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

by Stiles, T. J.

  No mere spectator, Custer mixed with the leaders of the National Union movement, including the Blairs, Couch, and such former Confederate officers as Richard Taylor of Louisiana. Inspired, Custer met with a group of fellow generals and planned a follow-up convention of veterans of both the Union and Confederate forces, to be held in Cincinnati.34

  On August 28, President Johnson departed Washington in a special train, embarking on his speaking tour of the North—soon dubbed the “Swing Around the Circle.” Custer missed the first few stops in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, where the Manhattan Club crowd of financiers hosted a luxurious dinner at Delmonico’s, the city’s most famous restaurant.35

  When Custer and Libbie joined the president, they found an increasingly unhappy party. Secretary of State Seward, a small man with visible scars on his neck from the knife attack he suffered as part of the Lincoln assassination plot, grew ill with diarrhea. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, with his enormous white beard, was rarely in a good mood, and he thought the tour a very bad idea. Grant smoked his cigars in silence, as always, but felt acutely uncomfortable. He knew Johnson wanted him along to give the impression that the great war hero supported the president politically. He came because Johnson had maneuvered him into a position where it would have seemed actively hostile to refuse.36

  The president himself alternately simmered and boiled. Broad-faced and beardless, with narrow eyes and a perpetual frown as if he had just tasted sour milk, he was, in a word, combative. “He sought rather than avoided a fight,” Congressman Shelby Cullom of Illinois observed. Originally a tailor from Tennessee, Johnson learned to read and write as an adult, and bitterly resented condescension. “Headstrong, domineering, having fought his way in a state filled with aristocratic Southerners from the class of so-called ‘low whites’ to the highest position in the United States, he did not readily yield to the dictates of the domineering forces in Congress,” Cullom wrote. He had risen in politics as a rousing orator, and believed he could personally move Northern voters away from the Radicals. Welles said that when he suggested that Johnson might get himself into trouble on the Swing Around the Circle, the president “manifestly thought I did not know his power as a speaker.”37

  “It seemed to me we gained more enjoyment than the rest of the party,” Libbie recalled. Welles and Seward supported Johnson more strongly than any other cabinet secretaries, but they “had their trials” on the trip. The staff officers in the group seemed at ease, as did Farragut and his wife. But the experience of the president, she believed, was “harrowing.” That was because Johnson faced not only a hostile Congress, but a hostile public. And so did Armstrong.38

  Falling back into the role of the Tennessee stump speaker, Johnson abandoned the high decorum that Americans demanded of their presidents. He viciously denounced Radical leaders Thad Stevens in the House of Representatives and Charles Sumner in the Senate, and suggested that they should be hung for treason. Hecklers filled many of the crowds he addressed from hotel balconies, and he replied in kind. “Is this dignified?” someone in the crowd in Cleveland demanded, after he had shouted back at a critic. “I care not for dignity,” he said.39

  “I have never been so tired of anything before as I have been with the political speeches of Mr. Johnson,” Grant wrote to his wife, Julia. “I look upon them as a national disgrace.” But Custer defended Johnson—fiercely, vocally, much the way that the president spoke. In Indianapolis, he interrupted Johnson’s remarks to shout down the hecklers, yelling, “Hush, you damned ignorant Hoosiers!” After the president retired to dinner, Custer watched as torch-wielding pro- and anti-Johnson mobs confronted each other outside the hotel; a burst of gunfire led to several casualties. Grant went to the balcony and restored calm with a few remarks.40

  When the presidential train pulled into Newark, Ohio, Johnson began as he usually did, saying he was gratified “that he could present to them the flag of the country, not with twenty-five, but thirty-six stars.” Onlookers interrupted him with calls for Grant to speak. Custer jumped forward. “You cannot insult the President through General Grant,” he said, and led the crowd in three cheers “for the Union of the thirty-six States.” In New Market, the citizens gave three cheers for Congress and three for Thad Stevens, and held up placards reading, “New Orleans.” Custer shouted, “I was born two miles and a half from here, but I am ashamed of you.” Arriving in Cadiz, Custer told a friendlier crowd that the people in New Market had been “the worst class of people he had seen since the beginning of the war.” When someone interjected, “Except the rebels,” Custer said, “No, I don’t except them. The rebels have repented.”

