War and Love Among the Americans
“We went out a skouting yesterday. We got to one house where there was Five Secessionests and they broke and run and Arch haloed out to shoot the ornery Suns of bitches and they all let go there fire. They may say what they please, but goddamit pa, it is fun.” From a letter from an Ohio recruit, writing home after his first brush with the enemy
George Armstrong Custer was a war lover. The Civil War was the great event in his life. He won national prominence and thoroughly enjoyed himself during those four bloody years. He responded enthusiastically to every aspect of war—being with “the boys,” drinking, swearing, loving the pretty young maids, fighting, marching. Custer had as much endurance as any Plains Indian and far more than his fellow whites; he actually enjoyed spending two or three days in the saddle, without rest or food. A 2 A.M. breakfast of hardtack and black, unsweetened coffee has little appeal to most men, but Custer reveled in such moments. He could imagine few things finer than the hearty comradeship, the rough good humor of the campfire. Always curious, always anxious to see new places or to have new experiences, Custer made the most of his wartime travels, which took him up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States and threw him into daily contact with the great and near great. So often was he in the right place at the right time that “Custer’s luck” became a byword in the Army.
Most of all, Custer discovered that he loved the smells, sights, and sounds of the battlefield. For him, no thrill compared to the saber charge. He was most thoroughly himself when he stood in his stirrups, bullets whizzing all around him, drew his saber, turned his head, and called out to the thousands of men behind him, “Charge!” Like George S. Patton, Jr., and hundreds of other generals through the ages, Custer was disappointed when “his” war ended, and he hardly knew what to do with himself. Only twenty-five years old at Appomattox, he had done it all, seen it all. Everything that followed, until the last week of his life, was anticlimactic.
Custer fought in innumerable battles in the Civil War. They have all been recorded. Incredibly small details are known about what he did, what his unit did, how a battle as a whole was fought. We know where Custer was on each day of the four-year war and what he was doing there. There is no need to go into such details here, fortunately, because Custer’s biography has been written, accurately and wisely, by Jay Monaghan. Indeed, Monaghan’s Custer is a model biography—scholarly, detailed, and lively. It cannot be surpassed and hardly needs to be summarized. General remarks about Custer’s Civil War, however, coupled with an attempt to understand why he did what he did, may help illuminate the man and his culture.
The first thing that stands out about Custer’s Civil War is that he was not engaged in a crusade. Custer shared his opponents’ assumptions and prejudices about the nature of the world, just as Crazy Horse did not object to the way the Crows lived but simply enjoyed fighting them. In politics, Custer was a War Democrat, loyal to the Union but opposed to the destruction of slavery or indeed any assault on the southern way of life. His proclivities in that direction, already pronounced when the war began, were immeasurably strengthened by service on the staff of General George B. McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac. McClellan gave Custer his first big break and Custer idolized him: “I have more confidence in General McClellan than in any man living,” he wrote in March 1862. “I would forsake everything and follow him to the ends of the earth. I would lay down my life for him.”1
The source of McClellan’s magnetism for Custer was obviously not “Little Mac’s” fighting style—McClellan avoided pitched battle whenever possible, while Custer embraced it. Custer did admire the way McClellan carried himself—he looked and acted like a soldier—but even more Custer responded to the atmosphere McClellan created around his headquarters. There were any number of French dukes and even princes there, and for Custer just being around royalty was a heady experience. In addition, prominent Democrats were always hanging around McClellan’s headquarters. They drank their whiskey straight and told rough, barrack room jokes about “niggers,” Lincoln, and the “Black Republicans.” Custer joined in the fun.
They also plotted against the government. In the summer of 1862 Fernando Wood, the recent mayor of New York City, visited McClellan’s headquarters. Wood was a leader of those northern Democrats who allowed their sympathy for the South, their hatred of blacks, and their opposition to the Republican party to carry them to the brink of treason. Wood and his friends were grooming McClellan for the 1864 Democratic nomination for the Presidency—or possibly for a coup d’état. It was an improbable proposition at best and seems impossible today to take seriously, but Wood was serious, and McClellan may have been. The “Young Napoleon” felt that he had been stabbed in the back by the Republicans, who in his view had deliberately withheld reinforcements from him during his Peninsula campaign of 1862 in order to bring on a humiliating defeat and thus get rid of him.
In addition, McClellan had basic policy differences with the Lincoln Administration. The general wanted a “soft” war, while Lincoln was inclining to the view that it would have to be a “hard” war, much of the difference between the hards and the softs centering around the problem of slavery. Lincoln was moving closer to abolishing it, and just before Wood arrived at McClellan’s headquarters, the latter had written to Lincoln, telling the President to change policy “or our cause will be lost. … Neither confiscation of property, political executions of persons, territorial organization of states or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment.” McClellan showed Wood a similar, although apparently more inflammatory note. When Brigadier General William F. Smith, one of McClellan’s closest friends, saw the second document, his hair stood on end and he mumbled, “It looks like treason.” On Smith’s advice, McClellan destroyed the document, but he certainly discussed the gist of it with Wood.2
McClellan’s staff, of course, knew what was going on and gossiped about it constantly. Since to Custer, McClellan’s views were so close to those of his father Emmanuel, his West Point friends, and his own, he felt himself to be a patriot when he joined in campfire talk about marching on Washington and putting Little Mac at the head of the government. On November 7, 1862, when Lincoln finally removed McClellan from his command of the Army of the Potomac, replacing him with Major General Ambrose E. Burnside, Custer and his fellow aides—all West Pointers, save for the foreigners—began drinking and swaggering around the headquarters tents. They were “talking both loudly and disloyally,” according to young Lieutenant James H. Wilson, and there was whiskey talk about “changing front on Washington” and setting McClellan up as a dictator. McClellan put such talk to rest when he took his leave of the Army, ordering it to “stand by General Burnside as you have stood by me,” but the attitude lingered, poisoning the Army of the Potomac throughout its existence.3
On leaving the Army, McClellan went to New York to write his final report. Custer went with him. Little Mac was as much drawn to Custer as Custer was to him, and had requested his services in preparing his report. For Custer, then almost twenty-three years old, the experience of working with McClellan on the report reinforced all his prejudices. There was, first of all, McClellan’s disdain for civilians generally and politicians especially. In the report, McClellan declared, “A statesman may, perhaps, be more competent than a soldier to determine the political objects and direction of a campaign; but those once decided upon, everything should be left to the responsible military head, without interference from civilians.” That “may, perhaps,” is priceless, but neither McClellan nor Custer thought it in any way remarkable.4
While he was in New York, Custer met more Democratic politicians, who seemed always to gather around McClellan, and indulged in more silly talk about the “treason” of the Republicans. Custer would later cultivate his contacts with the leading East Coast Democrats. He could not help but be impressed, young as he was, by the rich and powerful men he saw and talked with, and he was awed by the social life of New York’s upper crust. McClellan’s Democratic admirers in New York had presented the general with a house; Custer told his sister he had never seen such a palatial residence. Monaghan points out that the experience of helping McClellan prepare his report also taught Custer that no commander ever admits defeat, especially in his reports. In a number of instances, Custer knew that McClellan was indulging in plain and simple lies, most of all in his statements on enemy numbers.5
But Custer never wavered in his loyalty to McClellan, not even when it became obvious that being known as a “McClellan man” was a positive detriment to his career. Custer fought his way to the top; he earned his general officer rank despite, rather than as a result of, his politics. He stuck with his principles and never signed on for a crusade against slavery, but he also stuck with the Army and the Union.
