Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America
You couldn’t say that a biography of George Armstrong Custer fills a deplorable gap in America’s reading; in fact the national bookshelf groans under the weight of the volumes devoted to the “Boy General of the Golden Locks” and his calamitous end. T. J. Stiles’s Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America distinguishes itself from the throng by devoting less than 30 of its 550-plus pages to the fatal affair at the Little Bighorn. Instead, the book focuses on Custer as a man cut to fit another era, an individualistic, impulsive romantic caught between an older, freewheeling version of America and an emergent managerial society in which the requirements and values of the organization became dominant. Beyond that, Stiles concentrates on the important roles played by women in Custer’s life, most especially by Libbie, his wife and political handler; his servant and de facto quartermaster, Eliza Brown; and, to a lesser extent, by his half sister, Ann Reed. Further, he shows us that whatever Custer’s failings were — they were legion, noxious, and comprehensively described — the young man they called “Fanny” at West Point (where he finished last in his class and first in demerits) was extraordinarily gifted on the battlefield, as a fighter, impromptu tactician, and leader of men.
Stiles, who won both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for his last book, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, has a terrific gift for conjuring milieu and circumstance, for showing the complex political and financial context of his subjects’ actions, and, not least, for portraying personality and character. It is puzzling, then, that he insists that Custer’s difficulties sprang in part from his possessing a disposition more suited to a bygone era — that there was a “mismatch of the man and the times.” The Custer whom he actually and convincingly puts before us is a creature very much of his age: romantic, certainly, in his own estimation (and coiffeur and attire), but in fact a man overly conscious of outward appearance and the opinion of others, a striver who scrambled for celebrity and wealth, exulted in the company of the great, and lapped up the sophisticated pleasures and rich splendor of New York. His spirit, on the evidence of these pages, was that of the Gilded Age, and as far as his character is concerned, we find here in the most concrete and dismaying detail a Custer who is a liar and cheat, a womanizer, horse thief, gambler, backstabber, martinet, propagandist, trimmer, feckless business partner, and deep-dyed racist. Were it not for the Civil War, we would never have heard of him — though, of course, the same could be said of the indisputably great Ulysses S. Grant.
Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America
Hardcover $30.00
Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America
By T. J. Stiles
Hardcover $30.00
Appropriately, Stiles devotes almost 200 pages to Custer’s Civil War in both its military and political aspects, the latter notable for the importance of patronage and favoritism in brokering promotions and converting them from brevet to full rank. Custer’s courageous role in a reconnaissance mission which turned into a battle with Confederate troops brought a the young soldier to the attention of General George McClellan, a man whose dashing style he admired and whose anti-Lincoln views he shared — until it became expedient to denounce them. Stiles covers Custer’s ascent from second lieutenant in the U.S. Cavalry to brigadier general in the U.S. Volunteers, a rise propelled by a good portion of luck and battlefield genius (despite a propensity to shoot his own horses), by his own embellished reports of his military derring-do, by his strategic friendships, and, crucially, by his wife Libbie’s assiduous lobbying of powerful politicians in Washington. There, for stretches, alert to political crosswinds and fragile allegiances, the ambitious helpmeet lived a “lonely, barren life among drunken congressmen, unfaithful officers’ wives, and the army of the wounded and the dead.”
After the war, Custer’s bad traits began to predominate. Again and again, he showed his own unlovely brand of overweening self-assertion laid over essential pettiness and self-doubt. He mistreated his men, abandoning some. For the last sin and others, he was brought before a court-martial (his second). His activities also included setting up a bootless partnership in a Colorado silver mine and speculating via short-selling on the stock market, out of which came enormous debt. He actively and vocally supported President Johnson and his attack on black civil rights and, later, conspired against President Grant, planting scurrilous, unsubstantiated stories in the press — in sum, as Stiles puts it, “openly intriguing with the political opposition . . . to help a party dedicated to restoring white supremacy.”
