. One of those carried Libbie; another carried Custer’s dogs.
After Custer had picked out the campsite for the day, he would change into local dress and go deer hunting. One day some passing troopers of the 7th Indiana Cavalry failed to recognize him with his new short haircut, broad-brimmed gray hat, linen duster, and double-barreled shotgun—“cow-boy style,” one of them recalled. One asked, “Hello, stranger, will you trade hats?” The effrontery enraged him. Back in camp he sent for them to deal out their punishment, but when they arrived at his tent Libbie intervened, telling her husband he should wear “his proper uniform.” He let the men go, but held on to his habit of dressing up in local costume.41
During the march Sheridan redirected their course to Hempstead, Texas, about fifty miles northwest of Houston. When they arrived, the men found themselves surrounded by some of the richest plantations in the state, yet still they ate hog jowls and hard bread crawling with vermin. Some of them stole and butchered cattle. When the lieutenant colonel of the 12th Illinois asked that his regiment be excused from drill for a week to put their new camp in order, Custer snapped, “If the comdg Officer of this Regt will keep his command in camp, instead of allowing them to be going about the country in violation of orders, stealing and committing [sic] depredations, there would be no need of an application of this sort.” Custer ordered more whippings and head shavings on August 28 and September 11. He had a civilian horse thief whipped too, though no one complained, as Custer divided $55 found on him between the two soldiers who caught him. He also convened a board to investigate “the frauds perpetrated upon the enlisted men” by way of bad rations, with orders to inspect the food and find substitutes.42
It was too late. The chain of command had corroded. Officers bombarded Custer with more letters of resignation, which he indignantly denied. Desperate to go home, Capt. D. L. Riley of the 2nd Wisconsin appealed directly to Sheridan. Custer burst into a fit of pique at “so dishonorable and unmilitary a step.…It is evident that Capt. Riley needs to remain in the service long enough to learn the rules for the transaction of business and of courtesy.”43 The enlisted men, who could not even attempt resignation, pursued other options.
“It was a common occurrence to see soldiers at any time in the day draw up and shoot at Custer and staff,” recalled George Stover of the 7th Indiana. “I was officer of the day one time and saw the whole transaction. General Custer asked, ‘Who in the hell was doing that shooting?’ I told him there would be more.…He was in the camp of the 7th Indiana, whose men he had whipped for killing a beef.” Others also reported plots against Custer’s life. Rumors even reached Libbie. She insisted that her husband keep a revolver under his pillow. She told Eliza Brown about her fears at night, when the two usually chatted. Nothing would happen to the general, Brown assured her. “Nothin’ ever does, you know, Miss Libbie.”44
Countless soldiers wrote letters home like one from an Iowan who called himself “a slave to the tyranny and petty caprices” of Custer. Families took up the crusade against him. Newspapers published the volunteers’ accounts. Letters and petitions reached Secretary of War Stanton—as did the complaints of Governor William M. Stone of Iowa and Governor James T. Lewis of Wisconsin, who also wrote to Grant. The Iowa legislature passed a resolution calling for Custer’s prosecution. “Custer knows and has seen the letters that our boys have sent to the papers,” wrote Henry L. Morrill of the 1st Iowa. “Since Governor Stone’s telegram to the War Dept. he [Custer] has watched us with a jealous eye.…We are almost the same as at open warfare though seemingly everything is cordial on the outside.”
Representative Elihu Washburne of Illinois forwarded more complaints to Grant, his old protégé, adding, “I do not know but it is necessary for Custar [sic] to do all these inhuman and barbarous things to maintain discipline, but I have observed that it was not necessary for you to do such things in any Command you ever had.”45
Finally Grant sent Sheridan a two-sentence telegram. It was classic Grant: clear, simple, trusting in his subordinate’s judgment, and unsentimental, even ruthless. He wrote, “There is great complaint of cruelty against Gen. Custer. If there are grounds for these complaints relieve him from duty.”
Not for the last time, Sheridan saved him. He had already defended Custer to Stanton, saying the shaving-and-whipping order “had been rescinded.” He told Grant, “I have given my personal attention to the matter and know…Custar [sic] has not done anything that was not fully warranted by the insubordination of his command. If anything he has been too lenient.”46
This reply proves Sheridan’s loyalty, not his judgment. It’s true that Custer faced difficulties with his column. Even the harshly critical regimental historians admitted freely that the men resented being kept in the army. But Washburne’s criticism was fundamentally correct. The commanders of the other columns that Sheridan sent into Texas faced the same problems, yet they never resorted to such drastic measures. Custer’s actions went beyond discipline to personal pique. He collected hostile letters printed in the newspapers, and lost his temper at
reports of criticism. “He came near cowhiding a major in the 2nd Wis. Cav.,” Morrill wrote in a letter home, “because he thought he had said that Gen. Custer’s father who buys the forage here came to make money [off] the Gov’t.…He denied it and thus saved himself, if he was guilty or not. He did not frighten…although a revolver lay on the table where their private interview took place and the Gen. was much excited.”47
It was a test of command for which Custer was utterly unprepared by nature or experience. It was a test less of leadership than of management. He failed. Ironically, he created a furor that struck at his greatest insecurity: how others saw him. “The men of the 1st Iowa Cavalry remember this Custer,” the Des Moines State Register would declare in 1868. “His memory will be a stench in their nostrils, and that of their ‘children’s children to the remotest generation.’ ”48
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ON OR ABOUT OCTOBER 10, 1865, a nine-year-old girl came into the town of Hempstead from the broad, flat farmland that surrounded it, east of the winding Brazos River. How she traveled is unclear; perhaps she got a ride on a wagon, or hiked for several days. She came from a plantation twenty-three miles away, where she had been enslaved to Merritt Chambers. Slavery had separated her from her mother, who lived in Hempstead with a Mrs. Godey, and she wanted to be reunited with her.
Mrs. Chambers discovered the girl’s absence. She told her teenage son Willis, “Bring her out or kill her.” He rode his horse into town and found her at Mrs. Godey’s house. She refused to go, holding tight to her mother. “He then tied her hands behind her and then tied a rope around her waist, pulled her out, and tied her to a ring in his saddle, mounted, and put spurs to the horse,” reported M. P. Hanson, surgeon for the 2nd Wisconsin Cavalry. Long before young Chambers reached home she was dead. He cut her loose, “a mass of broken flesh and bones.”
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