One reason, perhaps, was that war was so much fun. An aspect of Custer’s joyful response to combat may have been that he did not hate his enemy. Few men were as effective in making war on the Confederacy as Custer, but no Union officer exceeded him in admiration for the southern way of life or in friendship for individual Confederate officers. The war had some of the aspects of a game about it, at least to Custer; it was as if he were a modern college football player, congratulating his opponents at the end of a hard-fought game. “I rejoice, dear Pelham, in your success,” he wrote West Point classmate John Pelham, who was making a name for himself in the Confederate artillery. After one of the early battles, Custer went to see “Gimlet” Lea, a West Point friend who had been captured. Tears welled in Lea’s eyes as he embraced “Fanny.” Custer brought him a meal and they chatted into the night, exchanging news of classmates on both sides. When Custer left he gave Lea some clothes and money. Bystanders wondered if they were brothers.6 And at the end of the war, while Grant and Lee were signing the surrender terms at Appomattox, Custer was fraternizing with his rebel friends, as he had done at every opportunity throughout the past four years.7
Custer was really a very young man, and nothing reminds us more forcibly of his youth than an incident of the Peninsula campaign. While McClellan was disembarking his massive Army from the Peninsula (a time when there were tasks aplenty for his staff), Custer prevailed on his commander for a two-week furlough. He spent it visiting with Gimlet Lea, who was on parole and about to be married. At the Tidewater house where Lea was staying, Custer made himself at home. Lea’s bride-to-be was there, along with her cousin. “What do you think of the girls?” Lea whispered in Custer’s ear the first evening.
“Beautiful, both of them. Beautiful.”
Lea had pushed forward the date of his wedding so that Custer could be there. It was an Episcopalian service, highly dignified. After the ceremony, Lea noticed that his Cousin Maggie was crying.
“What are you crying for?” he asked. “Oh, I know. You are crying because you are not married; well, here is the minister and here is Captain Custer, who I know would be glad to carry off such a pretty bride from the Southern Confederacy.”
“Captain Lea,” the girl said between sobs, “you are just as mean as you can be.” Going in to dinner that evening, Custer took Maggie’s arm and whispered, “I don’t see how such a strong Secessionist can take the arm of a Union officer.”
“You ought to be in our army,” she snapped back.
It was a gay two weeks for the four young people. They sang songs in the evening around the piano (“For Southern Rights, Hurrah!” “Dixie,” and other southern favorites), played cards, or just chatted merrily, teasing each other. Custer stayed in the delightful surroundings so long that he was the last Union officer to leave the Peninsula. The Army of the Potomac was gone before Custer had even said his good-byes to his rebel friends, and he had to book passage on a private steamer to get back to Washington.8
McClellan never asked Custer where he had been—Little Mac had enough problems at the time, since Lincoln at the end of August 1862 had taken much of his Army from him and given it to General John Pope for the second Bull Run campaign—so Custer’s luck held. Indeed, as mentioned above, it was always good. His Civil War record is replete with incidents in which he was in the right place at the right time. When Custer left West Point to take up his duties in Washington, for example, his classmates had a two-week jump on him. They had been where the action was while he had sat in the guardhouse at West Point. On the train to Washington, Custer probably fretted that his friends had taken all the choice assignments and that he would get off to a poor start on his Army career.
He arrived in Washington on the eve of the first battle of Bull Run. Reporting to the Adjutant-General’s office, he had to wait a few hours before finding an officer with time enough to accept his papers. The officer glanced at them, looked at some records, and informed Custer that he had been assigned to the 2nd Cavalry. Then, almost as an afterthought, the officer casually inquired, “Perhaps you would like to be presented to General Scott, Mr. Custer?” Then, according to Monaghan, “Young Armstrong stood dumfounded [sic]. He had glimpsed the grand figure of Winfield Scott when that dignitary visited the Academy for reviews, but the general had been as untouchable as the upper social set back in Monroe. He stammered assent …” (Winfield Scott, an old man by this time and soon to be retired, made something of pets of the West Point cadets and was always willing to do something special for them.)
After an exchange of greetings, Scott told Custer that his classmates were drilling recruits. “Now, what can I do for you? Would you prefer to be ordered to report to General Mansfield to aid in this work, or is your desire for something more active?”
What a choice! Custer indicated that he wanted to go into the line.
“A very commendable resolution, young man,” Scott replied. “Go and provide yourself with a horse, if possible, and call here at seven o’clock this evening. I desire to send some dispatches to General McDowell at Centerville, and you can be the bearer of them. You are not afraid of a night ride, are you?” (Brigadier General Irvin McDowell was in command of the Union troops in northeastern Virginia.)
“No, sir,” Custer replied, snapping into a salute. His luck continued to hold. He found a horse by great good fortune, made the ride to McDowell’s headquarters, handed over Scott’s dispatches, got to meet McDowell’s chief staff officers, joined his regiment, participated in the battle of Bull Run, got himself mentioned in the reports on the engagement, and had a quiet laugh at his classmates who had missed the battle. And it all happened because he had been court-martialed at West Point and was thus late in reporting for duty.9
A second example of Custer’s penchant for being where it counted came the following year during the Peninsula campaign, the occasion of his first meeting with McClellan. One day McClellan rode to the south bank of the Chickahominy River, attended by his usual retinue of princes, counts, rich Democrats, and distinguished regular Army officers. Custer, a fresh second lieutenant attached to a division staff, was at the rear of the column. When McClellan got to the riverbank he stopped, looked up- and downstream, and then said reflectively: “I wish I knew how deep it is.” No one stirred, but his question was passed down the line. Custer rode out from his place in the ranks, trotted up to the bank, put his spurs to his horse, and plunged into the river with the remark, “I’ll damn soon show how deep it is.” He quickly reached the other shore, turned around and forded the river again, came ashore, and called out, “That’s how deep it is, General.” Then he quietly rode back to his place in line.
