George Custer’s Trials: The Story Beyond Little Bighorn

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show, including yours. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. They’re some of our favorites.

T.J.

Styles was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer for History for his biography on Cornelius Vanderbilt, a story featured here on Our American Stories. In his biography on George Armstrong Custer, Styles casts surprisingly new light on one of the best-known figures of American history, a subject of seemingly endless fascination. Here’s T.J. Styles with the story of George Custer.

Now.

Custer is one of the most controversial figures in American history. People love him, and they hate him. These days, they tend to hate him more than love him. He was, in fact, notorious as well as a celebrity. During his own lifetime. But whether you love Custer or hate him, or have no particular opinion, we all envision him in a particular way, usually alone on a hilltop, surrounded by his dead soldiers, as Cheyenne and Lakota warriors circle around him as he fires off his last bullet and is slaughtered along with more than two hundred of his troops. This Custer is the one that lives in our imagination. He’s a man of the West. He’s a man who’s eternally fighting Native Americans. He’s someone who we can’t really imagine anywhere else. Custer is one of the most researched people in American history, and I respect that research. I tried to put together a picture of Custer’s life and his significance and his meaning for Americans at the time before he got to the Little Bighorn, before that enormous sun rises over his life and blinds us to everything that came before that stunning death of his, which was indeed significant. Why that Custer was a celebrity before he got there? Why was it that he was notorious before he got there? What was the meaning that Americans saw in him before he took on the meetings that we put upon him? This was the mission that I set for myself in writing this biography of Custer. There’s another aspect to Custer as well, one that’s a little bit more familiar. That’s Custer is the army officer. Now, many of these are very well known. He was a young boy from a poor background in Ohio who went off to West Point. Very lucky, he got an appointment to West Point. There, as one of his classmates said, when he realized he could not lead the class academically, he decided to support it by providing a solid base. He graduated last in his class, but first in demerits. And what does that mean? But again, this is something I have to do: I have to try to understand the human meaning, the interior state that’s reflected in the outer actions. All those demerits are a reflection of his acting out, of his performing for an audience, and that audience is his fellow cadets, trying to project an image of himself. And this is an important fact about Custer, something we have to understand about him. But also, sepast—which is the fact that he was always telling stories about himself. He was telling stories to an audience, and he was also telling those stories to himself. That this ego, this grand performative nature, his elaborate costume he wore into battle, the costumes he adopted when he went west, when he wore buckskin instead of a black velvet uniform as he had during the war. This is telling a story to the public, and it’s also creating one for himself that he’s not that obscure boy that no one from nowhere, that, in fact, that he’s someone who is great, who is performing on a historical stage, a man who’s an Antebellum romantic hero. That’s the story he’s telling, and he’s still performing for that audience. And just days after graduating, he’s the commander of the guard for the army encampment, the training encampment for the cadets as they do their military training in the summer, and an upperclassman starts a fistfight with an underclassman, a plebe, and Custer’s in charge; he’s captain of the guard. He’s supposed to arrest them. An army can’t function with soldiers fist-fighting with each other at will, and instead he says, “Stand back, boys, let them have a fair fight.”

Well, you know, nowadays that would be handled administratively. But this was something that he was court-martialed for, convicted.

But Custer’s luck came in something that saved him again and again. The Civil War had broken out. He’s terribly fearful that he’ll miss the entire thing, and so he pleads her mercy and missus guilt pleads her mercy, and they take pity on him. They convict him. The marshal convicts him, but they let him go off to war. There he finds a new audience. He’s performing now for his superiors. He finds a mission, and suddenly the miscreant of West Point begins to perform extremely well, and there’s something charming about him, something that’s very hard to capture in the documents. He’s got charisma, and his superiors are susceptible to it. So during the Peninsula Campaign, he’s actually plucked from obscurity when he performs very well taking part in a raid on a Confederate position that comes to the attention of General McClellan, puts him on his staff. Then, now, Custer is performing for General McClellan. He performs very well, and interestingly, he worships McClellan, a notoriously conservative general both politically and in military operations.

Custer worships this man who’s so accomplished and so esteemed, even though his own personality is so different. He’s volunteering to go off on raids. He wants to win in a way that McClellan doesn’t, and that’s what actually saves him when McClellan falls, the fact that he’s a committed soldier who wants to win. But the other thing that saves him is not just as merit. It’s the fact that he’s trying to find a new patron. And we have to remember, the Civil War was not fought primarily by the regular army, but by an organization that was created for the duration of the war, the U.S. Volunteers. And this is a very political army, with regiments raised by the states, with the regimental officers appointed by governors, and it very much reflects Antebellum America, a world of personal connections where there are very few large institutions.

