Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (29 page)

Officers in the Army of the Potomac lived better than did their counterparts in other theaters, and the cavalry officers did best of all. Civil War cavalry officers have often been compared to the hotshot Air Force pilots of the twentieth century—each service attracted the boastful, swaggering, devil-may-care, courageous young heroes. More than any other group, the young cavalry officers gave the Army of the Potomac its well-earned reputation for being the hardest drinking, hardest swearing outfit in the land. “I will be a perfect Barbarian if I should Stay hear 3 years,” wrote one soldier, while another confessed that “I have seen but little of the wickedness and depravity of man until I Joined the Army.” Another soldier commented, “The swearing especially is terrific, and even to a man accustomed to hear
bad language, and with sensibilities not very easily shocked, it is really disgusting.”
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Freed from the restraints of his Methodist parents and family, and from the petty regulations of West Point, Custer joined in the fun, swearing and drinking the way a cavalryman should and enjoying the fleshpots of Washington when on leave. But he did not neglect his duty, nor did the others, for they were all filled with ambition. The standard toast among the aides, at the beginning, middle, and end of a drinking bout, was “To promotion—or death!”

That was the only check on Custer’s happiness—he was still a captain while some of his classmates were moving ahead rapidly, especially in the Confederate Army. Custer did his best to please all the generals he served—he brought captured booty to Pleasonton, including a magnificent horse and, by rumor at least, a female companion—but the only way to get ahead, it seemed, was via politics. In May 1863 Custer went to Pleasonton to ask two favors. First, he wanted Pleasonton to appoint Lieutenant George Yates, a friend from Monroe, to the staff (throughout his life Custer liked to surround himself with friends and relatives). Pleasonton agreed. Then Custer made the request closest to his heart. Would Pleasonton recommend him to Republican Governor Austin Blair for command of a Michigan cavalry regiment, newly organized? Again Pleasonton agreed, for like most West Pointers he wanted other Academy graduates to serve as the colonels of the volunteer regiments, not the politician who had raised the outfit.

With Pleasonton’s recommendation, Custer was ready to make his application. He had already lined up four other generals to make recommendations for him, and he wrote to Judge Isaac Christiancy of the Michigan Supreme Court, a founder of the Republican party and a Monroe resident, asking for his help. Then he wrote his sister, confessing his fears: the politicians would never forgive him for being a “McClellan man,” he said, and his politics would prevent his rise in the Army.
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He was right. Politics did count for more than ability. Governor Blair turned him down, and not because of his age. There were West Pointers no older than Custer serving as colonels at the head of Union volunteer regiments, but they were Republicans.

If coming of age for young men in America meant hard drinking, hard cussing, and hard riding, Custer was finding the maturing process an easy one. But there is more involved in becoming a man than just being tough, and in one crucial area Custer experienced great
difficulty. Relations between young men and women were as complicated among the whites as they were among the Oglalas. White society emphasized the sanctity of marriage every bit as much as the Sioux did and forbade premarital and extramarital intercourse just as firmly as did the Indians. White girls were trained to be wives and taught to serve their husbands. There was not, of course, equality among white women. Those fortunate enough to be married to a member of the elite were able to hire someone else to do the household tasks, but that did not free them to pursue their own careers; rather, they were expected to give their husbands moral support and serve them as ornaments.

There were other divisions among white women not found among their Indian counterparts. White males tended to regard white women as objects, and those at the lower ends of the social and economic scale were fair game for any man who had the money and inclination to try to buy their time and bodies. Under these circumstances, Custer tended, not surprisingly, to divide women into two groups; those who were fast and loose and those who were pure. He used the first group and treated such women with contempt, while he idealized the second group and treated those women with veneration. Getting to know women as human beings was almost impossible for him, for like Crazy Horse he had been indoctrinated by his culture to view
all
women as weak and inferior, to be taken seriously only around the home or in bed.