McClellan called him forward. “Do you know,” the general said, “you’re just the young man I’ve been looking for, Mr. Custer. How would you like to come on my staff?” And so Custer got a promotion to captain and a place near the center of power.10
The next day McClellan began to cross the Chickahominy and he gave Custer the honor of leading a company in the van of a charge. “Why, that’s Armstrong Custer!” the men of Company A, 4th Michigan shouted when Custer took his place at the head of the column. The company had been recruited in Monroe, Michigan, Custer’s second home. Custer greeted the men cheerfully, shook hands all around, then straightened up in his saddle and shouted, “Come on, Monroe!” After leading the company across the river, Custer got involved in a fire fight with the rebel outposts. He had been scouting the area for more than a week and persuaded his immediate superior that by recrossing the river, riding downstream a mile, then crossing once again, he could bring Company A onto the enemy’s rear. Permission granted, Custer led the flanking expedition. When he had Company A in place he called out, “Go in, Wolverines! Give ‘em hell!” and led a charge that sent the rebels running. He was the first into the fight and the last man to leave the field. “Custer was simply a reckless, gallant boy, undeterred by fatigue, unconscious of fear,” McClellan wrote in his memoirs. “His head was always clear in danger and he always brought me clear and intelligible Reports. …I became much attached to him.”11
Custer’s luck was a major factor in his success, but as both incidents (and dozens of others) illustrate, luck was not the only thing on his side. There was, to start with, the West Point Protective Association. West Pointers took care of their own, and West Pointers ran the Union Army. But in addition to his luck and the assistance of the WPPA, Custer had unique qualities that pushed him to the fore. He was always eager for action, ready to take any risk, willing to seize the initiative. When McClellan had trouble finding someone willing to go up in a balloon to observe Confederate positions, Custer volunteered for the dangerous duty and carried it out with success. Staff officers in the Civil War, unlike their successors in the twentieth century, did precious little paperwork, much less planning for future campaigns. Instead, they did errands for their generals, odd jobs that no one else could or would do. Custer, ever the man of action, served with credit on the staffs of some half dozen generals during the first two years of the war.
All the generals under whom Custer served liked having him around. It was not only that he could be relied upon to get a job done; Custer also appealed to his superiors because of his fun-loving nature and droll ways. Perpetually cheerful, always full of practical jokes, he made those around him happy, and all generals appreciate a good-humored staff and cheerful headquarters environment. Custer was something of a character, with his slouch hat, his practice of cutting his hair, then letting it grow out and smearing it with cinnamon hair oil, his hodgepodge uniform, forever in need of washing, and his oversize boots. Custer was a dandy in reverse, almost what the Sioux called a “contrary.” Amid all the glitter and polish of his fellow staff officers, especially around McClellan’s headquarters, Custer stood out because of his deliberately sloppy exterior. He took to wearing captured Confederate boots, the bigger the better, and his outlandish footwear provided a standing joke. So did his tight hussar jacket and black trousers trimmed with gold lace. He looked, another staff member remarked, “like a circus rider gone mad.”12
Another factor in Custer’s success was his amazingly good health and endurance. He was little bothered by disease—he took sick leave only twice in the four-year war—in an Army that was wracked by fatal illness. More men died in the Civil War of looseness of the bowels than fell on the field of combat; in the Army of the Potomac there were 57,000 deaths from diarrhea and dysentery as against 44,000 killed in battle. Thousands more died from other diseases and it was not uncommon for new regiments to have two thirds of their strength on the sick list. But Custer came out of the war in perfect health, just as he had entered it.13
Over and above all his other qualities, Custer was firm in his principles and physically courageous. For his entire adult life Custer was on the unpopular side of the political fence, both in terms of national and Army politics. He was also willing to face death. It is easier to describe his courage than to account for it. He was at the head of every charge, never faltered, and always kept his head no matter how deadly the hail of bullets.
Like Crazy Horse, Custer lived his life to the full; again like Crazy Horse, he was so involved with living that he did not have time to fear death. He was not suicidal. His life was precious to him, but only if he lived up to his own image of himself. He would rather die than ignore his duty or shirk danger. Many Civil War soldiers shared that attitude; Bell Wiley’s magnificent account of the common soldier of the Union Army, The Life of Billy Yank, is full of accounts of men whose dying words were, “Have I not always done my duty?” or similar statements.14
In a way, Custer’s courage sprang from the fear of looking bad in front of comrades. His account of his first combat experience illustrates the point Six days after leaving West Point, he was involved at Bull Run in his first cavalry charge. “I realized that I was in front of a company of old and experienced soldiers,” he later recalled, “all of whom would have an eye upon their new lieutenant to see how he comported himself when under fire.” Custer tried, more or less successfully, to appear calm. Riding beside him was another young lieutenant, Leicester Walker, fresh from civilian life and holding a political commission. As the column rode toward the enemy on the other side of a hill, Walker anxiously inquired, “Custer, what weapon are you going to use in the charge?”
“From my earliest notions of the true cavalryman,” Custer wrote later, “I had always pictured him in the charge bearing aloft his curved saber, and cleaving the skulls of all with whom he came in contact.” So he promptly replied, “The saber,” flashed his bright new blade from its scabbard, and rode forward, totally unconcerned. Walker, figuring that was the way it was done at West Point, also drew his saber. But then Custer began to have doubts. “I began arguing in my own mind as to the comparative merits of the saber and revolver as a weapon of attack. If I remember correctly, I reasoned pro and con about as follows: ‘Now the saber is a beautiful weapon; it produces an ugly wound; the term “saber charge” sounds well; and above all the saber is sure; it never misses fire. It has this drawback, however; in order to be made effective, it is indispensable that you approach very close to your adversary … So much for the saber. Now as to the revolver, it has this advantage … one is not compelled to range himself alongside his adversary before beginning the attack … As this is my first battle, had I not better defer the use of the saber until after I have acquired a little more experience?’”
He returned his saber to its scabbard and drew his revolver. Walker, seeing Custer’s action, did the same. But Custer argued some more with himself, finally replacing the revolver and again drawing his saber. Walker did the same. So it went until they reached the top of the hill, to discover the enemy had already withdrawn.15
Custer knew how to overwhelm or at least overcome his fears, but there was more to his courage than that. He positively enjoyed combat. He would have understood perfectly the cavalryman who wrote after the battle of Brandy Station, “I never felt so gay in my life as I did when we charged with the Saber” or the artilleryman who remarked after Gettysburg, “I felt a joyous exaltation, a perfect indifference to circumstances through the whole of that three days fight, and have seldom enjoyed three days more in my life.”16 As much as any man who fought in the Civil War, Custer felt that exaltation that comes to some after a fight gets under way. “There is something grand about it—it is magnificent,” one rebel wrote. “I feel elated as borne along with the tide of battle.”17 In addition, as an officer at the head of a column of cavalry, Custer felt an awesome sense of power as he cried out, “Charge!”
