The Real Custer (17 page)

The Federal cavalry rout was soon dubbed the “Buckland Races.” Total Union casualties in the engagement were 150 killed, wounded, and missing. It was a particularly stinging defeat for Kilpatrick, who saw his expected victory over Stuart melt away. The
Richmond Sentinel
crowed that the Union commander was “completely ruined. His command was killed, captured, or dispersed. When last heard from, he was at Alexandria, where he is supposed to have opened a recruiting-office for the enlistment of his command.”
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A Northern writer disparaged the “deplorable spectacle of the cavalry dashing hatless and panic-stricken through the ranks of the infantry.”
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Kilpatrick's favorite race horse, a thoroughbred mare named Lively, ran off and was captured by some of Mosby's raiders, who also took the Union soldiers sent to retrieve the horse. The
Sentinel
opined, “[D]riven out of Culpeper, ruined at Buckland's, the loss of his favorite mare must appear to him the ‘unkindest cut of all.'”
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Fitzhugh Lee's turnabout ploy had worked perfectly. “I am justified in declaring the rout of the enemy at Buckland the most single and complete that any cavalry has suffered during the war,” Jeb Stuart wrote. A rebel ditty, attributed to Stuart, mocked the Federal cavalry:

            
It was “the Buckland races,” far-famed through old Faquier,

            
With Stuart before their faces, Fitz Lee came in their rear,

            
And such another stampede has never yet been seen.

            
Poor Kil led off at top of speed, and many a wolverine.
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Custer lost his headquarters baggage train, including his personal papers and uniforms, which had been sent ahead by Kilpatrick's order. However, his spirited defense at the Broad Run crossing was a bright spot in an otherwise embarrassing engagement, and the humiliation landed with Kilpatrick, which fanned the smoldering enmity between the two men. Whether by luck, ability, or a combination of both, it seemed Custer could do no wrong, and Kilpatrick increasingly resented it. There was no love lost on Custer's part either. He summed up the engagement in a letter to Nettie: “All wd have been well if Genl. K. had been content to let well enough alone.”
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Custer's relations with General Pleasonton were much better. “I do not believe a father could love his son more than Genl. Pleasonton loves me,” he wrote Nettie. “You should see how gladly he welcomes me on my return from each battle. His usual greeting is, ‘Well, boy, I am glad to see you back. I was
anxious about you
.'”
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In November Pleasonton gave Custer temporary command of the 3rd Division while Kilpatrick was in Washington on court-martial duty. Custer took the opportunity to mount a probing attack along the rebel front on the Rapidan. After his cavalry fell back, an artillery duel commenced along the river, and Confederate infantry advanced. Edward A. Paul of the
New York Times
captured a scene where Custer made an unorthodox
contribution to the battle: “Gen. CUSTER, at Morton's Ford, fired two guns with his own hands at some men who occupied a rifle-pit in a position so as to annoy our advanced pickets. There were ten rebels in the rifle-pits. CUSTER's first shot struck the centre of the pit, killing or wounding all but four of the men, who ran back to another pit. His next shot fell directly among them, and persuaded them into a second flight out of sight.”
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In Paul's telling, Custer comes across as a battlefield savior, an acting division commander single-handedly firing a cannon with pinpoint accuracy and taking out a threatening enemy position. Perhaps the shots were lucky—George was thirty-first in his West Point class in artillery tactics (better than his forty-fourth place showing in cavalry tactics, which placed him below nine cadets who resigned). But this incident along the Rapidan captured the Custer spirit, his willingness, even eagerness, to do whatever needed to be done to prevail in battle, even when it often meant doing it himself. Major Kidd, who had many opportunities to see Custer in action, said he was “brave, but not reckless; self-confident, yet modest; ambitious, but regulating his conduct at all times by a high sense of honor and duty; eager for laurels, but scorning to wear them unworthily; ready and willing to act, but regardful of human life; quick in emergencies, cool and self-possessed, his courage was of the highest moral type: his perceptions were intuitions.”
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“Often I think of the vast responsibility resting on me,” George wrote Nettie around this time, “of the many lives entrusted to my keeping, of the happiness of too many households depending on my discretion and judgment.” When making a decision, he would say to himself: “‘First be sure you're right, then go ahead!' I ask myself, ‘Is it right?' Satisfied that it is so, I let nothing swerve me from my purpose.”
¹⁴

