Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America

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Listen to find strength and community on the MG journey on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Cornelius Vanderbilt, a story featured here on Our American Stories. In his biography on George Armstrong Custer, Stiles casts surprisingly new light on one of the best known figures of American history, a subject of seemingly endless fascination.

Here's T.J. Stiles 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 200 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 was it 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 meanings 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 as 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?

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. Those demerits are a reflection of his acting out, of his performing for an audience. And that audience are 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 see past, 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. 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's 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 is in charge. He's captain of the guard. He's supposed to arrest them. They can't function with the soldiers fistfighting 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 core-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 for mercy, he admits his guilt, pleads for mercy, and they take pity on him. They reject him. The core-martial 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 his merit.

It's the fact that he's trying to find a new patron. 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's very few large institutions. And you've been listening to T.J. Stiles and what storytelling. And 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. Stiles 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.

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See website for details and important safety information. Subscription required. Controlled substances like Adderall are not available through the HERS platform. For each person living with myasthenia gravis or MG, their journey with this rare neuromuscular condition is unique. That's why Untold Stories Life with myasthenia gravis, a new podcast from iHeartRadio in partnership with Argenics, is exploring the extraordinary challenges and personal triumphs of underserved communities living with MG. Host Martine Hackett will share powerful perspectives from people living with the debilitating muscle weakness and fatigue caused by this rare disorder. Each episode will uncover the reality of life with myasthenia gravis. From early signs and symptoms to obtaining an accurate diagnosis and finding care, every person with MG has a story to tell. And by featuring these real-life experiences, this podcast hopes to inspire the MG community, educate others about this rare condition, and let those living with it know that they are not alone.

Listen to Untold Stories Life with myasthenia gravis on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we continue here with Our American Stories and with T.J. Stiles, the 2016 Pulitzer Prize 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 19th 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 becomes the commander of the Cavalry Corps, the Army of the Potomac. And when Lee invades the North, General Pleasanton, who picks Custer for his staff, gets a chance to appoint new brigade commanders, and he takes this 23-year-old lieutenant, who'd graduated last in his class, and makes him a brigadier general.

And what happens? Custer performs exceptionally well. He goes 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. Southern generals. And Custer himself is a product of actually border state culture. He had 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, a 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 a 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, the battles come fewer and fewer, farther and farther apart.

But in the Civil War, they come 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 is something that can seem difficult to repugnant or ridiculous to a 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 massive firepower. Custer is 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. You know, 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? Massed rifle fire and mass artillery fire wiped them out. They died by the thousands.

And they went forward with all the traditional martial values, 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 a now forgotten, but at the time, very important 19th 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, who are now on the other side. And he's constantly calling truces to go socialize with his old friends from West Point. And 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 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 a 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 into 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 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. Stiles 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. When you place one order, you pay just one flat rate, tracking included. Wish shipping isn't just cheaper either, it's also 26% faster. So what's your holdup? With Wish, you've got crazy low prices, super affordable shipping, and faster delivery. Download the Wish app today.

Hi, I'm Kristen Bell. Getting help from my anxiety made me feel like myself again, but we have all sorts of reasons for putting off taking care of ourselves. I thought I could just keep pushing through my depression symptoms.

Let's push through dinner with the in-laws, not life. I don't want medication to change who I am. Understood. But what if it helps you feel like yourself again? I hoped my depression would just go away after a while. Same.

But for me, it was kind of like wishing away my taxes. I've thought about trying medication for my anxiety before, but I don't know where to start. I've got you. Through Hers, you can get a prescription 100% online if a medical professional determines it's right for you. And through the Hers app, you can message them at any time. There shouldn't be a stigma about taking medication for anxiety. Start your free assessment today at ForHers.com slash care. That's ForHers.com slash C-A-R-E. Prescriptions require an online consultation with a healthcare provider who will determine if appropriate. Restrictions apply. See website for details and important safety information. Subscription required.

