This Day in Western History (Custer’s Waterloo at Little Big Horn)

June 25, 1876—Libby Custer got her wild man of a husband to swear off drinking completely, and she induced him to reduce his swearing. But she was less successful at curbing his gambling instinct, and that tendency led Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer to be slaughtered with his men at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in the Black Hills of Montana, in one of the worst military disasters in American history.

For a battle that everyone agrees took no more than two hours--and, according to more recent reconstructions of Custer and his surrounded, panic-stricken 200-odd men, quickly disintegrated into a chaotic melee with no command or organization--Custer’s Last Stand has resulted in countless books, articles, and depictions in all kinds of media to match its endless controversy. Such fine historians as Stephen E. Ambrose (Crazy Horse and Custer), Evan S. Connell (Son of the Morning Star) and, most recently, Nathaniel Philbrick (The Last Stand) have weighted in.

(If you’d like some helpful discussions of how the big screen has treated the event, you can read essays by Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. and Dee Brown on, respectively, They Died With Their Boots On and Fort Apache, a film with a fictional character strongly suggestive of the colonel, in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies.)

You really can drown in all this ink, no matter how fascinating. But as the first paragraph in this post implied, there’s another way to think of the Custer controversy, one really out of left field, one that, nevertheless, is more relevant than you think: women. (Or, as one of my friends--and he knows who he is--might write: WOMEN!!!)

When Colonel Custer died with every one of his men in his ill-fated campaign against the Lakota Sioux led by Sitting Bull, there was one obvious candidate for responsibility for this devastating loss sustained by the U.S. Army: himself. He was a glory-hound of epic proportions, the Union Army’s youngest general in the Civil War but now dying to make his status permanent. (He was only a “brevet” general in the war--meaning that his title was temporary--and had become a colonel in the regular army after Appomattox.)

If he could achieve victory over the Sioux, Custer believed, he could not only receive that long-desired promotion but maybe even propel himself to the White House. It was hardly a pipe dream: from George Washington to the current President, Ulysses S. Grant, Americans had always loved a man on horseback.

That burning ambition led Custer to disregard the wishes of the Commanding General of the Army, William T. Sherman, who warned Custer’s superior office, General Alfred Terry: “Advise Custer to be prudent, not to take along any newspapermen.”(Said newsman, Mark Kellogg of the Bismarck Tribune, died in the battle, too.)

Custer’s frustrated ambitions led him to discipline his men harshly, drive them relentlessly (especially on the 300-mile road trip across grasslands, badlands, mountains, and rivers that took him to the Little Big Horn), and take chances with their lives.

The biggest gamble of all came when, upon stumbling across a Sioux and Northern Cheyenne encampment on the Little Big Horn, he decided: a) to divide his force on ground he didn’t know in the face of an enemy he couldn’t see, b) to ignore the intelligence of his Indian scouts, who warned that Sitting Bull’s forces outnumbered his; and b) to attack said enemy immediately, thereby disobeying orders that he wait until Terry’s force linked up with him.

And there was this, going several years back: the general was given to impetuosity, having been found guilty by a court martial for being absent without leave--a conviction that could have led to his being unceremoniously drummed out of the Army, but for the urging of General Grant that Custer’s sterling Civil War record with the Union cavalry be considered in the sentencing.

The table was set, then, for Custer, with some great degree of justification, to be tabbed as the cause of his own death. It didn’t help that President Grant, annoyed when the general testified about corruption in his administration, had only agreed to him joining the Indian campaign after intercession by Sherman and mentor Philip Sheridan.

Enter Elizabeth Bacon Custer, a.k.a. Libby. She had been the reason why her husband had gone AWOL in the first place. To her, his 60-mile ride to be with her wasn’t abandonment of his post, but rather proof of his devotion.

So now, in the aftermath of the battle, grief-stricken Libby picked up the standard on behalf of her husband. For the rest of her 57 years, she pleaded his case insistently, not only in personal appearances but in three books. Probably no well-known American general had as careful a minder of a flame as Custer had with his Libby.

Well, maybe I should reconsider that. There might be one other contender for devoted widow: Sallie Ann Corbell “LaSalle” Pickett. You might not know her name, but there’s a good chance you know her husband: George E. Pickett. Yes, the leader of another suicidal charge that ended in mass deaths on a ridge, at the Battle of Gettysburg. Pickett wasn't responsible for that slaughter--that, despite generations of Lost Cause wishes, rested squarely on the shoulders of Robert E. Lee--but he was involved with another disaster that doomed the Confederacy.