The same was true when it came to matters of the heart. George was unswerving in his pursuit of Libbie's hand, and amid the strife of battle in the fall of 1863, Custer faced one of his bravest moments—writing to Judge Bacon. After being nearly annihilated at Culpeper, the matter had become imperative. George wrote to the judge that he regretted that they had not been able to meet when he was in Monroe to address his intentions directly. He stressed that despite the previous impressions Mr. Bacon may have formed of him, he had grown as a man and officer. “It is true I have often committed errors of judgment,” he confessed, “but as I grew older I learned the necessity of propriety.” He said he had not broken his vow of temperance “with God to witness.” George tried to make the case that he was responsible, mature, and “always had a purpose in life.”
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Naturally, Custer fretted about how Judge Bacon would respond. He was also vexed by a young woman in Monroe named Fanny who had taken a shine to him and used her wiles to make Libbie jealous. “I am not surprised at Fanny's telling that my likeness is in her locket,” he wrote to Nettie, on one of many exchanges regarding the prospective usurper. “I would be surprised at nothing she chooses to do.” He worried too about Libbie's cousin Albert Bacon weighing in against him “because of his strong attachment for Libbie.” But he stayed positive. “I am happy, happy in her love. Nothing can deprive me of that happiness, and I shall adhere to my long-established custom of looking on the bright side of things.”
¹⁶

After a few nervous weeks, Judge Bacon sent what Custer called a “straightforward and manly letter.” It was lengthy, admiring, but nevertheless vague and noncommittal. “What does he mean?” George wrote Nettie in frustration.
¹⁷
He sent a reply to the judge asking flat out if he and Libbie could begin corresponding directly. His answer came in a letter from Libbie opening, “My more than friend—at last.”
¹⁸

Once Judge Bacon consented to the relationship between Custer and his daughter, he thought they should be wed soon. “You must not keep Armstrong waiting,” he counseled Libbie, and of course George agreed. But Libbie intended to take things slowly. “Neither you nor he can know what preparations are needed for such an Event,” she wrote her fiancé, “an Event it takes at least a year to prepare for.”
¹⁹
Libbie was concerned that her mother had not fully signed off on the idea. “She is becoming reconciled,” she wrote Custer, “but it is not resignation I want, but wholehearted consent.”
²⁰
By Christmas, however, both parents were clearly happy with the romance. George sent a large photograph of himself to them to give to Libbie as a gift, and they secretly put it in her room and waited for her to discover it. “Father and mother were so excited, they thought I would never go upstairs to my room,” Libbie wrote.
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Libbie also began to give ground on her yearlong timeline, because she was growing more certain of their future happiness. “I have often said because I love so many I could never greatly love one,” she wrote George in December. “Foolish girl I was.”
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But she also fretted that the “worst about loveing [
sic
] a soldier is that he is as likely to die as to live,” and they might not have a year to wait.
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She eventually consented to a wedding in late winter.

“I am coming home in February for the purpose of getting married,” Custer wrote to Isaac P. Christiancy, then an associate justice on the Michigan Supreme Court. “Libbie Bacon is the fortunate or unfortunate person, whichever it will be, who will unite her destinies with mine.”
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Isaac's son Jim was a lieutenant serving as an aide in the 9th Michigan Cavalry and planned to accompany George back for the wedding. But the wedding plans were still a family secret, and he asked Christiancy to keep it to himself.

In the rush of events, George forgot to ask his own father's consent to wed. Father Custer, of course, was in favor, even with Judge Bacon's
first-rate Republican credentials. The Custers had moved to Monroe, and over the winter the two families got to know each other well.

