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

by Stiles, T. J.

  How could Custer not like Saratoga, with its racetrack, John Morrissey’s gambling saloon, the fashionable social scene on the Congress Hall veranda, its balls and hops, its worldly sophistication? But he went there for practical reasons. “At other watering places, they talked stocks; at Saratoga they bought and sold them,” William Fowler wrote. “Little knots of dealers stood in the piazzas of the United States Hotel, the Union, and the Congress, and traded in Erie and Harlem. The great pulsations of the heart-financial, 180 miles away, throbbed here through the telegraphic wires.”61

  Custer returned to New York, still hunting for money. He made other important contacts as well. He attended a dinner for the city’s leading journalists, taking a seat next to Horace Greeley, founder and editor of the New York Tribune, Whitelaw Reid, Richard Henry Dana, and Edmund C. Stedman, who was both a banker and a literary man, and would author a history of the New York Stock Exchange. Stedman compared Custer to the fifteenth-century French warrior Pierre Terrail, the Chevalier de Bayard, famous as “the knight without fear and beyond reproach.” He derived a more immediate benefit from Francis P. Church, a prominent Democrat, editor, and founder (with his brother William) of the Galaxy, a literary monthly. Custer had reached an agreement with Church on March 8 to provide articles on his adventures on the plains for $100 each, granting Church the option to publish them as a book.62

  Jairus Hall took little joy in Custer’s progress. He learned that Custer, in chasing the vapor of Wall Street, had neglected the rock of the Stevens Lode Mine itself.

  —

  “IN REGARD TO TAKING CHARGE of the mining in Colorado, of course we will have to do that, and then there will be no doubt about the success of the company,” Hall wrote to Custer on April 21, 1871. The remark implies that Custer had hoped to avoid any actual business management. The idea flummoxed Hall. “I will work with you in regard to further operations on the mine &c &c.,” he added.63 He filled his letters with details that Custer never mentioned: a man sent to assess the lode, the manager who directed the work, the Crescent Company’s progress on the western half.64

  In the fall of 1871 Custer finally left New York and reported for duty in Kentucky. After all those months of escorting a famous singer, attending all-night parties, dining at Delmonico’s, and visiting Saratoga, his fortune had still not materialized. The great financiers, who put their names down for ostensibly hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of stock, contributed a total of $12,000.

  Custer purchased his stake in the mine on credit, but Hall invested a good deal of his own money. Hall, too, hoped to sell out in the near term. He assigned a banker in Georgetown, Colorado, to serve as his proxy in “all matters pertaining to the sale of the Stevens.” He went to London in early 1872, hoping to find buyers there. Unlike Custer, he inquired into the actual business, and pressed their man on the spot to finally begin digging. He heard nothing from anyone, including Custer. In London he wrote on June 6, “I am in utter ignorance in regard to the state of affairs in Colorado at the Stevens mine.” In Paris on June 14 he begged Custer, “Write me fully.” On July 15 he wrote, “I arrived in New York last week, but found no letters from anyone in regard to the Stevens mine, nor did I find Travers at home.”65

  Finally, on July 26, 1872, Hall received a letter from Custer. “Your dispatch is as unsatisfactory as the silence of the past,” Hall wrote. Relations with the stockholders verged on disastrous. The friendship of Custer’s backers turned out to be as thin as a balance sheet. (Custer wasted a horse trying to get the support of Jim Fisk. On July 6, 1872, a rival for his mistress shot Fisk twice in the Grand Central Hotel, and he died the next day.) Hall asked Custer “if there is any chance you could go back to New York to fix things up.” The business demanded Custer’s attention to both finance and actual mining. “I think you had better go out yourself and look at the mine.” Once they straightened it out, “we can then look into a speculation for next winter in London.”66