Pickett and Custer shared some similarities. Their paths intersected in April 1865, when the rebel leader’s foolish decision to leave his troops while he attended a shad bake led to the crucial Union breakthrough on the path to Richmond, aided, in no small measure, by Custer’s pressing of the advantage. Like Custer, Pickett made for a dashing picture with his long locks. Like Custer, he ran afoul of his commander, being relieved of duty by Robert E. Lee just before the surrender at Appomattox. Like Custer, he found postwar life stultifying (probably more so, in Pickett’s case, as he became involved in the insurance business). Like Custer, he died while still young, in the mid-1870s.

And now we turn to the soldiers’ widows.

Like Libby Custer, LaSalle was a pretty young thing who turned her husband into a fool for love. The two women married their mates during the war, and went to bat on behalf of their husbands when they could no longer defend themselves. And both women died in the 1930s, more than 50 years after the deaths of their men.

If there was one good, even historically accurate, aspect of They Died With Their Boots On, it was the casting of Olivia DeHavilland, one of Golden Age Hollywood’s most intelligent and vibrant actresses, to play Libby. The widow was everything the actress could want in a role: beautiful, intelligent (valedictorian of her class), and devoted to her husband.

How devoted? So devoted that Libby lectured on her hero throughout the world. So devoted that she ended up writing three books that formed a collective shrine to her husband.

The effect of these should not be underestimated. Historians have, by and large, accepted Grant’s assessment of battles and junior commanders in his Personal Memoirs. Given the failings of Custer I discussed just now, there was no reason to think his negative view of Custer wouldn’t take permanent root as well. But Libby’s advocacy assured this wouldn’t happen. In fact, Custer became in popular memory not a fool, nor even a victim, but a gallant martyr in America's westward expansion.

Amazingly, though, LaSalle Pickett trumped Libby. Libby might have been indefatigable, but she wasn't excessively creative with facts. But it’s now been pretty much conclusively established that LaSalle’s books contain what can only be called whoppers--starting, but not ending, with the tall tale that Congressman Abraham Lincoln championed her husband's entrance into West Point.

We also now know that LaSalle Pickett was a fabulous fabulist who concocted two entire collections of wartime letters supposedly written by the Confederate general.

It all makes you wonder about this quote--written in overheated prose right out of a romance novel--by her husband that she hauled out, in her nonfiction account Pickett and His Men, supporting her conclusion that he could not have been drunk at Gettysburg: "I promised the little girl who is waiting and praying for me down in Virginia that I would keep fresh upon my lips until we should meet again the breath of the violets she gave me when we parted."

Unlike Pickett, Custer would not be accused of drunkenness at crucial instances in his career: He gave up booze permanently in 1862, after an embarrassingly public debauch endangered his courtship of Libby.

Ironically, it was another man more credibly accused of heavy drinking while on duty, President Grant, who, for all the unjust accusations of him as a "butcher," was far more careful with his men's lives than the teatotaling "Son of the Morning Star."

(Incidentally, the image accompanying this post shows the battle as recalled more than 20 years later by a Native American survivor, Kicking Bear. It’s not as well-known as the white-created depictions of the calm, sharp-shooting Custer and his men, but it is very likely far more truthful.)

This Day in Civil War History (Pickett Loss Spells Doom for South)

April 1, 1865—Robert E. Lee called on Major General George Pickett to save the Army of Northern Virginia, just as he had assigned him the task of breaking the center of the Union line at Gettysburg. But at the Battle of Five Forks, Pickett’s failure was more catastrophic—and more personally embarrassing—for it left Richmond vulnerable to Northern troops. Pickett may have reached “the high-water mark of the Confederacy” on July 3, 1863, but on April Fools’ Day nearly two years later he produced its Waterloo.

What actually happened at Five Forks—and the larger relationship of Lee and Pickett—was only rumored until after Pickett’s death 10 years after the disaster. Subsequent accounts from Civil War veterans and historians chipped away at the romantic cavalier image of Pickett, revealing a commander unprepared when the Union broke the back of Lee’s resistance.

As the winter of 1864-5 drew to a close, Ulysses S. Grant saw in the declining manpower of the Confederate Army a golden opportunity to end the siege of Petersburg, capture the rebel capital, Richmond, and bring the war to a conclusion. He instructed General Philip Sheridan to move south and west of Petersburg, falling on Lee’s right flank while cutting the rebels’ access to a key supply line to the city, the Southside Railroad.

Typically, Lee tried an aggressive maneuver—an attack on the Union at Fort Stedman—but when Grant’s vise remained as strong as ever, the Southern commander-in-chief ordered Pickett to halt the advance of the Army of the Potomac. After a day’s marching, Pickett repulsed Sheridan’s cavalry at the Battle of Dinwiddie Court House. But, with still more Northern troops on the way, Pickett retreated back to Five Forks, waiting in the rainy predawn darkness to see what would transpire next.

