The Real Custer (9 page)
Authors: James S Robbins
“A SLIM, LONG-HAIRED BOY, CARELESSLY DRESSED”
G
eorge Custer rushed from West Point to warfare faster than any graduate before him and probably since. In only days he went from the guardhouse at the Academy to the battlefield in Virginia. As he said, he got there in time to “run with the rest at Bull Run.”
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George left West Point on July 18, stopping briefly in New York City to buy his lieutenant's kit, then took an evening train to Washington that was “crowded with troops, officers and men, hastening to the capital.”
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Crowds at the stations cheered the soldiers on their journey south, since it was believed that open warfare was imminent. George arrived the morning of July 19 and went to Ebbit House in search of some of his classmates. He found one of his former Academy roommates, James P. Parker of Missouri. Parker and Custer were, according to Morris Schaff, a “well-matched pair.” They had “fooled away many an hour that should
have been devoted to study.” After George excitedly discussed the looming confrontation in northern Virginia, Parker sheepishly showed Custer the letter from the War Department accepting his resignation for the Confederacy.
Custer camped out at the adjutant general's office seeking orders, though the fate of a freshly minted second lieutenant was a low priority with war imminent. Finally, at two in the morning of the twentieth, the officer on duty beckoned to George and said casually, “Perhaps you would like to be presented to General Scott, Mr. Custer?” to which George “joyfully assented.” Winfield Scott was a figurative and, at six feet five, literal giant of American military history, with a career stretching back to 1808. “I had often beheld the towering form of the venerable chieftain during his summer visits to West Point,” Custer wrote, “but that was the extent of my personal acquaintance with him.”
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General Scott was very cordial to young Custer and asked him if he would like to join some of the Academy graduates who were busy training new volunteers, or perhaps he had a “desire for something more active?” George said he wanted to join his unit, Company G of the 2nd Cavalry, at the front as soon as he could. Scott commended Custer for his enthusiasm and told him to find a horse to ride to Commanding General Irvin McDowell's headquarters. He could deliver some dispatches before joining his unit.
Horses were in short supply, but Custer's luck held. He found a horse left behind by a West Point detachment. The horse turned out to be one he knewâWellington, “a favorite one ridden by me often when learning the cavalry exercises at West Point,” George recalled. That evening he rode his familiar friend to McDowell's headquarters at Centreville, arriving after midnight on July 21. Battle was imminent.
The Union had pushed into Virginia “in deference to the incessant demands of a large portion of the press, calling for an attack upon Confederate forces,” Custer said.
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Politics played an important role; it had
been three months since the attack on Fort Sumter, and few overt moves had been made to assert federal power, other than the occupation of Alexandria, Virginia, on May 24. Politicians and newspaper editors pressed Lincoln to act. Furthermore, the ninety-day enlistments the president had called for shortly after Fort Sumter were expiring, for some units that very day. The Union had to use the troops or lose them. But there was still a general view in the North that the war would be brief, exciting, and victorious. “War was not regarded by the masses as a dreadful alternative, to be avoided to the last,” Custer wrote of those early, heady days, “but rather as an enterprise offering some pleasure and some excitement, with perhaps a little danger and suffering.”
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The Battle of Bull Run at first seemed to live up to the expectation of war as something brief and glorious, at least from the Union side. McDowell opened with a broad flanking maneuver west of the Confederate Army of the Potomac under General P. G. T. Beauregard, which was encamped near Manassas Junction across Bull Run. Union forces drove rebel units back onto Henry House Hill by afternoon. Custer was assigned to a cavalry squadron protecting an artillery battery and did not see heavy fighting, though his unit did come under counter-battery fire. He noted of his first moments under enemy fire that while he had heard the sounds of cannon shot at West Point, “a man listens with changed interest when the direction of the balls is toward instead of away from him.”
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Late that afternoon Custer stood on a ridge with one of his classmates, watching the Union line advance. The two were congratulating each other on “the glorious victory which already seemed to have been won,” when Confederate reinforcements, principally under Colonel Thomas J. Jackson, who would earn his nickname “Stonewall” that day, began a fierce assault that broke the Union line.
“No pen or description can give anything like a correct idea of the rout and demoralization that followed,” Custer wrote. The confident
Union troops had become “one immense mass of fleeing, frightened creatures.”
