The Real Custer (10 page)

In late March 1862, at the onset of the Peninsula Campaign, Custer sailed from Alexandria to Fortress Monroe, where he was assigned to be assistant to Lieutenant Nicholas Bowen, Class of 1860, chief engineer for Brigadier General William F. “Baldy” Smith's division. During this period Custer achieved the distinction of becoming one of the first Army aviators. The Union Army Balloon Corps, under the leadership of Thaddeus S. C. Lowe, gave Federal commanders unprecedented intelligence on enemy positions and troop movements. Some, however, questioned the value of the expensive balloons and their highly paid civilian technicians. Since Lowe owned and operated the balloons, his men could
“report whatever their imagination prompted them to,” Custer wrote, “with no fear of contradiction,” thus ensuring their “profitable employment.”
¹⁴

To check this potential conflict of interest, the Army decided to send officers aloft, and General Smith chose Custer to make the ascents. It was “an order which was received with no little trepidation,” he wrote, “for although I had chosen the mounted service from preference alone, yet I had a choice as to the character of the mount, and the proposed ride was far more elevated than I had ever desired or contemplated.”
¹⁵
He noted an event a few weeks earlier, when General Fitz John Porter ascended in a balloon and the tether rope broke, sending him on a three-mile drift over enemy lines and back until he leaked enough hydrogen from the balloon to make a rough landing in a tree. At Bull Run, a Confederate battery from the New Orleans Lafayette Artillery, commanded by his old friend Thomas Rosser, put a ball through some of the ropes holding the gondola of a Union balloon, forcing the craft down.
¹⁶

Custer's first trip—which he made sitting nervously in the small basket—went without incident, and in time he was making almost daily ascents.
¹⁷
On the night of May 3–4, 1862, Custer observed heavy fires in the vicinity of Yorktown. Going up again on the morning of May 4, 1862, he noted that there were no expected campfires behind the Confederate lines. Custer informed General Smith the rebels had abandoned their positions, confirming intelligence Smith had just received from two “contrabands” who had wandered into the Union camp.

Union forces, led by Stoneman's cavalry, surged ahead, until being stopped by a dug-in rebel rear-guard at Fort Magruder under the command of James Longstreet, two miles from Williamsburg. During this movement Custer rode out ahead of the column and ran into a rebel cavalry rear-guard at Skiff's Creek. He exchanged fire with the horsemen, who retreated, leaving the bridge over the creek burning. Custer rushed ahead to put out the fire, blistering his hands in the process.

The Union right was held by one of Smith's brigades, commanded by Brigadier General Winfield Scott Hancock. Custer volunteered to join Hancock's force for the expected advance. The next morning, May 5, it appeared that rebel forces had abandoned a position across a dam to their front. Hancock assembled a volunteer force to take the rebel works, covered by artillery and infantry in case the position was still defended. But as the troops arrived for the assault, they saw that Custer and a captain had already ridden across and occupied the enemy trenches.

General Joe Hooker, on the Union left before Fort Magruder, kept the enemy busy while Hancock advanced. After a sharp action, Hancock's men occupied two enemy redoubts, seriously compromising the rebel defensive line. He sensed an opportunity to close the trap on Longstreet; instead, he was told to withdraw.

Hancock delayed his withdrawal several hours, hoping Sumner would change his mind. Late in the afternoon, when he was reluctantly preparing to pull back, rebel forces mounted a sudden, concerted assault. After a series of opening skirmishes, four heavy lines of Confederate troops emerged across level ground in front of Hancock's ridge crest position, “giving the Federal troops an opportunity, for the first time, of hearing the Southern yell,” Custer recalled.
¹⁸
He watched the rebels “advancing rapidly and confidently” as Hancock, on horseback, rode the line encouraging his troops.

