A Terrible Glory

by James Donovan

  Hooker took his advice in February 1863 and appointed Pleasonton to lead one of three divisions. Pleasonton took Custer onto his staff, and the exacting older man and the eager young one got along well, with Custer again making himself invaluable to a General. In several battles that spring, he established himself as a natural combat leader. Through several scrapes and skirmishes, as well as the occasional raid, he furthered his reputation for fearlessness and having a nose for battle. “He was always in the fight, no matter where it was,” recalled Custer’s orderly, Joseph Fought.15

  Pleasonton was given command of the entire cavalry on June 22 (meaning Custer also gained a grade) and decided he needed a few young brigade leaders to inject some vigor into his corps — “officers with the proper dash to command Cavalry.” He picked three young officers who had served on his staff: Custer, Elon Farnsworth, and Wesley Merritt. On June 28, the Army of the Potomac’s new chief, Major General George G. Meade, appointed them Brigadier Generals. While Pleasanton’s other two choices might have been, at least in part, politically motivated, Custer’s promotion could only have been the result of merit — and no small amount of affection.16

  During the first two years of the war, while on the staffs of these general officers and a few others, Custer had absorbed firsthand the elements of command. From each he had learned something valuable about leadership. He had gained confidence in his ability to gather intelligence, assess it accurately and quickly, intuitively make the right decision, and then implement the proper action—and make sure the job got done. “He was true as steel,” remembered an officer who served through the war with him. “He was depended upon for great things because he was dependable.”17 He had also learned, particularly from Pleasonton and McClellan, the value of tooting one’s own horn, whether it was in a personal letter, an official report, or an account given to a newspaperman.18 Finally, he had come to love battle as few other men did. Armstrong Custer felt truly happy, truly alive, only in war. He had found his calling, and he was damned good at it.19

  Very few Generals led their men into battle, preferring to direct from the rear. Custer had an idea that if his men saw their commanding officer share the danger, they would fight even harder. Upon receiving his promotion, Brevet Brigadier General Custer and his bugler-adjutant pieced together a nonregulation uniform that was ridiculed by some: “a velveteen jacket with five gold loops on each sleeve, and a sailor shirt with a very large collar that he got from a gunboat on the James. The shirt was dark blue, and with it he wore a conspicuous red tie — top boots, a soft hat, Confederate, that he had picked up on the field, and his hair was long and in curls almost to his shoulders.”20 Custer’s chief intention, he would explain, was conspicuousness: he wanted his men always to know where he was. Soon the men of his command began copying his red tie and even his long hair.

  The twenty-three-year-old Custer (he was the youngest General in the Federal army for a while) barely had time to learn his subalterns’ names before entering the crucible of Gettysburg just a few days after his appointment. Custer’s division commander was an excitable little West Point classmate named Judson Kilpatrick, nicknamed by his troopers “Kill-Cavalry” for the senseless charges he often ordered his men into. Kilpatrick sent Custer’s brigade to charge an unscouted Rebel position on the second day of the battle, south of Hunterstown. Custer, eager to impress his new command, trotted to the front of the foremost company, turned to his men, and declared that he would lead them. They charged down a road and were met with furious fire. Custer’s horse was hit, and he was thrown to the ground, stunned. A Private galloped up, shot a Rebel aiming his carbine at Custer, pulled his commander onto his own horse, and carried him to safety. Custer’s first charge as a brigadier was a failure, but he had shown his mettle to his men.21

  The next morning, the third day of the battle, General Robert E. Lee sent Stuart’s feared cavalry — his “Invincibles” — north around the Union’s right flank in an attempt to wreak havoc on its center rear while General George Pickett made his ill-advised charge on their front. In the area were the gun batteries that were doing significant damage to Pickett’s advance. As part of the Union line was about to be overrun, Custer led the Seventh Michigan Regiment against Stuart’s troopers with the cry, “Come on, you Wolverines!” His men drove the Rebels back until Confederate reinforcements arrived. Custer led his men back to safety before Stuart sent a wide formation of eight regiments forward in intimidating fashion. There was only one intact regiment, the First Michigan, and Custer again galloped to the head of the column, gave the same rallying cry, and led his men straight into the center of the eight Southern regiments. The resulting collision was like a train wreck, riders and their mounts crashing into and over each other, sabers clashing and pistols blasting at short range, bluecoats from either flank jumping in to help break the Rebel charge. Stuart withdrew, no doubt wondering who the fearless opponent in blue velveteen was. It was the first time the Federal horsemen had stopped Stuart’s cavalry and held the field.

