Glorious War: 
The Civil War Adventures of George Armstrong Custer

Thom Hatch

St. Martin's Press, 2013, 366 pp., $28.99

          

Review by Gordon Berg

        Probably only one Union officer can match the cult of personality that has grown up around Confederate generals Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jeb Stuart: George Armstrong Custer.  Thom Hatch undoubtedly agrees that Custer deserves the accolades appearing in the opening paragraph on the dust jacket of Glorious War.  "This thrilling and definitive biography of George Armstrong Custer's Civil War years is nothing short of a heart-pounding cavalry charge through the battlefield heroics that thrust the gallant young officer into the national spotlight in the midst of the country's darkest hours."  Even allowing for some marketing exuberance, it sets the bar high for Custer.
 

        Hatch makes an energetic case that Custer deserves the hype.  Glorious War is his fourth book with Custer as the main actor.  Hatch argues that the young officer's Civil War exploits have been undervalued because of his defeat at the Little Bighorn.  He contends that Custer should be seen as "a national hero on a grand scale due to his amazing achievements in the Civil War."  Hatch's unstinting effort to correct the record and his unreserved praise and admiration for his subject may cause more objective readers to question his conclusions.  To his credit, Hatch admits that his book is "a testament," and maintains that "Custer's entire military career should be reassessed by fair-minded historians under a more favorable light and found to have been commendable."

         Custer's war record, however, capably speaks for itself.  The spirited son of a staunchly Democratic Ohio family, Custer was a long shot to be accepted for West Point.  Given his propensity for hijinks and accruing demerits, it was an even longer shot that he would graduate.  Custer succeeded in doing both.   It was probably poetic justice that he was the last of his class to leave West Point in 1861.  Custer joined his unit, the 2nd United States Cavalry, in time to play a minimal role at First Bull Run.  His company did, however, form the rear guard as the disorganized Union Army retreated to the defenses of Washington.

        Custer saw his first real action on March 9, 1862, leading his company on a saber charge against Confederate pickets near Centerville, VA.  It would be the first of many.  The regiment soon joined the Army of the Potomac on The Peninsula.  There, the young horse soldier came to the attention of Major General George B. McClellan, a fellow Democrat but polar opposite in temperament.  Asked to serve on the commanding general's staff, Hatch assumes "Custer must have been bursting with pride as he reported to the commanding general ready to prove once again that he could assume any role thrust upon him and excel."

        At Antietam, Custer served mainly in a staff role but, while detailed to General Alfred Pleasonton, his detachment managed to capture several hundred Confederate stragglers near Boonsboro.  Custer's initiative caught Pleasonton's eye and McClellan reported the incident to President Lincoln.  Between assignments after McClellan was relieved of command, Custer used the time to vigorously pursue the hand of a reluctant Libbie Bacon.   It was probably only orders to return to duty in April 1863 that delayed his winning that battle, too. 

         His new assignment again found him with General Pleasonton, now in charge of Union cavalry after the disaster at Chancellorsville.  Accompanying hard-fighting Colonel Benjamin F. Davis's 8th New York Cavalry, Custer found himself at Beverly Ford at dawn on June 9, 1863.  When halted by Confederate pickets, Davis and Custer opened fire and launched the Battle of Brandy Station, the largest all-cavalry engagement ever fought in North America.  After Davis was killed, Hatch admits that Custer's actions "could be called a matter of interpretation."  Hatch favors the version whereby Custer, "by virtue of his actions became de facto leader of an entire brigade or at least an individual detachment."  Whatever the reality, Custer's aggressiveness put him in Pleasonton's good graces; fellow officers would soon be calling him "Pleasonton's Pet." 

        Pleasonton's patronage quickly paid big dividends.  While Lee moved his army into Pennsylvania in June 1863, Pleasonton recommended that new Union commander, Major General George G. Meade, promote three young cavalry officers to the rank of brigadier general.  Twenty-three year old George Armstrong Custer found himself the youngest general in the Union Army.  He commanded a brigade of four Michigan regiments known as "the Wolverines."  Four days after his promotion, in a farm field east of Gettysburg, a cavalry fight would solidify his career and launch his reputation. Hatch belongs to the school that believes the engagement in East Cavalry Field on July 3 was an integral part Lee's ingenious attack plan to break the Union center by coordinated attack by George Pickett's infantry and Jeb Stuart's cavalry.  This belief may be behind Hatch contention that this encounter and Custer's role in it probably saved the Union army but it "has all but been ignored by modern-day historians, likely due to prejudices and controversies from the Boy General's later career."  Unfortunately, Hatch's bibliography omits recent studies of Union cavalry operations at Gettysburg that differ from his point-of-view.

