The Real Custer (35 page)

The Iowans sought revenge by bringing in a ringer. They got to know a sympathetic breeder in Austin who raised the finest horses in the state. He set up a race with General Custer at the city track, putting up a wager of $1,500, and quietly told the Iowans to place all the bets they could with Custer's staff. A few days before the race, a trooper went to the horse breeder, supposedly on behalf of General Custer, offering to pay the full $1,500 if he let Custer's horse win. “I was not brought up to run horses that way,” the breeder responded. “If your horse is the fastest he takes the money; if my mare is the fastest she gets it.”
⁴⁶

On the day of the race, Custer and his staff were certain of victory. The mood was light, the division band played tunes, and the officers and wives had gathered for the event. The race started and “off went the beautiful Texas horse, like an arrow from a bow,” Libbie recalled. “But our Jack, in spite of the rider sticking the spur and cruelly cutting his silken neck with the whip, only lumbered around the first curve, and in this manner laboriously made his way the rest of the distance.”
⁴⁷
The track was six hundred yards long, and the little Texas mare beat Jack Rucker by sixty feet.

“Cheer upon cheer went up from the boys and citizens assembled there to witness the race,” a soldier wrote, “intermingled with such expressions as, ‘How are you, General Custer?' ‘Couldn't steal the race this time!' ‘Why don't you make your band blow?' and many other expressions.”
⁴⁸
The mood in the general's party turned less bright, and “the General and his staff, and the band and ambulances retreated in disorder and confusion.”
⁴⁹

“Of course it was plain that we were frightfully beaten,” Libbie wrote, “and with loud and triumphant huzzas, the Texans welcomed their winning horse long before poor Jack dragged himself up to the stand.” She claimed that Jack Rucker had been drugged.
⁵⁰

In November the command moved from Hempstead to Austin, where they were generally welcomed.
⁵¹
The war had not touched Texas as it had other Confederate states, and many in the countryside refused to recognize Federal authority, or in some cases any authority. Custer's cavalry was a necessary stabilization force. “The citizens are constantly coming to pay their respects to Armstrong,” Libbie wrote. “You see, we were welcomed instead of dreaded, as, Yankees or no Yankees, a man's life is just as good, preserved by a Federal soldier as by a Confederate, and everybody seems to be in a terrified state in this lawless land.”
⁵²
They passed several months in Austin without serious incident, and the Austin
Southern Intelligencer
said that Custer “won the admiration and
esteem of all of our citizens who have been associated with him, either socially or on business.” The paper said his conduct was marked by “uniform justice, kindness and courtesy.”
⁵³

Elsewhere Custer was not regarded with such esteem. The Iowa state legislature, after investigating the whipping of Private Cure and the general treatment of the 1st Iowa Cavalry, passed a resolution denouncing “such ill-treatment as no other Iowa soldiers have ever been called upon to endure” and concluding that “such treatment or punishment was dishonorable to the General inflicting it, degrading to the name of American soldier, unworthy of the cause in which they were engaged, and in direct and flagrant violation of the laws of Congress and the rules and articles of war.”
⁵⁴

A history of the 1st Iowa Volunteer Cavalry noted that “the hero of many a mad charge [sank] into the hero of the lash, [and] justly received the indignant condemnation of the people of Iowa.” Iowa governor William M. Stone, who had risen from the rank of private to colonel in the war and had helped carry the wounded President Lincoln from Ford's Theatre to the house where he died, protested the “barbarous code adopted by the long-haired young general.” He requested his unit be mustered out. Iowan Major General Fitz Henry Warren, the editor of the
New York Tribune
who had coined the expression “On to Richmond!” in 1861, took the matter to Secretary of War Stanton personally, and the unit was allowed to disband on February 15, 1866.
⁵⁵

But by then Custer had moved on. General Order 168 of December 28, 1865, mustered out 101 volunteer major generals, brevet major generals, and brigadiers, effective January 31, 1866. (In typical U.S. government fashion, the Senate finally confirmed George as a major general of volunteers three weeks later.)
⁵⁶
The Custers left Texas by Galveston, in an old blockade runner.

“They hated us, I suppose,” Libbie reflected on the morale problems in George's command. “That is the penalty the commanding officer
generally pays for what still seems to me the questionable privilege of rank and power. Whatever they thought, it did not deter us from commending, among ourselves, the good material in those Western men, which so soon made them orderly and obedient soldiers.”
⁵⁷

Charles Bertrand Lewis, who had served in the 6th Michigan Cavalry and accompanied the “expedish
a la Custer
” with the 7th Indiana, disagreed. He wrote that the men being good soldiers was never the issue and thought it appalling that they were “brought down here and drilled and worked nearly to death after they have done their duty and now they wish to go home to their families and friends.” He said it was “a disgrace that the American Government will permit a lot of Regular Army Officers to domineer it with a high hand over American citizens who, according to their enlistment papers are free.” As for his former commander, he concluded that Custer was “a Potomac officer trying to learn western men what duty is now the war is over. Potomac and Mississippi do not agree.”
⁵⁸

CHAPTER TWENTY

THE “SWING AROUND THE CIRCLE”

C
uster now faced a challenge he had not had to consider since he was commissioned: What does a natural-born warrior do in peacetime? For his entire professional career, George Custer had only known war. He had gone from the Military Academy to the battlefield. He had thrived in the wartime environment; it was the ideal setting to harness his abilities and proclivities in the interests of the Army and his country.

