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Custer: The Controversial Life of George Armstrong Custer
George Armstrong Custer has been so heavily mythologized that the human being has been all but lost. Now, in the first complete biography in decades, Jeffry Wert reexamines the life of the famous soldier to give us Custer in all his colorful complexity. Although remembered today as the loser at Little Big Horn, Custer was the victor of many cavalry engagements in the Civil War. He played an important role in several battles in the Virginia theater of the war, including the Shenandoah campaign. Renowned for his fearlessness in battle, he was always in front of his troops, leading the charge. His men were fiercely loyal to him, and he was highly regarded by Sheridan and Grant as well. Some historians think he may have been the finest cavalry officer in the Union Army.
But when he was assigned to the Indian wars on the Plains, life changed drastically for Custer. No longer was he in command of soldiers bound together by a cause they believed in. Discipline problems were rampant, and Custer's response to them earned him a court-martial. There were long lulls in the fighting, during which time Custer turned his attention elsewhere, often to his wife, Libbie Bacon Custer, to whom he was devoted. Their romance and marriage is a remarkable love story, told here in part through their personal correspondence. After Custer's death, Libbie would remain faithful to his memory until her own death nearly six decades later.
Jeffry Wert carefully examines the events around the defeat at Little Big Horn, drawing on recent archeological findings and the latest scholarship. His evenhanded account of the dramatic battle puts Custer's performance, and that of his subordinates, in proper perspective.
From beginning to end, this masterful biography peels off the layers of legend to reveal for us the real George Armstrong Custer.
But when he was assigned to the Indian wars on the Plains, life changed drastically for Custer. No longer was he in command of soldiers bound together by a cause they believed in. Discipline problems were rampant, and Custer's response to them earned him a court-martial. There were long lulls in the fighting, during which time Custer turned his attention elsewhere, often to his wife, Libbie Bacon Custer, to whom he was devoted. Their romance and marriage is a remarkable love story, told here in part through their personal correspondence. After Custer's death, Libbie would remain faithful to his memory until her own death nearly six decades later.
Jeffry Wert carefully examines the events around the defeat at Little Big Horn, drawing on recent archeological findings and the latest scholarship. His evenhanded account of the dramatic battle puts Custer's performance, and that of his subordinates, in proper perspective.
From beginning to end, this masterful biography peels off the layers of legend to reveal for us the real George Armstrong Custer.
464 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1996
43 people are currently reading
151 people want to read
About the author
Jeffry D. Wert
17 books35 followersAmerican historian and author specializing in the American Civil War. He graduated cum laude with a B.A. from Lock Haven University, and a M.A. from The Pennsylvania State University, both in History. He worked for many years as a history teacher at Penns Valley Area High School in Spring Mills, Pennsylvania.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
May 21, 2023
“Precisely when individual officers and men died on the hill, history cannot determine, but there were a few left when about forty men of Company E rushed off the hill toward the river. They formed a skirmish line on the slope for a few minutes, but then Hunkpapa Lakota attacked. Twenty-eight troopers broke through and sought shelter in Deep Ravine. ‘We were right on top of the soldiers,’ a warrior stated, ‘and there was no use in their hiding from us.’ The soldiers were finished. On the hill other warriors killed the wasichus who were still alive, using knives and hatchets. Although they did not know whom they had slain, in time the Lakota remembered the day as Pehin Hanska Ktepi, the day ‘they killed Long Hair…’”
- Jeffry D. Wert, Custer: The Controversial Life of George Armstrong Custer
George Armstrong Custer was a nineteenth century American soldier. He rose to prominence during the Civil War due to his youth, his meteoric ascent to general, his dash, and his skill as a cavalryman. After the war, he courted controversy, unleashing a dubious attack on a sleeping Cheyenne village along the Washita, earning a courts-martial for shooting deserters and leaving his command, and dabbling in Democratic politics to the ire of Republican President Ulysses S. Grant.