  Johnson and Custer were synchronized in emotion and conviction. In Steubenville, they responded jointly to hecklers in a crowd of about 4,000. When the president began to speak, the crowd hooted and groaned. Custer shouted, “Wait till next October [Ohio held its elections in October], and worse groans than those will be heard.” Johnson then quoted Christ, putting himself in the crucified savior’s position: “Let them alone; they know not what they do.” Not everyone was hostile, of course, in large part because many shared Johnson’s views on race. When an aged black man approached the president at one stop, a bystander pointed at the elderly fellow and said, “There, boys, is the cause of all this trouble.” Everyone laughed. Overall, though, the Swing Around the Circle alienated voters from Johnson—and Custer.41

  Unlike the other officers, Custer openly aligned himself with Johnson. He sent a public letter to the Detroit Free Press, explaining why he declined invitations to run for Congress: “It is not from any lack of sympathy on my part for the principles and platform of the National Union Party. To that party and its supporters I look for…the return of peace, harmony, and prosperity.”42

  Amid heavy rain on September 17, Custer, dressed in his bright red necktie, helped to lead the Soldiers and Sailors Convention in a cold, muddy tent in Cleveland. A band played “Dixie.” The delegates gave three cheers for Custer and other generals, including McClellan, who was absent. They voted Gordon Granger president of the meeting. “Custer felt hurt at this slight, and called it ingratitude,” a hostile correspondent for the New York Tribune reported. “He felt that he was the chief spirit of the Convention, and the one who first originated the scheme.…The quarrel was compromised by putting Custer on the Committee to present the proceedings of the Convention to his Excellency [Johnson].”

  The convention was an attempt to counter the Radical-leaning Grand Army of the Republic, a veterans’ league formed by Gen. John Logan, an Illinois politician and Civil War hero. The speakers praised Johnson and the National Union Party. Privately one delegate remarked, “We are going to say this is a white man’s government…and not a nigger’s government. We are going to put ourselves on the President’s side in this war against traitors.”43

  “The pet of the Cleveland convention was Custer,” wrote a correspondent for the Boston Advertiser. A constant presence on the speaker’s platform, “his manner is cold, but strangely impassioned,” the correspondent thought. At one point the crowd cried out for him to give a speech. He slowly shook his head. The call grew louder. He walked to the back of the platform as Granger and another officer tried to quiet the audience. Custer stopped, leaped to the front, pushed the two men out of the way with either hand, and led three deafening cheers “for the old flag. How he did it I shall never know; but henceforth I can understand why the rebels feared his cavalry—can understand how he got such splendid service out of his horsemen.”44

  “It is a matter of painful regret to all who still hold to the views upon reconstruction which he expressed in his testimony, to see him now so fully espouse the cause of the very rebels whom he fought.” That mournful assessment appeared on September 20 in the Monroe Commercial, Judge Christiancy’s newspaper. It was the mildest criticism he received in the Republican press, but undoubtedly the most painful. He had hurt himself at home, among his old sponsors.45

  This was true
within the army to some extent. Custer received the transfer he had sought, from the black 9th Cavalry to the white 7th Cavalry, one of the new regiments, in which he would serve as lieutenant colonel, promoted from his Regular Army rank of captain. Whether the president pushed the transfer is unknown, but Custer clearly alienated Grant.

  The general in chief’s view of him had grown darker since the end of the war. Twice Sheridan had intervened to protect Custer from Grant’s edicts, the first ordering the return of Don Juan, the second recommending dismissal after reports of Custer’s cruelty in Louisiana and Texas. Now Grant watched Custer offer outspoken public support to a president whose behavior Grant found increasingly troubling. “I regret to say that since the unfortunate difference between the President and Congress the former becomes more violent with the opposition he meets,” Grant wrote to Sheridan. “Indeed I much fear that we are fast approaching the point where he will want to declare the body itself [Congress] illegal, unconstitutional, and revolutionary.”46

