General Scott was very cordial to young Custer and asked him if he would like to join some of the Academy graduates who were busy training new volunteers, or perhaps he had a “desire for something more active?” George said he wanted to join his unit, Company G of the 2nd Cavalry, at the front as soon as he could. Scott commended Custer for his enthusiasm and told him to find a horse to ride to Commanding General Irvin McDowell’s headquarters. He could deliver some dispatches before joining his unit.
Horses were in short supply, but Custer’s luck held. He found a horse left behind by a West Point detachment. The horse turned out to be one he knew—Wellington, “a favorite one ridden by me often when learning the cavalry exercises at West Point,” George recalled. That evening he rode his familiar friend to McDowell’s headquarters at Centreville, arriving after midnight on July 21. Battle was imminent.
The Union had pushed into Virginia “in deference to the incessant demands of a large portion of the press, calling for an attack upon Confederate forces,” Custer said.4 Politics played an important role; it had been three months since the attack on Fort Sumter, and few overt moves had been made to assert federal power, other than the occupation of Alexandria, Virginia, on May 24. Politicians and newspaper editors pressed Lincoln to act. Furthermore, the ninety-day enlistments the president had called for shortly after Fort Sumter were expiring, for some units that very day. The Union had to use the troops or lose them. But there was still a general view in the North that the war would be brief, exciting, and victorious. “War was not regarded by the masses as a dreadful alternative, to be avoided to the last,” Custer wrote of those early, heady days, “but rather as an enterprise offering some pleasure and some excitement, with perhaps a little danger and suffering.”5
The Battle of Bull Run at first seemed to live up to the expectation of war as something brief and glorious, at least from the Union side. McDowell opened with a broad flanking maneuver west of the Confederate Army of the Potomac under General P. G. T. Beauregard, which was encamped near Manassas Junction across Bull Run. Union forces drove rebel units back onto Henry House Hill by afternoon. Custer was assigned to a cavalry squadron protecting an artillery battery and did not see heavy fighting, though his unit did come under counter-battery fire. He noted of his first moments under enemy fire that while he had heard the sounds of cannon shot at West Point, “a man listens with changed interest when the direction of the balls is toward instead of away from him.”6
Late that afternoon Custer stood on a ridge with one of his classmates, watching the Union line advance. The two were congratulating each other on “the glorious victory which already seemed to have been won,” when Confederate reinforcements, principally under Colonel Thomas J. Jackson, who would earn his nickname “Stonewall” that day, began a fierce assault that broke the Union line.
“No pen or description can give anything like a correct idea of the rout and demoralization that followed,” Custer wrote. The confident Union troops had become “one immense mass of fleeing, frightened creatures.”7 Custer’s unit kept good order and was one of the last organized troops to cross back over Bull Run, keeping the advancing rebels at bay as best they could. That night, Custer’s unit continued “hastening with the fleeing, frightened soldiery” back to Arlington, on muddy roads through driving rain. “I little imagined when making my night ride from Washington to Centreville the night of the 20th,” Custer wrote, “that the following night should find me returning with a defeated and demoralized army.” Reaching Arlington Heights the morning of the twenty-second, Custer lay down under a tree “where, from fatigue, hunger and exhaustion, I soon fell asleep, despite the rain and mud, and slept for hours without wakening.”8 It had been four days since he departed West Point.
