Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (34 page)

“I can’t tell you what a place Autie has here in public opinion,” Libbie wrote her parents from Washington in March 1864. “I thought that a Brigadier [General] would not be anything, but I find that mine is someone to be envied. It astonishes me to see the attention with which he is treated everywhere. One day at the House [of Representatives] he was invited to go on the floor, and the members came flocking round to be presented. … The President [Lincoln] knew all about him when Autie was presented to him, and talked to him about his graduation [from West Point].

“None of the other generals receive half the attention, and their arrivals are scarcely noticed in the papers. I am so amazed at his reputation that I cannot but write you about it. I wonder his head is not turned. Tho not disposed to put on airs I find it very agreeable to be the wife of a man so generally known and respected.”
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At a reception the following month, Libbie shook hands with President Lincoln “and I felt quite satisfied and was passing on, but it seems I was to be honored by his Highness. At mention of my
name he took my hand again very cordially and said, ‘So this is the young woman whose husband goes into a charge with a whoop and a shout. Well, I’m told he won’t do so any more.’” Libbie said yes, he would. “Oh,” Lincoln responded, “then you want to be a widow, I see.” They both laughed. “Was I not honored?” Libbie wrote. “I am quite a Lincoln girl now.”
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On a visit to the capitol, Libbie found that “People in the hall stared and pointed me out to each other: ‘Custer’s wife … That’s the wife of Custer!’” And Secretary Stanton solemnly informed her, “General Custer is writing lasting letters on the pages of his country’s history.”
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Libbie was even younger than her husband and no more prepared to handle the flattery than he was. She passed every hint of praise that she heard on to him, and there was a great deal of it, partly inspired by the fact that she was the prettiest girl in Washington and a great flirt. Senators, congressmen, Cabinet officers, and other high officials fell all over each other trying to get to her side at a ball or other social gathering. She loved hearing her Autie praised, so the men laid it on thick. She would then tell Autie of what had been said, always ending with a solemn warning to avoid vanity.

The adulation Custer received gave him a far different life experience from anything known to Crazy Horse. As a shirt-wearer, Crazy Horse had approximately the same status among Indian warriors as Custer did with white soldiers, but nothing remotely like the praise, honors, and privileges Custer enjoyed. White society fed the egos of its leaders, constantly telling them how great they were. White leaders stood out, above and beyond ordinary folk. In the most notable cases, such as Custer’s, they became heroes. Lesser leaders and the public fawned upon them, politicians flocked around them in the hope of catching some of their glory, and the newspapers reported on their every move.

One result was that the heroes came to objectify themselves, to confuse their public image with reality. Their “careers” came to be something beyond themselves, something “out there” to be encouraged, bolstered, or extended. In the summer of 1864, for the first time, Custer began writing about “my career” and enlisting the aid of others to help him advance it. Libbie, who lived in a fashionable boardinghouse in Washington when Custer was on campaign, was a great help. She told her parents of meeting Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax at a White House reception. Colfax said, “I have been wishing to be presented to this lady, but am disappointed she is a Mrs.!” Libbie smiled, took his arm, and chatted away. At the
capitol a month later, she reported to her husband, she “met Speaker Colfax and Oh he said lovely things about you.” Two weeks later Colfax began to push Custer for a promotion, prompting Custer to write, “Mr. Colfax’s note was certainly complimentary and it affords me great pleasure that so able and deservedly honored a man should be at all interested in my career.”
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Obviously Libbie was moving that career along; in so doing, she was following the stern injunction of Judge Bacon, who wrote his daughter in June 1864, “Be calm, submissive and composed is the wish and prayer of your Father.”
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Libbie accepted her role; as she wrote Custer, “I cannot love as I do without my life blending with yours. I would not lose my individuality, but would be, as a wife should be, part of her husband, a life within a life. I never was an admirer of a submissive wife, but I wish to look to my husband as superior in judgment and experience and to be guided by him in all things.”
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She meant what she said. During the Wilderness campaign, Custer wrote Libbie to say that he was surprised and pained to learn that she had not called upon Mrs. Francis William Kellogg, wife of an influential congressman from Michigan. Representative Kellogg, Custer told Libbie, “feels the omission deeply. … I should rather you had failed to call on any other person in Washington. I really feel quite badly about it. For my sake please be good and do so, won’t you?” Libbie did not want to go. “Scarcely anybody here likes Mr K,” she told Custer. “Some say he is dishonest and licentious.”
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But she hid her feelings and did as she was told. Through the remainder of the war, Libbie spent much of her social time with the Kelloggs.