Libbie had consented to marry quickly, but it would still be a major social event. She sent to New York for silks and trimmings for her dress and arranged an elaborate bridal tour. She wanted George to appear in full dress uniform, and to cut his hair. Her mother counseled there were some advantages to giving up on the dream wedding; with her first husband she agreed to hasten the ceremony, and she said she “always had my own way afterwards, in Everything!”
²⁵

When George left for the wedding, his officers gathered to wish him well. “Thank you, gentlemen,” he said. “I'm going out to the Department of the West to get a command, or a new commander, and I don't know which.”
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Friend Nettie wrote in one of her final missives before the wedding, “You are worthy of her, the highest compliment I could pay you.”
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The February 9 wedding date finally arrived. “There came to us such marveling,” Libbie recalled, “that anyone ever dared to marry when perhaps a few months, as with us, of only occasional, hurried, and tremulous meetings on my part constituted our knowledge of each other.”
²⁸
George and Libbie were joined in the Presbyterian Church by Dr. Boydon at 8:00 p.m. Hundreds turned out for the wedding, the crowd overflowing outside the church. Libbie wore a rich white silk dress with an extensive train and a veil decorated with orange blossoms. George was in the dress uniform of a brigadier general. With Libbie were Nettie and her friends Anna Darrah and Marie Miller. Standing with George were Captain Jacob Greene of his staff, who was engaged to Nettie; Conway Noble, who had introduced Libbie and George on Thanksgiving in 1862; and John Bulkley, George's deskmate from Stebbins' Academy. “All went off remarkably well, and no mistake made,” Judge Bacon wrote to his sister Charity. “It was said to be the most splendid
wedding ever seen in the State.”
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The families and three hundred guests then retired to the Bacon home for the reception, which went long into the night. “The occasion was delightful, hilarious and social,” Libbie's cousin Rebecca Richmond wrote.

For many it was the first time they were able to meet or spend any time with George, whom they had known only by reputation. Those who came expecting a vainglorious, pompous young general were pleasantly surprised. “Not one of us was prepossessed in [Custer's] favor,” Rebecca said, “but in no time everyone pronounced him a ‘trump'. . . . He isn't one bit foppish or conceited. He does not put on airs. He is a simple, frank, manly fellow.”
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The bridal party left at midnight for Cleveland, where a reception was held by family friend Charles Noble, a trustee of the Young Ladies Seminary who had handed Libbie her diploma a few years earlier. They then went to Buffalo, stopped in Onandaga to visit Libbie's Aunt Charity and her husband, and continued east to New York City.

Once in the city, Custer received telegrams urging him to return early. But because the messages were not direct orders, and he wanted to continue the honeymoon Libbie had planned, he took his new bride to West Point. The Hudson was frozen, so they went first by train, then by sled, which George helped push over the icy, rough roads. The Military Academy, Custer's former “rock-bound highland home,” charmed Libbie. “I never dreamed there was so lovely a place in the United States,” Libbie wrote her father.
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George was the returned prodigal son, and Libbie noted that “everyone was delighted to see Autie. Even the dogs welcomed him.”
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The superintendent was still Alexander H. Bowman, who had signed George's diploma. Some cadets knew him—as plebes they had suffered Custer's pranks. William Ludlow was in that class, for whom Custer had interceded the day before graduation to ensure a fair fight, and been court-martialed. George showed Libbie the grounds and
buildings, the guardhouse and yard where he spent many hours suffering various punishments, and introduced her to some of the cadets from his day who were yet to graduate and to professors who had followed his rise with some pride and not a little amazement. “Custer! A General!” exclaimed one professor's wife. “Not that Cadet who used to tie tin pans to my dog's tail?” George was a bit miffed with Libbie for allowing some cadets to show her flirtation walk, but overall the visit was a success, and Libbie said that after visiting West Point she realized she had “married a man of distinction.”
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