For the most part, it was a well-orchestrated defense of his conduct during the battle. As led by his counsel, Reno refuted the various charges made against him over the previous three weeks. He took a page from Benteen’s testimony to explain his much-delayed march toward Custer on the hill in an attempt to make it sound like a well-coordinated movement that he had overseen in every way. Despite his statement in his official report that he had heard Custer’s gunfire, he now claimed that he had not, and he refused to admit that anyone had brought it to his attention. The Major told the court that he had not drunk a drop from his bottle until long after the firing quit past midnight — two or three hours after his violent confrontation with Frett, which he weakly rationalized by saying that the man had had no business among the pack animals and had angered him enough to justify slapping him.59
On cross-examination, Lee displayed an edge not seen before. It was the closest he came during the trial to being a prosecutor. He pointed out contradictions between Reno’s testimony and his official report, and then he asked Reno whether he distrusted Custer or had confidence in him.
“Our relations were friendly enough, and if my brothers had been in that column, I could not have done any more than I did,” Reno said.
“The question is,” said Lee, “whether you went into that fight with feelings of confidence or distrust?”
“My feelings towards General Custer were friendly.”
This time the recorder would not be put off. He turned to the court. “I insist that the question shall be answered,” he said.
“The witness will answer the question,” said Colonel King.
“I had known General Custer a long time,” Reno added warmly, “and I had no confidence in his ability as a soldier.” His admission caused a sensation in the room.60
Later, Lee asked Reno what had become of the wounded men left behind in the timber.
“I suppose the Indians killed them,” Reno said.
“What steps were taken to bring them out?”
“I could not make any efforts. None were made.” Some of the spectators murmured at this.
“What became of the wounded men who were left in the bottom on crossing?”
“I do not know,” said Reno, adding, rather too smartly, “The Indians would not permit me to take care of them.” This, too, prompted mutterings in the room.61
Gilbert on redirect asked a final question: “Was there any communication on the part of anyone to tell you that General Custer’s column had been seen while you were in the timber?”
Reno’s answer was emphatic. “No, sir,” he said. “Never.”62
Reno’s testimony was shot through with discrepancies and outright falsehoods. If anything, he had strayed farther from the truth than Benteen had. As he had done with the other witnesses, Lee refused to seize on these opportunities. Even so, Reno, it seemed, had done an excellent job of discrediting himself without Lee’s help. The mood in the room was against him.
Reno was released from the witness chair on Saturday afternoon, February 8. Closing arguments began the following Monday morning, with Lyman Gilbert leading off. He began with an unsubtle appeal to the superior breeding of the officer class, complimenting “the greater impartiality which high rank confers.” He heaped disdain upon the citizens who had testified against Reno. “Those who live in the suburbs of the Army,” he said — in effect, anyone not an officer — “shall not be his [Reno’s] judge in matters which concern his life or his honor.” He went on to disparage the individuals in classic ad hominem fashion, using selective testimony from the Seventh’s officers to rebut every criticism.63
One of Gilbert’s last arguments was a nervy appeal to the memory of Custer that seemed to take hold among the officers of the court.64 The attorney suggested that “if Custer could come back,” he might say to the Seventh’s survivors, “Our efforts failed to be mutual supports because of overwhelming force that confronted each one of us, and your honor takes no stain.”65
Gilbert’s performance was masterful. “Gilbert’s Gloss,” blared the Chicago Times headline the next day. “He Even Conjures Up Custer’s Ghost to Corroborate His Statement in Full” read a subhead. “It was a careful analysis of the evidence of the past four weeks,” wrote the Times reporter, “and abounded with passages of remarkable force and eloquence. It made a good impression on the court and audience.”66
Lee gave his response the next day. His speech was somewhat shorter than Gilbert’s. For an hour, while a light snow fell outside, he delivered a “cool, dispassionate review of the evidence.”67 He began by criticizing Gilbert’s attempts to attack the credibility of the non-officers. “The evidence of even mule packers as to matters of fact . . . is as good as that of anyone, however exalted, until it is contradicted,” he pointed out. Concerning Reno’s flight from the timber and the approval of every officer present of the move, he observed that it was natural for every survivor of the retreat to “ultimately arrive at a conclusion that after all it was the best thing to do.” Esprit de corps, he noted, “is a strong inducement to participants to do this.”
