The Real Custer (32 page)

After another meeting between the senior leaders, officers from both sides began congregating in the center of town. Grant recalled, “[They] came in great numbers, and seemed to enjoy the meeting as much as though they had been friends separated for a long time while fighting
battles under the same flag. For the time being it looked very much as if all thought of the war had escaped their minds.”

The gathering at Appomattox Court House on April 10 was a pantheon of American heroes unlike any in history. Grant chatted with longtime rebel friends Pete Longstreet, Harry Heth, and Cadmus Wilcox, who had been a groomsman at his wedding. Lee met with his old friend George Meade, and Colonel Theodore Lyman of Meade's staff was reunited with his Harvard classmate “Rooney” Lee. George Pickett was there, talking to his friend from their northwest frontier days Rufus Ingalls, Grant's quartermaster general and West Point roommate. Other friends and family members, rebel and Federal, high-ranking officers and orderlies, met and renewed the bonds forged in the Old Army, in civilian life before the war, or at West Point. “Great God!” Longstreet wrote. “How my heart swells out to such magnanimous touch of humanity. Why do men fight who were born to be brothers?”
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Custer was his usual ebullient self. The previous night he had two tents pitched on a hill near the McLean House, and seven of his West Point friends from Lee's army stole away to spend the night there. “I remember their embracings and the genuine hearty reception given them by the General,” one of Custer's officers recalled.
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When morning came he sought out other friends and acquaintances from both sides, sharing stories and reminiscences. Gimlet Lea was there, and Custer provided a hamper of food for him and his staff. Fitz Lee came riding into town, and Custer, who had known him as a tactical officer at West Point before facing him in many battles, grabbed him; the two wrestled on the ground laughing and rolling about like boys.

The ceremonial stacking of arms and final pass in review of the Army of Northern Virginia were yet to come, but Custer was not present for it. Later on the tenth, Sheridan assembled the cavalry and moved twenty miles east to Prospect Station, then continued toward Richmond.

Libbie Custer was also heading to the former Confederate capital. The morning of April 10, she was “awakened to more joy than I believed I would ever know by the clang of bells, whistles, calliopes, firings of cannons and the shouts of the newsboys.” She jumped from bed and ran half-dressed to hear the news of Lee's surrender. “I wanted to scream and dance with joy,” Libbie recalled.
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She was invited to accompany a delegation of members of Congress from the Committee on the Conduct of the War and their wives on a visit to Richmond. They sailed in the president's dispatch boat
Baltimore
to City Point, then were guided by Admiral Porter through the Confederate mines up the river to the city.

“It was a great relief at last to see the spires and roofs of Richmond,” Libbie wrote. The once-beautiful city was a wreck: buildings were gutted, and ruins still smoldered from the fires lit during the evacuation a week earlier. Masses of cheerful, hungry, and uncertain freed slaves roamed the streets. The delegation did some sightseeing before reboarding the
Baltimore
to continue their voyage south to Charleston. But Libbie, upset at the prospect of being “whisked off to a city she cared nothing about” when George was so near, was allowed to stay in Richmond. She spent the night in the Confederate White House, in Jefferson Davis's bed.

On her second morning in Richmond, Libbie was “awakened by the sound of a saber knocking against the stairs.” She leapt from bed and saw through the cracked door George “leaping up the stairs two at a time.” Sheridan had given George permission to travel to Richmond to meet Libbie and bring her back to the command.