But with the conflict over, Custer had to adjust to life in a very different force. Libbie said that “the stagnation of peace was being felt by those who had lived a breathless four years at the front.”
¹
Volunteer units disbanded, and the professional officers who led them reverted to their Regular Army ranks. Wartime “brevet” ranks also disappeared. Custer was a major general of volunteers and brevet major general of the Regular Army when the war ended. But when he mustered out of the volunteer
service, he was once again a Regular Army captain, and his salary dropped from $8,000 to $2,000. “Hurrah for Peace and my little Durl,” George wrote Libbie after Lee surrendered. “Can you consent to come down and be a Captain's wife?”
²

George Custer was at a critical decision point in his career. He could continue to serve in uniform, but as a noted war hero, he was offered many other opportunities. “The temptations to induce General Custer to leave the service and enter civil life began at once, and were many and varied,” Libbie wrote. After they returned to Monroe from Texas, “all sorts of suggestions were made. Business propositions, with enticing pictures of great wealth, came to him. He never cared for money for money's sake. No one that does, ever lets it slip through his fingers as he did.”
³

“I think it probable that I shall leave the army,” George wrote in March, “but will not decide till assured of success.”
⁴
At the time, he was in Washington testifying before Congress, meeting important government officials, and pondering numerous offers from artists and photographers interested in recreating his likeness. He was in great demand and could have directed his interests profitably in a number of directions, whether civilian business opportunities or a government appointment. At one point he considered seriously a post as a foreign envoy. “I would like it for many reasons,” he wrote Libbie, including the salary of $7,000 to $10,000 per year. He could have gone into politics but turned down a chance to run for Congress in Michigan in 1866—a race he certainly would have won.

“The old soldiers, and civilians also, talked openly of General Custer for Congressman or Governor,” Libbie wrote. “It was a summer of excitement and uncertainty. How could it be otherwise to a boy who, five brief years before, was a beardless youth with no apparent future before him?”
⁵
He might have had a career like his former subordinate Russell
Alger of the 5th Michigan Cavalry, who served as governor of Michigan, secretary of war, and U.S. senator.

George also had an opportunity to keep fighting. Expatriate Mexican president Benito Juárez offered Custer a major general's commission in his rebel army, which would have put him in the field against the French-backed forces of self-styled Emperor Maximilian I. The U.S. Navy had established a blockade of Mexico, and Grant and Sherman liked the idea of Custer's having a hand in defeating Maximilian's army. The offer promised high pay and high adventure. But Libbie opposed the idea, as did Secretary of State William H. Seward. He thought the move would create further diplomatic complications with the French and prevailed upon President Johnson to block the appointment.

Libbie was tempted to urge George to resign. But her father, who had originally opposed her being an Army wife, talked her out of it. “Why, daughter,” he said, “I would rather have the honor which grows out of the way in which the battle of Waynesboro was fought, than to have the wealth of the Indies. . . . My child, put no obstacles in the way to the fulfillment of his destiny. He chose his profession. He is a born soldier. There he must abide.”
⁶
Judge Bacon had fully accepted George and Libbie's relationship, and lying ill in the spring of 1866 said that she had “married entirely to her own satisfaction and to mine. No man could wish for a son-in-law more highly thought of!”
⁷
Judge Bacon passed away on May 18, casting a pall of sadness over the two families, and George rushed back to Monroe from New York to support his grieving wife. “I should be far more miserable but for Armstrong's care,” she wrote. “I do not wear deep mourning. He is opposed to it.”
⁸

Ultimately, Custer decided to continue his Army career. The postwar force was larger than the one Custer had expected to serve in while he
was a cadet at West Point. In 1866, Congress tripled the size of the small prewar Army to undertake the military occupation of the former Confederate states, meet frontier security needs, man the coastal defense force, and deter the perceived threat from French-controlled Mexico.
⁹
But the larger force did not necessarily mean ample opportunities, as there were many senior officers, professionals, and volunteers with distinguished war records, all jockeying for assignments. Once the key billets were filled, promotions would not take place until a slot opened. “Death, dismissal, resignation, and retiring from illness or from age are the causes that make vacancies,” Libbie wrote. Officers would look through the Army register to see who outranked them “and to estimate how many years it would take for those in the way to be removed, either by Divine Providence or by dismissal.”
¹⁰

Patronage had been important during the war and proved no less critical afterward. Connections—and skill in the slippery art of political infighting—could be more valuable for career advancement than a sterling war record. As Mrs. Custer noted, “though safe from the dangers of battle it did not mean peace, for that public life was usually a perpetual fight, and so often the foe in the dark.”
¹¹