        Custer's star continued to rise.  His flamboyant battlefield presence caught the imagination of the Northern press.  Serving with distinction at Culpepper, the Bristoe Campaign, and as a decoy during the Kilpatrick-Dahlgren Raid, Custer even found time to avenge an earlier defeat, finally winning the hand of Libbie Bacon.  When Ulysses S. Grant became commander of all the Union armies and came east to join the Army of the Potomac, he brought Major General Philip Sheridan with him.  Grant made "Little Phil" commander of the Union cavalry.  Sheridan gave Grant's pet, Brigadier General James H. Wilson, command of the Third Division, passing over a more qualified George Custer.  To his credit, Custer masked his disappointment and continued to serve with distinction.  His brigade was in the thick of the fight at Yellow Tavern where a trooper from the Fifth Michigan is credited with mortally wounding Jeb Stuart.  The brigade took a beating at Trevilian Station and fought with determination in the 1864 Valley Campaign where Custer finally earned command of the Third Division.  Custer distinguished himself at Five Forks and the first white flag at Appomattox appeared in front his troops.

        After his death in Montana in 1876, Libbie Custer "worked tirelessly to protect the image of her later husband and vigorously defended him against those who brought criticism."  Libbie Custerr would have loved Glorious War.   

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

Appomattox: 
Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War

Elizabeth H. Varon

Oxford University Press, 2013, 305 pp., $27.95

          

Review by Gordon Berg

        The day Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant in the parlor of Wilmer McLean's house in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, the two generals fired the first shots of a second, albeit different war: a war for the meaning of that iconic event and how it would be remembered.  Grant opened the battle with the magnanimous surrender terms he offered to the Army of Northern Virginia.  Lee countered with General Order No. 9, his melancholy farewell to the men he led for four agonizing years.  Each man understood his document in ways consistent with the ideology for which he had fought.  The political, social, and cultural debates these documents spawned in the months after the surrender are the subject of Elizabeth Varon's provocative and insightful study of an event most students of the Civil War thought they understood.

      

       Varon probes deep into the psyches of Lee and Grant and analyzes them with fresh eyes to understand what kind of nation they envisioned emerging from the wreckage of war.  Grant's surrender terms reflected a victor's generosity and spoke to the moral righteousness of the Union cause that promised a better future for all citizens of an improved, united nation.  Lee's unrepentant message looked to the past and lamented the loss of an idyllic, simpler time when the virtue, privilege, and honor of the white South prevailed, before it was ground down by the weight of the North's gross numbers and impersonal industrial might.  Varon contends that both Grant and Lee were men of peace on April 9, but peace of very different kinds.  The two men thus become touchstones for Americans struggling to understand how the war would affect their daily lives.  Grant's surrender terms and Lee's farewell order became the founding documents for 150 years of debate over the legacy of the Civil War.

        Varon also delves into the letters, diaries, and memoirs left by the men of the two armies who fought each other during those last desperate days.  "The Union and Confederate soldiers who fought the Appomattox campaign were keenly aware," she concludes, "of the political nature of the surrender and of the high stakes involved in interpreting it."  While the opinions of individual soldiers varied, most of them adhered closely to the interpretations enunciated by their leaders.  These feelings traveled with the soldiers as they returned home, forming the basis of Lost Cause mythology in the South and Reconciliationist vindication in the North.  Varon gives appropriate credit for the important, but often unreported, role played by United States Colored Troops (USCT) during the Appomattox campaign.  "In the eyes of black troops," she maintains, "the fate of the Union was still uncertain on April 9, 1865, and their own agency tipped the scales."   Varon emphasizes that, for them, the end of the war was much more than a military victory that preserved the Union.  They viewed their participation as an integral part of a victorious crusade that "incorporated the themes of not only racial pride and liberation but also of clemency: they attempted to inscribe a civil rights message into the magnanimous terms of the surrender."