Controlled substances like Adderall are not available through the Hers platform. For each person living with myasthenia gravis, or MG, their journey with this rare neuromuscular condition is unique. That's why Untold Stories Life with myasthenia gravis, a new podcast from iHeartRadio in partnership with Argenics, is exploring the extraordinary challenges and personal triumphs of underserved communities living with MG. Host Martine Hackett will share powerful perspectives from people living with the debilitating muscle weakness and fatigue caused by this rare disorder. Each episode will uncover the reality of life with myasthenia gravis, from early signs and symptoms to obtaining an accurate diagnosis and finding care every person with MG has a story to tell. And by featuring these real-life experiences, this podcast hopes to inspire the MG community, educate others about this rare condition, and let those living with it know that they are not alone. Listen to Untold Stories Life with myasthenia gravis on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we continue with TJ Stiles 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 have 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 again. He's refusing to accept the validity of the institutional process of military justice within the Army, and he's lashing out. He's brittle. He's defensive. It's that insecurity in Custer that always makes a crisis worse. And so Sheridan intervenes. He says, I know what he did is wrong. It really offends me too.

Please don't do that. I actually want him back in duty. And finally Custer gets called back into duty to do what? To fight a battle. A battle that's very controversial with the Ouachita and the succeeding campaign. But as far as Sheridan's concerned, Custer fights well, and he fights this battle well. And that's what saves him from himself, his ability to fight, the thing that we think of him as being so bad at.

Now, Custer engages in a lot of other areas that I talk about in my book. He goes to Wall Street. He spends a total of about two years in New York. After the Civil War, he loves the Cosmopolitan Center. He loves the theater. He loves literature. He loves fine art. He tries to float a silver mine that he had invested in in Colorado on Wall Street.

He has no interest in running the mine. He just wants to float the stock and sell out and make a killing. And he does a terrible job of it. So he's a celebrity. He sees the world. He's celebrated on Wall Street.

He's treated to fancy dinners. He sees the wealth that the new financial markets are creating. He wants to take part in the new corporate economy, but he doesn't grasp it.

He can't master it. And that's Custer living on this frontier in time, wanting to engage with the new world, yet very much a man of an older world that's beginning to disappear, unable to master the way the world's changing. He finds some success as a popular writer, actually. He goes on to write articles for one of the new national magazines, and he tries to project himself as a public intellectual, writing about the Great Plains, its natural history and peoples, and then writes his memoir, but it's a very romantic style. It's very, very different from Henry Adams, who takes over the North American Review and gives orders that sound like something an editor would say today. Henry Adams says, you know, cut out all unnecessary words, especially adjectives. You know, it's like straight out of, you know, your Creative Writing 101.

Custer, meanwhile, is trying to cram in as many unnecessary words as possible. This is a man with a gambling addiction. He writes in his official report, in responding to an inquiry, exactly what meaning is intended to apply to the word gambling, which is construed differently by different persons.

He asks, I'm at a loss to understand. If by gambling the act of betting money or risking it on games of chance or contests of speed between horses, and if among games of chance are included that usually known as poker and similar games, my answer is that so far as my knowledge and belief extend, none of the officers of this command have an addiction to gambling except the commanding officer. It's an official report, and it's sarcastic as hell. Well, you know, lucky for him, he goes off on the Yellowstone expedition of 1873. But again, going through the National Archives, not just looking at the sort of high-profile events, you see that Custer is seen now as a problem officer. Within the institution of the Army, they talk about him as someone who can't get along with him. There's a dispute that blows up over really nothing, but people are writing about how we can't work with this guy.

They don't trust anything he says. It's about whether they need more supply wagons or whatnot. But nobody believes Custer because he's such a problem officer in the view of the Army, the institutional opinion of the Army. He goes off on the Yellowstone expedition escorting a surveying party for the Northern Pacific Railroad, one of the second wave of transcontinental railways, through Lakota country. And he's got a brewing fight with his commanding officer, Colonel Stanley. And Stanley's writing about Custer's reputation, how he's living up to his reputation as a problem officer.

And there's obviously the tension between the two is brewing to a boiling point, but what happens? He has two battles with the Sioux, and he actually performs very well, something we have to remember when we get to the Little Bighorn. He's not impetuous. He reads an ambush of the kind that led to the Fetterman defeat by the Sioux during Red Cloud's War. He reads it and avoids it. He keeps his men well in hand.