“I cried, I laughed, and then I began to realize that war was over,” she recalled, “and with the sanguine heart of youth I was sure that we would never be separated again.”
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After their reunion they went to catch a train at City Point, where some officers good-naturedly chided George that “it was a pretty how-do-you-do that after four years of fighting, his wife had beaten him” to Richmond.
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Meanwhile, George's former adjutant and best man, Jacob Greene, unexpectedly showed up, having spent six months in several Confederate prison camps after his capture at Trevilian Station. He was paroled and allowed to return north, and that January he had finally married “Friend Nettie” Humphrey.
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When word came that he was officially exchanged and freed for combat duty, he rushed to the front, missing the surrender by one day. The mood was light as the division rode back north through the Virginia countryside. Even Southerners flocked to the road to see the famous Custer, waving handkerchiefs and clapping.
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Weeks later, Custer's men were encamped at Bladensburg, near Washington, D.C., preparing for the Grand Review, a two-day tribute to the victorious Union Army ordered by President Johnson. The first day, May 23, featured the troops of the Army of the Potomac, with Sherman's Army of the West the day after. The troops marched a mile and a quarter down Pennsylvania Avenue, from the Capitol to the reviewing stand outside the White House: 160,000 soldiers over two days, with six hours of parade each day. Women also marched, wives of officers and other “Daughters of the Regiment” who had helped care for the men in camps and hospitals. Horatio Nelson Taft described it as “the most magnificent spectacle of the kind ever witnessed on the continent.”
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“It was a clear, bright morning,” Joshua Chamberlain recalled, “such as had so often ushered in quite other scenes than this.”
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Several thousand school children gathered at the north end of the Capitol singing patriotic songs and giving flowers and garlands to the troops as they passed. “A mighty spectacle this,” Chamberlain wrote, “the men from far and wide, who with heroic constancy, through toils and sufferings and sacrifices that never can be told, had broken down the Rebellion, gathered to give their arms and colors and their history to the keeping of a delivered, regenerated nation.”
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President Johnson, Generals Grant and Sherman, and many other officers and cabinet members watched from the reviewing stand outside
the north porch, which was wrapped in star-spangled bunting. Grant later sketched the scene:

            
The National flag was flying from almost every house and store; the windows were filled with spectators; the door-steps and side-walks were crowded with colored people and poor whites who did not succeed in securing better quarters from which to get a view of the grand armies. The city was about as full of strangers who had come to see the sights as it usually is on inauguration day when a new President takes his seat.

Spectators were hanging from windows and sitting on rooftops along the parade route, everyone cheering and throwing flowers. Many carried umbrellas to escape the hot sun and the morning rain, which helped keep the dust down. Bands played martial tunes, horses clattered on cobblestones, officers barked commands. A sign on the Capitol proclaimed in large letters, “The only national debt we never can pay is the debt we owe to the victorious Union soldiers.”
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Still, the joyous atmosphere was tempered by remnants of a recent tragedy. The Capitol was still hung with black crepe from President Lincoln's lying in state, and the flag flew at half-staff in his honor. The flag of the Treasury Guard regiment, which had hung below the presidential box at Ford's Theatre the night Lincoln was shot, draped the portico of the Treasury Department. A large tear at the bottom of the flag showed where John Wilkes Booth's spur had caught as he jumped from the balcony before falling onto the stage and breaking his leg.

The Cavalry Corps began moving at 4:00 a.m. for the review. They paraded down Maryland Avenue, passing the Capitol then turning up Pennsylvania. The cavalry led the parade, fronted by Wesley Merritt and his staff, General Sheridan having been called to New Orleans to organize occupation forces. Custer's 3rd Division followed in a column eight
horsemen across, and behind them the rest of the Corps, eight thousand horses strong.
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Custer rode at the head of his division, leading the first combat unit in the parade of what at the time was the most powerful land army in the history of the world.

