Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (33 page)

In his first battle experience as a division commander, in October 1864, in the Shenandoah Valley, Custer was pitted against Tom Rosser, a close friend at the Academy and now a major general of Confederate cavalry. Spreading his regiments to his right and left in line of battle, Custer rode toward the enemy, his staff and billowing flags beside him. He halted his aides in a prominent position and rode forward alone. Tom Rosser had to know who he was up against. Custer reined in his horse, lifted his broad-brimmed hat, and bowed.

Then he charged, with overwhelming numbers. The Union troops sent Rosser’s men running; Custer chased them for ten miles in what was called “the Woodstock Races.” He took six cannon, Rosser’s supply train, ambulances, and headquarters wagons. Next day Custer appeared before his men dressed in Rosser’s uniform, which was far too large for Custer. He wrote a note to Tom asking him to have his tailor make the tails shorter next time.
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Custer was a newspaperman’s delight. Sketches of him in action appeared in the popular magazines of the day, while reporters outdid each other in singing his praises. “Custer, young as he is, displayed judgment worthy of a Napoleon,” the New York
Times
wrote of his actions at Cedar Creek, Virginia, later in October 1864. At the outset of the spring campaign of 1865, E. A. Paul, the
Times’
s war correspondent, attached himself to Custer’s division, telling his editors that was the best place to be to get news.
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Paul was a Custer worshiper, enthusiastically so. In March 1865 he reported in the
Times
on a Custer raid: “General Custer deserves the credit for planning and executing one of the most brilliant and successful fights in this or any other war.”
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Such attention greatly pleased Custer’s men and added to the luster of being a member of Custer’s outfit.

Custer knew how to get publicity for himself and his men. He did his best to appear modest (with some success) and made it a rule to always praise his outfit, never himself, although he knew full well that honors for his division were honors for him and vice versa. His
men felt the same way. On the eve of the presidential election of 1864, when the Lincoln Administration needed all the encouraging publicity about the progress of the war that it could get, Custer rode into Washington with rebel flags taken in the Shenandoah Valley, to present to the War Department. He also brought along the soldiers who had actually captured the flags. His timing was perfect. Together, Custer and his men rode a street omnibus up Pennsylvania Avenue, a rebel flag flying from each window. The press reported, “Washington has not had many such sensations. The soldiers in the city were jubilant. . . and some of the old soldiers would kiss Custer’s hand.” At the presentation, in Secretary of War Edwin Stanton’s office, Lincoln’s cabinet officers and other high officials “all flocked round” Custer “and were as proud of him as if he were their own flesh and blood.”
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Custer made a little speech explaining how each flag was captured and pointing out the soldier who had taken it. At the conclusion of the ceremony, Stanton turned to the crowd and, taking Custer’s hand, declared, “General, a gallant officer always makes gallant soldiers.” One of Custer’s privates piped up, “The 3rd Division wouldn’t be worth a cent if it wasn’t for him!” A friendly press reported, “The embarrassed looks of General Custer, as he bowed his thanks, showed that his modesty was equal to his courage.”
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As the incident illustrates, Custer was learning to soft-pedal his politics, indeed, to simply keep his mouth shut. Libbie did not know which of the presidential candidates he supported, Democrat McClellan or Republican Lincoln. Most probably he did not vote at all. His only expression of political views was in a letter to Libbie during the 1864 political campaign: “I believe that if the two parties, North and South, could come together the result would be a union closer than the old union ever was. But my doctrine has ever been that a soldier should not meddle in politics.”
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Personally loyal to McClellan, he would hardly turn on the Lincoln Administration, which had promoted him to two-star rank.