Custer had had limited experience with women. Before going to West Point he had developed a close relationship with Mary Holland, but nothing had come of the affair. At the Academy, he lived a monk’s life, not even seeing any women his own age. Crazy Horse had more of an opportunity to get to know females than did Cadet Custer. After joining the Army of the Potomac, Custer knew only prostitutes on an intimate basis. Women of his own age and social status were a mystery to him, and a challenge.

In the late fall of 1861, Custer returned to Michigan on sick leave. His illness was brief, as would always be the case with him, and he had more than a month to make his reputation in Monroe’s social circles. The handsome and dashing young bachelor strutted up and down the streets of Monroe or held forth at parties or church functions, explaining to the civilians how the war was fought. Custer enjoyed every minute of it, but he was most delighted when he could be with the eligible young ladies of Monroe, laughing, talking, teasing. He proposed marriage to at least one and possibly more.

Custer reveled in the role of the young hero returned from the
wars. After escorting Fanny Fifield or another beauty home from singing class, he went on drinking sprees with his boyhood companions, filling their ears with combat stories—in Custer’s stories, he always led the charge, always killed his enemy, always swept the field. It was a glorious vacation.

In February 1862 Custer returned to active duty, but he was back in Monroe on a furlough in November of that year. This time he had more war stories to tell, and as McClellan’s aide he was near enough to the seat of power to command attention from the town’s dignitaries. He spoke at banquet halls and on platforms at public meetings. As a speaker he was awkward and embarrassed, but he struck the older men as being properly modest and began receiving invitations to the elite social affairs.
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On Thanksgiving evening, at a party held at the local girls’ finishing school, Custer was presented to Miss Elizabeth Bacon, daughter of Judge Daniel Bacon, the town’s most prominent resident. Usually full of talk, Custer for once was speechless; in addition to her social position, Libbie Bacon was easily the prettiest girl at the party, indeed one of the most beautiful Custer had ever seen. Libbie had been well-trained and knew how to keep a conversation with a bashful swain from floundering. She had one infallible question, flattering to male vanity: “And what do you
really
think of Higher Education for Women?” But on this occasion she too was tongue-tied and only managed to say, “I believe your promotion has been very rapid?” Custer, then a captain, replied modestly, “I have been very fortunate.”
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And that was about all, at least for that night. But it was as close to love at first sight
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as ever happens in real life, and Custer set his cap to catch her if he could.

Libbie felt the same way toward him. She saw Custer on the streets of Monroe the next day and he glanced at her. “Oh, how pleased I was,” she wrote of the experience. In church that Sunday, Custer couldn’t keep his eyes off Miss Bacon; as she put it, he “looked
such things
at me.” Like other love-struck young girls, she could not believe that anyone so attractive as Custer could be interested in plain old Libbie Bacon, and she took to comparing herself, unfavorably, to her friends. Those young ladies, she was convinced, were far better looking than she was, wore finer clothes, and were in constant competition with her for men in general and Custer in particular. “Yet without the least intention,” she later wrote, “I captured the greatest prize of all.”
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Libbie hardly needed to worry about her competition. Her seminary graduation photograph, taken in the summer of 1862, shows her practicing her sweet, demure look, and she brought it off well. Her dark, long, curly hair fell over her shoulder in ringlets. She had just the hint of a smile, barely enough to reveal her dimples. Her ivory-colored skin set off her dark hair and eyebrows. Later full-length photographs show an ample bosom and a dangerously thin waist—the perfect figure, in other words, for wearing the sweeping dresses of the day. She was twenty-one years old that fall of 1862, so she tried terribly hard to look mature and almost made it. But her eyes did her in. They sparkled with life, vitality, youth. They seemed to promise adventure, enthusiasm, energy, and indicated that here was a woman ready for fun and excitement, always anxious to try something new, no matter how dangerous.
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Libbie Bacon was one of the most remarkable American women of the nineteenth century. As will be seen, she had unbounded energy, but she never worked a day in her life. She was as courageous as Custer himself, although she hid her bravery behind shrieks, screams, and her supposed need for a male protector from all dangers, big and little. She was a superb horsewoman, again as good as Custer himself, although her society forced her to ride sidesaddle. She was highly intelligent, even though she hid her intelligence just as carefully as she did her bravery. And she was a marvelously effective writer. She has left us some of the best descriptive material available on the Great Plains in the nineteenth century. But she devoted the twelve years of her married life and the fifty-seven years of her widowhood to her husband. He was the only human subject she ever wrote about and, as far as one can tell, almost the only human being she ever thought about. She lived to serve him and his memory. What a waste! Had Libbie been a boy, given the good start in life a child of Judge Bacon would have enjoyed and the talents and energy Libbie had, she would probably have gone right to the top of the American scene in any one of a number of fields. As it was, she was fated to be known only as a wife and then as a widow.