Combat, for Custer, held some of the fascination of the hunt. In writing home about his battle experiences he used words like “the chase” or “the sport” and referred to his enemies as “the game.” In one of his early actions he was leading ten men in pursuit of a small body of Confederate cavalry. It was, Custer wrote home, “the most exciting sport I ever engaged in.” He saw a rebel officer mounted on a magnificent blooded bay horse. “I selected him as my game, and gave my black the spur and rein. … Seeing a stout rail fence in front of him, I concluded to try him at it. I reasoned that he might attempt to leap it and be thrown, or if he could clear it so could I. The chase was now exciting in the extreme.”
The Confederate cleared the fence. So did Custer. By avoiding a swamp, Custer gained on his quarry and called on him to surrender. When the rebel rode on, Custer fired his pistol. He missed. Again Custer called on him to surrender, but the man rode on. Taking careful aim, or as careful as he could from the back of a galloping horse, Custer fired again. A hit, right in the head. Custer kept the Confederate’s horse for himself, as well as his handsome saddle, fancy sword, and double-barreled shotgun. In reporting on his experience to his family, Custer concluded: “It was his own fault; I told him twice to surrender, but was compelled to shoot him.”18
For all of his sportsman’s attitude toward combat, however, Custer could get as sentimental about death as the most romantic Civil War soldier. In early 1862, when he was all of twenty-two years old, Custer told of burying a few dead Union soldiers. “Some were quite young and boyish,” he wrote, “and looking at their faces, I could not but think of my own younger brother. One, shot through the heart, had been married the day before he left Vermont. Just as his comrades were about to consign his body to the earth, I thought of his wife, and, not wishing to put my hands in his pockets, cut them open with my knife, and found knife, porte-monnaie and ring. I then cut off a lock of his hair and gave them to a friend of his from the same town who promised to send them to his wife. As he lay there I thought of that poem: ‘Let me kiss him for his mother …’ and wished his mother were there to smooth his hair.”19
In early spring 1863 Custer became an aide to Brigadier General Alfred Pleasonton, who commanded one of the three cavalry divisions in the Army of the Potomac, now commanded by General Joseph Hooker. Pleasonton was a tough old regular, a West Point graduate with twenty years’ service. He had fought with General Harney in the attack on Little Thunder’s camp of Brulés on the Bluewater River in 1855. It is easy enough to imagine the general and his young West Point aides sitting around the campfire eight years later, Pleasonton regaling his staff with stories of fighting against the Sioux. It was Custer’s first close contact with a real Indian fighter and he probably was fascinated by Pleasonton’s anecdotes.
Custer reveled in his new position, especially the daily rides through the command with his chief. He idolized Pleasonton, who in turn had a high opinion of the eager young staff officer. They lived well. Pleasonton sent to Baltimore daily for vegetables and other delicacies. “We have onions, radishes, and ripe tomatoes,” Custer told the home folks, plus “asparagus, fresh fish, mackeral, beef, mutton, veal, Bacon, pound cake, oranges, ginger snaps, candies, peas, warm biscuits (instead of hard bread), fresh milk, butter, cheese, & everything.”20 He was always a man of extremes. In the field, Custer often went three or four days with virtually no food or sleep, but in camp he lived the good life to the full.
The enlisted men hated all staff officers, especially young squirts like Custer fresh out of West Point and full of airs, and they bitterly resented the privileges the staffers enjoyed. The men could be disarmingly frank in making their feelings known. “You are God damned trash,” a Michigan private told his captain. “You think you can do just as you God damn please. … I’ll be God damned if I will [obey your orders]. I’ll see you in hell before I will.” An Irish soldier, when ordered by a headquarters aide to keep quiet while serving a term in a guardhouse, replied, “I will not keep quiet for you, you God damned low-lived son of a bitch, you shit-house adjutant.” “You order me!” an Ohio recruit snapped at another aide. “You ain’t worth a pinch of shit!” Staff officers were dubbed “buggers,” “dogs,” “green-horns,” “whore-house pimps,” and more frequently the time-honored “son of a bitch.”21
Clearly there was something of a gap between the leaders and the led in the Union Army—a situation totally foreign to Crazy Horse and the Oglalas—but Custer did not mind. Army discipline ensured that the men would do what they were told, and West Point had taught him that as an officer he was entitled to special privileges. Like other Union officers, he indulged himself in every comfort he could. By early 1863 Custer had a black woman cook, a teen-aged white boy who followed him everywhere and did all his cleaning and took care of his personal needs, two dogs, and a great pile of souvenirs. He was hardly alone; as a Massachusetts soldier pointed out, “Every private wants & Every officer has his colored servant whom he feeds scantily, clothes shabbily, works cruelly & curses soundly & in his curses includes the whole race.”22
Officers in the Army of the Potomac lived better than did their counterparts in other theaters, and the cavalry officers did best of all. Civil War cavalry officers have often been compared to the hotshot Air Force pilots of the twentieth century—each service attracted the boastful, swaggering, devil-may-care, courageous young heroes. More than any other group, the young cavalry officers gave the Army of the Potomac its well-earned reputation for being the hardest drinking, hardest swearing outfit in the land. “I will be a perfect Barbarian if I should Stay hear 3 years,” wrote one soldier, while another confessed that “I have seen but little of the wickedness and depravity of man until I Joined the Army.” Another soldier commented, “The swearing especially is terrific, and even to a man accustomed to hear bad language, and with sensibilities not very easily shocked, it is really disgusting.”23
Freed from the restraints of his Methodist parents and family, and from the petty regulations of West Point, Custer joined in the fun, swearing and drinking the way a cavalryman should and enjoying the fleshpots of Washington when on leave. But he did not neglect his duty, nor did the others, for they were all filled with ambition. The standard toast among the aides, at the beginning, middle, and end of a drinking bout, was “To promotion—or death!”
That was the only check on Custer’s happiness—he was still a captain while some of his classmates were moving ahead rapidly, especially in the Confederate Army. Custer did his best to please all the generals he served—he brought captured booty to Pleasonton, including a magnificent horse and, by rumor at least, a female companion—but the only way to get ahead, it seemed, was via politics. In May 1863 Custer went to Pleasonton to ask two favors. First, he wanted Pleasonton to appoint Lieutenant George Yates, a friend from Monroe, to the staff (throughout his life Custer liked to surround himself with friends and relatives). Pleasonton agreed. Then Custer made the request closest to his heart. Would Pleasonton recommend him to Republican Governor Austin Blair for command of a Michigan cavalry regiment, newly organized? Again Pleasonton agreed, for like most West Pointers he wanted other Academy graduates to serve as the colonels of the volunteer regiments, not the politician who had raised the outfit.
With Pleasonton’s recommendation, Custer was ready to make his application. He had already lined up four other generals to make recommendations for him, and he wrote to Judge Isaac Christiancy of the Michigan Supreme Court, a founder of the Republican party and a Monroe resident, asking for his help. Then he wrote his sister, confessing his fears: the politicians would never forgive him for being a “McClellan man,” he said, and his politics would prevent his rise in the Army.24
He was right. Politics did count for more than ability. Governor Blair turned him down, and not because of his age. There were West Pointers no older than Custer serving as colonels at the head of Union volunteer regiments, but they were Republicans.
