The Real Custer (12 page)

Custer wanted to be appointed colonel of a state volunteer regiment. These posts were plum positions that often went to those with political pull. Custer was hampered by his Democratic background, his close
association with the politically unpopular McClellan, and his lack of ties to Republicans beyond Congressman Bingham. Custer sent letters of recommendation from Generals Ambrose Burnside, George Stoneman, and Joseph Hooker to the Republican governor of Michigan, Austin Blair, but to no avail. Custer noted, “If the Governor refuses to appoint me it will be for some other reason than a lack of recommendations.”
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George even made an appeal to the troops of the 5th Michigan Cavalry regiment, then in need of a new commander. “About the 1st of June,” recalled Captain Samuel Harris, “a slim young man with almost flaxen hair, looking more like a big boy, came to us and, as the line officers expressed it, with the cheek of a government mule, actually asked us to sign a petition to Gov. Austin Blair to appoint him as Colonel of the 5th. He said his name was George A. Custer, and that he was a West Pointer.” Harris said, “We all declined to sign such a petition as we considered him too young.”
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Custer's luck returned in the person of Brigadier General Alfred Pleasonton, one of Stoneman's cavalry division commanders, who picked Custer as an aide-de-camp in May 1863. Pleasonton was a District of Columbia native and graduate of the Class of 1844, a career horse soldier who fought with the famed 2nd Dragoons in Mexico and on the frontier. He was in a number of important engagements in the Civil War and was brevetted for bravery at Antietam. Pleasonton had seen Custer in action days before that battle when George rode with him and the 8th Illinois Cavalry pursuing the Confederates after the Battle of South Mountain. They caught the Confederate rear guard cavalry near Boons-borough, Maryland, on September 15 and “charged them repeatedly, and drove them some two miles beyond the town.”
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Pleasonton noted in particular Custer's gallantry in the charges, as well as that of his aide, Captain Elon Farnsworth, whose uncle commanded the regiment.

Pleasonton had seen young Custer at his best. War and battle very much agreed with him. He took to it naturally, and the danger and thrill
of it spoke to something deep in his character. Custer wrote to his cousin Augusta that he would be glad when the war was over, and when he thought of the “pain and misery produced to individuals as well as the miserable sorrow caused throughout the land,” he could not but “earnestly hope for peace, and at an early date.” However, he wrote, “If I answer for myself
alone
, I must say that I shall regret to see the war end. I would be willing, yes glad, to see a battle every day during my life.”
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Though a staff officer now, Custer still sought action. At the Battle of Chancellorsville (May 1–4, 1863), he took part in Stoneman's raid behind Confederate lines. General “Fighting Joe” Hooker, the Union commander defeated at Chancellorsville, asked for Stoneman to be relieved, saying that “one more raid like it would leave us no cavalry.” But Custer thought Hooker was making Stoneman a scapegoat for his own failings. “Stoneman stands very high in the estimation of the entire army,” Custer wrote, “but it has become a rule in this army, from custom, that when any failure occurs, someone must be found to bear the responsibility, and in selecting such a person it is not proposed to find that one who really is responsible but to discover the most
available
man.”
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In June, Stoneman was relegated to a desk job at the Cavalry Bureau in Washington, but his rough treatment was another lucky break for Custer, since General Pleasonton was tapped to take over command of the Cavalry Corps.

