Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (66 page)

Custer was not one of Ulysses Grant’s favorite people. Their relations had been strained ever since Custer began writing articles for
Galaxy,
because in the articles Custer was critical of Grant’s peace policy toward the Indians. Custer’s arrest of Fred Grant had not helped matters, and now Custer was accusing Grant’s brother and his former Secretary of War of corruption. While in Washington, Custer had tried on three occasions to have an interview with Grant, but the President begged off each time on the excuse that he had a cold.
⁴³

The President now refused Custer permission to leave Washington. Custer tried to see him, spent several hours waiting in his anteroom on May 1, but the President still refused. Finally, a desperate Custer sent in a note to the President, saying that he wanted an interview only to correct some unjust impressions that he understood were held by the President regarding him. Still Grant would not see him. Custer then gave up on the President. He decided to rejoin his regiment, whatever the consequences, but he did his best to cover his rear. He wrote Grant another note, protesting the treatment he had received, and reported his proposed departure from Washington to both the Adjutant General and the Inspector General of the Army.

Custer took the train on May 2 to Chicago, his mind filled with thoughts of Libbie, the Sioux, and the 7th Cavalry, which was expected to take the field in a few days. But when he stepped off the train on May 3 a member of Sheridan’s staff met him. He was under arrest. The President had given the order. The charge was leaving Washington without permission, and Grant had added specific orders that Custer not be allowed to join the Sioux expedition.
⁴⁴

For Custer it was the worst possible development, but for the Democrats it was heaven-sent. Bennett’s
Herald
had a field day, denouncing
Grant for conduct which appeared “to be the most high-handed abuse of his official power which he has perpetrated yet.” On May 6 it declared that Custer was being disgraced “simply because he did not ‘crook the pregnant hinges of the knee’ to this modern Caesar,” and said that Grant’s theory of government was that of an “irresponsible despot … with an absolute power to decapitate anybody offending his Highness or his favorites.”
⁴⁵
Thanks to Bennett, Clymer, and Grant, Custer was now center stage. The Republicans denounced him, the St. Paul
Pioneer-Press
calling Custer “an extraordinary compound of presumptuous egotism and presumptuous mendacity which makes him the reckless and lawless being he is.”
⁴⁶

Whatever Custer may have hoped for as a result of a victory over the Sioux, he hardly wanted to be the center of political attention before the military campaign even began. He was free to move about, with the understanding that he should consider himself under arrest, and he took the train to St. Paul. There he met with General Terry, whom Grant had designated commander of the expedition in Custer’s place. (There had been a scramble among all the senior officers on the Plains when the news of Custer’s arrest broke; Major Marcus A. Reno of the 7th Cavalry, for example, had telegraphed Terry that since it was obvious that Custer would not be available, and since “S. Bull is waiting on the Little Missouri, why not give me a chance as I feel I will do credit to the army.”)

Custer regarded his interview with Terry as crucial, for Terry was his last hope. Sherman, now the General in Chief of the Army, had refused to intercede with Grant, and he evidently thought that Custer should have stayed in Washington. Sheridan, always something of a bootlicker, would do nothing to cross the President. Only Terry could help. So Custer went down on his knees, literally, and with tears in his eyes begged Terry to get the orders changed.
^47
‡
Terry suggested that Custer write President Grant again; Custer muttered that that wouldn’t do any good; Terry insisted that he should give it a try. Custer couldn’t think of what to say, so Terry composed a message for him. Custer read it and agreed to send it over his own name. The telegram, addressed to “His Excellency, the President (through
Military Channels),” read: “I have seen your order … directing that I be not permitted to accompany the expedition to move against the hostile Indians. … I respectfully but most earnestly request that while not allowed to go in command of the expedition I may be permitted to serve with my regiment in the field.” Then, there was the reminder of the old-school tie and of the honor of the professional soldier: “I appeal to you as a soldier to spare me the humiliation of seeing my regiment march to meet the enemy and I not share its dangers.”

Terry, who badly wanted Custer with him on the campaign, endorsed the request. He also promised Grant that he, Terry, would retain command of the expedition even if the President allowed Custer to resume command of the 7th Cavalry, adding that Custer’s “services would be very valuable with his regiment.” Terry also persuaded Sheridan to ask Grant to change his mind, and Sheridan did ask, although in a way that would not offend Grant. In his appeal, Sheridan recalled 1868, when “I asked executive clemency for Colonel Custer to enable him to accompany his regiment against the Indians, and I sincerely hope if granted this time it may have sufficient effect to prevent him from again attempting to throw discredit on his profession and his brother officers.”
⁴⁸
If these appeals were not enough to move him, the President had an additional motive for backing down—the Democratic press was taking him to pieces for his “abuse of power” and “mistreatment” of Custer. The President relented. Custer could command the 7th Cavalry on the expedition, but Terry would have command of the column.