If coming of age for young men in America meant hard drinking, hard cussing, and hard riding, Custer was finding the maturing process an easy one. But there is more involved in becoming a man than just being tough, and in one crucial area Custer experienced great difficulty. Relations between young men and women were as complicated among the whites as they were among the Oglalas. White society emphasized the sanctity of marriage every bit as much as the Sioux did and forbade premarital and extramarital intercourse just as firmly as did the Indians. White girls were trained to be wives and taught to serve their husbands. There was not, of course, equality among white women. Those fortunate enough to be married to a member of the elite were able to hire someone else to do the household tasks, but that did not free them to pursue their own careers; rather, they were expected to give their husbands moral support and serve them as ornaments.
There were other divisions among white women not found among their Indian counterparts. White males tended to regard white women as objects, and those at the lower ends of the social and economic scale were fair game for any man who had the money and inclination to try to buy their time and bodies. Under these circumstances, Custer tended, not surprisingly, to divide women into two groups; those who were fast and loose and those who were pure. He used the first group and treated such women with contempt, while he idealized the second group and treated those women with veneration. Getting to know women as human beings was almost impossible for him, for like Crazy Horse he had been indoctrinated by his culture to view all women as weak and inferior, to be taken seriously only around the home or in bed.
Custer had had limited experience with women. Before going to West Point he had developed a close relationship with Mary Holland, but nothing had come of the affair. At the Academy, he lived a monk’s life, not even seeing any women his own age. Crazy Horse had more of an opportunity to get to know females than did Cadet Custer. After joining the Army of the Potomac, Custer knew only prostitutes on an intimate basis. Women of his own age and social status were a mystery to him, and a challenge.
In the late fall of 1861, Custer returned to Michigan on sick leave. His illness was brief, as would always be the case with him, and he had more than a month to make his reputation in Monroe’s social circles. The handsome and dashing young bachelor strutted up and down the streets of Monroe or held forth at parties or church functions, explaining to the civilians how the war was fought. Custer enjoyed every minute of it, but he was most delighted when he could be with the eligible young ladies of Monroe, laughing, talking, teasing. He proposed marriage to at least one and possibly more.
Custer reveled in the role of the young hero returned from the wars. After escorting Fanny Fifield or another beauty home from singing class, he went on drinking sprees with his boyhood companions, filling their ears with combat stories—in Custer’s stories, he always led the charge, always killed his enemy, always swept the field. It was a glorious vacation.
In February 1862 Custer returned to active duty, but he was back in Monroe on a furlough in November of that year. This time he had more war stories to tell, and as McClellan’s aide he was near enough to the seat of power to command attention from the town’s dignitaries. He spoke at banquet halls and on platforms at public meetings. As a speaker he was awkward and embarrassed, but he struck the older men as being properly modest and began receiving invitations to the elite social affairs.25
On Thanksgiving evening, at a party held at the local girls’ finishing school, Custer was presented to Miss Elizabeth Bacon, daughter of Judge Daniel Bacon, the town’s most prominent resident. Usually full of talk, Custer for once was speechless; in addition to her social position, Libbie Bacon was easily the prettiest girl at the party, indeed one of the most beautiful Custer had ever seen. Libbie had been well-trained and knew how to keep a conversation with a bashful swain from floundering. She had one infallible question, flattering to male vanity: “And what do you really think of Higher Education for Women?” But on this occasion she too was tongue-tied and only managed to say, “I believe your promotion has been very rapid?” Custer, then a captain, replied modestly, “I have been very fortunate.”26 And that was about all, at least for that night. But it was as close to love at first sight* as ever happens in real life, and Custer set his cap to catch her if he could.
Libbie felt the same way toward him. She saw Custer on the streets of Monroe the next day and he glanced at her. “Oh, how pleased I was,” she wrote of the experience. In church that Sunday, Custer couldn’t keep his eyes off Miss Bacon; as she put it, he “looked such things at me.” Like other love-struck young girls, she could not believe that anyone so attractive as Custer could be interested in plain old Libbie Bacon, and she took to comparing herself, unfavorably, to her friends. Those young ladies, she was convinced, were far better looking than she was, wore finer clothes, and were in constant competition with her for men in general and Custer in particular. “Yet without the least intention,” she later wrote, “I captured the greatest prize of all.”27
Libbie hardly needed to worry about her competition. Her seminary graduation photograph, taken in the summer of 1862, shows her practicing her sweet, demure look, and she brought it off well. Her dark, long, curly hair fell over her shoulder in ringlets. She had just the hint of a smile, barely enough to reveal her dimples. Her ivory-colored skin set off her dark hair and eyebrows. Later full-length photographs show an ample bosom and a dangerously thin waist—the perfect figure, in other words, for wearing the sweeping dresses of the day. She was twenty-one years old that fall of 1862, so she tried terribly hard to look mature and almost made it. But her eyes did her in. They sparkled with life, vitality, youth. They seemed to promise adventure, enthusiasm, energy, and indicated that here was a woman ready for fun and excitement, always anxious to try something new, no matter how dangerous.28
Libbie Bacon was one of the most remarkable American women of the nineteenth century. As will be seen, she had unbounded energy, but she never worked a day in her life. She was as courageous as Custer himself, although she hid her bravery behind shrieks, screams, and her supposed need for a male protector from all dangers, big and little. She was a superb horsewoman, again as good as Custer himself, although her society forced her to ride sidesaddle. She was highly intelligent, even though she hid her intelligence just as carefully as she did her bravery. And she was a marvelously effective writer. She has left us some of the best descriptive material available on the Great Plains in the nineteenth century. But she devoted the twelve years of her married life and the fifty-seven years of her widowhood to her husband. He was the only human subject she ever wrote about and, as far as one can tell, almost the only human being she ever thought about. She lived to serve him and his memory. What a waste! Had Libbie been a boy, given the good start in life a child of Judge Bacon would have enjoyed and the talents and energy Libbie had, she would probably have gone right to the top of the American scene in any one of a number of fields. As it was, she was fated to be known only as a wife and then as a widow.
Libbie understood herself and her role. She was contented, even happy. She knew how to get what she wanted, which in truth was not much, as she never sought power or prominence or a career for herself. Her mother had died when she was quite young, and although her father remarried when she was in her late teens, she grew up without any close female companions. She did have schoolmates, of course, but they knew even less of the world than she did. So her views on what a woman was and how she should behave came primarily from her father, and Judge Bacon was a stern man who was firm in his views and set in his ways. He protected his little Libbie from the evils of the world. In fact, Libbie needed to be protected about as much as Custer did, but she learned to use her father’s attitude to win her own small triumphs.