The enemy crossed over half a mile uncontested to within three hundred yards, then opened up. Hancock's men returned fire, and Custer said the “exultant yell of the Southron met an equally defiant response from his countrymen of the North.”
¹⁹
Charging against lines of Union infantry, “the Confederates were losing ten to one of the Federals,” Custer recalled, but they kept coming.
²⁰

The rebels closed to within twenty paces when they finally began to falter under the ceaseless fire from Hancock's line. Sensing the enemy was vulnerable, Hancock, “as if conducting guests to a banquet rather
than fellow beings to a life-and-death struggle,” Custer recalled, issued the order, “
Gentlemen
, charge with the bayonet.” The Union line surged ahead, with Custer joining in. The rebels broke before the onrushing Union force, and Custer took six prisoners and “the first battle flag captured from the enemy by the Army of the Potomac.”
²¹
The banner, from the 5th North Carolina Infantry, was given to French observer François d'Orléans, prince of Joinville, son of the French king Louis Philippe, to return to McClellan's headquarters. Joinville, a combat veteran in his own right who would come to know Custer well, said he “entertained so high an opinion, from the first day I met him, that I am proud of his achievements. I mean Custer. He is a noble fellow.”
²²
Both Hancock and Baldy Smith praised Custer for his initiative and daring over those several days that began up in a balloon.

With the Confederate forces retreating toward Richmond, the Union troops advanced to the Chickahominy River. McClellan's chief engineer, Brigadier General John G. Barnard, called the river “one of the most formidable obstacles that could be opposed to the advance of the army.”
²³
But Custer noted that while the river was “chargeable with some of the misfortunes of the Army of the Potomac, [it] was almost literally a stepping-stone for my personal advancement.”
²⁴

The Chickahominy was not broad or swift, but it flowed through belts of forested swamp three to four hundred yards wide, and in the spring flood the river would spread across the entire area. The land was soft and spongy, unsuited for major military movements. There were a few widely separated and well-defended bridges. General Barnard was told that otherwise the river was not fordable.

The idea that the Chickahominy could not be crossed did not impress Custer. Given a scouting detail three-quarters of a mile below New Bridge, he found a good approach to the bank and waded right into the river. The water was four feet deep, but the bottom was firm, and Custer was able to cross without difficulty. A few days later, he made
a more dangerous scout, wading from near the bridge downstream for half a mile, risking fire from enemy pickets who apparently did not see him.

Having determined that the river was crossable, McClellan ordered a reconnaissance in force to prove that operations could be conducted there. On the rainy morning of May 24, Custer and Lieutenant Nicholas Bowen led a picked force of seventy-five men from Companies A and B of the 4th Michigan Infantry to the ford site. The men of A Company were from George's adopted hometown of Monroe. They crossed the river, then moved in a skirmish line toward the bridge, with the rest of the 4th following on the other bank.

The area was defended by the Fifth Louisiana and Tenth Georgia regiments, and Manley's battery of artillery. The rebels in the vicinity outnumbered the attacking force four to one. But Custer's raiders had the element of surprise, and they rushed the rebel outposts near the bridge, overwhelming the defenders, capturing many, and chasing those who broke back toward their camps. Custer grabbed a large bowie knife from one of the prisoners and brandished it to the regiment across the river.

“The Rebels say we can't stand cold steel,” he shouted. “I captured this from one of them. Forward and show them that the Michigan boys will give them all the cold steel they want!”
²⁵

The 4th fired a volley at the rallying rebels and pushed across the river. The bridge had been fired so the men waded through the armpit-deep water holding their bayoneted muskets and cartridges above their heads. The Union troops began firing from a bridgehead in a ditch behind a fence, knee-deep in water, but as ammunition ran low and rebel artillery appeared, the Union force withdrew, taking thirty-five prisoners with them. The attacking Federals lost only one killed and seven wounded, against twenty-seven killed, twenty-six wounded, and forty-three missing on the Confederate side.