That fact hardly bothered a jubilant Custer. As he told Colonel William Ludlow, engineer of the expedition, he expected “to cut loose from and make my operations independent of, General Terry during the summer.” Custer added that he had “got away from Stanley [in 1873] and would be able to swing clear of Terry” in 1876 without any difficulty.
⁴⁹
A week later, on May 17, 1876, the 7th Cavalry left Fort Abraham Lincoln with the band playing “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”

One evening shortly before the column moved out, Custer had visited the camp of the regiment’s Crow and Arikara scouts, and that visit brings us back to speculation about what may have been said to Custer while he was in the East. First, Custer presented his Rhee scout Bloody Knife with several gifts purchased in Washington and told him and the Arikaras of his visit to the capital. Then he said that this would be his last Indian campaign and that if he won a victory—no matter how small—it would make him the Great White
Father in Washington. If the Arikara helped him to a victory, he promised that when he went to the White House he would take his brother Bloody Knife with him. He also told the scouts that he would look after them and see to it that they got houses to live in, and finally promised that as the Great White Father he would always look after the welfare of his children, the Arikaras.
⁵⁰

Could the story be true? This biographer must begin by saying that he does not know, that no one will ever know. Only the event itself—a victory over the Indians, followed by a presidential nomination by the Democrats—could have provided proof, and even then we would not know if Custer had planned it that way or if it happened by accident. Still, it is too Custer-like a story to pass by without comment.

Questions arise. Did such a scheme fit in with Custer’s character insofar as we understand it? Certainly. Although it is true that he had passed up numerous political opportunities in the past, the presidency was something altogether different. If the Democrats in Washington put that bee in his bonnet while he was testifying against Belknap, it seems probable that the bee would have been just the thing to stir Custer’s ambition. President of the United States! The very words have a ring to them that only William T. Sherman has ever been able to resist. Of course Custer would have liked to have been President. Not that he had any program that he was burning to put through for the future benefit of his country—far from it. But the prestige, the glory, the admiration, the sense of being an historic personage—in short, all the things Custer wanted most—would be his forever.

Was it feasible? Could Custer realistically dream of becoming President, or was it all fantasy, whether his or Bennett’s or that of the Democrats in Washington? It would seem to have been a realistic enough proposal. After all, Americans since 1789 had been electing one or more war heroes per generation to the presidency—George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, and Ulysses S. Grant. The Sioux war had caught the national attention and a victory over them, especially if Custer won it on his own, would cap his military career and make him the most notable Indian fighter of them all. The Democrats, having been licked twice by General Grant, wanted a general of their own to run for the White House, but he had to be a general whose views were acceptable to the South.

What better choice than Custer? He had dozens of highly placed southern friends, was notoriously anti-black, had legitimate Democratic
credentials, had stood behind Andy Johnson when the Radical Republicans were hounding him, and besides all that was a Union war hero, the path breaker for the continental railroads, and the man who had opened the Black Hills. New York and New Jersey Democrats knew and liked Custer (McClellan, still Custer’s admirer, would become the Democratic governor of New Jersey in 1878). Nationally, he was well known.

In terms of the specifics of 1876, the Democrats could smell blood. They had Grant and the Republicans on the run, and they were going to make an all-out effort to get back into the White House after a sixteen-year absence. Governor Samuel Tilden of New York, a Democrat, had a strong organization and support, but the professionals in the party tended to be against him because of his reform impulses, which they regarded as dangerous. That spring some 120 prominent New York Democrats, following a series of secret meetings, had signed a petition which was printed and widely circulated, stating that they were opposed to Tilden’s nomination to the presidency. Some of Custer’s supporters were among the signers, including Fernando Wood and August Belmont. The problem these politicians faced was the absence of a viable candidate.

To men desperate for a candidate, Custer must have seemed ideal. The Democrats were scheduled to hold their convention in St. Louis in late June; by then, Custer should have found and whipped the hostiles. News of his victory could have swept the convention like wildfire if handled properly and led to a stampede for Custer. Did Bennett or someone else suggest this possibility to Custer? Despite direct orders to the contrary from Sheridan, Custer was bringing Mark Kellogg, a newspaper reporter, with him on the expedition.
⁵¹
Perhaps Custer hoped that Kellogg could get a report of the battle with the Sioux to the Democrats and to the country before June 27, the opening day of the convention.

There was enough reality in the proposition, one could suppose, for Custer to believe his nomination possible. If nominated, could he have won? That is anyone’s guess, American politics being as they are, but it may be instructive to recall that the Democrats were able to throw the election of 1876 into the House of Representatives, even when running so faceless a candidate as Tilden and despite widespread Republican fraud at the ballot boxes. And it might also be said that as a President, Custer probably would not have been much worse than the men who did hold the job for the remainder of the nineteenth century. The country would have survived.

But all that is speculation. We don’t even know if any important
Democrats whispered about the presidency to him, much less if he took such talk seriously or not. But something prompted him, according to the evidence, to tell Bloody Knife and the Arikara scouts that he was planning to become the Great White Father.

* This was done the following year, but the squaws couldn’t figure out how to keep a house clean. Brooms, dust rags, and stoves were a mystery to them. They had always cooked over open fires. In a tipi, when dirt accumulated, they just moved the tipi to clean ground and thus in half an hour finished their house cleaning. They could not clean a log house that way, so they moved out, living in the tipis and retaining the log houses to show off to their friends.

† Homestake Mining Company, which eventually got a virtual monopoly on the gold fields of the Black Hills, has taken approximately $1.5
billion
worth of gold out of the Hills. In 1974 alone it extracted $40 million worth of gold. It is the largest operating gold mine in the Western Hemisphere.

‡ Once again there is a close parallel between George Custer and George Patton. In May 1944 Patton got himself into hot water because of some silly political statements he made about Britain and the United States running the world after World War II. General Eisenhower threatened to relieve him of his command of the Third Army, on the eve of Operation Overlord. Patton got down on his knees, cried, and begged Ike for another chance. Stephen E. Ambrose,
The Supreme Commander: The War Years of Dwight D. Eisenhower
(Garden City, 1970), 344.