The flag-presentation incident also illustrates Custer’s popularity with his men. In general, they seem to have responded enthusiastically to his leadership. There were exceptions, of course, and most of what we know about how Custer’s men felt about him comes from his own writings, which makes it suspect, since Custer always saw what he wanted to see. Nevertheless, he was popular. After a fight near Front Royal, Virginia, Custer wrote Libbie: “Imagine my surprise … to see every man, every officer, take off cap and give
‘Three Cheers for General Custer!’ It is the first time I ever knew of such a demonstration except in the case of General McClellan.”
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More telling was an earlier petition signed by 370 soldiers in the 1st Michigan, asking to be transferred to Custer’s division. Later, 102 boys in the 7th Michigan also petitioned to join his outfit.
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But for all of Custer’s popularity, his dash, his willingness to take risks, his identification of himself with his men, and his other qualities, the question of how he got his men to do what they did remains unanswered. He once marched them one hundred miles in thirty hours,
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and in battle they fell in droves behind him. How did he do it? The question becomes even more intriguing in light of information developed in World War II by military historian S. L. A. Marshall. The remarkable facts Marshall discovered cannot be disputed, so careful and thorough was he in developing them, but they have never been applied to the Civil War.

Marshall’s key finding is nicely summed up in his own words: “The thing is simply this, that out of an average one hundred men along the line of fire during the period of an encounter, only fifteen men on the average would take any part with their weapons. This was true whether the action was spread over a day, or two days, or three.” Marshall found that this was the case in both the Pacific and European theaters, in small unit actions as well as big battles. The majority of American soldiers in World War II would not fire their weapons at the enemy, under any circumstances; of those few who would fire, less than half would take careful aim—the remainder just shot in the general direction of the enemy.
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Why wouldn’t they fire? Marshall puts the heaviest stress on the Christian injunction against killing. Most American soldiers simply refuse to kill other human beings.

It could be argued that Civil War soldiers were different, although certainly the Christian tradition was at least as strong in the 1860s as it was eighty years later. It is true that Civil War enlisted men were more likely to be farm boys than the GIs of World War II and that probably more of them were hunters and thus accustomed to taking life. But World War II soldiers were far better trained and thus much more familiar with their weapons than their Civil War ancestors. The GI in World War II had spent hours on the firing line, becoming familiar with his weapon. The Civil War soldier was handed a muzzle-loading rifle and shoved into the front line. Since we cannot subject Civil War troops to the post-combat-group-critique (Marshall’s method for determining what happened in a battle), we cannot tell if they did better or worse in terms of firing
at the enemy than did the World War II GIs. Even if the Civil War soldiers did three times better, however, that would still mean that less than half of Custer’s men were willing to fire at the enemy.

The point is that while Custer attracted hot-blooded young adventurers into his command and certainly brought out the fighting qualities in his men, the vast majority of the 3rd Division were ordinary American boys. They had no intention of playing the hero, they did not share Custer’s battle lust, and their desire to close with the enemy was nil. In one way, however, Custer was better off than infantry officers in World War II—his troopers did not have to fire their weapons to be effective. It is even possible that he recognized that most enlisted men would not shoot; that may be one reason he preferred the saber to the revolver or even to the repeating rifle. A mounted trooper, galloping into enemy lines, his saber glistening in the sun, was a fearsome sight, even if he never struck at the enemy. Cavalrymen in a charge don’t have to kill to get the job done.

But they did have to ride into danger, something few men do willingly, and even making allowance for the emotional fervor of a cavalry charge, which sweeps men up into a high tide of passion despite themselves and even infects the horses, Custer’s ability to get his men to charge continues to defy explanation. Certainly Crazy Horse would have liked to have known how Custer did it. No one has ever questioned the bravery of the Sioux, which makes the contrast between the way they fought and the way Custer’s men fought even more marked.

The crucial difference was discipline. Custer got his men to charge because he could threaten them with something worse than the risks of the battlefield if they did not.