  Hall, not Custer, went to the mine. Almost nothing had been done. The Crescent Company produced tons of ore, but Frank Dibben, the man who managed operations for Hall and Custer, “is totally unfit for business.” He was so ill that he could barely speak. “He is liable to die any day. I don’t think he will live through another winter.…Things are in bad shape, and we must look the matter square in the face.”67

  Hall saw the hollowness of Custer’s financial engineering. The investments collected on Wall Street pumped some air into the balloon, but could not make it fly. “I am very sorry that we ever accepted the 12000 dollar proposition at all,” Hall wrote. It was barely enough to begin digging, whereas now they needed to buy out the sick Dibben, who was not a hired hand but a partner—the original owner of the Stevens Lode. Ask the stockholders to advance enough to pay him off, Hall pleaded. “Get rid of him. We can then go on, work the mine and make some money, and have it understood & agreed that as soon as we can pay back the money advanced we shall have the balance of 100,000 either in cash or stock of said mine.” He sent a report by a mining engineer on the Stevens Lode, noting that the Crescent Company netted a profit of $1,000 per month. Despite their sick partner and Custer’s inattention, they might still get rich.

  Custer wrote to Travers, but it did no good. The Wall Street men had made their token contributions to the famous soldier’s pet project, and would put up no more. On September 23, 1872, Hall wrote, “I have delayed writing three or four days that I might possibly tell you of a favorable report—but…I must ask you to wait.” Then—silence.68

  In falling into the fever of the era, Custer failed to understand it. Only the massively wealthy could move the market at will—Vanderbilt, Drew, Gould, Fisk, and a few others. The lesser species tried to ride currents, not make them. The murkiness of this environment taught them to be wary. They did not exactly trust Custer, but risked only a tiny percentage of their subscribed amounts until the mine began to pay. His grand plan for snatching an easy fortune on Wall Street stalled.69

  Custer did not see that the financial ether still rested upon the real economy. He did not grasp that Vanderbilt’s stock market power derived from his ability to create large enterprises and run them profitably. Even the notorious Gould tried to make the Erie Railroad a success, and later achieved that goal with other companies. Custer thought appearances alone would do, because appearances had deceived him—the mistresses, mansions, and theater boxes. He failed to attend to the real work of management. He never fixed the mine’s problems or pushed the work forward, never even sought much information. The financiers cut him off. And so the fortune he had imagined vanished in the dark space between anticipation and realization.

  Fourteen

  * * *

  THE WRITER

  CUSTER TURNED TO HIS mission at last. It was a mission he hated.

  In September 1871, his long leave ended. He departed New York and reported to his new post in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, some three dozen miles south of Louisville. He lodged at the Hill House, an “old-fashioned hotel” with “humble accommodations” and a “quaint landlady” assisted by “a small darkey,” as he described it to Libbie. She came and looked over the town with a lacerating eye. “Everything is old, particularly the women,” she wrote to Maggie Custer. The landlady was old, a long-standing boarder was old, the grandfather clock was old, the dog was old and could barely walk. “The most active inhabitant of the place is a pig.”1

  Custer commanded two companies in Elizabethtown, one of the 7th Cavalry and another of the 4th Infantry. “The [7th Cavalry] regiment was stationed in various parts of the South, on the very disagreeable duty of breaking up illicit distilleries and suppressing the Ku-Klux [Klan],” Libbie later explained. That much was true. “Fortunately for us, being in Kentucky, we knew very little of this service,” she added. That was false. She was wrong, too, to blame her husband’s disdain for the post on his preference for “the free open plain.”2

  The reality of life in Kentucky could be seen in Elizabethtown
itself, the village Libbie found so boring. On November 1, 1871, with Custer away, command fell to Capt. A. B. Cain of the 4th Infantry. He reported, “The town authorities are very dilatory in dealing out justice to the offenders of their laws, which I attribute…to the terror in which they hold the lawless offenders.” A few days earlier a man had been arrested and brought before the town judge. “He arose from his seat in the court house and addressed the judge in the most foul and abusive language, branding him a coward and a man of the vilest character &c.” The judge fined him for contempt of court, and “the accused drew a pistol…threatening to kill the first man that laid hands upon him. In this case I had the man arrested and disarmed and returned to the civil authorities, when the judge…from sheer fear discharged the offender from custody.”3

