The Real Custer (21 page)

Custer's men moved forward against some light resistance. He quickly discovered he was not seven hundred yards from the station, but close to two miles. Undeterred, Custer moved up the tracks, and as he closed on the station, scouts reported Confederate supply wagons ahead, from Hampton's baggage train. He ordered Colonel Alger and the 5th Michigan to take the wagons. He sent the 6th Michigan in support, when rebel troops suddenly appeared to their rear and charged. Custer counterattacked and drove the enemy troops off, pressing on toward the
station. But there he found more rebel troops with a battery to the right of the road. He charged them with the 7th Michigan, sending word to the 1st Michigan, which was delayed at the end of the column, to come up rapidly. But “this regiment was found fully employed in holding the enemy,” he wrote, “who were making a vigorous assault on our rear.” The 5th Michigan, which had charged too far while pursuing Hampton's rear guard, was cut off by fresh rebel forces coming onto the field under Rosser from Hampton's division. The Confederates retook the station, and there was still no sign of Merritt's and Devin's brigades, which were fighting through the woods.

Custer had a serious problem. “I was compelled to take up a position near the station from which I could resist the attacks of the enemy,” he wrote, “which were now being made on my front, right, left, and rear.” He found himself sandwiched between two rebel divisions—Hampton's, which was also engaging the main column, and Fitz Lee's, which had come up the tracks behind Hampton, unbeknownst to Sheridan.

Custer quickly consolidated what forces he could and established a defensive ring. “The smallness of my force compelled me to adopt very contracted lines,” he wrote. “From the nature of the ground and the character of the attacks that were made upon me our lines resembled very nearly a circle.” His men were in open terrain and lacking cover, with his entire position in range of the enemy's guns. The position was so small and precarious that the rebels had to restrict fire for fear of overshooting into their own units on the other side.

Rebel units charged and were repulsed. Custer had to keep shifting his position to keep a cohesive defensive line. A Southern newspaper report captured the chaos of the scene: “A regiment of Yankees went tearing down the road, and into the dust which rose in clouds around them, darted Col. Waring with his ‘Jeff Davis Legion' in hot pursuit. Close on
his
rear pressed another Yankee regiment, followed by one of Rosser's—all thundering along together!”
¹⁷
The Federal officer in charge
of the captured rebel wagon train sought to move to a safer position and wound up delivering the haul back to the enemy. (He was later relieved.) Rebels took Custer's headquarters wagon, also capturing his cook, Eliza, a freed slave who had joined George's camp around the time he was made a brigadier. Custer's aide and best man, Jacob Greene, was captured, and when a Confederate took Greene's spurs at Hampton's headquarters, he announced proudly, “You have the spurs of General Custer's Adjutant-General.”

George was in the thick of the fight. When a trooper from the 5th Michigan was shot down in an exposed position, he ran out and picked him up to take him to safety. A rebel sharpshooter fired at Custer during the rescue, and the spent ball glanced off his head, stunning him briefly but otherwise leaving him unharmed.
¹⁸
Custer's standard-bearer, Sergeant Mitchell Beloir, was wounded but did not leave the line until overcome with blood loss. “General they have killed me,” he said. “Take the flag!” Beloir rode off to die, and George tore the flag from its staff and stuffed it into his shirt.
¹⁹

The rebels were pressing on all sides. One group seized a cannon and began to roll it off the field. Pennington reached Custer and said, “General they have taken one of my guns.”

“No! Damned if they have!” Custer replied, and with Pennington and a few other men in tow furiously charged the piece and took it back.
²⁰

The rest of the command under Torbert and Gregg was still slogging through the woods north of Custer's position. “The men fought desperately,” Torbert wrote, “but it was hard to drive the enemy from his cover, as my men could not see their foe.”
²¹
They had no word from the Michigan Brigade but had heard the sound of musketry and guns from the direction of the station all morning long. They eventually powered their way through the woods, and, reaching open ground overlooking Custer's fight, they saw the Wolverines surrounded and in dire straits. Torbert
and Gregg's men redoubled their efforts and forced Hampton's men back onto Custer's line. The scene grew even more chaotic as rebel units began to break to escape being surrounded themselves. “The Yankees swarmed over the whole country,” according to one Southern account. The rebels drew their guns up “into the form of a hollow square, and blazed away in all directions.”
²²

“So panic-stricken was [Hampton's] division and so rapidly was it pushed that some of it was driven through Custer's lines, and many captured,” Sheridan recalled.
²³
Hampton's force retired up the tracks, and Gregg's division drove Lee's troops back down the rail line toward Louisa Courthouse. Custer's brigade was saved.

That night the Union forces camped on the battlefield in exhaustion. Eliza had escaped her rebel captors in the confusion of the fight and returned. The elements of the 5th Michigan who had been cut off early in the battle eventually turned up after fighting through the rebels and riding a wide circuit back to the main body.

The next day, Sheridan's men set about destroying Trevilian Station and what railroad tracks they could. Overnight, Lee's men had circled around the Union force to join Hampton's division, blocking the way west. Late in the day on the twelfth, Torbert mounted a reconnaissance in force against the rebels, who were emplaced behind breastworks two miles away. After a series of fruitless charges, the Union forces pulled back.

