Review: "Custer's Trials," T.J. Stiles

By Al LaFleche

Possibly the United States’ most famous military leader best known for his demise is George Armstrong Custer. His life has been chronicled and dramatized in countless books, dime novels, and TV and cinematic movies.

He has been portrayed as vaunted hero, abject failure and grandiose buffoon. He was last in his class at West Point, barely keeping his demerits short of expulsion. He had befriended many cadets from the South and maintained his relationship with several throughout the Civil War. He was not supportive of abolition or Reconstruction, though his postwar service in Texas had him enforcing the latter. He became the youngest (brevet) brigadier general in the Civil War, being reduced to lieutenant colonel after the war. He was court-martialed at least twice. He struggled to set up a life among the rich and famous of his time.

One of the most recent books on Custer’s life is Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America by Pulitzer Prize-winning author T. J. Stiles.

The book follows Custer’s life from his childhood in Ohio to his demise, which is covered in an epilogue. The text is heavily researched using original documents, including personal letters to and from Custer. Footnotes comprise nearly half the book’s 800+ pages.

The question to be asked, given the number of biographies by such authors as Nathaniel Philbrick and Stephen Ambrose, is do we need another and will we learn anything new? Well, there are never too many books on any subject. So do we learn anything new or gain new perspective?

The answer is yes. Stiles presents Custer’s life as a microcosm of a changing American society, developing from an individualized society to a corporate one, with mega businesses gaining more control over the economy and government even as Custer strove to make a fortune investing, as he saw the great industrialists doing.

Stiles addresses points that have not been overly covered in other books. Custer was ambivalent about race. He opposed Reconstruction, but he took in a runaway slave as his housekeeper during the Civil War and kept her as such for many years afterward.

Custer was a risk-taker and addicted to gambling, an addiction he fed with his fast and loose investments, leaving him repeatedly near bankruptcy but living the high life with New York society, based on his notoriety. He led his troops from the front and was noted to have been a very deadly marksman.

Stiles takes a neutral position on Custer’s style of fighting during the Indian Wars on the Plains. While by modern standards, attacking a village housing noncombatants as well as fighters before dawn seems inappropriate, this would have provided, in theory, the lowest number of casualties on both sides. That the 1868 attack on Black Kettle’s camp on the Washita River turned into a bloodbath involving men, women and children does not appear to have been the goal. But there were no repercussions, either.

Other books have documented or romanticized Custer’s love for his wife, Libby. This biography explores Custer’s relationship with women more closely. When courting Libby, he was also involved with at least one of her women friends and played that to create jealousy. While Stiles does not conclusively say Custer was unfaithful, his letters to his wife suggest as much, and there may be evidence that she, too, was less than faithful.

This is an excellent addition to the body of nonfiction work on Custer, and well worth a read for those interested in his life.