  On the day that Cain tried to restore the rule of law in Elizabethtown, Custer was in Louisville with his wife. They attended a performance by a former star of the minstrel shows. “We have laughed until our sides ache,” he wrote to his sister Maggie. Lawrence Barrett came through town and sent a custom-made ring up to the Custers’ hotel room. Libbie came back first and opened the case. When Armstrong walked in, she said, “Oh, see here what a handsome present Mr. Barrett has sent you. I’m afraid you can’t get it on.” She was “hoping all the time I could not,” he noted. “Imagine her disappointment when I slipped it on my finger.” It was a curious incident, one that illuminates the famous actor’s sublimated love triangle with the Custers.4

  It also shows Armstrong’s disregard for Kentucky’s turmoil. As Cain reported, simple lawlessness was an enormous problem. The James-Younger gang often operated in the state, where the James brothers enjoyed the protection of friends and relatives. They robbed a bank in Columbia, sixty miles southeast of Custer’s post, on April 27, 1872. Just a few days before Custer reported to Elizabethtown, the troops there provided an escort for a train carrying a payroll, for fear that outlaws might rob it.

  Overwhelmingly, though, it was racial violence that plagued Kentucky—precisely the kind that Libbie dismissed as a far-off problem of the Deep South. “About the year 1870 bands of armed men, disguised and masked, began committing depredations,” a resident of Owen County reported to the U.S. district attorney. “They were known as Kuklux, and were in the habit of visiting the houses of citizens…in the nighttime.…Sometimes they would kill the parties whom they visited. Sometimes they would whip their victims severely, and occasionally burn the houses in which they lived.” They targeted black Union army veterans, teachers, and organizers. Sometimes they ordered the entire black population of an area to leave. They struck in every region of the state. “The violence perpetrated by the [Ku Klux] Klan in the bluegrass state would equal in ferocity and frequency the attacks on Afro-Americans anywhere in the old Confederacy,” writes the historian George Wright.5

  African Americans comprised 16.8 percent of the Kentucky population in 1870. Among states that had remained in the Union during the Civil War, only Maryland had a larger proportion of black residents. Ironically, they suffered because this was a Union state. The most rapid advance in civil rights came from the Reconstruction Acts; they applied only to ten states of the former Confederacy, requiring new constitutions that guaranteed civil liberties and gave black men the right to vote. Mississippi elected its first black officials long before 1871, whereas black Kentuckians could not even testify against whites in state courts. They did not take it quietly. African Americans mobilized, holding political conventions and organizing schools.

  Then the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870, prohibiting racial discrimination with regard to suffrage. A shift in power was imminent. Though a minority statewide, African Americans had concentrated in towns after emancipation. Lexington’s black population increased 300 percent between 1860 and 1870, compared to 10 percent for the white population. In key places black votes could decide elections. They organized.6

  Their political activity met an intensified terror campaign. In 1871, the Klan—which was not a nationally unified organization, but more of a model followed by local groups—“virtually usurped the local governments in several counties,” according to Wright, who counted fifteen so affected. “Kentucky was the only non-seceding state that had any significant Ku Klux Klan presence,” notes the historian Patrick Lewis. “Kentucky’s Klan members, in great contrast to their fellows in Republican-governed states elsewhere in the South, rode secure in the knowledge that their Democratic state government was hardly concerned with punishing them.” The official state militia, the Kentucky National Legion, behaved as the Klan’s partner. In Frankfort on August 7, 1871, a militia force assassinated a black political organizer, along with another man—merely two of scores of murders during this period. The Democratic legislature refused to pass legislation to suppress the violence.7

