The Real Custer

by James S Robbins

  “It astonishes me to see the attention with which he is treated everywhere,” Libbie wrote to her parents in March. “One day at the House he was invited to go on the floor, and the members came flocking round to be presented. . . . The President knew all about him when Autie was presented and talked to him about his graduation.”35 George and Libbie were a hit on the Washington social circuit—a young, attractive, and engaging couple. George’s rugged soldierly authenticity and practiced humility were well balanced by Libbie’s beauty and sharp wit. When Libbie met Congressman Bingham, she joked, “Mr. Bingham, I want to thank you for transforming my husband from a wood-chopper into a general of the United States Army.”36 Libbie was impressed with the way George was received around town and said she found it “very agreeable to be the wife of a man so generally known and respected.”37

  Kilpatrick never forgave Custer for outshining him during the war. He served out the rest of the conflict in the West and later had a controversial run as U.S. minister to Chile. Years after the war, George heard Kilpatrick lecturing on the Battle of Gettysburg, altering facts to minimize the role of the Michigan Brigade in stopping Stuart. After the lecture Custer approached Kilpatrick, laughed, and said, “All right Kil, so long as you don’t leave me out of the battle entirely.”38

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  LITTLE PHIL

  Custer’s luck held through the Dahlgren affair and was about to get better. General Ulysses S. Grant assumed overall command of the Army in the East, the latest attempt by Lincoln to find a fighting general who could bring the war to an end. The Custers traveled from the front in Virginia to Washington in March 1864 on the train bringing Grant from the West. George introduced Libbie to the new commanding general, and she wrote about her impressions to her parents: “Sandy hair and moustache; eyes greenish-blue. Short, and, Mother, not ‘tasty’ but very ordinary looking. No show-off but quite unassuming, talked all the time and was funny.”1 The Custers had a second honeymoon in the city for a few weeks while Grant settled into his new position and planned for the spring offensive.

  Grant reorganized the Cavalry Corps, yielding three divisions, commanded by General Gregg; General Alfred Thomas Archimedes Torbert, who had commanded the 1st Cavalry Division in the Army of the Potomac after the death of General John Buford in December 1863; and General James H. Wilson, an engineer who had served as Grant’s inspector general. Custer’s brigade was put in the 1st Division under Torbert, “an old intimate friend of mine, and a very worthy gentleman,” he wrote Libbie.2 The Cavalry Corps commander, Alfred Pleasonton, an unlucky victim of the Richmond raid he had opposed, was sent to the Trans-Mississippi theater, and the Union horsemen were handed over to Philip Sheridan.

  Sheridan bore little resemblance to Custer’s ideal, McClellan. Though both stood about five and a half feet tall, “Little Mac,” by his bearing, intellect, and sense of self, projected an air of significance that few could ignore. Not so “Little Phil.” David S. Stanley, who rode in a coach with Sheridan while on their way east to enter West Point, called him “the most insignificant looking little fellow I ever saw.”3 Wharton J. Green, who was acquainted with Sheridan at the Academy, recalled, “If, at that time, I had been called upon to designate the man on that historic spot who would later on reach the high rank Sheridan attained, he would probably have been one of the very last to have come under consideration.”4 Sheridan had a rough time at the Academy, being suspended a year for fighting, and graduating in the lower third of the Class of 1853. He served on the frontier in Texas, and at the start of the war was a captain in the Army of Southwest Missouri. He was nearly court-martialed for allegedly appropriating horses from private citizens but was saved by Major General (later Chief of Staff) Henry W. “Old Brains” Halleck, who made Sheridan a member of his staff. Shortly thereafter he was given a volunteer colonelcy and command of the 2nd Michigan Cavalry. By 1862, Sheridan was a division commander, and in 1863 he became a major general, noted for heroism at the battles of Murfreesboro and Chattanooga.

