The Real Custer (15 page)

C
uster's star rose considerably after Gettysburg. General Pleasonton noted that the performance of young Generals Custer and Merritt “increased the confidence entertained in their ability and gallantry to lead troops on the field of battle.” Custer was given a brevet promotion to major in the Regular Army for “gallant and meritorious services,” and word began to spread about his achievements. A few weeks after the battle, James Kidd was riding a train to Washington and observed that “the name of Custer, the ‘boy General,' was seemingly on every tongue and there was no disposition on our part to conceal the fact that we had been with him.”
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Custer's natural flamboyance and charisma helped. Joseph Fought, a boy bugler who met Custer in the opening days of the Civil War, said he was “a conspicuous figure from the first, attracting attention wherever he went.”
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That included the attention of reporters, at a time when stories
in East Coast papers were reprinted in smaller newspapers nationwide.
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New York Times
correspondent Edward A. Paul, who wrote extensively on the operations of the Army of the Potomac, often spent time with Custer's command and wrote comprehensive accounts of the operations of the Michigan Brigade.

Custer welcomed the attention. He allowed more access to reporters than most commanders did in those days. Many generals saw journalists as more trouble than they were worth, either passing along critical intelligence to the enemy through their stories or stirring up trouble with Washington by reporting incidents and shortcomings that did not make it into official dispatches. General Sherman famously court-martialed
New York Herald
reporter Thomas W. Knox after he violated an order not to accompany troops on what turned out to be a failed attack on Vicksburg. But Custer's press was generally good; a month after Gettysburg, the
Herald
published a glowing front-page profile:

            
General Custer is not sufficiently known. . . . With a manly and weather-beaten face of severe expression, he wears the long flaxen curls of a girl of fifteen, and in lieu of the usual uniform dons a black velvet jacket, embroidered profusely on the back and arms with gold lace. He is proud of his Michigan men, and they fully return the sentiment. Whenever a charge is made, be it of brigade, regiment or company, he trots coolly at the head, spurs into a gallop, and the curls, gaily dancing time to each movement as a beacon followed with enthusiasm. Custer, added to unflinching bravery, has excellent judgment, and is universally esteemed by his brother officers. He is a man of mark, and would shine in any military sphere.
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The Custer who said he would be glad to see a battle every day of his life almost got his wish in the weeks and months after Gettysburg. The
Michigan Brigade was in constant action, first pursuing Lee's army as it withdrew to the Potomac, then continuing the fight into central Virginia. By August 1863, the Michigan Brigade was on the Rappahannock, opposite Fredericksburg. When Custer got word that his friend Thomas Rosser was across the river, he decided to pay him a visit. He asked Captain Samuel Harris to go to the river under a flag of truce (actually Custer's handkerchief) and negotiate a meeting of the two West Pointers. “I walked up the river road holding the handkerchief over my head,” he recalled. “A large crowd very soon collected to see what the Yankee wanted.” Harris told his rebel counterpart that “Gen. Custer was close by and would like to come over” to meet with Rosser. A half hour later, Rosser appeared and said, “Send him over.” Harris escorted Custer to the river where Rosser sent a boat to fetch him. “At least 1000 cavalry and infantry from the rebel army thronged about the wharf as spectators when Gen. Custer landed,” according to one report. “His reception by the officers was exceedingly cordial.”
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“Custer staid over until about four o'clock,” Harris recalled. “I was becoming anxious about him when he returned, saying that he ‘had a fine time over there.'”
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On another occasion Thomas B. Beal of Company I, 14th North Carolina Infantry, was commanding the picket line in the morning when a Union officer “rode from the woods in our front and dashed straight for my picket post.” The officer was accompanied by unarmed soldiers carrying newspapers and coffee for exchange. “The horseman rode up in a few paces of my post and came to a halt,” Beal recalled, “at the same time crying out, ‘Here is your papers, and I have a canteen of whisky for Col. [Gimlet] Lea, of North Carolina, who was in West Point with me. I am Gen. Custer.'”

Beal noted that Custer and his men were completely at his mercy, and orders had come down the previous evening to fire on any Union troops who showed themselves. But Beal had already decided during the night that his “sense of justice and honor” prevented him from killing
men in cold blood who would not have known the risk. “I did not give the command to fire and close from right and left upon them,” he said, “but I ordered one of my soldiers to tell him our orders changed in the night, and I would give him one chance for his life, and that was retreat in haste, or I would be compelled to fire, though they were unarmed and defenseless.” Custer and his men quickly rode away. A year later Beal, wounded at Cedar Creek and left for dead by the retreating rebel troops, fell into Union hands. He wrote a letter to Custer relating the earlier episode and asking for parole, especially given his condition. He later received word that by Custer's order he was to be left at the residence in Strasburg where he was convalescing, and they bid him to “go home to my young wife I had married a short time before, who was thinking of me as dead.”
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In September 1863, Confederate forces in the west faced serious reverses, and General James Longstreet's corps was detached from Lee's army to reinforce Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee. This gave General George Meade an opportunity. On the morning of September 13, Union forces pushed over the Rappahannock upstream from Fredericksburg and drove the rebels from Brandy Station to Culpeper, where at midday three cavalry divisions under Buford, Gregg, and Kilpatrick were set to converge.