“No battle of the war startled and convulsed the entire country, North and South, as did the first battle of Bull Run,” Custer later wrote.9 It exploded the myth of the short war and gave notice to the North that not only were the rebels serious about defending the Confederacy but they were more than able to fight. Custer took time in the gloomy days afterward to find his benefactor, Congressman Bingham. “I had never seen him,” Bingham recalled. “I heard of him after the First Battle of Bull Run.” Word had spread in the capital that Custer’s delaying actions had helped prevent the disaster from being worse than it was. “I heard of his exploit with pride, and hunted several times for my boy, but unsuccessfully. Then one day a young soldier came to my room without the formality of sending a card. . . . He was out of breath, or had lost it from embarrassment. And he spoke with hesitation: ‘Mr. Bingham, I’ve been in my first battle. I tried hard to do my best. I felt I ought to report to you, for it’s through you I got to West Point. I’m . . .’ I took his hand. ‘I know. You’re my boy Custer!’”10
After the disaster at Bull Run, Custer’s company was temporarily attached to the Jersey Brigade, commanded by the mercurial one-armed Brigadier General Philip Kearny. Kearny, who had just organized the brigade, had no staff officers, and requested the junior officer in the company to be detailed to his staff. For Custer it was another stroke of luck.
“I found the change from subaltern in a company to a responsible position on the staff of a most active and enterprising officer both agreeable and beneficial,” George wrote.11 This began a series of assignments in which Custer served as a staff officer or aide to senior officers, positions that were critical to advancing his career. George learned how war was waged at the operational level, moving large units over great distances, not just the tactical level of the close-in battle. But more important, staff work gave him the opportunity to get into fights he would have missed had he been tied to the fortunes of his unit.
As a staff officer, Custer was called on to serve as a commander’s eyes and ears. He carried urgent battlefield messages, did critical reconnaissance, and engaged in a variety of special missions. When battles were looming, he knew when and where to get into the thick of them. It was work that suited Custer’s personality and skills and increased his freedom of action. It fed Custer’s appetite for adventure and placed him in situations where he could not only demonstrate his courage but make sure it was noticed.
In the fall of 1861, Custer was ordered back to his company. General Kearny thought highly of Custer and predicted great things for his future. Unfortunately, Kearny did not live to see it. He was killed the following September at the Battle of Chantilly.
After a furlough for sickness in the winter of 1861–62, Custer saw his first serious action. In March 1862, General George McClellan, chafing under criticism from President Lincoln and others for not having taken concerted action against the rebellion, ordered a general movement toward Manassas, which had recently been evacuated by rebel forces. After reaching Manassas, General George Stoneman, McClellan’s cavalry commander, ordered a movement south along the Orange and Alexandria Railroad to hit the rebel rear and, if possible, according to Custer, “drive him across the Rappahannock.” On March 14, the Union cavalry column found Confederate pickets in force on a hill near Catlett’s Station, twelve miles southwest of town. Orders came down to push them off the hill, and Custer, whose unit was conveniently at the front of the column, volunteered to lead the attack.12
“I marched the company to the front,” Custer wrote, “formed line and advanced toward the pickets, then plainly in view, and interested observers of our movements.” After leading the advance to a “convenient distance,” he wrote, “I gave the command ‘Charge’ for the first time. My company responded gallantly, and away we went.” The rebel skirmishers broke before the charging horsemen and ran across the bridge at Cedar Run, setting it on fire behind them. Custer’s force pursued to the riverbank and opened fire. “The bullets rattled like hail,” he wrote to his parents, and for a few minutes there was a spirited exchange. But with the bridge ablaze, no easy way to cross the river, and his men coming under increasing fire from the rallying Confederates, Custer pulled back. It was George’s first action in comma
nd, and he could take credit for “the shedding of the first blood by the Army of the Potomac,”13 which had been formed in the summer of 1861.