Lee concluded that the Major’s retreat was a contributing factor to the defeat of Custer’s battalion, since Custer had logically expected Reno to hold the timber and continue to threaten the village. He also pointed out the undisputed fact that Custer had received no support whatever from Reno’s seven companies, and Lee blamed this on indecision and tardiness. He stopped short of calling Reno a coward, though he provided multiple examples of his sorry performance. He also made it clear that he believed Reno to be lying when he testified that he had not heard Custer’s gunfire downriver. Even the partially deaf Godfrey had heard it, said Lee.
Only once did he show passion. To the last, he did not forget his self-imposed duty to the memory of Custer’s men. He had allowed Benteen to get away with stating that Custer’s battle was “a rout, a panic, until the last man was killed.”68 Now he hit back with fiery eloquence. “Fighting to the last and against overwhelming odds,” he said, “they died on the field of glory. Let no stigma of rout and panic tarnish their blood-bought fame.” It was a sharp and courageous rebuke. Whatever the verdict on Reno might be, Lee had struck his final blow for a “not guilty” verdict on the dead.
The court was cleared and closed for deliberation. Lee and the members of the court consulted for two hours before finalizing their findings and opinion about five o’clock. The report would be sent to Washington the next day.69 The War Department’s Bureau of Military Justice would review the sealed verdict and opinion, then send it to the President for his approval.
That same day, a letter from Frederick Whittaker appeared in the Chicago Times. He was confident, he wrote, that “this trial has established facts which prove Custer to have been, not rash, but prudent; not defeated by the enemy, but abandoned by the treachery or timidity of his subordinates. . . . The charge of disobedience has yet to be met, and I promise the people of the United States it shall be met and refuted at no distant date, before Congress.”70
No such investigation or refutation ever occurred. The various witnesses and officers of the court left Chicago the evening of the final day of proceedings or soon thereafter. The Seventh’s officers returned to their assigned stations. Reno remained in town for a few days, then returned to Harrisburg.
By that time, the court’s findings had been leaked to the press and appeared in many eastern newspapers: Reno had been found innocent. When the official report was released on March 6, it merely confirmed the rumors. The Major received the congratulations of his friends in Harrisburg and “congratulatory letters from all parts of the country,” reported a local newspaper.71 Reno and Gilbert discussed a libel suit against Whittaker’s publishers, Sheldon and Company, but never followed through.72 The Major would resume active duty on May 1, and he was looking forward to it.
The full text of the findings of the Reno court of inquiry was released to the public early in March. As endorsed by the Judge Advocate Gene
ral, General Sherman, and the Secretary of War, and approved by the President, the report was in essence a complete exoneration of Reno’s conduct. “No further proceedings are necessary in this case,” it concluded. The only admonition, mild as it was, read: “The conduct of the officers throughout was excellent, and while subordinates in some instances did more for the safety of the command by brilliant displays of courage than Maj. Reno, there was nothing in his conduct which requires animadversion from this court.”73
Years later, Merritt reportedly told his adjutant, “Well, the officers wouldn’t tell us anything and we could do nothing more than damn Reno with faint praise.”74
The official record of the proceedings — all 1,300 foolscap pages of it, half of them clipped accounts from the Chicago Times — was sent to Washington with the court’s findings and put away under lock and key, not to be available to the public for almost three-quarters of a century.