  African Americans mounted successful defenses in several instances. The man who reported to the U.S. district attorney also wrote of attacks in and around Stamping Ground in Scott County. “The negroes in one place returned the fire, killing one of their party, who was left by them on the road.” Yet they could never resolve the problem themselves. Outnumbered and outgunned, they faced the hostility of the entire machinery of state and local government. As early as 1866, black Kentuckians appealed for federal troops—as did victims across the South.8

  Congress hesitated. Despite a Republican majority (and president), it shrank from further intervention in state and local affairs. White Democrats denounced “occupation” and demanded “home rule,” even though Southern states ran their own affairs under the new constitutions mandated by the Reconstruction Acts. Amos T. Akerman, a white Republican from Georgia, went to Washington after Grant’s inauguration; the changing sentiment troubled him. “Even among Republicans,” he reported, there was “a hesitation to exercise the powers to redress wrongs in the states.” If Washington did not act now, “while the national spirit is still warm with the glow of the late war…the ‘state rights’ spirit may grow troublesome again.”9

  The mass violence by the Klan and similar organizations across the South halted this political drift. The moderate Republican senator John Sherman called the bloodshed an “organized civil war,” and said the only option was to once more “appeal to the power of the nation to crush [it].” In 1870 and 1871, Congress passed the Enforcement Acts to punish individuals for interfering with the protections in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments. The first two acts codified violations of the right to vote and provided federal oversight of elections. The most dramatic law went into effect on April 20, 1871. Known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, it made federal crimes of conspiracies and violence to deprive citizens of their rights, and authorized the use of the military and even suspension of habeas corpus.

  “The Ku Klux Klan Act pushed Republicans to the outer limits of constitutional change,” writes Eric Foner. Previously, only state and local governments punished “private criminal acts.” Now Washington would directly prosecute individuals. Asserting national power to protect national rights at the personal level, Congress “moved tentatively into modern times.”10

  The violence moved President Grant as well. In 1870 he replaced his distinctly prejudiced attorney general, Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, with the astonishingly egalitarian Amos Akerman. Born in the North but long resident in the South, Akerman had served as U.S. district attorney in Georgia during the first year of Grant’s administration. “For a man with young children to combat the Klan took courage, which Akerman did not lack,” William McFeely writes. As attorney general, equipped with new federal legislation, he intended to strike hard.11

  He struck in Kentucky, among other places. Kentuckian Benjamin H. Bristow, the solicitor general, piped messages and requests from the state directly to Akerman’s desk. In August 1871, Akerman authorized the district attorney G. C. Wharton to organize “a secret service force” to investigate attacks in Kentucky. By the end of September Wharton reported that he “had several persons engaged in this work
.” The army joined in, deploying more troops in Kentucky than in Mississippi. Some of them assisted the Internal Revenue Bureau in raids on illicit distillers. But many aided deputy U.S. marshals as they hunted and arrested Klansmen.12

  The troops stationed at Elizabethtown went on mission after mission with deputy marshals in late 1871 and 1872. They had an effect. During 1871 Wharton concluded seven civil rights prosecutions, winning six convictions; by December 31 he had twenty-six cases pending, plus three under the Ku Klux Klan Act (in addition to numerous tax prosecutions).

  On March 27, 1872, Wharton reported that the Ku Klux Klan “is now being broken up in every part of the state.” But he couched his optimism in caveats; the situation was not yet “as is to be desired.” Klansmen had deep roots in Kentucky; they continued the old system of slave-hunting patrollers, he wrote, and “are or have been equally endorsed by public sentiment.” He recommended that the federal courts in the state be tripled from three to nine “if these outrages continue.”13

  But Kentucky’s public officials thwarted him. The state legislature extended the terms of local white officeholders where black voters were concentrated. Towns such as Lexington enacted poll taxes that suppressed the black vote. Hostile judges and juries believed civil rights laws to be unconstitutional. Wharton won no convictions under the Ku Klux Klan Act in all of 1872, and only one under the Civil Rights Act.