  Triumph followed triumph for the Boy General and his Michigan Brigade, which quickly earned a reputation as the best brigade in the cavalry corps. “I believe more than ever in Destiny,” Custer wrote a few weeks after Gettysburg.22 He had good reason to do so. Pleasonton remarked in private that he thought Custer was “the best cavalry General in the world.”23 Culpeper, Brandy Station, Yellow Tavern, Haw’s Shop, Cold Harbor, Trevilian Station — these battles and other lesser engagements honed Custer’s tactical and leadership skills to a sharp edge. They also gained for him no small degree of fame. His style of dress and command, and his victories, made great copy, and his likeness began showing up in newspapers and weekly magazines. He was becoming famous.

  He also became a husband. Over the previous year, he had mounted a full-scale charge on Libbie Bacon and her father and stepmother. Libbie had decided quickly that she loved him; her parents took a bit longer. Through occasional visits and constant correspondence, Armstrong had gotten one and all to agree to a marriage, and on February 9, 1864, Armstrong and Libbie tied the knot in a grand wedding that included hundreds of guests. After a honeymoon trip that included stops at West Point, New York City, and Washington, D.C., the General returned to his troops, accompanied by his bride. Until war’s end, she followed him as closely as possible and stayed with him at his brigade headquarters whenever she could. Libbie was often the only officer’s wife with the command, granted special dispensation by Philip Sheridan, who was inordinately fond of Custer, whom he called “youngster.”24

  Thanks to yet another round of command changes, the pugnacious Sheridan was now in charge of the cavalry. In the spring of 1864, Ulysses S. Grant was appointed General in Chief of the Federal army. He had been extraordinarily successful in the western theater, conquering Vicksburg and Chattanooga, and seemed to be the leader Lincoln had been looking for since the war’s beginning. Grant came east and brought with him several of his favorite officers. One of them was a stocky man who wore a perpetual scowl — a tremendous leader, inspiring and audacious, whose men loved him. He had led infantry troops in the West, but now Grant put him in charge of the Cavalry Corps, relieving Pleasonton, much to Custer’s dismay. But Custer liked his new commander immediately, for Philip Henry Sheridan was an Ohio man after his own heart. The son of a laborer, Sheridan had battled his way through West Point as an Irish Catholic outsider several years before Custer. The squatty Sheridan and the taller Custer were physically distinct, but both were mercurial, emotional, and demanding of the men they led.

  In August 1864, Grant gave Sheridan command of his own Army of the Shenandoah and ordered him to crush the Confederate troops under the ill-tempered General Jubal Early that had been threatening Washington. Sheridan’s 40,000 troops were to destroy Early’s forces and wage total war on Virginia’s fertile Shenandoah Valley, the “Breadbasket of the Confederacy,” by burning or seizing all crops, livestock, and stores — anything that could feed the Rebel army. “Such as canno
t be consumed, destroy,” his orders read. As part of his command, Sheridan was given the First Cavalry Division, which included Custer’s brigade, and the cavalrymen embarked from Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, on August 9, 1864. Over the next ten weeks, Sheridan’s army brought the conflict home to the valley’s civilian inhabitants, causing severe damage to their homes, crops, buildings, animals, and morale. “It was a phase of warfare we had not seen before,” a Federal cavalryman later recalled.25 The new doctrine would ultimately win the war for the Union.