“Libbie Bacon has no mother! Poor motherless Libbie Bacon! How shamelessly I traded on this,” she confessed late in her life. “What an excuse I made of it for not doing anything I didn’t want to do! And what excuses were made for me on that score!” Judge Bacon had sent her to a seminary for young ladies in Grand Rapids, where she learned to sew, play the piano, and engage in other ornamental arts pleasing to the nineteenth-century American male. She spent her summers with the judge and his new wife in Monroe; Mrs. Bacon would not suffer her “young responsibility” to assume the slightest household task, so Libbie read edifying Christian literature. One year the Bacons kept Libbie in Monroe and out of school for the entire term, lest a summer cold cause her to “catch a consumption.”29
When Custer met Libbie in 1862 she had just graduated from the seminary. As her lifetime friend, Marguerite Merington, put it, she was now a thoroughly educated young lady. “Her main preoccupation from that time onward would be to find a husband—or, more modestly, to be found by a husband acceptable to herself and family. Home, thanks to the second Mrs. Bacon, was all that a young lady could desire. She took up painting in the interval between one security and another—she looked forward in marriage to the sheltered life.”30
Then occurred what Libbie ever afterward referred to as “that terrible day.” Custer went on an afternoon drinking spree in Monroe, got roaring drunk, and staggered his way home along the side-walk, weaving from side to side, falling, vomiting, and generally making a spectacle of himself. His path took him along Monroe Street, right past Judge Bacon’s house. Libbie happened to be at the window upstairs, while the judge was downstairs, also looking toward the street Both Bacons were disgusted by the sight of Custer.
“Home” for Custer in Monroe was, of course, the Reed house, where his older sister Lydia ran the household. She took one look and hustled the drunken soldier boy up to his room, locked the door behind her, and began her lecture. Frederick Whittaker, Custer’s close friend and first biographer, tells the story of what happened as only a nineteenth-century author could: “What passed at that interview between the anxious loving sister and the impulsive erring boy, already repenting of his degradation and error, will never be fully known until the last day. Far be it from us to strive to lift the veil. It was a season of tears, prayers, and earnest pleading on one side, overcoming all resistance on the other. The result was that George Armstrong Custer then and there, in the presence of God, gave his sister a solemn pledge that never henceforth to the day of his death should a drop of intoxicating liquor pass his lips. That pledge he kept in letter and spirit to the last. His excess in Monroe was his last anywhere, and henceforth he was a free man.”31
Custer did indeed keep his pledge. He would not even touch wine at formal dinner parties. He also took a pledge to refrain from cursing; on this point the evidence is not as clear as it was with regard to drinking, but most of Custer’s Army associates testify that after 1862 he seldom swore. It obviously took a man of strong character to keep either pledge, much less both, but Custer’s self-discipline was so strong that somehow he managed to do it.
The temptations not to do so were great throughout his life. The U. S. Army was hardly a teetotaling institution and Custer spent his adult years in close association with hard-drinking, hard-swearing officers. At no time was he more severely tested than during the first months of his pledge. According to Captain Charles Francis Adams of the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry, “During the winter [of 1862-63] … I can say from personal knowledge and experience, that the Headquarters of the Army of the Potomac was a place to which no self-respecting man liked to go, and no decent woman could go. It was a combination of barroom and brothel.” Custer nevertheless remained steadfast; his character was as solid as a rock.32
Libbie was soon enough ready to forget, or at least to forgive, Custer’s spree, but the judge was not. He had invited Custer to his home on one occasion, but it was a stiff, formal affair and he had told Libbie to stay upstairs, out of sight. The judge himself never introduced his daughter to Custer, nor did he allow her to meet other soldiers. “Oh, Wifey, Wifey!” he would cry out to the second Mrs. Bacon, “one of those mustached, gilt-striped and button critters will get our Libbie yet!” Custer had other disadvantages aside from his occupation—he came from a lower-class family and the judge could never forgive his drunken spectacle.
By this time Custer and Libbie were seeing each other regularly at social events, exchanging long looks in church, and otherwise flirting. The judge ordered his daughter never to see Custer again. To seal the matter, he told Libbie to go to Toledo, Ohio, until young Custer left town. A friend from Toledo, Annie Cotton, had been visiting Libbie in Monroe, so a return visit was easily arranged. Custer came to the train station to see Libbie off. Judge Bacon watched, aghast, as Custer gallantly touched Libbie’s elbow to help her onto the train. The judge had not dreamed that their intimacy had gone so far. When he got home, he wrote his daughter a stern letter, deeply critical of her loose ways.
Libbie replied with some heat “You have never been a girl, Father,”† she began, “and you cannot tell how hard a trial this was for me. At the depot he assisted Annie Cotton just as much as he did me.” She informed her father that she had told Custer “never to meet me, and he has the sense to understand. But,” she added, refusing to give in to her father’s dictatorial orders, “I did not promise never to see him again.” Monroe people, she said, “will please mind their own business, and let me alone. If the whole world Oh’d and Ah’d it would not move me … Do not blame Captain Custer. He has many fine traits and Monroe will yet be proud of him.”33
Custer, meanwhile, did his best to please the judge. He made sure that Bacon knew of his temperance pledge, and in any case the judge, as a leading politician in town, could hardly ignore Monroe’s young war hero (though they were of different political parties). The two were thrown together often at Union rallies. After he returned to the war, Custer corresponded with the judge, keeping him abreast of the war news and doing all he could to impress the older man with his sincerity and maturity. At the same time, Custer was corresponding secretly with Libbie—he addressed his letters to Nettie Humphrey, one of Libbie’s Monroe friends, who read them to Libbie. He was desperate by this time to have Libbie for his own and he knew that could happen only if he married her. He also knew he could marry her only with the judge’s consent, and that consent would come only if he proved himself. In effect, the judge and the captain were dickering over Libbie as if she were a piece of property, but Libbie accepted the rules. Strong-willed as she was, she would never dream of marrying without her father’s blessing. So Custer went back to active duty more determined than ever to make a name for himself.
Throughout the spring of 1863, Custer shone. When General Robert E. Lee started his invasion of the North in early June, Pleasonton’s cavalry had the task of breaking through Confederate General J. E. B. (“Jeb”) Stuart’s cavalry, crossing the Blue Ridge Mountains, and obtaining information on the size and direction of the Army of Northern Virginia. Custer fought in the various skirmishes and battles that resulted, frequently getting his name mentioned in dispatches. As McClellan’s aide, Custer had been a captain, but now that he was an aide to a corps commander (Pleasonton headed the Cavalry Corps) he reverted to his permanent rank of first lieutenant.