The cavalry rode on “splendid horses,” Taft wrote, “generally the officers and the Staffs rode horses which had been trained to the Service, but there was a great deal of prancing and dashing to and fro of officers on the Avenue.”
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General Sherman disagreed, grousing that Custer's cavalry “would not have passed muster on the Champ de Mars in Paris. The horses were good, the men were fine, but not good-looking for review.”
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Another observer said the cavalry review was “the shabbiest and least attractive of all. The horses of the generals and other mounted officers were fine brutes, and in excellent condition; but oh! ye unnamed rank and file, ye dragoons who charged with Sheridan and doubled up Lee's right wing at Five Forks, how did ye manage to do it with the sorry jades ye bestrode at Washington?. . . There were no curvetings, no high and boastful neigh; very tamely did they jog on, more like word-down dray-horses than the spirited chargers we had looked for.”
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Others, however, saw in the war-worn horses and their weathered riders a reflection of the hard and noble service they had undergone. Walt Whitman, who marched with his brother George and the 51st New York Volunteers, having served as a nurse in Washington, described the cavalry as he had seen them two days earlier during a review for the departing Sheridan: “[A] strong, attractive sight; the men were mostly young, (a few middle-aged,) superb-looking fellows, brown, spare, keen, with well-worn clothing, many with pieces of water-proof cloth around their shoulders, hanging down. They dash'd along pretty fast, in wide close ranks, all spatter'd with mud; no holiday soldiers; brigade after brigade. I could have watch'd for a week.”

“Custer's division, which had the advance, was the chief attraction,” one report read, “and its appearance was the signal for vociferous cheers
and continued applause. Throughout the army as well as among the people, the dashing and never-failing Custer is regarded as the Murat of the war.”
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Custer's men rode in platoon columns with drawn sabers, all wearing the crimson cravat. “His long golden locks floating in the wind,” Horace Porter recalled, “his low-cut collar, his crimson necktie, and his buckskin breeches, presented a combination which made him look half general and half scout, and gave him a daredevil appearance which singled him out for general remark and applause.”
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“General Custer, a dashing fellow with youthful look and long yellow hair, lead the cavalry,” Reverend H. M. Gallaher recalled. “The ladies near by assured us he was a very handsome officer.”
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George was at the high point of his fame as he passed up Pennsylvania Avenue to the cheers of the crowd: “Custer! Custer! Hurrah for Custer!”

The column turned up 15th Street, went around the Treasury Building, and headed for the reviewing stand. Custer doffed his hat as he passed a chorus of three hundred young ladies in white, who threw flowers as they sang “a pleasanter shower than the leaden one through which Sheridan's squadrons had so often and so boldly rode.”
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One girl tossed up a wreath of roses and evergreens, but the thorns pricked Custer's spirited mount, Don Juan, and the former racehorse reared up and bolted down the road to the cries of spectators.

The viewers were “enchained breathlessly by the thrilling event,” a reporter wrote, and the “perilous position of the brave officer.”
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Custer attempted to salute as he rocketed by the reviewing stand, dropping his hat and saber. But he stayed calm and steady in the saddle, and once he regained control of Don Juan, he turned his mount and trotted back to his men. “Round upon round of hearty applause greeted him,” said a report, and the officers and officials in the reviewing stand joined in the clapping.
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Custer's final Civil War charge had stolen the show.

Don Juan's bolting sparked a debate. One former staff officer alleged “it was merely a little theatrical display by the gallant trooper” who
afterward “pranced back to his position at the head of his column.”
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Another witness argued “the true cause of the runaway was combined in the profuse display of bunting, the sudden shouts of ten thousand people and music from several bands (on the high stands) which greeted the head of the column of the Army of the Potomac.”
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Dr. Pulaski F. Hyatt wrote Libbie that the thorny wreath had caused the problem. George himself believed the thoroughbred thought the parade was the prelude to a race, and “the moment he saw the stand the old turf days came back to his memory and the judges giving the start . . . and he was off.”
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Theatrics or not, “It was a pretty picture,” a reporter wrote.
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Another noted, “In the sunshine his locks unskeined, stream a foot behind him. . . . It is like the charge of a Sioux chieftain.”
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After passing the reviewing stand, the 3rd Division trotted back east on K Street, stopping at a field on the edge of the city. There the men lined up in their regiments “to take leave of the young and gallant General whom they had learned to follow with a perfect confidence of victory, and had learned to love as few commanders have been loved by cool-headed American soldiers.”
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George handed his hat to an aide and, along with Libbie, rode along the front of the division, followed by his colors and staff, to the cheers of each regiment as he passed.