  The Army of the Shenandoah fought a series of running battles with Early’s meager forces. The Rebels held their own for a few weeks, but after a two-week respite, the hostilities heated up in mid-September. At Winchester, Virginia, on September 19, Custer respectfully refused an order by Sheridan to make a charge into a heavily manned enemy position. When the Rebel units shifted, he led an attack that broke a superior infantry force and drove it from the field. The victory was his swan song with the Wolverines; at the end of the month, Sheridan rewarded him with a division of his own. Both the enlisted men and the officers of the Michigan Brigade were stunned and despairing at the news, and 472 of them signed a petition requesting transfers.26 But Custer’s new command, the Third Cavalry Division, was elated, and many of its members donned red neckties in his honor.

  Once the Federals had driven the Rebels out of the Shenandoah Valley, Sheridan began withdrawing his forces north through the valley, the cavalry acting as a rear guard, burning and pillaging a swath thirty miles wide as they went. A fresh force of Rebel cavalry led by Custer’s old West Point friend Tom Rosser nipped at the Union army’s heels as it retreated. Custer begged to fully engage the Confederates, and Sheridan granted his wish. At Tom’s Brook, the first major battle in which Custer led his new command, two brigades of the Third turned and attacked a larger division led by Rosser, smashing it so hard that the Union cavalry pursued the Rebels for twenty miles.

  Ten days later, on the foggy morning of October 19, a brilliant surprise attack by Early’s forces on the unsuspecting Union army’s camp at Cedar Creek routed three entire divisions. Custer’s Third Division, on the army’s right flank, was one of the few commands that did not retreat in disarray. The men of his division and one other held firm until Sheridan, after his storied eleven-mile ride from Winchester the following morning, rallied the Union troops and swept the field. Custer’s division delivered the death blow, and the battle essentially ended the fighting in the valley. It was clear to all that the Union cavalry had fought in the forefront, and to reward Custer and Merritt, his best cavalry leaders (Farnsworth had died at Gettysburg), Sheridan recommended their promotion to Brevet Major Generals. The brevets were awarded a few days later.

  Through the rest of the year, the cavalry stayed in the field, busy with raids and reconnaissance in the valley against the never-say-die Rosser and his Laurel Brigade. The Texan gained a measure of revenge on December 21, 1864, when he surprised the Third Division at Lacey’s Springs in a predawn attack after Custer had pulled his pickets in early, after reveille. The division regrouped quickly and counterattacked with minimal damages, but a shaken Custer —who had barely escaped from the inn that he had commandeered — ordered the Third to retreat back down the valley to Winchester. After criticism and questioning from Sheridan, Custer would twist the facts in his official report to avoid taking responsibility — a common tactic among Civil War commanders, and one that Custer would occasionally use in the future.27

  In late February 1865, after a long, cold winter of work, the cavalry rode south to join up with Grant and the Army of the Potomac in their hammering of the remnants of General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, still entrenched in Petersburg and Richmond, Virginia. At Waynesboro in early March, the Third overwhelmed Early’s forces and routed them, destroying what was left of the little Rebel army. A few weeks later, the cavalry reached Grant outside Petersburg. The Union commander gave them the task of riding around Lee’s army and capturing his supply and escape routes, the Richmond & Danville and Southside railroads. The half-starved Southerners could ill afford that blow, so Lee sent almost 20,000 men to block the Union troops. The two armies met at a crossroads named Five Forks. Over the previous two days, Custer’s division had been detailed to guard and help the baggage train through thick mud, but he moved his men quickly up to the front just in time to bolster the sagging Union line. The next day, the Third played a large part in a furious Federal victory. The loss of many thousands of troops and the two railroads broke the back of the Confederacy.

  The following day, Lee’s Rebels made a run for North Carolina in an attempt to reach General Joseph Johnston’s Confederate army there. Grant sent Sheridan’s cavalry to head them off. Over the next eight days, Lee did his best to evade the Federals, avoiding major confrontations whenever possible, but his ragged troops were starving, exhausted, and dispirited, and the fight had largely gone out of them. On April 6, one wing of the Rebel army made a stand at Sayler’s Creek but ultimately gave in to the constant pounding by the superior Union force. As usual, Custer and his Red Tie Boys, as they were now known, were in the thick of things.