On June 8, the day after receiving his new assignment, Pleasonton was poised on the banks of the Rappahannock with a strike force of eleven thousand cavalry, three thousand infantry, and six batteries of horse artillery. Custer was up late as duty officer in Pleasonton's headquarters at the James Knox house near Beverly's Ford, with orders to awaken the general at 2:00 a.m. He wrote to his sister that he was about to embark on a major raid. “We could see the rebels in their rifle pits on the opposite bank before dark,” he said. The Union cavalry had quietly moved into attack positions, and at four in the morning they would
“ford the river and charge” the enemy emplacements. “It will be a daring undertaking,” he wrote, and the raiders expected to make it as far as Culpeper, fifteen miles west, and thence beyond. “We can ride over anything that opposes us,” he predicted.
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When the hour came for the attack, Custer and Colonel Benjamin Franklin “Grimes” Davis, Class of 1855 and a pro-Union Alabamian, rode down to the riverbank and quietly crossed the fog-enshrouded ford, pistols drawn. As they rode up the opposite bank, they were challenged and opened fire, which signaled the 8th New York Cavalry regiment to charge across the ford after them. The Union horsemen rode furiously through the Southern positions, slashing and firing as the surprised rebels attempted to mount a defense.
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Hooker devised the raid to beat Stuart's cavalry to the punch. The plan was to cross the river in two columns, one under John Buford at Beverly's Ford and another under David McMurtrie Gregg six miles south at Kelly's Ford; converge near Brandy Station; and drive on to Culpeper. Pleasonton expected to face some, though light, resistance. But the Union commanders were unaware that they faced not a small raiding force but 9,500 rebel cavalrymen. And Culpeper, rather than being lightly defended, was surrounded by Ewell's and Longstreet's corps and was serving as Lee's headquarters for his planned move north into Pennsylvania. So what both sides believed would be the start of a few days of raiding became the Battle of Brandy Station, the largest cavalry battle in the war.

Custer was mounted on a horse called Roanoke, an iron-gray stallion he had captured during a raid into Virginia's Northern Neck three weeks earlier. The horse was allegedly worth nine hundred dollars, and Custer wrote his sister, “I never intend to ride him into battle, he is too valuable.” His preference was to send Roanoke home and “leave him there until the war is over.” But his other horse, Harry, was “getting very fat and
pretty,” and the need for a strong mount in the planned-for raid changed his mind.
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Roanoke, however, was untested in war, and his first engagement showed him lacking in martial ardor. Custer and “Grimes” Davis, leading the 8th New York, slammed into the 6th Virginia Cavalry on the Beverly Ford road. A chaotic fracas ensued in which Davis was mortally wounded and Roanoke dashed into a roadside fence, where the horse “huddled in fright, neighing madly but budging not an inch”
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until the Federals retreated. On the retreat, Roanoke cleared a stone wall clumsily and sent Custer flying. He remounted and hurried to join the main body of Union cavalry.

The Battle of Brandy Station raged for hours but was inconclusive: on the one hand, Lee's movement north was shielded by the costly engagement; on the other, the Union Cavalry Corps proved it could match Stuart's famed horsemen. Custer was singled out by Pleasonton as being “conspicuous for gallantry throughout the fight.”
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About a week later, Custer was given another opportunity for battle. General Hooker ordered Pleasonton to break through the rebel cavalry screen, penetrate the Blue Ridge Mountains, and determine if Lee's forces were moving down the Shenandoah Valley. Pleasonton ordered Brigadier General Gregg's division west down the Little River Turnpike to the town of Aldie, a key crossroads in the Bull Run Mountains, eighteen miles east of both Ashby's and Snickers Gaps.

Custer rode along with Gregg and his staff. David McMurtrie Gregg was a scruffy, bearded cavalryman who had served on America's northwest frontier after graduating with honors in the West Point Class of 1855. He had a solid combat record in the Civil War, and his sturdy demeanor had earned him the nickname “Old Steady.” Gregg was not known for dressing the part of a commanding general, and that day Custer blended in with his informal style.

“When Custer appeared he at once attracted the attention of the entire command,” recalled Captain Henry C. Meyer of the 24th New York Cavalry. He was “dressed like an ordinary enlisted man, his trousers tucked in a pair of short-legged government boots, his horse equipments being those of an ordinary wagonmaster. He rode with a little rawhide riding whip stuck in his bootleg, and had long yellow curls down to his shoulders, his face ruddy and good-natured.”
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He also sported a broad-brimmed straw hat. After watering on the banks of Little River, Custer's horse Harry (he had returned to his trusty mount following Roanoke's less than ideal performance at Brandy Station) slipped coming up the bank, dumping George in the river. He emerged unharmed but soaking wet. “The dust at this time was so thick that one could not see more than a set of fours ahead,” Meyer wrote, “and in a few minutes, when it settled on his wet clothes and long wet hair, Custer was an object that one can better imagine than I can describe.”
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Kilpatrick's brigade led the advance and made contact with rebel pickets outside Aldie on June 17, sweeping them briskly through the town. They encountered firmer resistance from the 5th Virginia Cavalry under the command of Thomas Rosser, who were firing from behind a stone wall with artillery support. The rebels “received Kilpatrick's men with a murderous fire,” wrote First Lieutenant Henry Hall, “which literally covered the field in front with dead and dying, and sent the others flying in disorder to the rear.”
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With Kilpatrick's offensive power spent, Confederate Colonel Thomas T. Munford sent the 3rd Virginia forward to counterattack. He hoped to seize Union guns and push the Federal cavalry back through Aldie. At that critical moment, the 1st Maine Cavalry arrived.

