And yet, other officers overcame the same difficulties without landing in a court-martial. To find the sources of Custer’s downfall, it is necessary to delve into his personal life, going back at least as far as his departure for Kansas in the fall of 1866.
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“WE CANNOT UNDERSTAND each other, except in a rough and ready way,” E. M. Forster once said. We see just the surface of other human beings, and only glimpse the interior when thoughts and emotions emerge as actions. In that sense, he said, “fiction is truer than history, because it goes beyond the evidence, and each of us knows from his experience that there is something beyond the evidence.”6 So we do. But some translate their interior lives into action more directly than others.
“It was impossible for Custer to appear otherwise than himself,” a close friend later wrote. At first glance, this seems like a bizarre thing to say. The Boy General of the Golden Locks comes across as nothing but affectation. Indeed, the same friend acknowledged his “fondness for theatrical presentations” and “love of military display.” But he could not conceal his emotions. His interior state radiated through the surface, unfiltered, unmediated, uncalculated. It was one reason why his friends liked him so much. But it also posed a constant danger.7
Libbie Custer possessed a different temperament, and had been bred to a different role. She had been assigned by family and society to the emotional plane where restraint, persuasion, and even manipulation were essential tools. Her husband’s raw displays forced her to use those tools regularly. In April 1866, for example, he had written confounding letters to her from New York, professing his intense sexual need for her yet glorying in the attention of the city’s women. He was “nearly starved” for “a ride,” he wrote. In Manhattan (with Libbie still in Monroe), “I cannot without great expense and much danger enjoy the luxury of such a ride as that I refer to. I never did enjoy riding strange horses.” He was loyal, but tempted. “It is a great risk,” he wrote. And he seemed to suggest that she should flirt with a politician who was coming to Monroe, making clear that the gentleman was quite lecherous.8
Did this behavior aggravate her? Or had these two flirtatious partners integrated it into their relationship? Libbie concealed the answer. Yet something about this period of her marriage clearly troubled her, as seen in her memoir Tenting on the Plains. There was, for example, the curious way in which she wrote about her friend Anna Darrah, who came with her and Armstrong to Kansas. She claimed to have staged an impersonal search for a companion, writing that she and Armstrong devoted “most of our attention…to the selection of a pretty girl.” She gave a rather unsettling motivation: “A pretty girl…it was held by both of us, would do more toward furnishing and beautifying our army quarters than any amount of speechless bric-á-brac.” In other words, they wanted to look at her.
Libbie implied that they chose a stranger, and disguised Anna as “Diana.” Why? To protect her privacy? Perhaps the tale reflected her emotional memory of the uncomfortable proximity of her attention-loving husband and a pretty young friend who had confessed “jealousy & envy” at Libbie’s marriage. After all, she described “Diana” as a remorseless flirt. And her discomfort would grow.9
If Libbie was accumulating wrath, she found a safe target for it in a new servant who worked alongside Eliza Brown, “a worthless colored boy, who had been trained as a jockey in Texas.…What intellect he had was employed in devising schemes to escape work,” she would write. This “lazy servant” moved Armstrong’s mother with stories of his suffering as a slave. Her “amazing credulity” disgusted Libbie.10
Armstrong, Libbie, Anna, Eliza, and the jockey began their journey to Kansas in Detroit, where they visited the recent mayor, Kirkland C. Barker. A friend of Armstrong’s, Barker shared his enthusiasm for “dogs & horses & hunting,” as Libbie put it. He insisted they take his private railroad car to St. Louis, in company with his daughter, niece, a young female friend, and two men. But the men disappeared from Libbie’s account in her memoir, leaving only a “pretty galaxy of belles.”11
In St. Louis, to Armstrong’s delight, they traveled to the distant past. They attended a grand fair held by the Southern Relief Association, held to raise money for impoverished white families in the former Confederacy. It featured a medieval-style tournament, in which men dressed in feudal garb tilted with lances at tiny rings in an arena. “It was something so novel to us and reminded us of Ivanhoe and other descriptions of olden days,” Libbie wrote to Rebecca Richmond.