In late March 1862, at the onset of the Peninsula Campaign, Custer sailed from Alexandria to Fortress Monroe, where he was assigned to be assistant to Lieutenant Nicholas Bowen, Class of 1860, chief engineer for Brigadier General William F. “Baldy” Smith’s division. During this period Custer achieved the distinction of becoming one of the first Army aviators. The Union Army Balloon Corps, under the leadership of Thaddeus S. C. Lowe, gave Federal commanders unprecedented intelligence on enemy positions and troop movements. Some, however, questioned the value of the expensive balloons and their highly paid civilian technicians. Since Lowe owned and operated the balloons, his men could “report whatever their imagination prompted them to,” Custer wrote, “with no fear of contradiction,” thus ensuring their “profitable employment.”14
To check this potential conflict of interest, the Army decided to send officers aloft, and General Smith chose Custer to make the ascents. It was “an order which was received with no little trepidation,” he wrote, “for although I had chosen the mounted service from preference alone, yet I had a choice as to the character of the mount, and the proposed ride was far more elevated than I had ever desired or contemplated.”15 He noted an event a few weeks earlier, when General Fitz John Porter ascended in a balloon and the tether rope broke, sending him on a three-mile drift over enemy lines and back until he leaked enough hydrogen from the balloon to make a rough landing in a tree. At Bull Run, a Confederate battery from the New Orleans Lafayette Artillery, commanded by his old friend Thomas Rosser, put a ball through some of the ropes holding the gondola of a Union balloon, forcing the craft down.16
Custer’s first trip—which he made sitting nervously in the small basket—went without incident, and in time he was making almost daily ascents.17 On the night of May 3–4, 1862, Custer observed heavy fires in the vicinity of Yorktown. Going up again on the morning of May 4, 1862, he noted that there were no expected campfires behind the Confederate lines. Custer informed General Smith the rebels had abandoned their positions, confirming intelligence Smith had just received from two “contrabands” who had wandered into the Union camp.
Union forces, led by Stoneman’s cavalry, surged ahead, until being stopped by a dug-in rebel rear-guard at Fort Magruder under the command of James Longstreet, two miles from Williamsburg. During this movement Custer rode out ahead of the column and ran into a rebel cavalry rear-guard at Skiff’s Creek. He exchanged fire with the horsemen, who retreated, leaving the bridge over the creek burning. Custer rushed ahead to put out the fire, blistering his hands in the process.
The Union right was held by one of Smith’s brigades, commanded by Brigadier General Winfield Scott Hancock. Custer volunteered to join Hancock’s force for the expected advance. The next morning, May 5, it appeared that rebel forces had abandoned a position across a dam to their front. Hancock assembled a volunteer force to take the rebel works, covered by artillery and infantry in case the position was still defended. But as the troops arrived for the assault, they saw that Custer and a captain had already ridden across and occupied the enemy trenches.
General Joe Hooker, on the Union left before Fort Magruder, kept the enemy busy while Hancock advanced. After a sharp action, Hancock’s men occupied two enemy redoubts, seriously compromising the rebel defensive line. He sensed an opportunity to close the trap on Longstreet; instead, he was told to withdraw.
Hancock delayed his withdrawal several hours, hoping Sumner would change his mind. Late in the afternoon, when he was reluctantly preparing to pull back, rebel forces mounted a sudden, concerted assault. After a series of opening skirmishes, four heavy lines of Confederate troops emerged across level ground in front of Hancock’s ridge crest position, “giving the Federal troops an opportunity, for the first time, of hearing the Southern yell,” Custer recalled.18 He watched the rebels “advancing rapidly and confidently” as Hancock, on horseback, rode the line encouraging his troops.
The enemy crossed over half a mile uncontested to within three hundred yards, then opened up. Hancock’s men returned fire, and Custer said the “exultant yell of the Southron met an equally defiant response from his countrymen of the North.”19 Charging against lines of Union infantry, “the Confederates were losing ten to one of the Federals,” Custer recalled, but they kept coming.20
The rebels closed to within twenty paces when they finally began to falter under the ceaseless fire from Hancock’s line. Sensing the enemy was vulnerable, Hancock, “as if conducting guests to a banquet rather than fellow beings to a life-and-death struggle,” Custer recalled, issued the order, “Gentlemen, charge with the bayonet.” The Union line surged ahead, with Custer joining in. The rebels broke before the onrushing Union force, and Custer took six prisoners and “the first battle flag captured from the enemy by the Army of the Potomac.”21 The banner, from the 5th North Carolina Infantry, was given to French observer François d’Orléans, prince of Joinville, son of the French king Louis Philippe, to return to McClellan’s headquarters. Joinville, a combat veteran in his own right who would come to know Custer well, said he “entertained so high an opinion, from the first day I met him, that I am proud of his achievements. I mean Custer. He is a noble fellow.”22 Both Hancock and Baldy Smith praised Custer for his initiative and daring over those several days that began up in a balloon.