  He lost patience with Custer and his role in, as Grant saw it, a national tragedy. The field officers of the 7th Cavalry “should be on duty with it [the regiment],” he wrote on September 24. “In view of the 7th Cavalry being at Fort Riley, [Kansas,] Gn. Custer’s orders may be changed to ‘joining his regiment without delay.’ ” The Cleveland Herald reported the summons and asked, “Did Colonel Custer, in that letter, get a hint as to General Grant’s views in regard to army politicians?”47

  Too late, Custer learned that Libbie had been right all along. She even hinted at her own disdain for Johnson, referring to him privately as “Mr. My Policy,” a reference to a phrase he used that Americans found egotistical and belligerent. She moped as a friend read to her “some leading articles in half a dozen different papers denouncing Autie’s course in the boldest manner,” she wrote to her cousin. She took some small comfort in her ability to fight off “settled melancholy” (emphasis added).48

  Custer abruptly reversed himself. Russell Alger, one of his regimental commanders in the Michigan Brigade, asked him publicly if he supported J. Logan Chipman, the pro-Johnson candidate in Michigan’s First District. Custer replied with an open letter, claiming to have been “misrepresented.” He disingenuously claimed that he would never advise his old soldiers on how to vote—then he denounced Chipman as a Copperhead. (Chipman complained to Johnson, “If I am to be slaughtered in the house of my friends, the fight better be abandoned.”)

  It was an obvious attempt to repair the damage he had inflicted on himself. A second public letter earned him further abuse from both Radicals and conservatives. The Chicago Tribune observed, “General Custer’s rapid promotions are yet to be passed upon by the United States Senate. Is it possible that he had this trifling circumstance in mind when he wrote the letter denouncing Copperheads?”49

  It was a valid question. Publicly and privately, Custer tried to convince senators that his actions had been the opposite of what they obviously were. He told Senator Jacob Howard, “I assure you I have been misjudged.…I have never been the supporter of Mr. Johnson’s policy as represented, on the contrary I have always condemned his unlimited exercise of the pardoning power [of Confederates] as well as the conferring of political power upon leading rebels.” This was false. The marvel is that he thought it might work. He even pretended to support limited black suffrage.50

  By the time he wrote this letter, the election was over. The North returned a large Republican majority to both houses of Congress, which would take control of Reconstruction and, eventually, impeach Andrew Johnson. Publicly humiliated, Custer and his wife went west to Kansas. Perhaps there, on the remote frontier, he might set things right and restore his reputation.

  Eleven

  * * *

  THE FALLEN

  ON SEPTEMBER 16, 1867, ten officers of the United States Army sat at a table in a wooden building in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The unusual warmth made them rather uncomfortable in the uniforms of their brevet ranks—or as close to such uniforms as they could get. Five of them made do with borrowed generals’ dress swords and sewn-on shoulder straps affixed with stars. Fort Leavenworth—or “11worth,” to use the customary shorthand—often surprised Civil War veterans, who expected a piece of military engineering, a fortification. As a young soldier wrote that year, “It is merely a military village.” It was an administrative center, headquarters of the military Department of the Missouri, which was why they were there. They had convened as a court-martial to try Lt. Col. and Brevet Maj. Gen. George Armstrong Custer.

  All but one of the men had met briefly the day before. They had squabbled in the usual army fashion over seniority, determined by a complicated combination of their service and brevet ranks in the Regular Army. Today, with the official reporter and the judge advocate, Capt. Robert Chandler, 13th U.S. Infantry Regiment, they could proceed to the reading of the charges and specifications.1

  Col. William Hoffman of the 3rd Infantry, a slender man of about sixty with a mustache and chest-length, squared-off gray beard, presided. Curiously, he had served on the court-martial that had tried and convicted Custer in 1861. He was “dear old Genl H——” to another member of the court, forty-one-year-old Col. Benjamin Grierson of the 10th Cavalry, a regiment of black troops. Bearded and baggy-eyed, he had commanded cavalry in the war as a major general of volunteers. He had denounced Custer to his wife as one of Sheridan’s “toadies” when Sheridan picked him for the Texas command in 1865. “Sooner or later,” he had written privately of Sheridan, “I will get even with this man.” Yet he also had a reputation for judgment and integrity.2