And you’ve been listening to T.J. Styles, and what’s storytelling? In my goodness, the storytelling about him at West Point: last in his class on grades, first in demerits, acting out for the cadets, acting out for himself, creating, in a sense, his own version of himself that he would have to live up to. And that is a part of the American Dream. What is Gatsby all about? In the end, The Great Gatsby, one of the great American pieces of fiction by Fitzgerald. When we come back, more of this remarkable self-creation, a story of a man we all know but don’t. The story of George Custer continues with T.J. Styles here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the stories we tell about this great country, and especially the stories of America’s rich past, know that all of our stories about American history, from war to innovation, culture, and faith, are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that are good in life. And if you can’t get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale.edu to learn more. And we continue here with Our American Stories and with T.J. Styles, a 2016 Pulit Surprise winner for History, on his biography on Cornelius Vanderbilt. Please, by all means, go to Our American Stories and take a listen. It’s a terrific piece of storytelling. Let’s get back to T.J. and the story of George Custer.

Lincoln himself was a self-taught lawyer. Well, you know, before the end of the nineteenth century. It’s unimaginable to think of a self-taught lawyer representing the largest corporations in America, as Lincoln had. And this is the world, though, that Custer came out of. So he’s in the army, one of the first great institutions of the upcoming America, the organizational society, but he’s operating very much as a man of the past, looking for those personal patrons still current.

It’s not past.

Yet. But this is the world that is not looking to the future, but rather one that reflects an older America. And he finds a new patron. His patron is—becomes the commander of the Cavalry Corps of the Army of the Potomac. And when Lee invades the North, General Pleasanton, who picks Custer for his staff: it’s a chance to appoint new brigade commanders, and he takes this twenty-three-year-old lieutenant who graduated last in his class, and makes him a brigadier general. And what happens? Custer performs exceptionally well. He goes straight, practically straight to the Battle of Gettysburg. His men see him in this black velvet uniform with gold braid winding from cuff to elbow, and they think he’s kind of ridiculous. I’d like to point out there were other generals who dressed like that. They were all Southern generals. And Custer himself is a product of actually border state culture. At a Maryland-born father, he’s from Southern Ohio. He has very much Southern affinities. And, you know, this is kind of the Antebellum idea of chivalry, kind of more Southern idea of culture, again reflecting an older America, a more romantic ideal. And that’s the ideal that Custer represents. But an interesting thing about that is that it served a practical purpose. And when we see Custer’s affectations, it’s very easy to dismiss him as merely an egoist, someone who was full of vanity and simply wanted everyone to look at him. But on the battlefield of the Civil War, a brigadier general is in the mix, and by drawing attention to himself, he’s both inspiring his men. He’s both giving them a rallying point, they know where their commander is, and he helps to orient his men, especially when he leads them forward. And it’s also declaration about his own confidence in himself as a fighter, a declaration of confidence in himself, in his own personal courage. And this is something that we have to remember when we see that grand performance that Custer puts on, that when it comes to battle, there’s real substance there.

This is a man who actually fought very well, and he wasn’t merely lucky, he wasn’t merely impetuous. He actually was a real professional. And in all of the chaos of Custer’s life, this is where we see him performing with confidence, with self-assurance, and with real professionalism. That’s where he’s in control of himself is in battle. The problem for him is that in the future of the battles, and fewer, farther and farther apart, but in the Civil War, that comes thick and fast, and his men love him, they admire him. He may be the last American general to kill someone in a sword fight, and seeing their leader actually fighting and fighting well, not just bravely, but with personal skill, this is something that his men absolutely love. One of his soldiers says, “I saw General Custer plunge his saber into the belly of a Rebel who’s trying to kill him.” You can imagine how hard men fight for a general who’s that brave. So, you know, this, this is something that can seem difficult, repugnant, or ridiculous to modern mind, but to that mind that comes out of Antebellum America, in a world in which the Civil War is crushing gallantry, it’s crushing individual heroics under the mass of firepower, Custer’s in this little slice of the Civil War, cavalrymen fighting other cavalrymen, in which old-fashioned gallantry actually still serves a practical purpose.