The fair and the tournament formed part of a backward-looking cultural struggle against the Union victory. Missouri had officially remained in the Union, but as a slave state it had a militant corps of secessionists who waged a bitter guerrilla struggle during the Civil War. Now old Confederates asserted Missouri’s Southern identity, using tournaments to celebrate the idealized chivalry of antebellum Dixie.
Custer loved it. “He longed to bound down into the arena, take a horse, and tilt with their long lances at the rings,” Libbie wrote. The winner was to crown the Queen of Beauty at a “Calico Ball” at the Southern Hotel, where the Custers lodged.12
First the couple and their entourage went to the theater to see a romantic drama titled Rosedale. It starred Lawrence Barrett, a striking young actor only slightly older than Custer himself, who had begun to build a national reputation. During the war Barrett had moved to Union-occupied New Orleans, where he dominated the stage. He had first performed Rosedale there, winning acclaim by taking different roles on different evenings. Clearly a rising star, he brought the career-making play to St. Louis.
Barrett’s performance mesmerized the Custers. After the final curtain, Libbie insisted that Armstrong go to his dressing room and bring him back to meet her.13
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LAWRENCE BARRETT HEARD the rap at his dressing room door. “Entered a tall, fair-haired, blue eyed, smiling gentleman,” he recalled. The stranger apologized for intruding and said he was General Custer. Barrett recognized the famous face and long hair. “He had been sent to bring me to the hotel where he was temporarily residing,” Barrett recalled. “I was to go with him to meet Mrs. Custer and other members of his party.…He pleaded ‘orders’ which must be obeyed, and refusal was impossible.”
He went. He met Libbie and the others, and went with them to the hotel. They chatted for an hour in the lounge. He impressed Libbie as “an elegant gentleman,” and stunned her by revealing that he had started out as a bellboy in Detroit. Music floated out of the ballroom. Everyone rose to their feet, and Barrett prepared to say good-bye. Libbie placed her small hand on his arm—“and before he had realized it,” she recalled, “he was being marched into the brilliantly lighted ballroom, and bowing from force of capture before the dais on which sat the Queen of Love and Beauty.…Mr. Barrett was not released until he pleaded the necessity for time to work.”14
Libbie would later claim that her husband arranged it all, but Barrett recalled otherwise. After months of watching Armstrong revel in the attention of female admirers, after days of seeing him surrounded by beautiful young women—including the flirtatious Darrah—she maneuvered him into bringing her a handsome young star.
Barrett and Armstrong, though, found each other fascinating. The actor learned that the private Custer was quite different from the battlefield hero. “His voice was earnest, soft, tender, and appealing, with a quickness of utterance which became at times choked by the rapid flow of ideas, and a nervous hesitancy of speech, betraying intensity of thought,” Barrett wrote. Custer had an infectious “chuckle of a laugh,” but was also “peculiarly nervous.” In conversation, he searched Barrett’s face, “as if each word was being measured mercilessly by the listener.”
Barrett glimpsed Custer’s deepest fears. Among friends, Barrett noted, “he was all confidence, his eye would brighten, his face light up, and his whole heart seemed to expand.…He seemed in private to become as gentle as a woman.” But he was “reticent among strangers.…He himself frequently complained that
he could not be ‘all things to all men.’ ” Custer had pushed onto the political stage in 1866, only to be judged on a national scale. As a celebrity, his image was beyond his control. So he retreated into tighter social circles. Soon after this evening, a large group of visitors came to his home and “there were incessant inquiries for the General,” Libbie recalled. “It seems that he had begun that little trick of hiding from strangers, even then.”15
In The Sebastopol Sketches, Tolstoy drew upon his army experience to explain the self-conscious officer. “The man who feels unable to inspire respect by virtue of his own intrinsic merits is instinctively afraid of contact with his subordinates and attempts to ward off criticism by means of superficial mannerisms,” he wrote. Military veterans throughout history have seen this dynamic in martinets and missing commanders. In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, for example, Major Major receives his rank solely because his surname is Major. Knowing himself to be incompetent, he hides. He orders his clerk to tell callers that he’s out whenever he’s in, but to let them in whenever he’s out.