  “There is no soldier of the Civil War with whom [Sheridan] can be fairly compared with justice to either,” James H. Kidd wrote. There was nothing that stood out about Sheridan, and “if he had not the spark of genius he came very near to having it.” Sheridan was calm, unhurried, thoughtful, and confident. “In his bearing was the assurance that he was going to accomplish what he had pledged himself to do. . . . The outcome to him was a foregone conclusion.”5

  Grant brought Sheridan east as a trusted subordinate who would make the cavalry a unified combat arm instead of a scattered force used chiefly for flank security and raiding. One day after he arrived in Washington, Sheridan stood on the porch of Willard’s Hotel with Major John H. Brinton, a surgeon on Grant’s staff, discussing the new seriousness he was going to bring to the Corps. “Doctor, I’m going to take the cavalry away from the bob-tail brigadier generals,” he said. “They must do without their escorts. I intend to make the cavalry an arm of the service.”6

  “The art of war is simple enough,” Grant said in 1862, commenting on French military theorist Antoine-Henri Jomini. “Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.”7 This had been Grant’s way of war in the West, and with the Overland Campaign he brought that logic to the eastern theater. Grant planned a push similar to what Hooker had attempted a year earlier at Chancellorsville, seeking to break the stalemate along the Rappahannock and push Lee back toward Richmond. But instead of relying on Jomini’s steady logic to overcome Lee, as Hooker had tried to do, Grant would use brute force. As he wired to Washington from Spotsylvania six days into the Wilderness Battles, having already lost twenty thousand men and eleven general officers, “[I] propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”8

  Grant had opened his campaign on May 4 and immediately became engaged in a hard fight in the woodlands west of Fredericksburg. After several days of pitched battle, Grant sought to flank Lee’s forces and cut him off from Richmond. Sheridan was ordered to take the key crossroads of Todd’s Tavern, a position he had previously occupied. But when the Federals returned on May 7, rebel cavalry was there to meet them. Todd’s Tavern became a bloody but inconclusive contest in which Custer and Rosser squared off again. After repeated attacks the road was kept open long enough for Lee to pull back to more favorable ground at Spotsylvania. Some say this single failed Union action extended the war for another eleven months.

  Passions were high afterward: General Meade, commanding the Army of the Potomac under Grant, had arrived late to the battle, and on May 8 he and Sheridan got into a shouting match over the perceived blunder. Sheridan argued that if Meade cut him loose, he could take on Jeb Stuart’s entire corps and whip the rebel cavalry. Grant decided to let Sheridan make good his boast. The cavalry set off the next day intending to drive deep into Virginia. “Our move would be a challenge to Stuart for a cavalry duel,” Sheridan wrote, “behind Lee’s lines, in his own country.”9

  Custer led the way. The first day, his men pushed to Beaver Dam Station, capturing and burning two trains of supplies headed for Lee’s army, tearing up eight miles of track and freeing hundreds of Union prisoners captured in the wilderness. That night the “sky lighted up for miles with the glare of burning property,” by one report. The next morning, the cavalrymen were “awakened by the howling of rebel shells,” but their horse artillery “soon drove the enemy to a respectful distance.” They pushed south along the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Rail Line toward the Confederate capital, “constantly fighting the rebels from our rear and flanks” and “at night bivouacked within twelve miles of Richmond.”10

  The Kilpatrick raid was still a fresh memory, and the Confederates may have thought Sheridan was attempting a similar move on the city. Stuart pushed ahead on Sheridan’s left and established a blocking position on high ground about nine miles from the city center, a few hundred yards east of Brook Road, the main route into Richmond. The rebels made
their stand just north of a junction and an inn called Yellow Tavern.

  On May 11, Sheridan got his cavalry duel. As his force moved on the Confederate position, the enemy “poured in a heavy fire from his line and from a battery which enfiladed the Brook road, and made Yellow Tavern an uncomfortably hot place.”11 Custer, on the right of the Federal line, was taking brisk fire from rebel guns and sharpshooters in nearby woods, and he rode about his command ordering, “Lie down, men—lie down. We’ll fix them!” He told Wesley Merritt he was going to attack on Stuart’s left flank while Gibbs and Devin held the rest of the line. Merritt said he would support the move in any way he could. Soon Sheridan rode up, and Merritt told him of Custer’s plan.