Libbie knew how to use influence, too, as a letter to her father in October 1864 illustrates: “Mr. Kellogg has just returned from the front. He wants to go to Monroe and deliver a speech telling them what a man General Custer is. Now, Father, do have some of your friends invite Mr. K. to do this. But don’t let anybody know you did so. For when he praises Autie they might think us proud. We have a right to be, but not to be ‘set up.’ ”
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Another result of being a hero was that Custer found himself in intense competition with others who aspired to that degree of celebrity, especially his classmates who had also become boy generals. West Pointers did all they could to protect each other from outsiders, older graduates helped junior Academy-trained officers get ahead, but at the top the West Point Protective Association was ineffective and it was every man for himself. Throughout his life Custer retained
warm feelings for his fellow West Pointers who had gone over to the Confederacy, partly because he was never in direct competition with them, but came to despise those few West Pointers of his age who vied with him for position and status. The two major culprits for Custer were Judson Kilpatrick and James Harrison Wilson, who graduated one and two classes, respectively, ahead of Custer.

Custer’s problem with Kilpatrick began early. For one thing, Little Kil became a division commander when Custer took over his brigade, and Custer had to fight under Kil’s orders. For another, the two youths seem to have shared a girlfriend in the summer before Custer got married, and they evidently quarreled over her.
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But the major factor was professional jealousy. They fought each other over honors after successful battles and blamed each other when something went wrong. Custer claimed that a thrashing he had taken from the Confederates in the fall of 1863 was all Kilpatrick’s fault.
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Shortly thereafter Custer toyed with the idea of going to the Western theater, where he would be free of Kilpatrick and more likely to be able to operate on his own. He hesitated, however, because “in leaving I should leave those with whom I have what reputation I now have,” while “were I to go West… I should have to have success unmarred for a considerable time, to establish myself.” But there was an advantage not to be overlooked: in the West, he would serve under Major General George Thomas, who “is Colonel of my regiment in the regular army, and would give me every opportunity to acquire distinction.” On the other hand (Custer was forever making a list of plusses and minuses before coming to a decision), Thomas “could scarcely do more for me than Genl. Pleasonton.”
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Custer wavered for a month. He possibly recognized that going West would cost him in publicity, for he could never draw as much attention to himself in Georgia as he could in Virginia. In any event, what mattered most to him was his relationship to Kilpatrick, and that settled the issue. “I heard that Kilpatrick is to be made Major-General and ordered West,” he wrote home. “I am pleased because he is my senior. Had I been promoted and he not, his friends in Washington and in Congress would have attempted to defeat the confirmation. If he does not go West, I will.” Kilpatrick went, and Custer stayed.
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Custer rode over to Kilpatrick’s headquarters for a farewell dinner Little Kil was throwing. “Fellow officers,” Monaghan writes, “jealous of his [Kilpatrick’s] bravery, yet hating the brisk brutality with
which he could order others to their deaths, drank to his health and sang his praises. This was the army Custer knew so well.”
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Custer was even more jealous of Wilson than he was of Kilpatrick, possibly because Wilson was the best officer of the three, certainly because Wilson was General Grant’s pet and Grant had made him a division commander when Custer wore only one star. Grant had picked Wilson to help him prepare a report on the Vicksburg campaign. A lucky Army pet, Custer called Wilson. The jealousy burned bright in large measure because Custer was identified with McClellan, whose star had disappeared, while Wilson had hitched himself to Grant, whose star was ascending.

Custer blamed one of his defeats on Wilson. After a battle in which he lost 480 men, Custer wrote Libbie: “Wilson proved himself an imbecile and nearly ruined the corps by his blunders. Genl. Sheridan sent for me to rescue him.” Afterward, Custer reported, “one of Genl. Sheridan’s highest staff officers said, ‘Custer saved the Cavalry Corps,’ and Genl. Sheridan told Col. Alger ‘Custer is the ablest man in the Cavalry Corps.’” Typically, Custer added, “This is for you only, my little one. I would not write this to anyone but you. You may repeat it to our own people in Monroe …”
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In later correspondence, Custer referred to Wilson as “that upstart and imbecile,” and even had the gall to call Wilson “an inexperienced and untrained officer.”
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Wilson had no use for Custer, either. After Yellow Tavern, where Custer’s men mortally wounded Jeb Stuart, Wilson was incensed. He felt that the press was giving credit to Custer that belonged to him.
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Still, when Wilson went to the western theater for the last year of the war, he stifled his feelings and requested Custer’s services; as ambitious as Little Kil or Custer himself, Wilson wanted the best cavalryman as his chief subordinate. Custer refused, but Wilson could be forgiving; at the end of a distinguished career, he wrote in his memoirs of those glorious Civil War days, “The modest man is not always the best soldier. … Some of the best, while shamelessly sounding their own praises, were brave, dashing, and enterprising to an unusual degree.”
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When Wilson went to the western theater, Sheridan gave his division to Custer; this was the beginning of a Custer-Sheridan relationship which became mutually dependent and lasted to the end of Custer’s life. Sheridan was a bullheaded little man, given to intense rages, mad with battle lust during an engagement, quick to censure and slow to forgive, bursting with energy, forever demanding
the impossible of his men. He was a perfect superior for Custer and the two generals got on famously.

Custer usually had good relations with his superiors—it was his equals who gave him fits. After the Shenandoah Valley campaign of late 1864, General Merritt officially objected to the praise Custer received in the press. Merritt said Custer was claiming honors that rightfully belonged to his division, specifically, that Custer had told newspaper correspondents that his men had captured guns actually taken by Merritt’s division. Custer demanded a board of inquiry to determine who actually took the guns.
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And so it went, throughout the Civil War. The ambitious boy generals squabbled with each other like the immature men they were.

That they did so can hardly be wondered at, considering the stakes. They all knew that when the war ended they would lose their handsome general officer’s pay and revert to their regular Army rank, lieutenant in most cases. Only one or two could become regular Army colonels, and they would be the ones with the most distinguished records. Custer was as careless with money as he was with the claimed number of enemy he had met and overcome; he had not saved a penny—could not, really, with Libbie buying $100 dresses to attend her social functions—and his tastes were as expensive as Libbie’s. Beyond the money, the rewards that white society gave its famous leaders were much desired, and no one enjoyed them more than Custer and Libbie.

Libbie especially cashed in on Custer’s fame and on her own beauty. She became the leading light of the Washington social scene in the last year of the war. She knew all the right people, went to all the right balls, wore the right clothes, and charmed every man she met. “Such style as we go in!” she told her parents in the spring of 1864 when she was living in camp with Custer. “Most army officers’ wives have to ride in ambulances, but my General has a carriage with silver harness that he captured last summer, and two magnificent matched horses. We have an escort of four or six soldiers riding behind.”

When Custer left the Shenandoah Valley for the start of the Wilderness campaign in May 1864, he and Libbie rode the train to Washington in a special car assigned to General Grant, who was just then coming to the capital to take command of the Union Armies. The twenty-three-year-old Libbie had a gay time chatting about Army life with General Grant. “I was the only lady, and he was so considerate he went out on the platform to smoke his cigar,
fearing it might be disagreeable to me, till Autie begged him to return. He smoked 5 on the journey.”
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