        From the armies in the field, Varon gracefully moves to the two home fronts.  In the North, the mood of the populace quickly shifted from joy and relief to shock and anger in the wake of Lincoln's assassination, occurring less than a week after Appomattox.  Analyzing Radical, moderate Republican and Democrat, and Copperhead newspapers, Varon follows the panoply of public opinion toward the South in general and the Confederate government in particular.  It ranged from mercy grounded in moral righteousness to retribution fired by grief and all the various shades of each in between.  But through the cacophony of voices, the conciliatory words of Lincoln's last public speech and the magnanimous words of Grant's surrender terms reverberated throughout the North.  Varon also recognizes that these sentiments were mirrored in the restraint shown by African American troops toward the homeward bound Confederate soldiers they encountered.  Rather than responding with anger and violence in the wake of the president's assassination, she notes that "They paid tribute to Lincoln, as most white soldiers did, by upholding the fragile peace."

        Except for an almost universal reverence of Lee, feelings in the South were also divided about what the end of the war meant.  The theme of General Order No. 9 -- that the South succumbed only to the North's crushing numerical superiority and massive material advantages -- helped many salve feelings of shock, disbelief, and humiliation that the vaunted Army of Northern Virginia could be surrendered.  Again, Varon uses newspapers to take the pulse of public opinion.  It ranged from resignation and a wish for "peace and brotherhood" to angry defiance, urging "more determined and united action."  Southern Unionists felt vindicated in their loyalty to the old flag and Southern blacks "celebrated Lee's surrender as a day of jubilee."  The battle over the meaning of Appomattox, Varon astutely concludes, "did not simply pit South against North or even Confederacy against Union.  Instead it pitted those who opposed a thoroughgoing transformation of the South…against those who demanded such a transformation."  The  ideological battles of a second Civil War, less bloody, to be sure, but just as determined, had begun.

       

        In an earlier book, Varon expertly chronicled the turbulent decades leading to national disunion.  She now reveals an equal affinity for documenting the dramatic ending of that disunion.  Her scholarship provides readers with excellent bookends for the many volumes devoted to the Civil War.  At its root, Appomattox is a study of the power and subtlety of language.  In her clear, confident, yet elegant, prose, Varon gives renewed life to many of the players in the last act of America's greatest tragedy.  We can hear and understand their points-of-view, even if we don't agree with them.

   

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination:
The Untold Story of the Actors and Stagehands at Ford's Theater

Thomas A. Bogar

Regnery Publishing, 2013, 375 pp., $27.95

          

Review by Gordon Berg

     Charles Francis Byrne, John Mathews, and Helen Muzzy are among forty six all but forgotten individuals who had unintended parts in the greatest tragedy ever played out in an American theater.  History has plentifully recorded what happened in Ford's Theater on the evening of April 14, 1865.  But what about backstage?  The assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth forever changed the lives of the men and women working in the theater that night.  Thomas Bogar resurrects these unintended actors in an entertaining, delightfully written narrative, that offers an innovative perspective on an oft told tale.

       Historians have generally followed the evening's two main protagonists; one across 10th Street to the Peterson boarding house and martyrdom, the other across the Navy Yard bridge to Richard Garrett's tobacco barn and infamy.  Bogar sets himself a more formidable task.  "I have consciously given preference to the perceptions and words of those who experienced that night," Bogar relates, "and its subsequent harrowing days, from backstage, rather than to accounts by audience members, as has largely been the case to date."  He found a few performers, like lead actress Laura Keene, who were already public figures and left a paper trail to follow.  Some backstage hands took advantage of their chance notoriety and later spoke freely and publicly of events of that night as they knew them.  But most of that night's unfortunate bit players and backstage staff sought to distance themselves from events and willingly faded into obscurity.  Bringing them to life is an accomplishment of the first order. 

        Bogar, a theater historian by trade, offers more than capsule biographies of unfamiliar individuals.  He interweaves the state of the theater in wartime America with the way thespians of the time lived and worked.  Booth was one of the highest paid actors of his era and a favorite of Lincoln's.  After one performance, the president asked to meet the actor; the request was curtly refused.  Lincoln loved attending the theater in Washington, and he especially liked going to see light comedy at the recently refurbished building owned and managed by the three Ford brothers. 