WHITTAKER’S PUBLIC INVOLVEMENT comprised two more letters. He wrote a long one to the New York Sun after the leaked opinion first appeared. This missive was a bitter, almost hysterical diatribe against Benteen, Reno, Gilbert, Merritt, Mike Sheridan, and even the army Adjutant General that labeled the proceedings “the merest mockery of justice . . . a partial whitewash.” He claimed to have overheard Merritt say, on the penultimate day of the investigation, “It is a pity that this thing was brought on now. It will hurt the army badly. It ought not to have been allowed to come out.”75 After an ex-officer acquaintance of Benteen’s answered with a letter in the Philadelphia Times that denounced Whittaker’s interest in the case as an advertising dodge for his biography of Custer and ridiculed the Weir affidavit he allegedly had, Whittaker wrote a letter to that paper and claimed that he had “never pretended to have an affidavit from Weir, and never caused such a statement to be made.”76 It was the last public statement Whittaker made on the subject.
THAT MILITARY COURTS could be manipulated, and had been, was nothing new.77 And the top brass could not have been happy to have the Reno court of inquiry forced upon it, though that was surely preferable to a potential congressional hearing, which would have been much harder for the army to control.
On the unit level, there was good reason to downplay Reno’s incompetence. A proven charge of cowardice on the Major’s part would be a stain on the regiment and its officers — one that would never completely disappear. Regimental pride was more than enough reason for the Seventh’s officers to stand shoulder to shoulder and defend their honor, even if in doing so they had to stand with someone most if not all of them despised.
But it was on the personal level that they may have felt most motivated. Few of the surviving officers could be completely proud of their own conduct during the battle. Many if not all of them had something to hide, whether it was disobedience, cowardice, incompetence, or insubordination: Benteen’s dawdling on the back trail; Edgerly’s abandonment of a trooper in his headlong retreat from the high peaks; Gibson, Mathey, and Moylan’s hiding on the hill during the siege; DeRudio’s questionable return to the timber; the shared failure to mount a rear guard during the retreat; leaving the wounded in the valley; most of the officers’ heading north without permission and ignoring Reno’s calls to retreat; and so on. A full confession of Reno’s faults might have led to another, more comprehensive inquiry into the conduct of other officers, and who knew what might be discussed and discovered then? In addition, every officer knew that according to Article 121 of the Articles of War, testimony given in a court of inquiry could be admitted as evidence in a court-martial. The two-year statute of limitations had run out, but no one cared to muddy the waters.
At the deepest, most solitary level, each of the testifying Seventh officers must have confronted his own shortcomings, real or imagined, through the accusations made against Reno. That they rehearsed their stories beforehand is unlikely; all it took was a mutual agreement — one that made sense in so many ways — to defend the honor of the regiment by avoiding blame and refusing to brand Reno a coward. Every officer’s greatest fear was breaking under pressure as Reno had. Even a veteran soldier of many a terrific battle like Moylan had displayed questionable courage. If it could happen to him, it could happen to anybody, at any time. Perhaps it was better to keep those innermost anxieties chained and submerged, in the deepest recesses of a man’s psyche, and avoid a public questioning of another man’s courage. The next time, it could be any one of them. Besides, the Lieutenants and Captains of the Seventh were testifying against their superior officer (or at least Reno would be again, after his sentence was up and he returned to active duty in six weeks), and who wanted to place himself in ill favor with a man who might be his commanding officer for a long time? Reno was a vindictive sort and might jeopardize a man’s military career.78
The thin blue line had closed and apparently helped stave off reorganization. The army appropriations bill finally passed in early April with no amendments attached. The court’s verdict seemed to satisfy the nation’s outcry for an answer on the cause of the debacle. But human nature decreed that blame be placed somewhere, and a public unfamiliar with the complexities of the situation, and unable to examine the record, accepted Custer’s guilt with satisfaction. Someone needed to wear the goat’s horns; if not Reno, then his commanding officer.
For a still vibrant and attractive widow struggling to make a living in New York, that would not do.