In battle, Custer was no Major Major. Justifiably confident in his personal courage and skill with a horse and saber, he had put himself in front of the Michigan Brigade and 3rd Division. He assumed a rather different set of responsibilities after the war. He would not be called upon to lead so much as manage. In Texas, this mission had flummoxed him. He had indeed felt “unable to inspire respect by virtue of his own intrinsic merits,” when those merits did not include combat prowess. An unexpected side effect of his rapid rise in rank turned out to be a lurking fear of inadequacy.
The situation in Kansas would be similar, but with a difference. The troops in Texas had been volunteers, anxious to return home; those in Kansas would be professionals. He now had to build lasting relationships in a permanent institution. The worst thing he could do would be to withdraw or put on airs. When a commander did that, Tolstoy observed, “his subordinates, who see only this superficial aspect of the man, one which they find offensive, are inclined, often unjustly, to suppose it conceals nothing good.”16
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THEY ARRIVED AT FORT RILEY, Kansas, roughly 120 miles west of Fort Leavenworth, in the middle of October 1866. The Union Pacific Railroad, Eastern Division—soon to be called the Kansas Pacific Railroad—already extended to within ten miles of Fort Riley amid its construction from Kansas City to Denver. The Custers, Anna Darrah, Eliza Brown, the jockey, and their various dogs rode the rest of the way in ambulances, accompanied by three horses.
“This is not a fort, tho’ called so,” Libbie wrote to Rebecca Richmond. “For there are no walls enclosing it.” It was one of the older posts on the Great Plains, established in 1853 near the junction of the Republican and Smoky Hill rivers, forming the Kansas River. Libbie described Riley as “a little city” of limestone buildings. Three two-story barracks faced three others across a large square parade ground, framed on the remaining sides by matched sets of three two-story officers’ quarters, each consisting of two attached houses. The fort also included stables, the store run by the sutler (the civilian merchant permitted to operate at a military post), express company office, post office, civilian housing, mess halls, chapel, ordnance building, and more. After shifting about, the Custer household settled into a permanent home. It had a large porch, a room in the back for Brown, and a sizable kitchen. Beyond the fort they could shop for supplies at nearby Junction City.17
As a new regiment, the 7th Cavalry was still undergoing organization, and not all of the personnel had arrived. In 1866, cavalry regiments consisted of twelve companies, each with no more than 100 enlisted men, and usually far fewer. By the start of 1867, the 7th Cavalry would count fifteen officers and 963 troopers. For many privates, joining the army was a last resort; as one wrote, peacetime society considered the word soldier “a synonym for all that is degrading and low.” About half of them were immigrants, particularly Irish or German. Poorly paid, badly fed, subject to harsh discipline, they could still make fine troops if well led. “Each company rated a captain, a first lieutenant, and a second lieutenant, nearly always reduced to two or even one [officer] by details to detached service,” the historian Robert Utley explains. “The field grades were a colonel, lieutenant colonel, and three majors. In theory each major commanded a battalion of four companies, although this rarely happened in practice.” Rarely, because the overstretched peacetime army split up regiments to man small posts in the West and the Reconstruction South. The 7th Cavalry would serve as a complete unit only once in Custer’s lifetime, with disastrous results. On the other hand, the roster of officers in a peacetime regiment remained extraordinarily stable, year after year.18
Custer found that some of his fellow officers had already arrived. Others (including Tom, now a first lieutenant transferred to the 7th Cavalry) trickled in over the next few months. Custer’s senior subordinate was Maj. Alfred Gibbs, a jowly man with a mustache and goatee turning to gray. An 1846 graduate of West Point, he had served with Custer in the Cavalry Corps of the Army of the Potomac. Gibbs drilled and organized the men, and he and his wife provided the Custers with pleasant company.