Custer was used to giving orders by this time, especially in a combat situation. Joseph Fought, a drummer boy who attached himself to Custer for most of the war (and wore oversize boots and long hair in emulation of his hero), described the situation that prevailed: “Genl. Pleasonton, a very active officer, was always anxious to be posted about what was doing in front of him. He himself could not be in front all the time, and in that respect his Trusties [aides] were more valuable to him than his brigade commanders. If Lt. Custer observed that it was important to make a movement or charge he would tell the commander to do it, and the commander would have to do it, would not dare question, because he knew Lt. Custer was working under Genl. Pleasonton who would confirm every one of his instructions and movements.”34
On the night before Pleasonton moved out to attack Stuart, June 8, 1863, Custer wrote a long letter to his sister Lydia. He described every detail of his duties, said he would wake Pleasonton at 2 A.M. for a 4 A.M. march, remarked that his health was excellent and that he never felt better in his life. But there was a good chance he would be killed in the campaign. “In case anything happens to me,” he wrote, “my trunk is to go to you. Burn all my letters.”35
The following day, just at daylight, Custer helped lead a charge into the midst of some rebel cavalry cooking breakfast, thus beginning the battle of Brandy Station. For the first time in the war, Union cavalry fought Stuart on even terms. Custer took command of the 8th New York Cavalry when its colonel was killed. He led a series of charges, got himself and his men surrounded and outnumbered, cut his way out, and was lucky enough to have Pleasonton observe some of the action. The general was pleased with the way his aide took over in a crisis.
On June 17, 1863, Brigadier General Judson Kilpatrick, who had been a year ahead of Custer at West Point and who now commanded a brigade of three regiments (which fact made Lieutenant Custer burn with envy), attacked Stuart’s horsemen. Custer got into the fight but his horse, a favorite named Harry, bolted and carried him through the Confederate lines and into their rear. He described what followed in a letter home: “I was surrounded by rebels, and cut off from my own men, but I made my way out safely, and all owing to my hat, which is a large broad brim [straw hat], exactly like that worn by the rebels. Every one tells me that I look like a rebel more than our own men. The rebels at first thought I was one of their own men, and did not attack me, except one, who rushed at me with his saber, but I struck him across the face with my saber, knocking him off his horse. I then put spurs to ‘Harry’ and made my escape.”36 Michigan newspapers played up the incident, making it appear that Custer saved the day by charging through the rebel lines.
On June 26 Pleasonton’s cavalry crossed the Potomac, close on Lee’s heels. The next day, when they were in Frederick, Maryland, the cavalrymen heard astonishing news. Lincoln had replaced Hooker with Major General George Gordon Meade as commander of the Army of the Potomac. The Cavalry Corps was being reorganized on the march: three new division commanders had been named, and new brigade commanders were expected to take over. (A Union cavalry division ordinarily had three brigades in it; each brigade contained three or four regiments. A regiment at full strength contained one thousand soldiers, but by 1863 the average size of a regiment was below five hundred. A cavalry brigade, then, contained between one thousand five hundred and two thousand troopers, while a division was five thousand to six thousand strong.) Kilpatrick, only a year older than Custer, became one of the division commanders, with a brigadier’s star on each shoulder to go with it Custer hid his jealousy, blurted out congratulations to Little Kil, then went off on the disagreeable task of inspecting the pickets in a pouring rain. His mood was hardly a good one when he returned to the aides’ tent, dripping wet, and threw back the flap.
Some wag called out, “Gentlemen, General Custer!” Custer cringed. He had told his fellow aides countless times that he was “determined to be a general before the war was over,” and he took a lot of ribbing because of the boast. “How are you, General Custer?” another voice taunted. “You’re looking well, General,” called out a third.
“You may laugh, boys,” Custer retorted. “Laugh as long as you please, but I will be a general yet, for all your chaff. You see if I don’t, that’s all.”
The aides slapped their sides and roared with laughter. Custer looked ready to fight. His Monroe friend, Lieutenant Yates, came to his rescue.
“Look on the table” Yates told Custer.
There was a large official envelope addressed to “Brigadier General George A. Custer, U.S. Vols.” Custer took one look and sank into a chair. He was afraid he might cry.37
It was a volunteer rank, of course—in the regular Army Custer remained a first lieutenant—but still, at twenty-three years of age, Custer was a brigadier general, responsible for the lives and successes of a brigade of cavalry. How had it been done? How could it be done?
First and foremost, there was Custer’s record. Pleasonton, who had made the recommendation, had seen Custer in action and come to trust him. The man and the youth had a close relationship. Custer wrote later, “I do not believe a father could love his son more than Genl. Pleasonton loves me. He is as solicitous about me and my safety as a mother about her only child.”38 Pleasonton desperately needed to shake up the Cavalry Corps, which had not been doing well in its battles with Stuart, and he wanted fresh young men at the top. Politics played no role in Custer’s remarkable promotion. Pleasonton was a Republican and Custer’s intimate contacts with the McClellan Democrats hurt rather than helped him. Pleasonton simply wanted the hardest driving, most ambitious young officers to give his cavalry some spirit, and Custer was an obvious choice.
It should be recalled that the Civil War was fought by very young men, at all levels. Three out of every four soldiers in the Union Army were under thirty years of age, and half had not celebrated their twenty-fifth birthday.39 At the start of the war the officers tended to be somewhat older, but as the battles became fiercer and the political appointees began to drop out, their places were taken by young West Pointers. In 1860 and 1861 the Academy graduated a total of one hundred twenty cadets; of this number, fourteen became general officers in the Union Army, three in the Confederate service. Custer was by no means the only “boy general” of the war, although at age twenty-three he was the youngest man in the history of United States Armed Forces to ever wear stars on his shoulders.
Custer took charge of the 2nd Brigade in Kilpatrick’s 3rd Division of the Cavalry Corps. The 2nd Brigade included the 1st, 5th, 6th, and 7th Michigan Cavalry Regiments, along with a battery of artillery. The 5th Michigan was the regiment Custer had asked to command as a colonel, only to be turned down by Governor Blair—oh, sweet is revenge! Custer led his brigade recklessly and with great success in the Gettysburg campaign, gaining wide publicity and becoming something of a national pet “The Boy General with his flowing yellow curls,” a New York Herald correspondent called him.40
In September 1863 Custer led his brigade on a brilliant saber charge against some Confederate cannon at Brandy Station. He captured some of Jeb Stuart’s artillery, in itself a glorious feat, and added to the glory by taking Stuart’s headquarters, including the rebel general’s dinner. In so doing, Custer had his horse shot from under him (one of a dozen horses killed under him in combat in the war). Pleasonton had seen it all, accompanied by Colonel Theodore Lyman, a Harvard graduate serving as an observer for General Meade. After the battle, Custer came galloping up to Pleasonton and Lyman. “His aspect though highly amusing,” Lyman wrote, referring to Custer’s outlandish costume, “is also pleasing, as he has a very merry blue eye, and a devil-may-care style. His first greeting to General Pleasonton, as he rode up, was: ‘How are you, fifteen-days’-leave-of-absence? They have spoiled my boots but they didn’t gain much there, for I stole ‘em from a Reb.’” Custer stuck out his foot to show the boot leg torn by the shell that killed his horse. Pleasonton gave Custer his requested fifteen days’ leave and added ten more.41
So Custer returned to Monroe in late September 1863, now a national hero with his picture in Harper’s Weekly. Custer met Libbie at once, and after he explained that he had been carrying on with Fanny Fifield and other Monroe girls only to stop gossip about himself and Libbie, she accepted his proposal of marriage. Custer promised to ask Judge Bacon’s consent, but could not muster the courage—he would rather charge a division of Stuart’s cavalry. He returned to active duty without becoming formally engaged.