  “Bully for Custer!” Sheridan said. “I’ll wait and see it.” Custer and his men set off toward the rebel lines as the band played “Yankee Doodle.” His men descended into a depression at the trot, crossed a ditch over three small bridges, and then broke into a charge up the rising ground to the cheers of the men in the line behind them. The rebel guns on the crest could not be depressed enough to come into effective play, and Custer’s men routed the artillerymen and their support troops and captured three guns. A rebel prisoner later said he “never saw such a man as ‘That Custer,’” adding that “when he goes for a thing he fetches it in.”12

  “It was, without exception, the most gallant charge of the raid,” a reporter wrote, “and when it became known among the Corps cheer after cheer rent the air.”13 As Custer broke the rebel left, Gibbs and Devin attacked in the center and right, driving the Confederates from their positions and scattering them. Casualties were heavy on both sides, but the Confederates suffered a particularly acute loss. Jeb Stuart, trying to rally his men against Custer’s assault and stem the tide, was grievously wounded and carried from the field.14 The shot was credited to John A. Huff of the 5th Michigan, who would be mortally wounded at the Battle of Hawe’s Shop seventeen days later. Stuart was taken to Richmond to be tended by his brother-in-law Dr. Charles Brewer, but succumbed to his wounds. Thus Sheridan in his first head-to-head battle with Stuart not only defeated his cavalry but deprived the Confederacy of its beau ideal.

  “We have passed through days of carnage and have lost heavily,” George wrote Libbie days later. “We have been successful. . . . The Michigan Brigade has covered itself with undying glory. . . . I also led a charge in which we mortally wounded Genl. Stuart.” Merritt told him the Michigan Brigade was “at the top of the ladder.”15 George enclosed a sprig of honeysuckle he said he plucked from inside the fortifications of Richmond. The battle had opened the approaches to the city, but Sheridan wisely chose not to try to enter Richmond proper, since he might not emerge afterward. He stuck to his plan and moved toward Butler’s men on the peninsula.

  The Overland Campaign pushed Lee back on Richmond, at high cost to both sides. However, Grant failed to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia, and by June the rebels were digging in around Richmond and Petersburg while Grant prepared for a siege. Railroads were critical for the Confederates to maintain communications and supplies, and Grant approved a plan for a sweeping raid up the Virginia Central Railroad to cut the vital line at Trevilian Station, fifty-five miles northwest of Richmond. Sheridan was then to proceed to Charlottesville to join Major General David Hunter’s forces campaigning in the Shenandoah Valley.

  The raid launched on June 7. Sheridan, with Torbert’s and Gregg’s divisions, crossed to the north side of the Pamunkey River and headed northwest, parallel to the North Anna River. The raiders faced no serious resistance, and four days later they were poised a few miles due north of Trevilian Station. However, the Confederates had detected Sheridan’s movement and rushed forces up the Virginia Central line to meet him.16

  Both sides took the initiative. Early on June 11, as Union troops began their move south, two brigades of Wade Hampton’s division engaged Sheridan’s force in the woodland just north of Trevilian. Sheridan did not know how many troops he was facing or if there were other Confederate units in the area, but he was too close to his objective not to make a fight for it.

  He planned a two-pronged attack. Torbert ordered Custer to take the Michigan Brigade along a wood road a mile to the right of the rebel defensive line, which led to the railroad, seven hundred yards from the station. Custer’s mission was to run around Hampton’s flank, turn right up the railroad, and get into the enemy rear, seizing the objective if possible. The rest of the cavalry would press Hampton in the front, heading south on the road through the woods leading directly to Trevilian Station, where the two forces would rejoin.

  Custer’s men moved forward against some light resistance. He quickly discovered he was not seven hundred yards from the station, but close to two miles. Undeterred, Custer moved up the tracks, and as he closed on the station, scouts reported Confederate supply wagons ahead, from Hampton’s baggage train. He ordered Colonel Alger and the 5th Michigan to take the wagons. He sent the 6th Michigan in support, when rebel troops suddenly appeared to their rear and charged. Custer counterattacked and drove the enemy troops off, pressing on toward the station. But there he found more rebel troops with a battery to the right of the road. He charged them with the 7th Michigan, sending word to the 1st Michigan, which was delayed at the end of the column, to come up rapidly. But “this regiment was found fully employed in holding the enemy,” he wrote, “who were making a vigorous assault on our rear.” The 5th Michigan, which had charged too far while pursuing Hampton’s rear guard, was cut off by fresh rebel forces coming onto the field under Rosser from Hampton’s division. The Confederates retook the station, and there was still no sign of Merritt’s and Devin’s brigades, which were fighting through the woods.