For all that, if Custer is remembered today, it is for his spectacular final act, in which he achieved immortality by getting himself – and most of his cavalry regiment – killed on a Montana hillside near present day Hardin, while fighting Lakota and Cheyenne warriors.
Custer’s so-called “Last Stand” has beguiled generations of amateur sleuths seeking to discover the chronology of the 1876 battle, and the motivations that led the commanding officer of the Seventh Cavalry to split his regiment into four separate bodies, and then plunge into an encampment that vastly outnumbered them. His actions have been attributed to arrogance, overweening ambition, and condescension for the Indians he fought.
According to Jeffry Wert, no American save Abraham Lincoln has been the focus of so many publications. Whether accurate or not, most Custer books focus on the Little Big Horn, where Custer and his troopers ran headlong into Crazy Horse and hundreds of other hardened fighters, all seeking to hold the line on a vanishing way of life.
In Custer, Wert goes another direction, delivering a full-scale biography that seeks to look beyond its subject’s last moments. The result is readable, well-researched, and totally fine. If that sounds like a backhanded compliment, I assure you that is my intent.
***
When it comes to biographies, page count matters. The reason, of course, is that lives worth writing about are usually very full. If you try to compress that fullness down to 358 pages, as Wert does here, it’s immediately apparent that the narrative is going to be stripped down to its essentials. While you still get all the vital information, it lacks texture and depth.
That is exactly the problem with Custer.
Wert takes us through the life of George Custer step by step: his youth in New Rumley, Ohio; his laughable showing at West Point, where he graduated 34th in a class of 34; his remarkable exploits during the Civil War, rising to the rank of general at 23; and his reinvention as an “Indian fighter” in the west, with all the storms that created.
The prose is solid. The judgments are studied. But with so much going on, and so few pages to describe them, Custer simply lacks most of the plus-factors that you see in the best biographies. There is no depth given to the supporting cast; there are no richly-developed set pieces. In short, you get “the life,” but not “the times.”
***
When I finish a bio, I always ask myself: Would I know what it’d be like to stand in this person’s presence. If he or she walked into a room, would I have a sense of their physicality, their personality, their virtues and vices, their beliefs and prejudices. That is simply lacking in Custer. Wert barely even attempts such an evocation.
Still, there is a lot of good information here. Wert not only summarizes past research, but gives a fresh, seemingly-nonpartisan account of some of the many disputes that George Custer left in his wake.
For instance, there is the contention that following the battle – or massacre – at the Washita River, Custer developed a sexual relationship with a Southern Cheyenne woman named Mo-nah-se-tah, and even had a child with her. Some of the sources of this legend – such as Captain Frederick W. Benteen, an avowed Custer-hater – are less than creditable. Nevertheless, the tale is also found in Cheyenne oral histories, free from any such taint. After weighing the evidence, Wert dismisses the notion, arguing that Custer caught gonorrhea at West Point, which likely left him sterile.
This is a logical deduction, and even though I think that Wert misses the bigger point – Custer could’ve had an affair without a child, and there’s quite a bit of testimony that Custer and other officers took advantage of Cheyenne women after the Washita – I appreciated his take on it.
***
When it comes to the Little Big Horn, Wert – unfortunately – is not up to the task. Simply put, this final encounter is the sole reason that we remember George Custer at all. Without it, Custer is just a blonde Wesley Merritt. If you don’t know who that is – well, that’s the point. To be successful, a Custer biography requires a strong description of this rarest of clashes: a battle of annihilation.
Wert’s retelling is rushed, confusing, and frankly disappointing. He barely touches the rather voluminous Indian recollections, and makes no effort to use them to create a tapestry. He mentions the archaeological research done on the battlefield – where bullets and shell cases were excavated, and then precisely marked, establishing where people were getting shot, and where they were shooting – but doesn’t use it to show anything.
There are two potential explanations, neither compelling. The first is that he simply didn’t want to venture into this hotly disputed arena. The other is that he had a strict word count, and couldn’t spare any.
