The Real Custer (36 page)

Custer was fortunate to have some powerful, high-level patrons. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton greeted him very cordially when he visited Washington in March 1866, gushing, “It does me good to look at you again!”
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Stanton approved many suggestions from Custer for filling junior officer vacancies. Sheridan—who had been a first lieutenant at the time of Fort Sumter and emerged from the war a full major general—argued for a generalship for his young protégé, or at the very least command of a cavalry regiment. But Sheridan's entreaties and Custer's other connections were not enough. On July 28, 1866, Custer was commissioned lieutenant colonel of the 7th U.S. Cavalry, a new regiment based at Fort Riley. The coveted colonelcy was given to Brevet Major
General Andrew Jackson Smith, the son of a Revolutionary War veteran and member of the West Point Class of 1838. He fought in Mexico and on the frontier and served in the West under Grant during the Civil War. Grant had singled him out for heroism in the fighting during the approach to Vicksburg, and he ended the war a corps commander.

Custer was naturally disappointed. Being made a regimental deputy seemed like a rebuff. Smith arguably lacked Custer's exceptional record of achievement in the war, but he was typical of the generation receiving command billets in postwar regiments. The Army had a wealth of young, motivated officers like Custer, with impressive backgrounds, seeking to get ahead, but took a long-term view toward institution building. Seniority was still a guiding principle, and the Young Turks would have to wait their turn.

The new colonels were a mixed bag. Command of the 8th Cavalry went to John Irvin Gregg, cousin of General David M. Gregg; he had fought in Mexico, pursued a career in the iron industry between the wars, and rose to the rank of brevet major general as a cavalry commander in the Civil War. The 6th Cavalry colonelcy went to James Oakes of West Point's Class of 1846, brevetted for bravery in Mexico but with an undistinguished Civil War record. The 9th Cavalry went to Edward Hatch, a former brevet major general who had commanded a division in the West in the Civil War. And the 10th went to Benjamin Grierson, another brevet major general, division commander, and Westerner, whose raid before the siege of Vicksburg General Sherman called “the most brilliant expedition of the war.”

Custer was not the only bright light of his generation whose career hit a slowdown. Wesley Merritt, who had been in higher command positions longer than Custer, was made lieutenant colonel of the 9th Cavalry under Hatch.
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Like Custer, Merritt's highest Regular Army rank had been captain. But even if officers of Custer's and Merritt's caliber were
not given regimental commands, neither were they being punished. Jumping two ranks to the regular rank of lieutenant colonel was the sort of career mobility that would have been nearly impossible in the Old Army.

Some were not so lucky. Custer's old corps commander General Pleasonton, who had graduated from West Point in 1844, was a Regular Army major before and during the war, and was offered the lieutenant colonelcy of the 20th Infantry, which he declined, before leaving the service in 1868. Alexander Pennington went from a volunteer cavalry brevet brigadiership to a Regular Army artillery captaincy, reaching the rank of major only in 1882; he made lieutenant colonel ten years later and returned to the rank of brigadier general in the Spanish American War, thirty-eight years after graduating from West Point.

Custer may have been given some hope by the treatment of 1855 West Point graduate William W. Averell, whose removal after the Battle of Fisher's Hill in August 1864 had opened the way for Custer's first division command. Averell resigned from the military in March 1865, but on July 17, 1866, President Johnson recommended Averell be promoted from the regular rank of captain all the way up to major general. The U.S. Senate confirmed the elevation on July 23. Averell did not return to the colors, accepting instead the post of consul general to the British North American Provinces, and afterward earning fame as the inventor of asphalt paving.
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But he proved such promotions were possible.

Custer had supporters, but questions persisted. Rumors that he was politically unsound continued to dog him. He had achieved celebrity in part through the patronage of Radical Republicans, particularly Secretary of War Stanton, but was still of a Democratic bent. In March 1866 he was forced publicly to address a claim that while in Texas he had made pro-secession speeches. “I have made no speeches since coming to Texas,” he wrote in an open letter, “and if I had, my voice would not have been
raised in support of and in sympathy with the statement and the doctrine of whose hostility to the Government is now as strong and openly manifested as at any time during the rebellion. I hope my course during the war will be accepted as bearing me out in this statement.”
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Custer was called to testify before Congress on conditions in Texas, and he toed the Radical Republican line, warning strongly against removing occupation troops, due to lingering hostility against the Union.
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However, after his Republican patrons failed to deliver the rank Custer wanted, he decided to hitch his fortunes to Democrat Andrew Johnson.

In early August, Custer met with President Johnson to discuss getting another assignment, perhaps command of one of the more numerous new infantry regiments. “But in whatever branch of the service I may be assigned,” he wrote afterward to Johnson, “I most respectfully request to be attached to an organization composed of
White
troops, as I have served and wish to serve with no other class.”
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(Custer had earlier been looked at for the lieutenant colonelcy of the 9th Cavalry, one of the new black regiments, later famed as the Buffalo Soldiers, but Grant had shifted him to the 7th Cavalry, and Merritt went to the 9th.) Johnson was not immediately forthcoming, but he did ask Custer's assistance in shoring up his shaky political fortunes going into the 1866 midterm congressional elections.