Kilpatrick, retreating with the remnants of his brigade and looking “a ruined man,” saw Custer hastening the Maine cavalry to the field. “Forward First Maine!” Kilpatrick shouted. “You saved the field at Brandy Station, you can do it here!” Custer, who was with the cavalry's
commander, Colonel Calvin Douty, waved his saber and charged ahead. The regiment followed.

“In an instant we were among them,” Hall wrote, “and soon all who were on the road were on the run.” They “charged up the road close at the heels of the enemy and midst such a storm of dust that it was impossible to tell the dividing point between friends and foes,” wrote private William O. Howe.
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Kilpatrick was stopped when his horse was shot through the throat. Douty rushed out far in advance of his men and was cut down. Custer, with Harry galloping uncontrollably, powered through the chaos reaching the enemy rear, fighting all the way, then circled the field and returned to the Union lines.
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George might have been run down by the rebels, but with his dust-caked clothing and unorthodox hat, it was not clear which side he was on.

Colonel Munford reported of Aldie, “I have never seen as many Yankees killed in the same space of ground in any fight I have ever seen, or any battle-field in Virginia that I have ever been over.”
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But the Virginians withdrew and the Federals held the field. Captain Henry Meyer said at Aldie that Custer attracted “the attention of every one present by his conspicuous gallantry.”
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By June 25, Lee had crossed the Potomac into Maryland with most of his army.
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President Lincoln and Union General in Chief Henry Halleck lacked confidence in Hooker's ability to thwart Lee and relieved him of command on June 28, replacing him with General George Meade.

That day, Meade sent for Pleasonton—who had recently been promoted to major general—to discuss the growing crisis of Lee's invasion and how they could handle it. “I told him that Lee would make for Gettysburg,” Pleasonton recalled, “and that if he seized that position before we could reach it we should have hard work to get him out, and that to prevent his doing so would depend more on the cavalry than anything else.” He asked permission to reorganize the Cavalry Corps, and especially “to have officers I would name specially assigned to it, as I expected
to have some desperate work to do.” Meade agreed, and in his first dispatch to Washington three young captains were elevated to the rank of brigadier general: Wesley Merritt, Elon Farnsworth, and George Custer.
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They were assigned to the 3rd Cavalry Division under Judson Kilpatrick.

Custer at twenty-three became the then-youngest general officer. In that respect he reflected a trend. The cavalry was an arm of experimentation and innovation on both sides of the war, and each had their twenty-something horse generals. All the members of the 3rd Division's command group were in their twenties: in addition to Custer, Kilpatrick and Merritt were twenty-seven, and Farnswoth was just shy of twenty-six. Custer's friend Pierce M. B. Young of Georgia became a Confederate general at twenty-six, and so did Thomas Rosser. Confederate General Stephen Dodson Ramseur had gained his promotion at age twenty-five. Former West Point Cadet John Herbert Kelly, whom Custer had saluted as he was being borne off on the shoulders of his friends to join the Confederacy, became a cavalry brigadier in November 1863, also at age twenty-three. He was killed near Franklin, Tennessee, in August 1864.

Custer received notice of his promotion June 29, and at first he thought it was a joke. When it became clear he really was being made a brigadier, he quickly penned a note to someone he felt needed to know immediately, Elizabeth Bacon. “I owe it all to Gen'l Pleasonton,” he wrote. “He has been more like a father to me than a Gen'l.”
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