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Stiles carefully describes the policies and ideologies that motivated Custer’s Indian fighting, yet the greater contribution of this biography is in the way that Stiles so carefully embeds Custer in the racial politics of Reconstruction. Like many other white Americans before him, he professed admiration for American Indians but thought their demise inevitable. He fancied himself an expert in the tactics of warfare against the Indians of the North American plains, and his 1868 attack on a Southern Cheyenne village on the Washita River established him as one of the best-known Indian fighters in the Army. He adopted a wardrobe of buckskins and beards, led hunting parties for buffalo and penned articles describing his frontier adventures. As in the Civil War, he needed the right costume for this new theater. Like so much about the Civil War, the rank of brigadier general had been temporary.Īfter the surrender of the Confederacy, the West offered Custer a chance to reinvent himself, and he threw himself into the project. He gambled foolishly on the stock market, endured strains on his marriage and was frustrated by meager opportunities for promotion. Even after his battlefield victories, his promotions and his acclaim in the Northern press, he was plagued by insecurity, especially after the conclusion of the Civil War left him uncertain about his future. Stiles’s Custer, by contrast, is life-size. Custer’s iconic status has led other writers to treat him too much like the leading figure in a melodrama, whether hero or villain. Stiles has previously written biographies of Jesse James and Cornelius Vanderbilt, and his prodigious knowledge of 19th-century institutions is on display throughout “Custer’s Trials.” He is able to situate Custer in the shifting culture of the Civil War and its aftermath in a way no other biography has achieved. If Custer’s model for military success was the medieval chevalier, then Grant’s was the industrial factory: a massive, impersonal and ruthless machine.Ĭuster's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America by T. Grant, who directed his forces from the rear and never engaged in Custer’s theatrics. For Stiles, the antithesis of Custer was Gen. He persuasively contends that Custer was an effective, at times brilliant battlefield commander - but a terrible manager, uninterested in and poorly suited to the daily tasks of running a large organization. This insight is central to Stiles’s argument. He embodied a mode of romantic individualism that was already falling out favor. However, Custer’s formula was also a vestige of a waning era. Until the day of his death, it was a style of leadership that served Custer well on the battlefield, and Stiles provides a stirring account of Custer’s remarkable deeds over the course of the Civil War. A favorite of the Northern press, Custer was, as one newspaper observed, “as gallant a cavalier as one would wish to see.”
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He matched this sartorial flamboyance with dazzling tactics, and his men were soon wearing red neckties of their own. He created his own uniform of black velveteen and gold trim - complete with a red necktie - so that his men could easily observe their general leading the charge. Ever ambitious, he seized the opportunity. In this deft portrait, Stiles restores Custer as a three-dimensional figure, a complicated man whose formidable talents were nearly overwhelmed by his difficulties in managing affairs away from the clamorous riot of battle.Ĭommissioned as a second lieutenant at the beginning of the Civil War, Custer was promoted at age 23 to the rank of brigadier general, a move that placed the young officer in command of thousands of men, four regiments of volunteer cavalry from his adopted home state, Michigan. Stiles observes the irony: Whether idol or punch line, Custer is commonly recalled for failure on the field of battle, the one arena where, in fact, he succeeded throughout his lifetime. By now he has been reduced to the cultural equivalent of a sight gag, his standing on par with a banana peel. In the defeat of the 7th Cavalry by Sioux and Cheyenne Indians at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, Custer led a desperate, ultimately futile last stand that once served as a touchstone of heroic sacrifice, celebrated in paintings, poems and live performances. Cartoonists draw him - arrows protruding from his torso - to signify overconfidence, incompetence and plain bad judgment. Native Americans regularly invoke his name as the distillation of colonial racism.
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It is hard to think of another figure from American history who has been deflated more spectacularly than George Armstrong Custer. Elliott is the author of “Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer.”