The Real Custer (33 page)
Authors: James S Robbins
In a voice choked with emotion and with tears in his eyes, Custer thanked his troops for their courage, loyalty, and kindness. “I shall now leave you for another field,” he said, “but before doing so I take pleasure in transferring this standard, which you have so bravely followed, to the hands of General Capehart, than whom you cannot ask a more gallant and capable commander. Farewell! God bless you!”
The band struck up “Auld Lang Syne,” and George, Libbie, and an escort rode off toward the Capitol.
THE “LONG-HAIRED HERO OF THE LASH”
I
n the summer of 1865, George, Libbie, and Eliza went south to join Sheridan's new command in the Military Division of the Southwest in Texas. The Custers traveled west by train then south by riverboat, meeting homeward-bound Confederate General John Bell Hood along the way. During a stop in New Orleans, they were warmly received by General Winfield Scott, then seventy-nine years old and nearing the end. He died the following May at West Point.
Sheridan met them in his mansion headquarters. He had left Washington before the Grand Review due to the perceived urgency of the situation in Texas, where the rebellion had lingered. Confederate units under General Edmund Kirby Smith had kept up the fight after Lee's surrender, and the last battle of the war, at Palmito Ranch, took place a month after Appomattox. Even when Kirby Smith fled to Mexico after negotiating his army's surrender on May 26, there were concerns that
conditions in Texas would remain chaotic. Sheridan wrote that “there is not a very wholesome state of affairs in Texas. The Governor, all the soldiers, and the people generally are disposed to be ugly.”
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Grant believed that “the whole State should be scoured to pick up Kirby Smith's men and the arms carried home by them,” but given the size of the state and the few Federal troops on hand, this was clearly impossible.
2
Some also worried the French-backed government in Mexico might take advantage of the volatility in Texas to press claims to lands lost twenty years earlier in the Mexican War. Sheridan wrote Grant of the “rascality of the Rio Grande frontier,” where there was “no government and a questionable protectorate.” He believed that “this portion of the late rebellion should be crushed out in a manly way and with the power of a great nation, as a contrast to this French subterfuge to assist in the attempt to ruin our country.”
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Sheridan planned a show of force to quell any military action by unruly Texans, the French, or the Mexicans. He planned to send two columns west: 5,000 men under Wesley Merritt, riding from the Shreveport to Austin, and 4,500 under Custer, heading from Alexandria, Louisiana, to Houston. If necessary, they were to unite with Merritt in San Antonio to form a division for movement south. The troops were to carry pontoon bridges “to cross streams on the line of march, and for the additional object of being able to cross the Rio Grande.”
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When Custer arrived in Alexandria on June 23, 1865, he took command of five cavalry regiments: the 7th Indiana, 1st Iowa, 5th and 12th Illinois, and 2nd Wisconsin. He might have expected he could immediately take up with the style of command he used with his old division. But these troops had fought mostly in the West during the war, under their familiar officers. All they knew of Custer was what they read in the papers. Custer had not shared their hardships or bled with them.
There were no battles looming where Custer could prove his mettle. The war was over. President Johnson had declared an end to hostilities
on May 10, 1865, when Jefferson Davis was captured, and again on June 13. But he excepted Texas, where the rebellion would continue into August 1866. This technicality, however, made no impression on the men serving in the volunteer regiments. With the rebel armies disbanded and the Confederate government dissolved, they expected to go home. “Now that the war was ended,” Philip E. Francis of Company B, 1st Iowa Cavalry wrote, “and we were to separate in a few days, never again to meet as a military body, never again to live over those experiences which had made us a band of brothers, the future of each seemed the concern of all and plan-making was mutual. We were all heartily glad the end of the bloody contest had come, yet loth to separate.”
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Troops gathered at Memphis fully expecting to board ships headed north. But when the transports heaved downriver instead of up, “then the men
did
yell,” one reporter wrote. “The men were madâand pandemonium
was
let loose, but nevertheless down the broad bosom of the Mississippi we glidedâdestination unknown.”
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“Tired out with the long service,” an officer recalled, “weary with an uncomfortable journey by river from Memphis, sweltering under a Gulf-coast sun, under orders to go farther and farther from home when the war was over, the one desire was to be mustered out and released from a service that became irksome and baleful when a prospect of crushing the enemy no longer existed.”