In the Union Army, soldiers who failed to do their duty in combat were court-martialed and given such sentences as a year at hard labor with forfeiture of all pay or dishonorable discharges, with such tokens of disgrace as head shaving and drumming out in the presence of comrades. On occasion, branding the letter C for coward with a red-hot iron on the culprit’s hip or cheek was part of the penalty.
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Punishment for cowardice in the face of the enemy was only part of the disciplining process. Custer’s soldiers were well disciplined when they entered the Army, at least in comparison to Crazy Horse’s warriors, but the Army made the discipline stick in ways that went far beyond anything encountered in civilian life. Custer had a reputation for tough discipline, and although among Europeans the Union Army was regarded as not much more than an armed mob,
in fact to have a reputation as a disciplinarian in that Army meant that Custer was very tough indeed.

In the Army of the Potomac cavalry, petty offenders were required to carry saddles about the camp or were confined to the guardhouse on bread and water or were made to do exhausting labor. In some instances, commanders had offenders tied to the wheels of artillery pieces. One soldier described the brutality of that penalty: “Feet and hands were firmly bound to the felloes [rims] of the wheel. If the soldier was to be punished moderately he was left bound in an upright position on the wheel for five or six hours. If the punishment was to be severe, the ponderous wheel was given a quarter turn … which changed the position of the man being punished from an upright to a horizontal one … I have frequently seen men faint while undergoing this punishment … To cry out, to beg for mercy, to protest ensured additional discomfort in the shape of a gag being tied into the suffering man’s mouth … No man wanted to be tied up but once.”
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No wonder Custer’s men obeyed his orders. The only alternative was to desert, but desertion was an act of total desperation; if caught the punishment was death. Bell Wiley reports that between July 1 and November 30, 1863, in the Army of the Potomac, 592 men were tried for desertion (the Army’s total strength averaged slightly over 100,000 for that period). Of these, 291 were found guilty, 80 were sentenced to death, and 21 were eventually shot. In all, the Union Army executed 267 Union soldiers during the war, one third of them for murder or rape, the others for desertion.
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Custer himself, incidentally, although he had abundant self-discipline, was far from being a model soldier. Like so many officers before and since, he regarded the Army’s rules and regulations as something for enlisted men. He frequently disobeyed direct orders from superior officers in combat situations, but he got away with it by pleading that he possessed information not available to his commanding officer. On a number of occasions he was technically guilty of deserting his command in the face of the enemy. Libbie spent part of the winter of 1864-65 in Custer’s Winchester camp, and, as she reported to her parents after he had gone on a raid, “Autie always gets back ahead of his command. When within five miles, he lets his black horse fly, and ’tis all the staff can do to keep up with him.”
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Had an enlisted man tried that stunt, he would have been drummed out of the Army.

As an officer, Custer had the entire power of the state behind him when he gave an order. The Army and the government would go to
great lengths to protect an officer’s position. When Private John Williams of the 1st New Jersey Cavalry told his lieutenant, “If I ever get liberated I will shoot you and all such sons of bitches,” his bid for personal freedom earned him forfeiture of all pay, confinement in the penitentiary for the rest of his enlistment, and dishonorable discharge. An Ohio artilleryman who cursed and slapped his lieutenant was sentenced to be shot; President Lincoln commuted his sentence to forfeiture of all pay and imprisonment during the remainder of his enlistment.
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Examples could go on endlessly, but the point is clear enough. Drawing upon the experiences and traditions of European armies, the Union Army practically guaranteed Custer that his men would do what he told them to do, no questions asked. One result was that Custer never had to face the problems of leadership that Crazy Horse did. Another was that Custer got an exalted and unrealistic view of his own leadership abilities.

It was probably inevitable, however, that Custer would come to see himself as bigger and more important than he really was. Seldom, if ever, has so young a man been so overwhelmingly subjected to praise and even adulation. The wonder is not that the boy general became as conceited as he did, but rather that he retained any sense of balance and perspective at all. To be compared by the New York
Times
to Napoleon at twenty-four years of age is, after all, a heady experience, but that was only part of the silly praise heaped on Custer.