  Custer had a serious problem. “I was compelled to take up a position near the station from which I could resist the attacks of the enemy,” he wrote, “which were now being made on my front, right, left, and rear.” He found himself sandwiched between two rebel divisions—Hampton’s, which was also engaging the main column, and Fitz Lee’s, which had come up the tracks behind Hampton, unbeknownst to Sheridan.

  Custer quickly consolidated what forces he could and established a defensive ring. “The smallness of my force compelled me to adopt very contracted lines,” he wrote. “From the nature of the ground and the character of the attacks that were made upon me our lines resembled very nearly a circle.” His men were in open terrain and lacking cover, with his entire position in range of the enemy’s guns. The position was so small and precarious that the rebels had to restrict fire for fear of overshooting into their own units on the other side.

  Rebel units charged and were repulsed. Custer had to keep shifting his position to keep a cohesive defensive line. A Southern newspaper report captured the chaos of the scene: “A regiment of Yankees went tearing down the road, and into the dust which rose in clouds around them, darted Col. Waring with his ‘Jeff Davis Legion’ in hot pursuit. Close on his rear pressed another Yankee regiment, followed by one of Rosser’s—all thundering along together!”17 The Federal officer in charge of the captured rebel wagon train sought to move to a safer position and wound up delivering the haul back to the enemy. (He was later relieved.) Rebels took Custer’s headquarters wagon, also capturing his cook, Eliza, a freed slave who had joined George’s camp around the time he was made a brigadier. Custer’s aide and best man, Jacob Greene, was captured, and when a Confederate took Greene’s spurs at Hampton’s headquarters, he announced proudly, “You have the spurs of General Custer’s Adjutant-General.”

  George was in the thick of the fight. When a trooper from the 5th Michigan was shot down in an exposed position, he ran out and picked him up to take him to safety. A rebel sharpshooter fired at Custer during the rescue, and the spent ball glanced off his head, stunning him briefly but otherwise leaving him unharmed.18 Custer’s standard-bearer, Sergeant Mitchell Beloir, was wounded but did not leave the line until overcome with blood loss. “General they have killed me,” he said. “Take the flag!�
�� Beloir rode off to die, and George tore the flag from its staff and stuffed it into his shirt.19

  The rebels were pressing on all sides. One group seized a cannon and began to roll it off the field. Pennington reached Custer and said, “General they have taken one of my guns.”

  “No! Damned if they have!” Custer replied, and with Pennington and a few other men in tow furiously charged the piece and took it back.20

  The rest of the command under Torbert and Gregg was still slogging through the woods north of Custer’s position. “The men fought desperately,” Torbert wrote, “but it was hard to drive the enemy from his cover, as my men could not see their foe.”21 They had no word from the Michigan Brigade but had heard the sound of musketry and guns from the direction of the station all morning long. They eventually powered their way through the woods, and, reaching open ground overlooking Custer’s fight, they saw the Wolverines surrounded and in dire straits. Torbert and Gregg’s men redoubled their efforts and forced Hampton’s men back onto Custer’s line. The scene grew even more chaotic as rebel units began to break to escape being surrounded themselves. “The Yankees swarmed over the whole country,” according to one Southern account. The rebels drew their guns up “into the form of a hollow square, and blazed away in all directions.”22

  “So panic-stricken was [Hampton’s] division and so rapidly was it pushed that some of it was driven through Custer’s lines, and many captured,” Sheridan recalled.23 Hampton’s force retired up the tracks, and Gregg’s division drove Lee’s troops back down the rail line toward Louisa Courthouse. Custer’s brigade was saved.