The next day, Sheridan’s hopes of striking at Pickett before he had a chance to breathe were set back when Major General Gouverneur Warren couldn’t get his men positioned soon enough to attack. “Little Phil” was so hotheaded that he had even gotten into an argument with a superior, George Meade, the year before, so he certainly wasn’t going to accept Warren’s plausible excuses (bad maps, muddy roads) for the delay. He relieved Warren, effectively short-circuiting the career of a hero of Gettysburg.

If only Sheridan could have seen how this momentary lapse actually worked to his advantage! Maybe Pickett was too exhausted to think straight after the last several furious days of marching and fighting. Whatever the case, when Pickett didn’t see action developing early on April Fools Day, he decided it was just fine to accept an invitation to a wonderful Virginia tradition: a shad bake.

There were several problems with this:

* Pickett, General Thomas Rosser, and cavalry commander General Fitzhugh Lee (Robert’s nephew) took off without telling anyone where they were going.

* The shad bake took place in Hatcher’s Run, which was surrounded by so much woodland that it muffled the sounds of gunfire and cannon from any nearby battlefield. (Rumors circulated that whiskey at the celebration didn’t keep the generals' senses alert, either--but that's impossible to verify.)

* The morning of April 1, Pickett had received a note from Lee that, in contrast to the Confederate commander’s sometimes ambiguous orders to subordinates earlier in the war, this time could hardly have been more explicit: “Hold Five Forks at all hazards. Protect road to Ford’s Depot and prevent Union forces from striking the Southside Railroad.” In other words, this was the worst possible time for Pickett to be away from his troops, and he should have known better.

* No matter how adept the junior commanders were in placing troops, they could not coordinate their actions without guidance from above.

The Federals didn’t attack until 4 pm, but by the time Pickett made it back the fighting was already halfway over. Sheridan’s total of killed and wounded—800—exceeded Pickett’s (600), but the real story lay in the prisoner count—2,400 men that Pickett and Lee could ill afford to lose.

The loss at Five Forks meant that Lee had to abandon the defense of Petersburg and Richmond. His last desperate hope—to flee west—ended a little more than a week later, in the surrender at Appomatox Courthouse.

After Lee’s movement had been cut off at Sayler’s Creek, he relieved Pickett—now down to only 60 men under his command—and two other generals from further duty. The two other generals received their notices, but not Pickett. Lee, not happy to see Pickett still around headquarters, reacted with an asperity rarely seen in a general known for courtliness: “I thought that man was no longer with the army.”

Though Pickett would serve as a pallbearer at Lee’s funeral five years after the war, Five Forks capped a relationship that had been quietly, steadily deteriorating since Gettysburg. Lee had deep-sixed Pickett’s post-battle report on Gettysburg, troubled that it blamed everyone but himself (including other generals who’d fallen on the field of battle) for the losses sustained by his division. In contrast, Pickett was angered that Lee had ordered a charge so futile that he was left with no division afterward. The last, awkward meeting of the two men, after the war, was followed by a typical Pickett remark to an associate that the “old man” had gotten his troops killed at Gettysburg.

George Pickett had cut quite the picture during the war with his tailored uniform, gold spurs, and long brown hair that curled at the shoulders. One person taken by this image was LaSalle (Sally) Corbell, who ended up marrying him.

Sally Pickett was the Southern counterpart to the widow of another soldier involved in Five Forks, the Union’s George Armstrong Custer. Both Libby Custer and Sally Pickett would see their husbands die within a year of each other—Pickett in 1875 from scarlet fever, Custer in 1876 at Little Big Horn. Both commanders, known for their impetuousness as well as their tonsorial styles, were fools for love, and their wives repaid their love—all the way until their own deaths in the 1930s, a half century after their husbands'--by writings that fiercely defended their men.

In one respect, however, Sally had her Northern counterpart beat: Her memoirs, swallowed whole at the time, now bear, in spots, the strong whiff of fiction. Consider the following:

* In an attempt to stake out her claim as the “Child Bride of the Confederacy”—supposedly marrying Pickett at age 15—Sally sliced five years off her age.

* She presented her husband as a largely simple, pure man, but he was known to imbibe, at least some--and, years after the fact, a rumor took hold that he could did even more than that.

* She claimed that none other than Abraham Lincoln had helped her husband get admitted into West Point, not bothering to explain how Lincoln—an Illinois Congressman at the time—would become interested in a Virginian with no connection to his district.

* She published a book of letters supposedly written by her husband, but they are so filled with facts that the general could not have known at the time that, historians have concluded, Sally herself must have written them instead.

Now that, folks, is love.