When Capt. Albert Barnitz learned in January 1867 that he had been assigned to the 7th Cavalry, he wrote to his future wife, Jennie Platt, “Custer is Lieutenant Colonel of the Reg’t…and in command! Then of course his amiable little wife, whom you would love, I think, will be there! Isn’t that pleasant! I hope it will prove true.” Barnitz, like all the other officers, was a Civil War veteran, and had proudly served in Custer’s 3rd Division. Lt. Thomas B. Weir had been Custer’s subordinate in Texas, along with Maj. Joel Elliott. Other key officers included Maj. Wyckliffe Cooper, Capt. Louis Hamilton, Capt. Robert M. West, Capt. Frederick W. Benteen, and Irish-born Capt. Myles Keogh, who had fought in the Papal army against Italian unification.19
Many of them were quite young. Elliott turned twenty-six in October 1866, the same age as Keogh. Hamilton was only twenty-two and Lt. William W. Cooke just twenty. They belonged to a generation that would dominate the officer corps for the next three decades; fully 42 percent of commissions in that period were issued within two years of Appomattox. Most had served in the U.S. Volunteers, and tended to resent what they saw as West Pointers’ clubby, superior attitude. Worst of all, they were stuck. “The army moved into the long interwar period [ending with the Spanish-American War] with a large number of officers in the same age range, regardless of their new rank,” writes the historian William Coffman. “Since the army did not increase in strength and because so many officers were in the same age group, there was little hope for advancement. Year in and year out they went about their company-level routines.…It is surprising that this situation did not cause more disharmony than it did.”20
If disharmony in the 7th Cavalry began with anyone, it was with Captain Benteen, a soft-faced but bitter man.*1 He had performed well in the Civil War, and would prove himself a cool-headed combat officer in the years to come. He used political connections to get an appointment in the Regular Army, as many officers did, and made a hobby of lobbying for retroactive brevet promotions for his valor in the Civil War. Benteen’s hostility toward Custer colored all of his later writings, making him the most untrustworthy of narrators. He would claim that his resentment began in his first interview with Custer at Fort Riley. He took offense at Custer’s reading of his congratulatory order to the 3rd Division and at comments about Gen. James Wilson, Custer’s old rival and Benteen’s former commander. True or not, he hated Custer immediately.21
In the beginning, though, an outside observer detected little dissension at Fort Riley. “Came here Thursday evening,” Jennie Barnitz wrote to her mother on February 26, 1867. “We were at once invited to Gen. Custer’s.” Jennie had just married Barnitz and traveled with him to Fort Riley. “Mrs. Custer is a charming woman, and very gay. We were constantly receiving calls from officers, some times a half dozen at a time. They are splendid—I should think all of them from the best class of socie
ty.”22
On the day she wrote this letter, Custer assumed command of the 7th Cavalry, though the regiment’s senior officer remained Col. Andrew Jackson Smith. An avuncular, bearded old horseman, Smith had graduated from West Point in 1838 and served throughout the West. He had fought well in the Civil War against the feared Nathan Bedford Forrest. Smith relied heavily on Custer from the outset, and handed the regiment off to him when he assumed command of the military District of the Upper Arkansas, taking Lt. Weir as adjutant. Custer would remain a lieutenant colonel—if he passed a test.23
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ON NOVEMBER 9, 1866, CUSTER left Fort Riley for Washington. Having jumped to the Regular Army rank of lieutenant colonel, he had to appear before an examining board that tested newly appointed officers. He passed easily, but the examination had a larger significance. It spoke to an ongoing change in the United States: the rise of professionalization.24 West Point educated and a flagrant nepotist, Custer himself epitomized the transitional nature of this moment, as America transformed into an organizational society. These first proficiency tests pointed in the new direction.
Libbie did not accompany him. He spent more than a month away from her, returning on December 16.25 The prolonged separation is striking. Perhaps they could not afford for Libbie to go, or felt that she could not abandon Darrah at Fort Riley. Or she may have wished to keep Darrah away from Armstrong. Curiously, none of his letters to Libbie during this trip survive in the public record. He made a habit of writing to her daily when they were apart, but she chose not to excerpt his correspondence in her memoirs or preserve it in the collections that she deposited in archives.
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