  Custer objected to the makeup of the court—not to the presence of Hoffman or Grierson, but of Lt. Col. John W. Davidson. “First I objected on the grounds of his being a material witness” as well as a judge, Custer wrote to a friend. Second, Davidson had publicly stated “that he did not see ‘how General Custer expected to get out of these charges. He is a young man—a newcomer in the service—he only graduated in ’61, and never commanded a company, and he must be taught that he cannot come out here and do as he pleases.’ ” Davidson rose, Custer reported, “and admitted that he had said all I charged him with and much more.” The court sustained the objection, “much…to my satisfaction,” Custer wrote. The trial had not yet begun and already it was going well.3

  At his court-martial in 1861, he had admitted his guilt. Now he acted like a man on trial for his life. He retained counsel, Capt. Charles C. Parsons, 4th Artillery. A West Point classmate with a distinguished record, Parsons had a good reputation as an army lawyer. And Custer devoted himself to the case, reviewing every detail.4

  Custer’s life was at stake—his professional life, not his mortal existence. That much was clear from the charges and specifications, which were read aloud to the court. Charge: “Absence without leave from his command.” Specification: “That he, Brevet Major General G.A. Custer, Lieut. Col. 7th U.S. Cavalry, did at or near Fort Wallace, Kansas, on or about the 15th day of July 1867, absent himself from his command without proper authority, and proceed to Fort Harker, Kansas, a distance of about 275 miles, this at a time when his command was expected to be actively engaged against hostile Indians.” Charge: “Conduct to the prejudice of good order and discipline.” Specification First: That, on the first leg of his movement to Fort Harker, he marched without rest to Fort Hays, taking three officers and seventy-five men “upon private business,” seriously harming the horses. Specification Second: During his march he procured two ambulances and four mules for his own use. Specification Third: After learning that some of his men had been ambushed by Indians, he did nothing to defend them; informed that two had been killed, he “did neglect to take any measures to pursue such party of Indians, or recover or bury the bodies of those of his command that had been killed.”

  The court heard an additional charge, preferred by one of Custer’s subordinates, Capt. Robert M. West, 7th Cavalry, with four specifications. Charge: “Conduct prejudicial to good orde
r and military discipline.” Specification First: During operations between the Platte and Smoky Hill rivers, he sent a detachment in pursuit of deserters, and did “also order the said party to shoot the supposed deserters down dead, and to bring none in alive.” Specification Second: That he ordered Bugler Barney Tolliver, Pvt. Charles Johnson, and a private named Allburger “to be shot down as supposed deserters, but without trial, and did thus cause three men to be severely wounded.” Specification Third: That he ordered the three badly wounded men “to be placed in a government wagon, and to be hauled eighteen miles, and did…neglect and positively refuse to allow the said soldiers to receive treatment.” Specification Fourth: That fifteen miles south of the Platte River he ordered “the summary shooting, as a supposed deserter, but without trial, of one Private Charles Johnson” on July 17, 1867, causing his death.

  In sum, he was charged with placing himself above the law. The prosecution claimed that, in a time of active hostilities, he abandoned his regiment for personal reasons, drove government horses until they were virtually crippled, seized public property for his own use, and ordered the extrajudicial murder of his men.

  He pleaded innocent on all counts. At 3:40 p.m., the court adjourned until the following morning. At ten o’clock on September 17, it would begin to hear witnesses.5

  The purpose of the trial was simple: to establish the facts of Custer’s actions between June 1, 1867—when he had marched out of Fort Hays, Kansas, on the hunt for hostile Indians—and about half past two in the morning of July 19, when he had arrived at Fort Harker. Only two questions mattered: What did Custer do? Did he have authority to do it?

  The court would not ask why. Why had he plunged into such a crisis? Why had a national celebrity, one of the most accomplished generals of the Civil War, followed such a self-destructive course? Possible explanations abound. There were the difficulties created by the federal government’s lack of a coherent policy toward the indigenous nations of the Great Plains. There was the failure of Custer’s superiors to craft a successful military strategy, or even identify achievable goals. There were the new challenges Custer faced in taking a command position in a permanent regiment of the Regular Army.