***
Wert ends Custer with a tepid call to assess him in the context of his entire military career. No offense, but that’s kind of lame. Custer’s heroics in the Civil War were noteworthy, but hardly without parallel.
To give just one example: Custer graduated in June 1861 with a young man named Alonzo Cushing. On July 3, 1863, Cushing commanded Battery A of the Fourth U.S. Light Artillery. He was stationed at the angle of a stone wall, along a place called Cemetery Ridge, outside the town of Gettysburg. During the third day of the bloodiest battle in American history, Cushing held the Angle against an assault remembered today as “Pickett’s Charge.” Packing his three-inch ordinance rifles with double canister, Cushing’s battery blew tremendous holes in the attacking Confederate ranks. He was hit in the shoulder by shell fragments. A second shell fragment tore into his groin. According to Sergeant Frederick Fuger, this wound destroyed his testicles. Ignoring his grievous injuries, he continued to fight, manning his cannon until a bullet hit him below the nose and ended his unimaginable sufferings.
Cushing finally got his Medal of Honor in 2014. Nevertheless, there are something like 3,000 books on Custer, and maybe one on Cushing. The Civil War was filled with heroes; that’s not why Custer endures.
People care about Custer because he is a symbol, a lightning rod, and an avatar of America’s schizophrenic Indian policies in the Trans-Mississippi after the Civil War. He embodies the murky ethics and questionable morality that attended the “winning of the West.” Custer’s contradictions mirrored those of his country: he professed to respect the Indian way of life, even as he tried to destroy it; he recognized the humanity of Indians, even as he charged into their encampments at dawn, bugles blaring.
Wert gives us a grounded examination. But Custer – the hero or the villain, the good soldier or the uniformed murderer – requires more.
- Jeffry D. Wert, Custer: The Controversial Life of George Armstrong Custer
George Armstrong Custer was a nineteenth century American soldier. He rose to prominence during the Civil War due to his youth, his meteoric ascent to general, his dash, and his skill as a cavalryman. After the war, he courted controversy, unleashing a dubious attack on a sleeping Cheyenne village along the Washita, earning a courts-martial for shooting deserters and leaving his command, and dabbling in Democratic politics to the ire of Republican President Ulysses S. Grant.
For all that, if Custer is remembered today, it is for his spectacular final act, in which he achieved immortality by getting himself – and most of his cavalry regiment – killed on a Montana hillside near present day Hardin, while fighting Lakota and Cheyenne warriors.
Custer’s so-called “Last Stand” has beguiled generations of amateur sleuths seeking to discover the chronology of the 1876 battle, and the motivations that led the commanding officer of the Seventh Cavalry to split his regiment into four separate bodies, and then plunge into an encampment that vastly outnumbered them. His actions have been attributed to arrogance, overweening ambition, and condescension for the Indians he fought.
According to Jeffry Wert, no American save Abraham Lincoln has been the focus of so many publications. Whether accurate or not, most Custer books focus on the Little Big Horn, where Custer and his troopers ran headlong into Crazy Horse and hundreds of other hardened fighters, all seeking to hold the line on a vanishing way of life.
In Custer, Wert goes another direction, delivering a full-scale biography that seeks to look beyond its subject’s last moments. The result is readable, well-researched, and totally fine. If that sounds like a backhanded compliment, I assure you that is my intent.
***
When it comes to biographies, page count matters. The reason, of course, is that lives worth writing about are usually very full. If you try to compress that fullness down to 358 pages, as Wert does here, it’s immediately apparent that the narrative is going to be stripped down to its essentials. While you still get all the vital information, it lacks texture and depth.
That is exactly the problem with Custer.
Wert takes us through the life of George Custer step by step: his youth in New Rumley, Ohio; his laughable showing at West Point, where he graduated 34th in a class of 34; his remarkable exploits during the Civil War, rising to the rank of general at 23; and his reinvention as an “Indian fighter” in the west, with all the storms that created.