From prisoners Sheridan learned that General Hunter, commanding Union forces in the Shenandoah, was near Lexington, not Charlottesville as he had thought. So, facing a strong, roused enemy deep in their territory, short on ammunition, and with supplies uncertain, Sheridan withdrew to the east.
²⁴
The trip back was arduous; Sheridan was hampered by his train, the wounded, and hundreds of former slaves who spontaneously joined the Federal column from surrounding farms and plantations. They reached their start line by June 20.

Sheridan declared Trevilian a victory, even though he had suffered over one thousand casualties, compared with over eight hundred by the Confederates. The damage to the rail line was repaired in two weeks, foiling that aspect of the plan. And he came nowhere near Hunter's force. It was only a win in that he avoided a major disaster and escaped with his command relatively intact.

Grant's report suggested that Custer intentionally got surrounded so “when the assault was made, the enemy found himself at the same time resisted in front and attacked in rear, and broke in some confusion.”
²⁵
George wrote, in words presaging a battle then twelve years distant, “My Brigade was completely surrounded, and attacked on all sides. Had the others been prompt we would have struck the greatest blow inflicted by our cavalry.”
²⁶
He had lost all of his personal belongings except what he carried in battle and his toothbrush. Libbie's love letters were gone, and she later learned from a former POW at Libby Prison that, to her mortification, the surgeon there had been reading them. In a later battle, when Custer's men captured rebel Brigadier General Thomas T. Munford's baggage, Custer had the personal letters tied up and put off-limits to save his enemy the same embarrassment.
²⁷

The first Libbie knew of the Trevilian raid was in the newspapers. “The
Herald
says you are gone on a dangerous expedition, again,” she wrote to her husband on June 10.
²⁸
Libbie followed the war closely while living in Washington and came to know the rhythms of the city that portended a fight. Before the Overland Campaign kicked off in May, she noted the large numbers of troops and supply trains moving through the city. She said the “silence in the papers shows that a great battle is expected.”
²⁹

Libbie said that Army marriages were happy because “there were so often, in those days of oft-occurring separations, repeated honeymoons.”
³⁰
George told her that when it came to reports from the front, “no news is good news.”
³¹
Sometimes the bad news was unavoidable, even if it was wrong. After the Battle of Trevilian Station, Congressman Bingham heard that Custer was dead and went to Secretary of War Stanton to confirm it. Learning George was alive, he rushed to Libbie and “found her pale and trembling. She had heard the newsboys under her windows crying ‘Custer killed. All about Custer being killed.'”
³²
Three times that summer, she heard reports of George being dead.

Wives of soldiers living in the city kept a close watch on the War Department, where a special flag was flown announcing battlefield victories. This was not necessarily good news, since victories always came at a high cost. Many casualties of battles fought in Virginia were taken to hospitals and cemeteries in and around Washington. “This is the saddest city,” Libbie wrote her parents, “with maimed and bandaged soldiers in the streets, and the slow-moving government hearses.”
³³
She took a dim view of Washington in general, with its loose morals and no-go areas where unescorted women might be mugged, or taken for the wrong kind of lady. “This city is a Sodom,” she wrote, “crowded with sin which the daylight sees as well as the night.”
³⁴

After seeing President Lincoln at the theater, Libbie described him as “the gloomiest, most painfully careworn looking man I ever saw,” and Mrs. Lincoln was “short, squatty and plain.” But at a crowded White House reception, the president recognized her. “So this is the young woman whose husband goes into a charge with a whoop and a shout,” he said, as they shook hands in the receiving line. “I am quite a Lincoln girl now,” she told her parents afterward.
³⁵

In July, Michigan senator Zachariah Chandler invited Libbie to accompany a party of dignitaries taking the president's boat to the Union supply depot at City Point, at the head of the James between Richmond and Petersburg. She eagerly consented, having been separated from George for two months. The craft “seemed to crawl” down the Potomac,
and a sightseeing stop at Fortress Monroe only increased Libbie's impatience. She wondered how she would get in touch with George when she got to the port, since she had not been able to send word in advance. But soon after the ship arrived, George appeared, standing in a small boat headed toward them, shouting and waving his hat to the cheers of the people at the rails. He bounded on the ship, ignoring the high-ranking dignitaries, “perfectly fearless in rushing for me as soon as he leapt on deck,” Libbie recalled, “lifting me in [the] air, and overwhelming me with demonstrations of affection.”
³⁶
Poet Caroline Dana Howe of Maine witnessed the scene and immortalized it in verse:

            
Out from the shore, a boat! A boat!

            
With glistening oars, see, see! Custer there!

            
Erect and firm, with locks afloat,

            
With folded arms, and martial air.

            
Our very breaths we almost check,

            
His coming had for her such charms:

            
One leap, he stands upon the deck,

            
And has her in his brave, young arms.
³⁷

Soon other officers joined the party, and they danced on the deck to the music of Sheridan's band, against the booming of the Union siege guns bombarding Petersburg.

CHAPTER TWELVE

INTO THE VALLEY