IN THE SPRING of 1877, Libbie Custer had moved from Monroe to New Jersey, then New York City. Liens against her husband’s meager estate — from debts he had accrued as a result of his failed financial dealings — had left her with little money beyond a pension of $30 a month. Though President Grant had arranged for her to assume postmistress duties in Monroe, Libbie’s pride had prevented her from accepting a favor from him. New York seemed the most likely place for a woman to find employment. She took a part-time job as secretary of a women’s organization and began to make new friends.
In the summer of 1877, a contingent commanded by Captain Mike Sheridan and guided by George Herendeen trekked to the battlefield to recover the officers’ remains and cart them back east. Despite doubts in some quarters as to the authenticity of her husband’s remains, Libbie arranged for his burial at West Point. On October 10 of that year, she attended a funeral with full military honors, including a chapel packed with cadets and a cortege with a riderless horse bearing in its stirrups a pair of spurred cavalry boots, toes turned to the rear. The solemn ceremony and its respectful coverage in newspapers and magazines eased her mind a bit. Autie had always wanted to be buried at West Point.
In the two years since Whittaker’s biography, he and Libbie had corresponded occasionally. Just months after the book’s release in December 1876, Whittaker had counseled her through fits of despondency brought on by the ensuing publicity. He had advised her to write of her life with her husband, recommending it as a kind of catharsis, and had provided advice on the subject: “Use short sentences preferably. . . . Avoid using the dash. . . . Be careful of your pronouns.”79
Libbie did not travel to Chicago for the hearing, and the news of Reno’s exoneration only reinforced her feelings about Wesley Merritt, whom she knew, in her own mind at least, to have been her husband’s enemy since their days in the Army of the Potomac. (Her instincts may have been right. Upon hearing of Custer’s death, Merritt had said, “Well, he hadn’t anybody this time to help him out,” according to one of his Fifth Cavalry troopers.)80 She had hoped that Merritt had put aside his enmity and jealousy, but the court’s decision convinced her that he never had.81 As for Reno, she would always consider him “a coward who lost all control on [the] battlefield and took revenge on a soldier who could not reply.”82 But if the dead Custer could not reply, his widow could.
Whittaker had failed as knight-errant on Libbie’s behalf: Reno had not, as she had hoped, been publicly disgraced, and her Autie had not been fully vindicated. As a guide and mentor, however, the Englishman was more successful than he could
have anticipated. Libbie would heed his advice and eventually write three accomplished and successful books about her and her husband’s adventures on the frontier that would remain in print for more than a century. She lived fifty-seven years more than her husband and devoted her life to polishing his reputation as a great cavalier and a perfect man and husband. Along the way, she used her popularity as an author to forge a successful career on the lecture circuit that provided a more than comfortable living for the permanent widow. And for more than half a century, she corresponded with Presidents, Generals, and anyone else who might help her in her quest for official vindication of her Autie. Most expressed sympathy and begged off. Those who aided her, such as Edward Godfrey, did what they could in the manner of letters, articles, and publications. Even her husband’s enemies respected Libbie and refrained from causing her pain. Not until after her death in 1933 was any reappraisal of her glowing portraiture attempted, and then to devastating effect. The following year, novelist Frederic F. Van de Water’s well-written but scathing biography of Custer, Glory-Hunter, hit the bookstores and the headlines and initiated decades of reexamination. But Libbie’s efforts had ensured that George Armstrong Custer’s name would live on in the consciousness of the American public and of the world. He was gone, but he would never be forgotten.
TWENTY-ONE
Ghosts Dancing
I have seen the wonders of the Spirit Land, and have talked with the ghosts.
KICKING BEAR, MINNECONJOU
In February 1878, Sheridan’s office in Chicago forwarded to the Adjutant General’s office in Washington a report of the total cost of the Sioux War in the Department of Dakota. As estimated by General Terry with disconcerting military precision, it was $992,807.78.1
A Terrible Glory Page 42