Stiles gives as a wonderful description of Custer in 1867, now assigned to subduing the Indians on the Great Plains. He is “dressed in full frontier style: buckskin suit, twin revolvers belted at his waist (butts forward, as Wild Bill wore them), knee-high moccasins fringed along the calves, along with his usual long hair and low-crowned, wide-brimmed hat. The outfit highlighted his failures as a plainsman. He repeatedly lost Indian trails, shot his own horse twice again that year, and mistook an elk herd for the enemy.” Nevertheless, for all this clownishness, Custer still showed extraordinary gifts in actual combat, seeing the field and deploying and galvanizing his men. He did blunder at the Little Bighorn in dividing his troops, but, according to Stiles, who bases his views in the works of other scholars, the battle was not lost by a reckless, incompetent Custer so much as it was won by the superior force of the Lakota Sioux, then at the apex of their power, in combination with the Northern Cheyenne.
No doubt there are right now further Custer biographies in the making, a fact not lost on Stiles. Custer’s “sudden offstage ending,” he notes in concluding this fine work, “left him suspended forever between East and West, past and future, to be misremembered as needed by each new generation.” I guess this is so, but I, for one, am heartily sick of him.
Appropriately, Stiles devotes almost 200 pages to Custer’s Civil War in both its military and political aspects, the latter notable for the importance of patronage and favoritism in brokering promotions and converting them from brevet to full rank. Custer’s courageous role in a reconnaissance mission which turned into a battle with Confederate troops brought a the young soldier to the attention of General George McClellan, a man whose dashing style he admired and whose anti-Lincoln views he shared — until it became expedient to denounce them. Stiles covers Custer’s ascent from second lieutenant in the U.S. Cavalry to brigadier general in the U.S. Volunteers, a rise propelled by a good portion of luck and battlefield genius (despite a propensity to shoot his own horses), by his own embellished reports of his military derring-do, by his strategic friendships, and, crucially, by his wife Libbie’s assiduous lobbying of powerful politicians in Washington. There, for stretches, alert to political crosswinds and fragile allegiances, the ambitious helpmeet lived a “lonely, barren life among drunken congressmen, unfaithful officers’ wives, and the army of the wounded and the dead.”
After the war, Custer’s bad traits began to predominate. Again and again, he showed his own unlovely brand of overweening self-assertion laid over essential pettiness and self-doubt. He mistreated his men, abandoning some. For the last sin and others, he was brought before a court-martial (his second). His activities also included setting up a bootless partnership in a Colorado silver mine and speculating via short-selling on the stock market, out of which came enormous debt. He actively and vocally supported President Johnson and his attack on black civil rights and, later, conspired against President Grant, planting scurrilous, unsubstantiated stories in the press — in sum, as Stiles puts it, “openly intriguing with the political opposition . . . to help a party dedicated to restoring white supremacy.”
Stiles gives as a wonderful description of Custer in 1867, now assigned to subduing the Indians on the Great Plains. He is “dressed in full frontier style: buckskin suit, twin revolvers belted at his waist (butts forward, as Wild Bill wore them), knee-high moccasins fringed along the calves, along with his usual long hair and low-crowned, wide-brimmed hat. The outfit highlighted his failures as a plainsman. He repeatedly lost Indian trails, shot his own horse twice again that year, and mistook an elk herd for the enemy.” Nevertheless, for all this clownishness, Custer still showed extraordinary gifts in actual combat, seeing the field and deploying and galvanizing his men. He did blunder at the Little Bighorn in dividing his troops, but, according to Stiles, who bases his views in the works of other scholars, the battle was not lost by a reckless, incompetent Custer so much as it was won by the superior force of the Lakota Sioux, then at the apex of their power, in combination with the Northern Cheyenne.
No doubt there are right now further Custer biographies in the making, a fact not lost on Stiles. Custer’s “sudden offstage ending,” he notes in concluding this fine work, “left him suspended forever between East and West, past and future, to be misremembered as needed by each new generation.” I guess this is so, but I, for one, am heartily sick of him.