Johnson was in a difficult position. The most destructive conflict in the nation's history had fundamentally reshaped the political landscape. “A new political era is being inaugurated,” Custer wrote, “an era which is destined to remodel and develop the character of our political structure.”
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But exactly what that era would look like was a matter of speculation. Some believed that
ante bellum
sectionalism was a thing of the past and that with the end of slavery, both the Southern Democratic faction and Republican party had lost their reasons for being. By this calculation the future belonged to centrist Democrats like Johnson. He had run with Lincoln in 1864 under the National Union banner, cutting
into McClellan's moderate-Democratic support. Johnson believed that he could keep the movement alive and build a new centrist party composed of disaffected Democrats, former Confederates, Northern Copperheads, and moderate Republicans alienated by the party's dominant Radical wing.

The plan seemed to make sense. The Republican party had made its name as an anti-slavery party. Lacking the cohesion and fervor supplied by abolitionism, it was feasible that the decade-old party would fracture, and Johnson's Union movement, championing moderate reconstruction policies, could pick up the pieces.

But the Republicans had several important factors working in their favor. They were the party of the martyred Lincoln, who was revered in death far more than he was while in the White House. Johnson by contrast struggled against the perception that he was never supposed to be president. Republicans also established networks of friendship and influence through war service that would prove to be long lasting and politically beneficial. Republican governors gave key volunteer regimental commands to trustworthy political allies, a factor that had worked against Custer earlier in the war, and these relationships remained solid for decades.

This was the dawn of an era of Republican preeminence at the national level. During the period in which the generations that fought the war dominated American national politics, from the 1860s to 1910, only one Democrat, Grover Cleveland, was elected president. There was also a sense among many Republicans, particularly among the Radicals, that the mission of the war was not yet complete. The South had to be punished, or at least the sacrifices made by the North had to be recognized. The 1866 election was the first peacetime opportunity to “wave the bloody shirt.” It was not yet time to forgive and forget.

Reconstruction had replaced slavery as a dominant national political issue. The issue broke along institutional lines: Congress and the executive
departments dominated by Radical Republicans appointed by Lincoln sought a punitive peace, while Johnson and the Democratic congressional minority favored a more moderate course of reconciliation.

The Radicals on Capitol Hill moved ahead with their program. On June 11, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment, authored by Republican Ohio congressman John A. Bingham, who had secured Custer's appointment to West Point. Supporters of the amendment said it was necessary to secure the rights of freed slaves and political minorities in the South, but opponents called it a Federal power grab. Johnson agreed to a plan to hold a National Union convention in Philadelphia from August 14 to 16 to defend “states' rights” against the “usurpation and centralization of power in Congress.”

Custer attended the convention and became an open spokesman for reconciliation. He shook hands with a delegate from South Carolina, former Confederate Brigadier General Samuel McGowan, saying, “General, we have been looking at each other often during the war through field glasses and amid the smoke of battle. If we can now shake hands, these civilians who have stayed at their homes in safety surely should.”
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Custer served as an honorary vice president of a Union conference in Michigan, which approved a resolution praising “the restoration policy of Andrew Johnson, and that the Southern States, which were not admitted to be out of the Union in time of war, are now that the rebellion is suppressed, as right-fully and should be as effectually in the Union as they were before the madness of their people attempted to carry them out.”
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In an open letter to a National Union party mass meeting in Washington, D.C., on August 23, Custer said he believed that the policies of the Radicals were so punitive they could start a second civil war. “I have had enough of civil war,” he wrote, “and believing that the great National Union party is the only one whose efforts look to a permanent and honorable peace, and by whose aid only the Union can be restored
under the Constitution, I have enlisted under its banner, beneath whose broad folds I propose to battle until the victory is won.”
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Around the same time, Custer became involved with the Soldiers' and Sailors' Union (SSU), a veterans' organization formed in January 1866 by Northern and Southern troops seeking reconciliation. The organization was closely tied to the National Union movement. Custer, along with scores of other former general officers, signed an SSU statement that said he believed “the South is sincere in its declarations,” and that he was “unwilling that the Southern people shall be held in vassalage, and that they cannot be denied representation in Congress without a plain violation of the Constitution.”
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Custer's vigorous show of loyalty to Johnson was a far cry from his earlier political statements. In January 1864 he wrote to Republican Senator Jacob M. Howard of Michigan that he would “hang every human being who possesses a drop of rebel blood in their veins whether they be men, women, or children.” And in May 1865 he had said that “extermination is the only true policy we can adopt toward the political leaders of the rebellion, and at the same time do justice to ourselves and to our posterity.”
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His abrupt change in tone, even if it reflected his true, private political views, was seen as hypocrisy and opportunism. “Gen. Custer, who flogged and shaved the heads of Iowa soldiers in Texas, is now the leader of the military wing of President Johnson's supporters,” one newspaper observed. The
Detroit Free Press
charged that Custer had “deserted to the Southern ranks.”
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Custer denounced such articles as creating “false impressions regarding my past and present position,” which he said were “being so assiduously disseminated throughout the country by a subsidized, unscrupulous, and fanatical press.”
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But the attacks intensified.

In late August, President Johnson embarked on a public relations tour of the North and Midwest that became known as the “Swing around the Circle.” A pro-Johnson newspaper wrote that “the best answer to the unnumbered slanders which radical lips and radical sheets have hurled at The President will be his own presence among the American people.”
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Johnson took along a number of luminaries, including well-known cabinet officials, Admiral Farragut, and Generals Grant, Stedman, Stoneman, Crook, Rousseau, and Custer, who joined the party on its way through West Point.
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Libbie accompanied her husband, and a press report described her as “among the most sprightly ladies of the presidential party. She is about 24, but looks not over 17, and is quite girlish and charming in her manners.”
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