Custer’s Last Stand?
Sometimes I think that no matter how much we may know about history as individuals, collectively we know nothing at all.
Case in point: Custer’s Last Stand.
I am currently working on an article that is about a painting about the event that you and I have always known as Custer’s Last Stand.* I went into the piece with only the vaguest sense of the historical event, something I felt no shame about because American history is not my field.** Here is what I had going in:
Custer during the Civil War. The long curls were gone by Little Big Horn.
- Custer was a Civil War hero, and as problematic after the war as that other Civil War hero, Ulysses S. Grant. Though not the same way.
- A small group of soldiers under his command died fighting a large group of Indians at the Battle of Little Big Horn
- A vague sense that Custer was at fault***
- A certainty that it must have been a critical battle, because otherwise why would I have heard about it?
- It occurred after the American Civil War, during the period when the west was “opened”.****
None of that is completely wrong. Except for the part about it being a critical battle. It wasn’t. Whether you think the death of the Seventh Cavalry at the Little Big Horn on June 25, 1876 was a military blunder or an act of heroism–or both,***** the battle changed nothing. It was barely a battle, even by nineteenth century standards. It had no lasting effect on the so-called Indian Wars, or on the drawn-out dreary campaign of which it was a part. The Sioux won the battle, but gained nothing by their victory.
The battle/fight/skirmish is historical fact, but it turns out that the popular image of that skirmish as a “last stand” is an artist’s creation, reinforced by other artists’ creations over the last 140 years. And the power of that largely mythical image is one reason an otherwise meaningless military encounter became, and remains, an important emblem of a ugly struggle that stands at the root of America’s westward expansion.
When it comes to the the Battle of Little Bighorn, we don’t actually know what happened and the question of whether Custer showed poor judgment continues to be hotly debated among those who care. The Seventh Cavalry, under Custer’s leadership, was intended to be one prong of a three-pronged campaign to encircle the Sioux and drive them from their treaty territory. When Custer’s scouts reported the discovery of a Sioux village, Custer divided his forces into three parts, keeping only five companies with him to face what turned out to be a much larger Sioux force than the US Army had originally estimated. Companies under the leadership of Captain Benteen and Major Reno retreated to a defensive position on the bluffs rather than attacking an overwhelming force. As for Custer, the last thing we know of him is his often-quoted final message: “Benteen. Come on. Big village. Be quick. Bring packs. W.E. Cooke. P.S. Bring pacs.” According to Trumpeter John Martin, who carried the message, Custer was about to charge the village as Martin left.
This is the point at which traditional histories often say that no one survived the battle. In fact, hundreds of people survived the battle–all of them members of the Sioux tribe. Some of them left their own accounts of the battle, but those accounts disagree about the actions taken by Custer’s troops. (This should come as a surprise to no one. Soldiers in the front line of battle seldom have a sense of the big picture.)
Maybe the battle, from the perspective of the 7th Cavalry, was a heroic last stand.******* Maybe it was a rout. The one thing we can say for certain is that whatever happened, it probably didn’t look like this:
William Cary. Death Struggle of General Custer. July 19, 1876
*Coming soon to an issue of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of American History
**Despite the fact that I’ve been firmly embedded in the American Civil War for the last thirteen months because of a certain book.
***Almost a reflex for me. I was twelve in 1970, when Little Big Man hit the screen and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was released, The ironic Western and revisionist examinations of Native American history are deeply rooted in my brain. Possibly the first step in a career based on trying to walk in someone else’s historical shoes.
****A phrase that ranges from problematic to horrific. Once you start looking at a period of history with an awareness that there are two sides to every historical event you find linguistic pitfalls everywhere. I have no good answer for how to cope with this other than to type with my eyes wide open and carry a large bag of quotation marks.
*****The two are not mutually exclusive. Think the Charge of the Light Brigade.
******According to the OED, a last stand is “an act of determinedly holding or defending a position against a (more powerful) opposing force; a final show of resistance or protest”. Wikipedia adds a few critical elements from the popular definition: the defensive force usually takes very heavy casualties or is completely destroyed and (most important for the rest of this discussion) the last stand is a tactical choice taken because the defending forced recognizes the benefits of fighting outweigh the benefits of retreat or surrender.
You think one vote doesn’t matter? Hah!
Almost 100 years ago today,* the 19th Amendment was ratified, making it legal for women in the United States to vote.**
The Amendment was ratified thanks to one man’s vote.
In August, 1920, 35 states had ratified the amendment; 36 states were needed for it to pass. Tennessee was the only state still in the game. Proponents and opponents of the amendment gathered in a Nashville hotel to lobby legislators. The press dubbed it the War of the Roses because supporters of the suffrage movement wore yellow roses in their labels while its opponents wore red roses.
On August 19, the vote appeared to be tied, assuming the count of red and yellow roses was correct. When the roll call came, 24-year-old Harry T. Burn stepped into history. Burn came from a very conservative district and wore a red rose in his label, but when asked whether he would vote to ratify the amendment he answered “aye”. What changed his mind? A letter from his mother, who told him to “be a good boy” and vote in favor of the amendment.
Asked later about his change of heart, Burn said “I knew that a mother’s advice is always safest for a boy to follow and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification. I appreciated the fact that an opportunity such as seldom comes to a mortal man to free 17 million women from political slavery was mine.”
If you have the right to vote, use it. Because one vote can in fact change the world.
*Okay, 96 years ago if you’re going to be picky.
**Note that I do not use the phrase “gave them the right to vote”. Women fought hard for that right. Some even died for it.
City of Sedition
I keep thinking I’ll take a break from the American Civil War, but it just keeps shoving itself in my face. And so I keep shoving it in yours.
I recently finished an extraordinary book. It had me writing notes to myself in the margins: “check what [someone else] has to say, “compare to X”, or sometimes just “!!!”.* Despite the fact that it looks at the war through the lens of one city, it gave me a new perspective about the war as a whole. Not an easy thing to do given how much time I’ve spent on the Civil War
In City of Sedition:The History of New York City During the Civil War, John Strausbaugh explores New York City’s multi-faceted role in the American Civil War: a role complicated by the city’s close financial ties with the South in the years immediately before the war, conflicts (physical and theoretical) between recent immigrants and anti-immigration “nativists,” political corruption at all levels and the rhetoric of competing “penny daily” newspapers. He portrays a city that was as divided by the war as any border state. So divided that in the months before the war, some city political leaders proposed that New York become a “free port” on the medieval model, seceding not only from the Union but from the state of New York.
Strausbaugh builds his portrait of the city from a multitude of smaller portraits, all set within the context of the larger story of the war. He tells the stories of well known New Yorkers, such as popular preacher Henry Beecher, journalist Horace Greeley, Tammany Hall politician “Boss” Tweed, and poet Walt Whitman. He follows less known figures over the course of the war, introducing readers to characters such as twelve-year-old drummer boy Gus Schurmann, who enlisted with his father in the all-German Mozart brigade and spent an afternoon playing with Todd Lincoln. He considers the fates of slave ship captains, abolitionist businessmen, war profiteers, and military units from all levels of New York society. (I was particularly taken with the volunteer immigrant militias, which were formed in response to laws that kept them from joining the official militia**)
The final result is a richly layered and often surprising history, as crowded and fast-paced as a Manhattan sidewalk.
*I love books that force me to have a conversation with them.
**We’ve been officially stupid about immigration from the beginning. [Insert rant here]
The guts of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.