The prose is solid. The judgments are studied. But with so much going on, and so few pages to describe them, Custer simply lacks most of the plus-factors that you see in the best biographies. There is no depth given to the supporting cast; there are no richly-developed set pieces. In short, you get “the life,” but not “the times.”
***
When I finish a bio, I always ask myself: Would I know what it’d be like to stand in this person’s presence. If he or she walked into a room, would I have a sense of their physicality, their personality, their virtues and vices, their beliefs and prejudices. That is simply lacking in Custer. Wert barely even attempts such an evocation.
Still, there is a lot of good information here. Wert not only summarizes past research, but gives a fresh, seemingly-nonpartisan account of some of the many disputes that George Custer left in his wake.
For instance, there is the contention that following the battle – or massacre – at the Washita River, Custer developed a sexual relationship with a Southern Cheyenne woman named Mo-nah-se-tah, and even had a child with her. Some of the sources of this legend – such as Captain Frederick W. Benteen, an avowed Custer-hater – are less than creditable. Nevertheless, the tale is also found in Cheyenne oral histories, free from any such taint. After weighing the evidence, Wert dismisses the notion, arguing that Custer caught gonorrhea at West Point, which likely left him sterile.
This is a logical deduction, and even though I think that Wert misses the bigger point – Custer could’ve had an affair without a child, and there’s quite a bit of testimony that Custer and other officers took advantage of Cheyenne women after the Washita – I appreciated his take on it.
***
When it comes to the Little Big Horn, Wert – unfortunately – is not up to the task. Simply put, this final encounter is the sole reason that we remember George Custer at all. Without it, Custer is just a blonde Wesley Merritt. If you don’t know who that is – well, that’s the point. To be successful, a Custer biography requires a strong description of this rarest of clashes: a battle of annihilation.
Wert’s retelling is rushed, confusing, and frankly disappointing. He barely touches the rather voluminous Indian recollections, and makes no effort to use them to create a tapestry. He mentions the archaeological research done on the battlefield – where bullets and shell cases were excavated, and then precisely marked, establishing where people were getting shot, and where they were shooting – but doesn’t use it to show anything.
There are two potential explanations, neither compelling. The first is that he simply didn’t want to venture into this hotly disputed arena. The other is that he had a strict word count, and couldn’t spare any.
***
Wert ends Custer with a tepid call to assess him in the context of his entire military career. No offense, but that’s kind of lame. Custer’s heroics in the Civil War were noteworthy, but hardly without parallel.
To give just one example: Custer graduated in June 1861 with a young man named Alonzo Cushing. On July 3, 1863, Cushing commanded Battery A of the Fourth U.S. Light Artillery. He was stationed at the angle of a stone wall, along a place called Cemetery Ridge, outside the town of Gettysburg. During the third day of the bloodiest battle in American history, Cushing held the Angle against an assault remembered today as “Pickett’s Charge.” Packing his three-inch ordinance rifles with double canister, Cushing’s battery blew tremendous holes in the attacking Confederate ranks. He was hit in the shoulder by shell fragments. A second shell fragment tore into his groin. According to Sergeant Frederick Fuger, this wound destroyed his testicles. Ignoring his grievous injuries, he continued to fight, manning his cannon until a bullet hit him below the nose and ended his unimaginable sufferings.
Cushing finally got his Medal of Honor in 2014. Nevertheless, there are something like 3,000 books on Custer, and maybe one on Cushing. The Civil War was filled with heroes; that’s not why Custer endures.
People care about Custer because he is a symbol, a lightning rod, and an avatar of America’s schizophrenic Indian policies in the Trans-Mississippi after the Civil War. He embodies the murky ethics and questionable morality that attended the “winning of the West.” Custer’s contradictions mirrored those of his country: he professed to respect the Indian way of life, even as he tried to destroy it; he recognized the humanity of Indians, even as he charged into their encampments at dawn, bugles blaring.
Wert gives us a grounded examination. But Custer – the hero or the villain, the good soldier or the uniformed murderer – requires more.
