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

Stiles, T.J.

 
9780307475947: Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307475948 ISBN 13: 9780307475947
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History

In this magisterial biography, T. J. Stiles paints a portrait of Custer both deeply personal and sweeping in scope, proving how much of Custer’s legacy has been ignored. He demolishes Custer’s historical caricature, revealing a capable yet insecure man, intelligent yet bigoted, passionate yet self-destructive, a romantic individualist at odds with the institution of the military (court-martialed twice in six years) and the new corporate economy, a wartime emancipator who rejected racial equality. Stiles argues that, although Custer was justly noted for his exploits on the western frontier, he also played a central role as both a wide-ranging participant and polarizing public figure in his extraordinary, transformational time—a time of civil war, emancipation, brutality toward Native Americans, and, finally, the Industrial Revolution—even as he became one of its casualties. Intimate, dramatic, and provocative, this biography captures the larger story of the changing nation. It casts surprising new light on one of the best-known figures of American history, a subject of seemingly endless fascination.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

T. J. STILES is the author of The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, which received the Ambassador Book Award and the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Custer’s Trials was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2016. An elected member of the Society of American Historians and a member of the board of the Authors Guild, he was a 2011 fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a 2004 Gilder Lehrman Fellow in American History at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and a member of the 2014 faculty of the World Economic Forum. He lives in San Francisco, California, with his wife and two children.

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A voice called out to Custer, telling him to come see the observation balloon. He stepped out of the large tent that he shared with three other officers and his dogs and looked up. It was aloft, floating over the Union encampment. He found his field glass in his hand, so he put its twin lenses to his eyes. He was stunned to see two young women from Monroe seated in the basket—women in whom he had a certain interest. He dropped his field glass and ran to the balloon’s base a short distance away. “Let me go up too,” he begged the men in charge of it. They agreed. In a moment he somehow reached the basket high above, “but my friends had gone, much to my disappointment.”

He awoke. Unusually, he remembered the dream. “I always deal with realities,” he wrote to his sister. “I am not a believer in dreams”—unlike his mother—“but on the contrary think it absurd to pay any attention to them.” The more he disavowed any significance, the more he implied that the dream haunted him. Two attractive young women appear in his most isolated post, a basket in the air; he suddenly, inexplicably, rises to that great height; they vanish the instant he reaches them. He corners what he desires, yet it escapes him, leaving him bewildered and alone.

When he stepped outside of his tent in the morning—awake, this time—he found himself at Harrison’s Landing, the James River bivouac where the Army of the Potomac had retreated after the victory at Malvern Hill. McClellan established his headquarters at Berkeley Plantation, virtually the birthplace of the slaveholding aristocracy in the South. Out of respect, McClellan did not occupy the brick manor house, but ordered tents erected on the grounds. There he brooded on his enemies in the administration.

Just after the Battle of Gaines’s Mill, McClellan had sent a remarkable telegram to Secretary Stanton. “If I save this Army now I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or any other persons in Washington—you have done your best to sacrifice this Army.” He knew his accusation was shocking, but, he wrote to his wife, Lincoln was “entirely too smart to give my correspondence to the public—it would have ruined him & Stanton forever.” His delusion was not tested. In Washington the telegraph supervisor excised that last sentence, and so McClellan’s anger grew unchecked.

On July 8, in stifling heat and humidity, Lincoln came to Harrison’s Landing. McClellan and staff, including Custer, met his steamer at the pier and conducted him on a review of the army. Afterward the general and the president sat together under an awning on the deck of Lincoln’s vessel. McClellan handed the president a letter. Lincoln opened it and read as the general waited.

“I earnestly desire . . . to lay before your excellency, for your private consideration, my general views concerning the existing state of the rebellion,” McClellan wrote.

It should not be a war looking to the subjugation of the people of any State in any event. It should not be at all a war upon population, but against armed forces and political organizations. Neither confiscation of property, political executions of persons, territorial organization of States, or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment. . . . Military power should not be allowed to interfere with the relations of servitude, either by supporting or impairing the authority of the master.

He argued that the owners of contrabands should be compensated. And he backed his political lecture with an implicit threat: “A declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our present armies.”

Lincoln said nothing, a silence that McClellan took as vindication. The general even saw his defeat as a fine thing, reversing his earlier analysis. “God has helped me, or rather has helped my army & country,” he told his wife on July 10. “If I had succeeded in taking Richmond now the fanatics of the North might have been too powerful & reunion impossible.” He wrote to Samuel L. M. Barlow, the Democratic Party insider, “I have lost all regard & respect for the majority of the administration, & doubt the propriety of my brave men’s blood being spilled to further the designs of such a set of heartless villains.”

The self-absorbed general did not see the rising anger at his performance, in the North and even in his own army. Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, an influential Radical on the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, wrote to his wife on July 6, “I can hold my temper no longer & will not try. . . . McLelland is an awful humbug & deserves to be shot.” McClellan airily wrote to Barlow, “I do not think it best to reply to the lies of such a fellow as Chandler—he is beneath my notice.”

McClellan also misread Lincoln. The recent setbacks had convinced the president that victory required farther-reaching policies. On July 13, he told two cabinet members, “We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued. The slaves were undeniably an element of strength to those who had their service, and we must decide whether that element should be with us or against us.” But McClellan was blind to these shifts in politics—and blind to himself as well.

Custer was more complicated. In the weeks that followed Lincoln’s visit, he did two things that illustrated his inner contradictions—actions that were true to himself, yet pointed to two very different possible futures.

One of his deeds was to take part in a Confederate wedding. His old friend John “Gimlet” Lea had been paroled after the Battle of Williamsburg—allowed to go free as long as he did not return to military service before being formally exchanged. Prisoners on both sides obeyed the terms of paroles with remarkable faithfulness. Custer had heard that a family in Williamsburg was caring for his badly wounded friend, and McClellan gave permission to go to look for him.

Custer found Lea restored to health. Lea said that he was engaged to the daughter of his host—“very beautiful to say the least,” Custer wrote—and asked Custer to serve as best man. He agreed. During the wedding ceremony they stood together in uniform, one in blue and one in gray, opposite the bride and her attractive cousin Maggie. As Custer escorted Maggie out of the room, he told her she couldn’t be a very strong secessionist to agree to take the arm of a Union officer. “You ought to be in our army,” she said. “I asked her what she would give me if I would resign in the Northern army and join the Southern,” he wrote. She replied, “You are not in earnest, are you?”

He remained with Lea for two weeks, flirting with Maggie. The four spent each evening in the parlor, playing cards or listening to Maggie on the piano, playing “Dixie,” “For Southern Rights Hurrah,” and other rebel tunes. Custer did not mind; he was more interested in her beauty than her politics. In a sense, though, his very presence was political, in a way McClellan fully endorsed.

The other thing he did set a different tone, an implacable tone. “He vowed that he would not cut his hair until he entered Richmond,” Tully McCrea wrote to a friend. “You may think from this that he is a vain man, but he is not; it is nothing more than his penchant for oddity. . . . He is a gallant soldier.” He would let his curly blond hair grow and grow until the Union achieved total victory—a sign that he wanted...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307475948
ISBN 13 
9780307475947
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
640
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
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Deutschland

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