  Two days later, it was all over. At Appomattox Courthouse, Custer’s Third Division seized four trains of Rebel munitions and supplies. The next morning, after some skirmishing, a single Confederate officer rode up to Custer waving a white towel. Lee wanted an end to the hostilities. That afternoon Lee met Grant at Wilmer McLean’s house at Appomattox to negotiate the surrender. Outside, Custer wandered among the Confederate officers, talking with those he knew from the Point. Sheridan paid McLean $20 for the small table on which the conditions of surrender had been signed and gave it to Custer as a gift for Libbie. In a note to her he wrote, “There is scarcely an individual in our service who has contributed more to bring about this desirable result than your gallant husband.”28

  The war was finally over, and everyone in the Union army was thankful, including Custer, scarecrow gaunt after the final exhausting campaign — or at least so he told Libbie: “Thank God PEACE is at hand,” he wrote her two days later.29 But on some level, he must have been disappointed. He had rhapsodized in his letters about the glory of war, and it must have been clear to him after four years of almost constant fighting that he was a born warrior. Never again would he be as happy as when he was leading devoted soldiers into battle for a great cause. Of the Union’s Generals, only Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan were thought of more highly by the American public. Among Custer’s peers, only the jealous would whisper that such a meteoric rise was undeserved. There was still plenty of boy in him, but he had matured. He seemed to many, inside the army and out, to be the very model of noble knighthood. Custer’s praise and concern for those serving under him filled his reports — to the virtual exclusion of any feats of his own. His men responded in kind, and anecdotes of his gallantry and modesty became the stuff of legend. After Custer’s death, one soldier who had been shot in the leg and helped off the field by the Boy General summed up the admiration his men felt for their commander when he said, “I would have given my right arm to save his life — aye, I would have died in his place!”30

  Custer spent much of the next year in Texas and other parts of the South with a cavalry division assigned to Reconstruction duty — and the not-so-hidden job of ostentatiously displaying America’s martial might for the edification of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, whose French puppet masters had violated the Monroe Doctrine by putting him in power. Custer’s troopers were Northerners, volunteer remnants of the great Army of the Republic, and they could not have cared less for the idea of another campaign, however justified it might be. They had done their jobs and saved the Union, and now they just wanted to go home, as most of their fellow soldiers had. And they wanted no part of the harsh West Point disciplinary tactics that Custer believed in, including floggings, which had been abolished by the army in 1861, and even the execution of deserters, whose numbers were sky-high. Rations that were slow in coming
or of inferior quality exacerbated the situation. After a grueling 150-mile march in August from Alexandria, Louisiana, to Hempstead, Texas, things got even worse. Most of the enlisted men in the division, and some of their officers, hated Custer. The commanding officer who had seemed so solicitous of his men during the war now seemed strikingly indifferent to their well-being. Sheridan encouraged Custer’s strict discipline, and the local populace appreciated his efforts, but it earned him a reputation as a tyrant — a reputation that would linger, deservedly or not, to the end of his days and beyond.31

  MAJOR GENERAL GEORGE Armstrong Custer’s volunteer commission expired in January 1866, and he was mustered out of the army at the ripe old age of twenty-six. He and Libbie returned to Washington. By virtue of brevet — an honorary promotion granted to reward battlefield heroics or meritorious service, but all too often the result of staff connections — almost every officer in the service above the level of Lieutenant had commanded a regiment or battalion in the Civil War. The end of the war had seen virtually every one of them reduced to their regular army rank, usually several notches lower. Even Custer, one of the most accomplished Generals, could not avoid this fate. He was now only a cavalry Captain in the regular army, trying to decide what to do with the rest of his life. He explored civilian options, including several business opportunities in New York, with money and the means of earning it uppermost in his mind. Friends urged him to consider politics, but he decided against that after spending an unpleasant several weeks on President Andrew Johnson’s campaign tour. Back in Washington, he seriously considered a lucrative offer from the Mexican government of a high position in the Mexican army. General Grant endorsed a year’s leave of absence to pursue this opportunity, but Custer was still an officer in the U.S. Army, and the Secretary of State denied permission. To accept the offer, Custer would have to resign his commission, and who knew how long the job in Mexico would last? He turned down the post, his future still uncertain.