He's not reckless and impetuous. And suddenly Stanley is writing about how proud he is of Custer. And so once again, Custer has created a crisis for himself, unable to work within the institution of the Army, unable to catch on to the changing times, but he has a chance to fight, and that's what saves him from himself.

Well, he plunges himself after the Elson expedition into one more great crisis. When there is a revolutionary election in 1874, the Democrats come into control of the House of Representatives, and they do something which may be familiar to you. They launch a wave of investigations of the administration. And they call on Custer to testify.

Now, as I point out, prosecutors or committee chairmen don't call witnesses unless they know what they're going to say. Somehow Custer has been in touch with them. And so Custer testifies about corruption in the Grant administration, which he doesn't know about personally, a high-profile regular Army officer openly allying himself with the political opposition of the Commander-in-Chief, something the Army would not tolerate today. But Custer does it.

And guess what? President Grant is a little upset about this, and I think justifiably, actually. And so he says Custer cannot be the field commander of the 7th Cavalry in an upcoming campaign to drive in the Sioux so that the government can seize control of the Black Hills. And again, Custer sees a chance to fight is escaping him, and he becomes desperate. And he pleads, and he manages to get General Terry, his immediate superior, to plead for him. And finally, reluctantly, Grant allows him to be put back in command of his troops and to go off to fight in an attempt to save himself one last time from a crisis that he's created for himself.

But that time, the situation had changed. The Lakotas and Cheyennes, they are the ones, I think, that deserve the credit for that victory. In dismissing Custer as an arrogant fool, we can diminish the magnitude of that victory, not simply in numbers, but fighting skill, and the most amazing combination of tactical leadership among the Lakotas especially. They defeat Custer. Custer lost. He made mistakes.

But they won. And Custer rode into something he couldn't luck his way out of and he couldn't fight his way out of, and Custer's luck finally ran out at the Little Big Horn. And the reason that that was such an event for Americans is not simply the scale of the defeat.

It's very true. Not simply that the cream of the American army, such as it was, was wiped out by a bunch of pre-industrial nomads, but that it was led by this great, loved, notorious celebrity whom Americans had put so much meaning on, still as controversial as ever, and yet in that bright sunlight of the Little Big Horn, we can forget all of the great crises that ran through his life and all of the meaning he had for his fellow Americans and how much his life tells us about the way our country, as it exists now, came into being. And a superb job on the storytelling and production by Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to T.J. Stiles for remarkable storytelling on the life of George Custer. His book, Custer's Trials, A Life on the Frontier of a New America, is available on Amazon and all the usual suspects.

Heck, go to a bookstore and buy it. Again, T.J. Stiles, Custer's Trials. What a life. Multiple court-martials and somehow his fighting ability and his connections always saved the day.

Of course, until it didn't. As T.J. said, until one day his luck ran out at Little Big Horn. The story of George Custer. The story of General George Custer.

The side of his life that you probably didn't know. We love doing that here on this show. Here on Our American Stories. In Denver, A Girl's Getaway to the City comes with a side of Rocky Mountains, a place where you can find out more about the world and the world around you.

We'll be right back. In Denver, A Girl's Getaway to the City comes with a side of Rocky Mountains. Shopping in Cherry Creek turns into delicious Larimer Square eats. Sunny days in Wash Park lead to sizzling nights in River North. And a concert at Red Rocks means dancing with a view. When you're planning your girl's trip, come to the intersection of life and however you like living it. Denver, always welcome.

Plan your getaway at visitdenver.com slash summer. Sponsored by Visit Denver. For each person living with myasthenia gravis, or MG, their journey with this rare condition is unique. That's why Untold Stories, Life with Myasthenia Gravis, a new podcast from iHeartRadio in partnership with Argenics, is exploring the extraordinary challenges and personal triumphs of underserved communities living with MG. Host Martine Hackett will share these powerful perspectives from real people with MG so their experiences can help inspire the MG community and educate others about this rare condition. Listen to find strength in community on the MG journey on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.