With the Confederate forces retreating toward Richmond, the Union troops advanced to the Chickahominy River. McClellan’s chief engineer, Brigadier General John G. Barnard, called the river “one of the most formidable obstacles that could be opposed to the advance of the army.”23 But Custer noted that while the river was “chargeable with some of the misfortunes of the Army of the Potomac, [it] was almost literally a stepping-stone for my personal advancement.”24
The Chickahominy was not broad or swift, but it flowed through belts of forested swamp three to four hundred yards wide, and in the spring flood the river would spread across the entire area. The land was soft and spongy, unsuited for major military movements. There were a few widely separated and well-defended bridges. General Barnard was told that otherwise the river was not fordable.
The idea that the Chickahominy could not be crossed did not impress Custer. Given a scouting detail three-quarters of a mile below New Bridge, he found a good approach to the bank and waded right into the river. The water was four feet deep, but the bottom was firm, and Custer was able to cross without difficulty. A few days later, he made a more dangerous scout, wading from near the bridge downstream for half a mile, risking fire from enemy pickets who apparently did not see him.
Having determined that the river was crossable, McClellan ordered a reconnaissance in force to prove that operations could be conducted there. On the rainy morning of May 24, Custer and Lieutenant Nicholas Bowen led a picked force of seventy-five men from Companies A and B of the 4th Michigan Infantry to the ford site. The men of A Company were from George’s adopted hometown of Monroe. They crossed the river, then moved in a skirmish line toward the bridge, with the rest of the 4th following on the other bank.
The area was defended by the Fifth Louisiana and Tenth Georgia regiments, and Manley’s battery of artillery. The rebels in the vicinity outnumbered the attacking force four to one. But Custer’s raiders had the element of surprise, and they rushed the rebel outposts near the bridge, overwhelming the defenders, capturing many, and chasing those who broke back toward their camps. Custer grabbed a large bowie knife from one of the prisoners and brandished it to the regiment across the river.
“The Rebels say we can’t stand cold steel,” he shouted. “I captured this from one of them. Forward and show them that the Michigan boys will give them all the cold steel they want!”25
The 4th fired a volley at the rallying rebels and pushed across the river. The bridge had been fired so the men waded through the armpit-deep water holding their bayoneted muskets and cartri
dges above their heads. The Union troops began firing from a bridgehead in a ditch behind a fence, knee-deep in water, but as ammunition ran low and rebel artillery appeared, the Union force withdrew, taking thirty-five prisoners with them. The attacking Federals lost only one killed and seven wounded, against twenty-seven killed, twenty-six wounded, and forty-three missing on the Confederate side.
In his report of the action, Lieutenant Bowen praised Custer, saying he was “the first to cross the stream, the first to open fire upon the enemy, and one of the last to leave the field.”26 General Barnard said that the “attack and capture of the enemy’s pickets by [Second Lieutenant Custer] and Lieutenant Bowen was founded upon these reconnaissances, to which the successful results are due.”27 In a note to Secretary of War Stanton, General McClellan noted that Custer and Bowen made “a very gallant reconnaissance” and that the recon force “handled [the rebels] terribly.”28
After the action, McClellan sent for Custer to thank him for his efforts, and recalled him as “a slim, long-haired boy, carelessly dressed.” He was fresh from the engagement and covered in Chickahominy mud. The general thanked Custer and asked what he could do for him. Custer “replied very modestly that he had nothing to ask, and evidently did not suppose that he had done anything to deserve extraordinary reward.” McClellan then offered Custer a position as his aide-de-camp at the rank of Captain of Volunteers, and George “brightened up and assured me that he would regard such service as the most gratifying he could perform.”
The Real Custer Page 6