December 1, 2019
This is not as good a biography as either Custer's Trials or Touched by Fire. Wert soft-pedals things, like Custer's racism, that Stiles faces head on, and he doesn't offer the kaleidoscopic view that Barnett does. He's also not as good a writer as either of them. (Also, I think he's wrong about what happened at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.) In general, he seems more concerned to paint Custer in a favorable light than I think the historical facts quite warrant.
This isn't by any means a bad biography; I've just read better.
This isn't by any means a bad biography; I've just read better.
Read
June 18, 2019The Civil War hero and "Boy General" finds himself at a loss for dealing with the hardships and vagaries of the Indian Wars. From disobeying orders from his superiors to punishing subordinates haphazardly, he proves his inability to command.
July 17, 2008
Detailed, with numerous quotes from those who knew him & may have or not liked him. Builds the mystery of what made him tick, errors and excells in judgement.
December 10, 2012
Biography of Custer was excellent Good job of tracing his life and rise to fame in the civil war. He should be remembered for more than his last battle.
September 25, 2014
If you think about it, it was kind of stupid for Custer to even fight in a battle called "Custer's Last Stand".
October 17, 2018
Wert did a nice job of covering Custer's Civil War years but came up woefully short on the Little Big Horn campaign.
January 31, 2025
This was my first Custer biography and I think that it was a good starter. As other reviewers have noted, the book is a bit skimpy in its coverage of most events. As a Civil War buff, I was already familiar with Custer at Gettysburg, but knew little about the Little Big Horn. That is still true after reading the book. I have several books focusing on the LBH and hope to learn more when I get around to reading them. I fear that the challenge that all authors face is the paucity of available documentation about this battle. Nobody survived to be interviewed later. Those who saw the field the following week didn't document what they saw, out of respect for Libbie Custer's feelings. They intended to publish articles after Libbie died, but she outlived them all.
What I learned most from this book is the relationship between George and Libbie Custer. It sounds like they had a lot of fun together. There are very few complete biographies of Custer, which is a shame because he had a very interesting life. A life that needs quite a bit more than 350 pages to do it justice.
What I learned most from this book is the relationship between George and Libbie Custer. It sounds like they had a lot of fun together. There are very few complete biographies of Custer, which is a shame because he had a very interesting life. A life that needs quite a bit more than 350 pages to do it justice.
August 4, 2019
An excellent biography of a very interesting character in American history. The author, Wert, who has written other biographies, presents a balanced and quite unbiased viewpoint. He notes Custer's excellent record as a cavalry leader in the Civil War but also records his less than stellar performance on the Plains in the American attempt to subdue the Indian tribes, notably the Sioux and Cheyenne , who have refused to cooperate with Washington's plans to seize their land and force them onto reservations, as they have successfully done with other tribes.
August 19, 2023
Not bad, not bad. When folks think of Custer, it's he and the Little Big Horn. Wert focuses more on Custer and the Civil War years, and, folks, then he was good. Somehow, he had his good years then and his less than spectacular years after. I sensed the soldiers then had more of a belief in their cause (or "The Cause"), then those who came along post-1865, and so G.A.C. had more challenges in leadership. Wert didn't cover the rivalry between Custer and Merritt, but we have Oviedo's The Boy Generals to do that.
August 18, 2019
Great book... I really enjoyed reading this. I like how the author went through Custer's accomplishments and involvement during the Civil War (more than half the book) and then followed Custer across the Plains eventually to the Little Big Horn battlefield.
September 19, 2024
Very Good Biography
This book was well written. I liked the footnotes. The takeaway from this book for me was that Custer was good at fighting confederates. However, due to various reasons, he was not as good at fighting Indians.
This book was well written. I liked the footnotes. The takeaway from this book for me was that Custer was good at fighting confederates. However, due to various reasons, he was not as good at fighting Indians.
December 18, 2012
Excellent book, very insightful view of Custer's life. It debunked many of the popular myths. I recommend it for those of you interested in American History particularly Old West Military history.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews