Custer:
The Controversial Life of George Armstrong Custer
By Jeffry D. Wert
Simon & Schuster, 462 pages, $27.50
Touched by Fire:
The Life, Death and Mythic Afterlife of George Armstrong Custer
By Louise Barnett
Henry Holt, 540 pages, $30
With Custer on the Little Bighorn
By William O. Taylor
Foreword by Greg Martin
Viking, 208 pages, $27.95
Three new books celebrate Army Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s last moments on Earth at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, June 25, 1876, and two of them go on at great length to aggrandize the brief and noisy life of a fallen Civil War celebrity.
In Jeffry D. Wert’s biography “Custer: The Controversial Life of George Armstrong Custer,” there is all the sentimental mythologizing a Custer-lover could want (“Custer had acquired some notoriety as a buffalo hunter, and he received nearly two hundred requests from individuals for him to lead them on a hunt”), and there is almost no clear-eyed feel for the fact that Custer lived a soldier’s thankless life and died a soldier’s pointless death.
Louise Barnett’s biography “Touched by Fire,” on the other hand, offers a sentimental demythologizing of Custer as a man who “could lead a cavalry charge” but depended on his wife’s “loyally reflecting mirror” to maintain his equilibrium. In other words, Custer was a man who benefited from the power of his tough, articulate, ambitious wife, Elizabeth “Libbie” Bacon.
Scheduled to be published in late August is a spectacular little book, “With Custer on the Little Bighorn,” a first-person account by William O. Taylor written in 1917 and unavailable until now. In its old-fashioned way, it does more than a whole library shelf of Custer books to establish those few hours on the Little Bighorn as a snapshot of American politics.
All three books address the central question about Custer’s life–Why did he ride into a massacre?–and this is a wonderful occasion, at the 120th anniversary of the battle, to answer it. (A fourth book, “A Road We Do Not Know,” a historical novel by Frederick Chiaventone about events at the Little Bighorn, is slated for publication in September.)
What was really going on when Custer directed his 7th Cavalry against the large Sioux camp in the Dakota Territory that morning? Why was Custer so desperate to attack? Did Custer really die for our sins?
The answer is that Custer died for the sins of President Ulysses S. Grant and the Republican Party. Just two months before Custer led 212 soldiers into the valley of death at the Little Bighorn, he led himself into the halls of Congress to testify against Grant, a Republican, and the corrupt War Department.
What was more stupid: (a) to go up against Sitting Bull and the five tribes gathered in the Black Hills or (b) to go up against “Unconditional Surrender” Grant (and worse, to have lunch with Democrats beforehand)? The answer is (b). The worst mistake Custer ever made was to flirt with Democrats of the 44th Congress, to coo in the ears of the Democrat-controlled House committees on military affairs and military expenditures that were investigating the poltroonery and plain rot of the War Department under newly appointed Secretary Alphonso Taft (patriarch of the Ohio Tafts) and Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman.
You thought Custer’s worst decision was to split his command, sending some of his troops under Maj. Marcus Reno down the trail to charge the Sioux camp while taking his own troops to the right to attack the lower part of the camp? No, Custer’s mistake was to wander into a dogfight between Grant and the Congress and have the president condemn him afterward. The Sioux just made a mercifully short job of what would have been a lifetime of obscure ruination at the hands of Grant’s allies.
In the snowy Plains spring of 1876, Custer was camped with his wife and baggage at Ft. Abraham Lincoln in the Dakota Territory. It had come to this for a hero of Gettysburg and Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan’s cavalry corps–a shabby, undermanned outpost against the disgruntled Lakota Sioux in the middle of a trackless wilderness. Meanwhile, lesser men from the war years were leap-frogging over each other as they rose to power.
Was Custer frustrated? Yes–and then it got worse. In mid-March, Custer was beckoned to Washington to testify against the War Department by the Democratic troublemaker and Grant-basher Rep. Heister Clymer of Pennsylvania. It was a fool’s errand, and Custer knew it. Custer hesitated, asking his commander, Gen. Alfred H. Terry, if he had to go. Finally Custer left the fort by sleigh on March 21, bound for Congress. Why did Custer decide to go? Ambition. Desperation. Frustration.
The 44th Congress was thick with Grant-bashing, Rebel-tainted Democrats who had their eyes on the 1876 election. Everyone knew that Grant wanted an unprecedented third term, and even the Republicans were blinking hard at Grant’s boldness.
Licking their chops, the Democrats in Congress were lining up corruption investigations to expose how rotten the Grantites had become. Some of the worst rot was in the Army. Custer had been playing with the Democrats since they had taken the House in ’74. He had written criticism under a nom de plume, and he’d fed gossip to James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald. Custer was betting that if the Democrats carried the White House in the fall of 1876, he would be rewarded for denouncing the Grant administration.
Custer was a golden puppet for the Democrats, and they bragged about him to the grim-eyed Republicans. Clymer had already discredited Secretary of War William Belknap as a bribe-taking rascal. Clymer aimed to use Custer’s celebrity to smear Grant’s War Department.
In April, Custer testified at length twice, but what he had to say came to little more than hearsay and gossip. Soon the Senate called him to testify, then changed its mind and ignored him.
Grant watched and waited, and immediately after Congress was done with Custer, Grant told a Cabinet meeting that he wanted Custer sacked and another man given the 7th Cavalry.
The evidence is that Custer didn’t learn he’d been fired until after he’d left Washington for home. The next two weeks were a flurry of telegrams among grumpy generals about what to do with the blockhead Custer. Sherman and Sheridan knew Custer was wrong to cross Grant, but they also wanted him in Sioux territory.
Eventually, Grant relented, and on May 8, Custer learned he’d been given a second chance. Giddy with relief, Custer told a colleague that he aimed to “cut loose” during the summer from Gen. Terry, who was directing the campaign against the Sioux, and make a grand show as an Indian fighter. Little Bighorn was Custer cutting loose–the catastrophe waiting for him as he rode to escape the wrath of Grant and the shenanigans of Congress.
Custer’s last moment was not noble; it was confused and pointless, the direct consequence of political hackery and partisan back-stabbing. The remembrance that the Battle of the Little Bighorn deserves is not Jeffry Wert’s Custer fixation nor Louise Barnett’s Mrs. Custer fixation.
No, what Custer deserves is a sensational quotation from “With Custer on the Little Bighorn,” by William O. Taylor, a trooper who rode with Maj. Reno that day and survived to talk about it constantly until his death in 1923. The quote is from Sitting Bull in a post-battle interview:
“The soldiers (Custer’s men) who were killed were horsemen, but they had no chance to fight or run away, they were surrounded too closely by our many warriors. As they stood there waiting to be killed they were seen to look far away to the hills in all directions and we knew they were looking for the hidden soldiers in the hollows of the hills to come and help them.”
What makes the Taylor book so lovely is its exceeding attention to the lowly, soldierly details of the last action on the Little Bighorn. Taylor served five years with the 7th Cavalry (’72-’77), and he can casually report what it meant to be a trooper on the frontier. Like a private in Oliver Stone’s movie “Platoon” about Vietnam, Taylor was in the special position at the Little Bighorn of having witnessed the catastrophe from the bottom of the pile–a grunt’s-eye view of the world of officers and their decisions. He also would never get over what we now call survivor syndrome: He rode down the trail with Reno and lived out an ordinary life, while carrying in his mind’s eye a last glimpse of his comrades who rode off to the right with Custer to become immortals.