Libbie understood herself and her role. She was contented, even happy. She knew how to get what she wanted, which in truth was not much, as she never sought power or prominence or a career for herself. Her mother had died when she was quite young, and although her father remarried when she was in her late teens, she grew up without any close female companions. She did have schoolmates, of course, but they knew even less of the world than she did. So her views on what a woman was and how she should behave came
primarily from her father, and Judge Bacon was a stern man who was firm in his views and set in his ways. He protected his little Libbie from the evils of the world. In fact, Libbie needed to be protected about as much as Custer did, but she learned to use her father’s attitude to win her own small triumphs.

“Libbie Bacon has no mother! Poor motherless Libbie Bacon! How shamelessly I traded on this,” she confessed late in her life. “What an excuse I made of it for not doing anything I didn’t want to do! And what excuses were made for me on that score!” Judge Bacon had sent her to a seminary for young ladies in Grand Rapids, where she learned to sew, play the piano, and engage in other ornamental arts pleasing to the nineteenth-century American male. She spent her summers with the judge and his new wife in Monroe; Mrs. Bacon would not suffer her “young responsibility” to assume the slightest household task, so Libbie read edifying Christian literature. One year the Bacons kept Libbie in Monroe and out of school for the entire term, lest a summer cold cause her to “catch a consumption.”
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When Custer met Libbie in 1862 she had just graduated from the seminary. As her lifetime friend, Marguerite Merington, put it, she was now a thoroughly educated young lady. “Her main preoccupation from that time onward would be to find a husband—or, more modestly, to be found by a husband acceptable to herself and family. Home, thanks to the second Mrs. Bacon, was all that a young lady could desire. She took up painting in the interval between one security and another—she looked forward in marriage to the sheltered life.”
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Then occurred what Libbie ever afterward referred to as “that terrible day.” Custer went on an afternoon drinking spree in Monroe, got roaring drunk, and staggered his way home along the side-walk, weaving from side to side, falling, vomiting, and generally making a spectacle of himself. His path took him along Monroe Street, right past Judge Bacon’s house. Libbie happened to be at the window upstairs, while the judge was downstairs, also looking toward the street Both Bacons were disgusted by the sight of Custer.

“Home” for Custer in Monroe was, of course, the Reed house, where his older sister Lydia ran the household. She took one look and hustled the drunken soldier boy up to his room, locked the door behind her, and began her lecture. Frederick Whittaker, Custer’s close friend and first biographer, tells the story of what happened as only a nineteenth-century author could: “What passed at that interview between the anxious loving sister and the impulsive erring
boy, already repenting of his degradation and error, will never be fully known until the last day. Far be it from us to strive to lift the veil. It was a season of tears, prayers, and earnest pleading on one side, overcoming all resistance on the other. The result was that George Armstrong Custer then and there, in the presence of God, gave his sister a solemn pledge that never henceforth to the day of his death should a drop of intoxicating liquor pass his lips. That pledge he kept in letter and spirit to the last. His excess in Monroe was his last anywhere, and henceforth he was a free man.”
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