In which that romantic image actually lives on and allows him to succeed, and for that reason he becomes extremely popular. He didn’t just win battles, he did it in a way that captures an older idea of America that people felt was slipping away. At the same time that he’s leading a gallant charge against a Confederate charge on horseback and fighting with a sword. At that very moment, Pickett was leading the mass Confederate infantry attack on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg. And what happened? Masked rifle fire and mass artillery fire wipe them out. They died by the thousands, and they went forward with all the traditional martial values, and those traditional virtues neatly lined up with their flags in front of them, and they were crushed. Individual heroics are being wiped out. So the Civil War gives rise to Ambrose Bierce, one of the darkest American writers, who came out of the infantry fighting of the Civil War convinced that death comes from everyone at random, sometimes playing cruel, practical jokes on human beings. You have Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose idealism bled out of him through the bullet hole through his neck at Antietam, who comes out and becomes one of the great realists of American law. You have people who didn’t fight, like Mark Twain and Henry Adams, who have a much darker, more ironic sensibility, or Henry Adams’s brother, who’s now forgotten but at the time a very important nineteenth-century intellectual who fought in the cavalry and who developed a much darker and more cynical worldview as a result.

But Custer is an outlier. He’s a man who actually has all of his illusions reinforced by the Civil War, and yet by looking beyond just the battle records, we see Custer in another role, which is the institutional man, the organizational man, and the record is full of reprimands from his superiors, especially General Kilpatrick. Custer, for example, would go over the head of his division commander to appeal directly to Pleasanton, his patron, and he’s getting written reprimands saying, “You are supposed to go through the chain of command. Don’t go around your division commander.” He loves his old friends from West Point. He is now on the other side, and he’s constantly calling truces to go socialize with his old friends from West Point. And, you know, Kilpatrick is saying, “You’ve been told before: you are not to fraternize with the enemy.”

“We’re having a war!”

And this is something Custer is constantly, you know, you know, being told not to do. And this is a theme that runs throughout his life. His difficulty as functioning as a member of a hierarchical organization, in his sense, as a member of a bureaucracy or a large institution, dealing with chains of command, dealing with the institutional requirements, being able to manage subordinates, and being able to meet his duties as they’re required by superiors.

Now there’s much more to it than that, but that is the first point where we see it. Johnson: the Democrats are defeated. Johnson loses his effort, and Custer goes west. He enters into his first campaign against American Indians, and it’s fascinating in many ways. One having nothing to do with Custer is the fact that he sits in on councils that are being held between General Winfield Scott Hancock, who leads this first Great Expedition that Custer joins on the Great Plains, and he’s conferring with Kiowas and with Cheyennes and Lakotas on the Great Plains, and they’re explicitly telling him what the crisis is, even before settlers began to move on to the Great Plains and occupy lands that the High Plains nations counted as their own, because you had the California Gold Rush, you had the Great Migration to Oregon, you had the Colorado Gold Rush, and you had thousands of migrants moving across the Great Plains, and Custer himself doesn’t quite grasp it. His first year on the Great Plains is a disaster, and he goes off and is humiliated by the Cheyennes and Lakotas on the Great Plains, and he finally gives up the campaign, and rides back to meet his wife and is court-martialed and convicted.

So, you know, this is a well-known story. Custer is convicted. But something that people don’t realize is that Custer was nearly court-martialed again. He couldn’t accept the fact that he’d been convicted. This is not Custer’s luck. This is not the way that he’s used to being treated. Rules have always been broken for him.

And you’ve been listening to T.J. Styles tell a remarkable story about, well, let’s face it, someone we think we all know, George Custer, but don’t. And I’m a history buff, and I didn’t know a lot of this. Twenty-three years old, he’s a brigadier general and in black velvet uniform, sort of regaling his sort of quasi-Southern cultural roots, parents from Southern Ohio and Maryland. He had a bit of that border state culture in him and a bit of that Rebel in him. It all served a purpose. And the fact that he’s the last American general to kill an opposing soldier in a sword fight, the fact that he would be in battle rallying his guys. There was more here than just a showman. He was a warrior and a soldier. When we come back, more of the story of George Custer here on Our American Stories, and we continue with T.J. Styles and the story of George Custer here on Our American Stories. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

He’s always been able to avoid the usual institutional processes, and when he’s convicted, quite rightly, even though he’s only suspended for a year, he can’t take it, and he writes a letter to the press saying it’s a trumped-up prosecution and that everybody agrees that he should never been convicted. And so we find in the records of the National Archives the Judge Advocate General writing to General Grant saying everybody believes that he should be court-martialed.