The correspondence that ensued between Custer, Judge Bacon, Libbie, and Nettie Humphrey (who still acted as go-between for Custer and Libbie) is a priceless collection, providing a day-by-day account of the difficulties involved in getting married for respectable people of that era. Custer took forever to screw up his courage and write the judge; the judge sent an evasive reply; Custer pressed the point; the judge eventually gave in. Then began a long correspondence between the betrothed, page after page of it. Much of the material appears in Marguerite Merington’s loving memoir, The Custer Story: The Life and Intimate Letters of General George A. Custer and His Wife Elizabeth, so only a few examples need be quoted here.
Custer selling himself to the judge: “It is true that I have often committed errors of judgment, but as I grew older I learned the necessity of propriety. I am aware of your fear of intemperance, but surely my conduct for the past two years—during which I have not violated the solemn promise I made my sister, with God to witness, should dispel that fear. [As usual, Custer exaggerated; he had stopped drinking less than a year earlier.] … I left home when but sixteen, and have been surrounded with temptation, but I have always had a purpose in life.”42
Custer selling himself to Libbie (via Nettie): “Often I think of the vast responsibility resting on me, of the many lives entrusted to my keeping … and to think that I am just leaving my boyhood makes the responsibility appear greater. This is not due to egotism, self-conceit. I try to make no unjust pretensions … I ask myself, ‘Is it right?’ Satisfied that it is so, I let nothing swerve me from my purpose.”43
Custer claiming that he would do anything for Libbie, which in practice meant anything that would not interfere with his career (again to Nettie): “However much I might wish to add a star to the one I wear, yet would one word of disapproval from Libbie check my aspiration. Yet I do not anticipate that she would wish me to lose that laudable ambition to which I already owe so much.”44
Libbie urging Custer to put off their wedding date (he kept pressing her to push it forward): “Ah, dear man, if I am worth having am I not worth waiting for? The very thought of marriage makes me tremble. Girls have so much fun. Marriage means trouble, and, never having had any … If you tease me I will go into a convent for a year. The very thought of leaving my home, my family, is painful to me. I implore you not even to mention it for at least a year.”45 … “Father accuses me of trifling, says ‘You must not keep Armstrong waiting.’ But neither you nor he can know what preparations are needed for such an Event, an Event it takes at least a year to prepare for.”46
Libbie told her stepmother that she was afraid that if she gave in and agreed to an early marriage, she would always have to give in to Custer’s whims. “No, No,” Mrs. Bacon replied. “For I consented to hasten my own wedding because my former husband Mr. Pitts insisted on it. … And I always had my own way afterwards, in Everything!”47 What she meant by “Everything,” of course, was control of household arrangements, probably what Mr. Pitts wore, and possibly their social life. But then Libbie’s ambition was limited, too—she wanted only security, an opportunity to run her loved one’s private life, and a famous husband.
In Monroe, class and social lines were so closely kept that Libbie had not yet met Custer’s family, even though now they lived only one block from the Bacon home. (Custer’s mother and father had moved to Monroe to be with the Reeds; Custer helped support them on his general’s salary.)
Libbie to Custer: “Now I am going to surprise you. I know your family by sight. I stood near them at the Lilliputian Bazaar. I think they knew me. I could have kissed your little sister, she was so considerate of her mother.”48 Libbie did meet Custer’s parents before the marriage.
Libbie to Custer, describing herself: “My own faults are legion. I am susceptible to admiration. In church I saw a handsome young man looking at me, and I blushed furiously. Mother says I am the most sarcastic girl, and say the most withering things.”49
Libbie thinking about what she was getting herself into—and what it meant—in a letter to Custer: “Blessings brighten as they take their flight. How I love my name Libbie BACON. Libbie B-A-C-O-N. Bacon. Libbie Bacon.”50 (Libbie had no luck in holding onto her own name. In the index to the innumerable Custer books, she always appears under the name, “Custer, Mrs. George Armstrong.”)
And finally, Libbie telling Custer that in return for giving up her name, she expected to share his life with him: “I had rather live in a tent, outdoors with you than in a palace with another. There is no place I would not go to, gladly, live in, gladly, because … Because I love you.”51
The wedding took place on February 9, 1864, at the First Presbyterian Church in Monroe. Custer wore his full-dress uniform and was surrounded by his aides, all resplendent Libbie wore a hoop-skirted, mist-green wedding dress, trimmed with yellow cavalry braid. She had her dark hair parted, rolled over each ear, and coiled in a knot on her neck under a green-silk wedding veil.52 There were hundreds of guests; some had to be turned away because the church was overflowing. It was said to be the most splendid wedding ever seen in Michigan.53
The couple spent their honeymoon visiting cities between Michigan and New York. They stopped off at West Point for a day. There Libbie learned that her husband could be just as jealous, protective, and possessive of her as her father. Custer was furious at the way she flirted with the cadets and because she had kissed one of the professors. Years later, Libbie described the aftermath: “In the train [going down to New York] I was amazed to see my blithe bridegroom turned into an incarnated thundercloud. ‘But,’ I tearfully protested, ‘the professor who claimed the privilege of kissing the bride was a veritable Methuselah. And the cadets who showed me Lover’s Walk were like school-boys with their shy ways and nice, clean, friendly faces …’ Oh, I quite expected to be sent home to my parents, till I took courage to say, ‘Well, you left me with them, Autie!’”54
From West Point the couple went to New York, then on to Washington. Custer received orders to report to his brigade. He told Libbie to stay in a boardinghouse in the capital. Not on your life! Libbie was going with him to the front, no matter what he said. Autie caved in. Libbie went to be with him at his winter headquarters five miles south of Brandy Station, Virginia. For better or for worse, she was in the Army now. Custer made her as comfortable as he could in a tent, introduced her to his black cook, his other servants, his dogs and horses, and his fellow officers. Then he turned his attention back to making war.
* Custer had seen Libbie often as a child but had never been properly introduced because of the social gap between them.
† This classic line, so typical of Libbie, would fit well on the mantelpiece of every man who has a daughter.