        In a brief, fast paced, chapter, Bogar vividly describes the confusion, pandemonium, and anguish that occurred immediately after Booth's fateful shot.  Even before Mrs. Lincoln's ear-piercing scream alerted cast and audience that something was amiss, Booth was already backstage, shoving past novice actress Jeannie Gourlay and orchestra conductor Billy Withers.  He hit "basket boy" Peanut John, who was holding his getaway horse in an alley behind the theater, with the butt of a Bowie knife and galloped away.  Many recognized the fleeing Booth even before they realized Lincoln had been shot.  Actor Tom Gourlay quickly brought a prop table that allowed Dr. Charles Taft to climb from the stage into the presidential box where he was soon joined by Dr. Charles Leale and Ms. Keene.  Manager Harry Ford ordered ticket taker "Buck" Buckingham to find Washington mayor Richard Wallach who was in the audience.  Wallach ordered the theater cleared and stage manager John B. Wright dropped the plush green curtain.  It would not rise again for more than a century.  An evening that began with farce ended in tragedy. 

        Bogar skillfully interweaves a summary of the plot of "Our American Cousin" with the thumb nail biographies of the players and how they came to be together at Ford's.  Some were experienced performers, others members of Ford's stock company, still making their way through the ranks.  Veteran Helen Muzzy had had personal contact with Lincoln the previous year.  Her brother, a Confederate blockade runner, was sentenced to be hung in Norfolk, VA.  Muzzy and her mother made their way to Washington to plead personally with Lincoln for clemency.  Lincoln spared her brother's life and Muzzy remained in Washington to work.  From the stage, she would notice Booth just outside the presidential box that night. 

        Young Ned Emerson bore a striking resemblance to Booth and knew him well.  Rehearsing some lines with actress May Hart the day before in the alley behind Ford's, he was observed gesturing and pointing by two local women who reported what they had seen.  But he was never questioned by authorities or called to testify.  Another friend of Booth's, John Mathews, sometimes entertained the assassin in his rented room at the Peterson house; the very room in which Lincoln would later die.  General and Mrs. Grant, who declined an invitation to accompany the Lincoln's to the theater, passed a mounted Booth on Pennsylvania Avenue on their way to catch a train to New Jersey.  The night of the assassination, theater owner John T. Ford was attending to business 120 miles away in Richmond.  Bogar's book abounds with "stranger than fiction" anecdotes such as these. 

        With close attention to detail, Bogar takes readers through the play's dress rehearsal and performance preparations earlier in the day.  That night, as the fateful moment in Act III, Scene 2 approached, his narrative strategy of short, staccato sentences, builds an atmosphere of anxiety and dread.  From the moment the fatal shot was fired, Bogar maintains, the world of all the personages in the theater "turned upside down."  Authorities relentlessly questioned the theater people, looking for links to the assassination conspiracy.  Only Ned Spangler, a stagehand, would be convicted of any complicity although others had been associated with earlier plans to kidnap Lincoln.

        What happened to the theater people after the investigation and trials were all over?  Ten of them would be dead within a decade.  Laura Keene kept to a rigorous performance schedule but died at age forty-seven in 1873.  John T. Ford became one of the most successful theater managers in America until his death in 1894.  Harry Hawk, the actor on stage when Booth leaped into history, continued to work until he stopped acting and started raising chickens and dogs in Bryn Mar, New Jersey.  He moved to the Channel Islands in 1911 and died there in 1916.  Helen Truman, whose secessionist brother was spared by Lincoln formed a small touring company, retired to Los Angeles, and died at her home in 1924.  The last to die was program boy Joseph Hazelton who was only eleven in 1865.  He moved to California, performed in silent films, became a radio personality, and insisted to his death in 1936 that John Wilkes Booth did not die in Richard Garrett's tobacco barn.  Hazelton insisted that Booth escaped to South America and later returned to the United States where he committed suicide in a hotel in Enid, OK in 1903.  Lincoln was the first of four presidents to die by an assassin's bullet and his death spawned conspiracy theories over the years that rival the finest theater ever performed on the American stage.

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.