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Custer's unit kept good order and was one of the last organized troops to cross back over Bull Run, keeping the advancing rebels at bay as best they could. That night, Custer's unit continued “hastening with the fleeing, frightened soldiery” back to Arlington, on muddy roads through driving rain. “I little imagined when making my night ride from Washington to Centreville the night of the 20th,” Custer wrote, “that the following night should find me returning with a defeated and demoralized army.” Reaching Arlington Heights the morning of the twenty-second, Custer lay down under a tree “where, from fatigue, hunger and exhaustion, I soon fell asleep, despite the rain and mud, and slept for hours without wakening.”
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It had been four days since he departed West Point.
“No battle of the war startled and convulsed the entire country, North and South, as did the first battle of Bull Run,” Custer later wrote.
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It exploded the myth of the short war and gave notice to the North that not only were the rebels serious about defending the Confederacy but they were more than able to fight. Custer took time in the gloomy days afterward to find his benefactor, Congressman Bingham. “I had never seen him,” Bingham recalled. “I heard of him after the First Battle of Bull Run.” Word had spread in the capital that Custer's delaying actions had helped prevent the disaster from being worse than it was. “I heard of his exploit with pride, and hunted several times for my boy, but unsuccessfully. Then one day a young soldier came to my room without the formality of sending a card. . . . He was out of breath, or had lost it from embarrassment. And he spoke with hesitation: âMr. Bingham, I've been in my first battle. I tried hard to do my best. I felt I ought to report to you, for it's through you I got to West Point. I'm . . .' I took his hand. âI know. You're my boy Custer!'”
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After the disaster at Bull Run, Custer's company was temporarily attached to the Jersey Brigade, commanded by the mercurial one-armed
Brigadier General Philip Kearny. Kearny, who had just organized the brigade, had no staff officers, and requested the junior officer in the company to be detailed to his staff. For Custer it was another stroke of luck.
“I found the change from subaltern in a company to a responsible position on the staff of a most active and enterprising officer both agreeable and beneficial,” George wrote.
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This began a series of assignments in which Custer served as a staff officer or aide to senior officers, positions that were critical to advancing his career. George learned how war was waged at the operational level, moving large units over great distances, not just the tactical level of the close-in battle. But more important, staff work gave him the opportunity to get into fights he would have missed had he been tied to the fortunes of his unit.
As a staff officer, Custer was called on to serve as a commander's eyes and ears. He carried urgent battlefield messages, did critical reconnaissance, and engaged in a variety of special missions. When battles were looming, he knew when and where to get into the thick of them. It was work that suited Custer's personality and skills and increased his freedom of action. It fed Custer's appetite for adventure and placed him in situations where he could not only demonstrate his courage but make sure it was noticed.
In the fall of 1861, Custer was ordered back to his company. General Kearny thought highly of Custer and predicted great things for his future. Unfortunately, Kearny did not live to see it. He was killed the following September at the Battle of Chantilly.
After a furlough for sickness in the winter of 1861â62, Custer saw his first serious action. In March 1862, General George McClellan, chafing under criticism from President Lincoln and others for not having taken concerted action against the rebellion, ordered a general movement toward Manassas, which had recently been evacuated by rebel forces. After reaching Manassas, General George Stoneman, McClellan's
cavalry commander, ordered a movement south along the Orange and Alexandria Railroad to hit the rebel rear and, if possible, according to Custer, “drive him across the Rappahannock.” On March 14, the Union cavalry column found Confederate pickets in force on a hill near Catlett's Station, twelve miles southwest of town. Orders came down to push them off the hill, and Custer, whose unit was conveniently at the front of the column, volunteered to lead the attack.
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“I marched the company to the front,” Custer wrote, “formed line and advanced toward the pickets, then plainly in view, and interested observers of our movements.” After leading the advance to a “convenient distance,” he wrote, “I gave the command âCharge' for the first time. My company responded gallantly, and away we went.” The rebel skirmishers broke before the charging horsemen and ran across the bridge at Cedar Run, setting it on fire behind them. Custer's force pursued to the riverbank and opened fire. “The bullets rattled like hail,” he wrote to his parents, and for a few minutes there was a spirited exchange. But with the bridge ablaze, no easy way to cross the river, and his men coming under increasing fire from the rallying Confederates, Custer pulled back. It was George's first action in command, and he could take credit for “the shedding of the first blood by the Army of the Potomac,”
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which had been formed in the summer of 1861.