In his report of the action, Lieutenant Bowen praised Custer, saying he was “the first to cross the stream, the first to open fire upon the enemy, and one of the last to leave the field.”
²⁶
General Barnard said that the “attack and capture of the enemy's pickets by [Second Lieutenant Custer] and Lieutenant Bowen was founded upon these reconnaissances, to which the successful results are due.”
²⁷
In a note to Secretary of War Stanton, General McClellan noted that Custer and Bowen made “a very gallant reconnaissance” and that the recon force “handled [the rebels] terribly.”
²⁸

After the action, McClellan sent for Custer to thank him for his efforts, and recalled him as “a slim, long-haired boy, carelessly dressed.” He was fresh from the engagement and covered in Chickahominy mud. The general thanked Custer and asked what he could do for him. Custer “replied very modestly that he had nothing to ask, and evidently did not suppose that he had done anything to deserve extraordinary reward.” McClellan then offered Custer a position as his aide-de-camp at the rank of Captain of Volunteers, and George “brightened up and assured me that he would regard such service as the most gratifying he could perform.”

“McClellan had, by a rare power peculiar to him, in that short interview, won Custer's unfailing loyalty and affection,” recalled Lieutenant Willard Glazier, of the 2nd New York Cavalry, “and when Custer was asked afterwards how he felt at the time, his eyes filled with tears, and he said: ‘
I felt I could have died for him.
'”
²⁹

CHAPTER FIVE

“I PROMISE THAT YOU SHALL HEAR OF ME”

M
cClellan liked Custer as “a reckless, gallant boy, undeterred by fatigue, unconscious of fear” whose “head was always clear in danger,” and who “always brought me clear and intelligible reports of what he saw when under the heaviest fire. I became much attached to him.”
¹
Custer, likewise, admired McClellan. But they were in many ways opposites. Where Custer was the goat of his West Point class, McClellan graduated second in the Class of 1846. Where Custer was bold and spontaneous, McClellan was cautious and methodical. Both, however, were men of strong will and independent spirit, which could also be taken as arrogance and feed the resentment of rivals. Custer believed that McClellan's wartime failures were not the fault of the general, whom he considered a master strategist. Rather, he thought they were imposed by Washington politicians who conspired against him. “Few persons can realize or believe at this late day the extent
of the opposition which McClellan encountered from those from whom his strongest support and encouragement should have come,” Custer wrote long after the war. “This opposition was well known at the time; in fact there was little if any effort to conceal it.”
²

Custer was with “Little Mac” as the general's ambitious plan to take Richmond and defeat the rebellion was itself defeated. The Federal advance was blunted five miles from Richmond on May 31, 1862, at the Battle of Seven Pines. The Confederate commander, General Joseph E. Johnston, was wounded and eventually replaced by Robert E. Lee, who, though outnumbered, went on the offensive during the Seven Days' Battles, taking place from June 25 to July 1. The Confederates suffered almost twice the number of Union killed and wounded, but Lee's string of victories demoralized McClellan's army, ended his Peninsula Campaign, and undermined his already soft political support in Washington. The Federals still had considerable forces in the field, backed onto Malvern Hill on the James River, but McClellan was effectively paralyzed as a commander, and the threat to Richmond was over.

On August 5, McClellan sent a three-hundred-man reconnaissance in force toward the White Oak Swamp Bridge, about four miles from Malvern Hill. Custer was part of a twenty-five-man advance force with orders to “dash at once upon the enemy as soon as he should be discovered” and to “engage to the best advantage while the main body was being brought up.” Near the bridge, the shock troops encountered thirty to forty men of the 10th Virginia Cavalry and fell on them with a fury. They killed three and captured twenty-two, and the rest dispersed. While part of the Federal detachment rushed ahead to capture the bridge, Custer and Lieutenant Byrnes “took the road to the left toward Malvern Hill, chasing, shooting, or capturing all the pickets that came from that direction.” When the Confederates formed for a counterattack, the Federals withdrew. Colonel William W. Averell, commander of the 3rd
Pennsylvania Cavalry, later commended “the gallant and spirited conduct of Captain Custer and Lieutenant Byrnes.”
³