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Worse than not going home, the men learned that they might be sent into a war they had not volunteered to fight. Rumors that they might be part of an invasion of Mexico had a ruinous effect on troop morale. “A feeling amounting almost to mutiny existed throughout the command,” Custer wrote, “occasioned by their determined opposition to remain longer in the service, and particularly was this opposition heightened by an impression that they were to be required to go to Mexico, a measure that they would not consent to under any circumstances. They claimed that they had enlisted for the present war, that the war was over,
and that they were entitled to their discharge from service.”
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Many promptly deserted.
Custer's column remained in Alexandria until July, awaiting horses and equipment for the expedition. This delay created problems. The men had too much time on their hands, no pay, and meager supplies. There was none of the discipline imposed by facing an enemy army with prospects of battle. Returning Confederates, unhappy with the war's outcome and the impact of the struggle on their homes, came home to find Yankee troops roaming the streets. There was also the challenge of caring for freed slaves who had no guidance about what to do or where to go, seeking food and other forms of relief with no sympathy from the locals and no established Federal infrastructure to support them. “Between the troublesome negroes, the unsubdued Confederates, and the lawless among our own soldiers, life was by no means an easy problem to solve,” Libbie wrote.
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Custer had to deal with the types of complex problems that over a century later would be called the “Three Block War,” requiring him to serve as soldier, diplomat, and humanitarian relief worker simultaneously.
Sheridan sent glowing reports back to Washington, claiming that “the columns of cavalry which start from Shreveport and Alexandria . . . are perhaps the best equipped and handsomest of the war.”
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Custer's inspector general, James W. Forsyth, had a different view of the handsome troops: “Robbery, plundering and murdering was of daily occurrence,” he wrote, “and nearly the entire division was in open mutiny.”
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“The conduct of these troops while at Alexandria was infamous,” Custer recalled,
           Â
and rendered them a terror to the inhabitants of that locality, and a disgrace to this or any other service. Highway robbery was of frequent occurrence each day. Farmers bringing cotton
or other produce to town were permitted to sell it and then robbed in open daylight upon the streets of the townâthis, too, in the presence or view of other soldiers than those perpetrating these acts. No citizen was safe in his own home, either during the day or night. Bands of soldiers were constantly prowling about the surrounding country for a distance of twenty or thirty miles, robbing the inhabitants indiscriminately of whatever they chose, and not unfrequently these squads of soldiers who were so absent from camp, not only in violation of orders but of articles of war, were accompanied by officers.
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The supply problem was critical. Clothes and uniforms were dilapidated, pants frayed from the knee down, shirts torn and tattered (if worn at all in the subtropical heat), boots worn out. “It was with the greatest difficulty that they could be made to wear any clothing,” Forsyth wrote. “When I joined, large numbers of the men were riding horses about the country, and to water, with nothing on their persons but a pair of drawers and an undershirt, and a chip or straw hat. In this disgusting way they rode through the streets of Alexandria. A lady could not appear on the streets.”
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An officer explained to Custer that “the boys think they ought to be allowed to go home, and if not allowed to go home they ought to have a little liberty.” Custer interpreted this “liberty” as “unrestrained permission to go where they pleased and rob whoever came in their way.”
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Custer quickly and harshly sought to impose order on his raucous command. Three deserters who had been captured and one man who had engaged in mutiny were sentenced to death. The mutineer, Sergeant L. L. Lancaster of the 2nd Wisconsin, had a grudge against their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Dale. He had ordered Dale to take a boat and leave the command, also intending to send Custer off, “and
if he did not go quietly they would make him go or throw him in the river.”
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On the day of the execution, the command was assembled in a square, and the prisoners led in. “The wagon, drawn by four horses, bearing the criminals sitting on their coffins, followed at a slow pace, escorted by the guard and the firing-party, with reversed arms,” Libbie wrote of the sanguinary scene. “The coffins were placed in the centre of the square, and the men seated upon them at the foot of their open graves. Eight men, with livid countenances and vehemently beating hearts, took their places in front of their comrades, and looked upon the blanched, despairing faces of those whom they were ordered to kill.”
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