Confederate guns were emplaced on a ridge outside of town. The 2nd New York Cavalry took “very severe artillery fire,” said one report, “as great trees broken off and shattered clearly proved.” Colonel H. E. Davies, commanding Farnsworth's old brigade, ordered a battalion of the 2nd New York under Lieutenant Colonel Harhaus and Major McIrwin to take the guns. The troopers galloped down a hill facing the battery, “a perfect avalanche of shot and shell crashing above them, and ploughing the ground around them,” dressed the line at the base, then “charged up with such impetuosity that every thing gave way before them.”
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Kilpatrick then tried to move left around Culpeper to capture a train that was departing in haste before the enemy onslaught. Custer's brigade scattered rebel skirmishers posted on the edge of the town, but the advance was frustrated by a stream swollen from recent rains. One hundred men from the 7th Michigan waded and swam the stream and charged up a hill on the other side, running off a rebel gun and some sharpshooters, securing that flank.

Meanwhile, Confederate cavalry had established a new defensive position in the woods just on the other side of the town, and rebel guns placed on a high hill began to punish the Union forces. Kilpatrick ordered a battalion of the 1st Vermont Cavalry, commanded by Major William Wells, to neutralize the threat. Custer dashed up to accompany the assault.

The charge was “of unequalled gallantry,” one report read. The Vermonters were “obliged to dash through the town, and down a steep hill, through a ravine, and then up a steep and very high hill to the battery, which, meanwhile, was belching forth its shell and canister upon their ranks. But it could not retard the speed nor daunt the spirit of the ‘Boy General of the Golden Locks' and his brave troops.” The cavalrymen swarmed the rebel guns, and Custer, “armed only with his riding whip, compell[ed] many a man to surrender at discretion.” Cavalryman Willard Glazier said that “no soldier who saw [Custer] on that day . . . ever questioned his right to a star, or all the gold lace he felt inclined to wear.”
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The battle continued for hours after, with a series of charges and countercharges. Shot and shell rained into Culpeper, and a Confederate account noted that “women were shrieking, soldiers were groaning with their wounds, and children were crying from fright, and the death-shots hissing from afar were howling and screeching over the town.” At four in the afternoon, the rebels finally quit their defense and withdrew eleven miles to the Rapidan River. The assault netted numerous guns and over one hundred prisoners, but Custer was wounded by a Confederate shot,
“which killed his horse and came near killing the general.” A shell had taken off part of his boot and wounded Custer in the leg. He went up to General Pleasonton and said, “How are you, fifteen-days'-leave-of-absence?” referring to the leave granted a wounded man. “They have spoiled my boots but they didn't gain much there, for I stole 'em from a Reb.” Colonel Theodore Lyman noted that “the warlike ringlets got not only fifteen, but twelve [additional] days' leave of absence and have retreated to their native Michigan!”
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The furlough was well timed. George had important business to attend to in Monroe. He had not been there since the previous spring, and this would be his first visit as a general. He had important matters to discuss with Libbie and was also determined to have a talk with her father, at the very least to make sure the judge was aware of his achievements. George and Libbie had honored her father's admonition against the two having any direct contact and had carried on correspondence through Libbie's friend Annette Humphrey. “Friend Nettie” and “Friend Armstrong” exchanged many letters, and in this way the indirect courtship continued. Libbie's friend Marguerite Merington said that George was “never allowed too abundantly to hope nor too utterly to despair,” though at times he veered between the two.
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Libbie and her family had been away at Traverse City but by chance returned to Monroe the day after George arrived. Libbie wrote her cousin Rebecca Richmond that since George and Nettie were such good friends, “of course I saw him at once, because I could not avoid him. I tried to but I did not succeed.” She confided that George “proposed to me last winter, but I refused him more than once, on account of Father's apparently unconquerable prejudice. I never
even thought of marrying him
. Indeed I did not know I loved him so until he left Monroe in the spring.”
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George wasted no time and renewed his intention to marry
Libbie. “The General's proposal was as much a cavalry charge as any he ever took in the field,” she recalled. “Proposing the second time I saw him as a violent contrast to the ambling ponies of my tranquil girlhood.”
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During this visit they made a pledge to each other, short of a formal engagement.

But nothing would happen without the judge's approval, and he was not yet ready to give his daughter over to George. Father Bacon sensed something was up during the furlough and artfully dodged the topic. He saw George off at the train station, where the young suitor said he had wanted to talk to the judge but would write instead. Mr. Bacon replied, “Very well.” In Baltimore en route back to his command, George wrote Nettie that Libbie would have to intercede if there was any hope of getting her father's permission. “I feel her father, valuing her happiness, would not refuse were he to learn from her own lips our real relation to one another,” he said.
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