Custer: From the Civil War's Boy General to the Battle of the Little Bighorn

by Ted Behncke, Gary L. Bloomfield

An extensive, in-depth biography of Custer that covers his lesser-known personal history as well as his military career.

The reader is introduced to a little-known side of Custer—a deeply personal side. George Custer grew up in an expanding young country, and his early influences mirrored the times. Two aspects of this era dominate most works about the Civil War, and the war with the Indians, culminating in his death at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. When mentioned, if at all, his early life and years as a cadet at West Point are brief, and then only enough to set some background for discussion of the mystery of the Little Bighorn. This is the first Custer biography to focus on these lesser-known parts of his life in great detail.

The approach uses all of Custer’s known letters; magazine articles; his book,  My Life on the Plains ; and his unfinished memoirs of the Civil War; along with materials and books by his wife, Elizabeth Custer; and reflections of others who knew him well.

The five chapters are Early Life (growing up and as a West Point cadet), The Civil War, The Indian Fighter, The Little Bighorn, and Conclusion. The theme of the book is not so much new historical information but the depth of his character development and lesser-known influences of his life.  Custer  draws together these elements in a succinct and accessible read.

The book also includes illustrations (primarily from  Harper’s Weekly ) and photos, such as Matthew Brady’s Civil War collection, to accompany the text.

Praise for Custer

“Ted Behncke and Gary Bloomfield remain faithful to the facts and enable the reader to better grasp the man as he was and the one he envisioned. Custer’s personalities, beliefs and actions, or lack thereof, weave through each chapter, amid a lively and readable writing style that interlaces quotes and sources within the text.” — Roundup Magazine

264 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 30, 2020

Reviews

[Cyrus · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think this is probably the worst history book I have ever read. However, to be clear, I don't think that this is necessarily near the absolute bottom of the barrel of history books, though it is an undeniably poor showing. I am very picky about the quality of history books and I normally am more discerning about the books I read. But because I am interested in reading about Custer, I'm more interested in collecting as many history books on him as I can. I wound up picking this one up for that very reason.

I got around to reading it after owning this book for around two years. I was very disappointed in this one. I have nothing against amateur historians taking a crack at history books. However, the amateur nature of the authors is kind of the problem here. It's an ill-researched, poorly fact checked, and overall clumsily written work.

First of all, to get the smaller points out of the way, the authors get very basic information wrong. Page 1 of this book sees them state that the Mexican-American War took place from 1848 to 1948. Certainly a mere typographical error, but the fact that a glaring error like that occurred on page 1 and was not caught at any point in the editing process makes me suspicious about whether this book was edited much in the first place. Page 1 also sees the authors state that Custer only had two younger brothers. He had three. Nevin Custer is oft-forgotten about because he was not present at Little Bighorn due to his poor health, but this is basic, easy to find information about him.

Similarly, at one point later on in the book, the authors state that Custer served with Ulysses S. Grant's brother, Fred Grant. Fred was Grant's son, not his brother. Another easily checkable piece of information.

I have an older edition of the book, so maybe these got fixed in the paperback, but I kind of doubt it. Who knows, though.

These are small errors, but it betrays a lack of particular care to ensure that the details are accurate.

This lack of care persists throughout the entire book. The authors express no interest in analyzing or elaborating on the information they are providing. They do not critically examine the sources they use, nor provide any insight on what these sources could mean in the grand scheme of who Custer was or why he'd do certain things. On rare occasion you do get some blind speculation on why Custer did certain things, which made me wonder how they figured that. I think of the sequence at the beginning of the final chapter where they suggest that Custer hated the corruption among Indian agents and sutlers, and I would love to see a quote or a source backing that up because I've never heard that from any of the other bios I read.

I also bring up the lack of a critical eye towards their sources, because I feel like the authors have fallen into the easy trap that many amateur historians fall into (and I, too, have, because I'm nothing but an amateur with a History bachelors) in not questioning for a second what the source is telling them. Frederick Whittaker is a common source for parts of Custer's life in this book, which left me genuinely aghast. The only person who loves lying more about Custer's life than Custer himself was Frederick Whittaker. I don't think you could take anything he says as truth, and some things they quote as true are nothing but pure fiction from Whittaker.

I also recall a moment in the chapter covering his Civil War era that proves to me that the authors aren't really doing their proper research. In reference to the parade of sorts that happened after the Civil War where Custer's horse panicked and dashed ahead of all the other leaders, the authors quote someone who stated that the horse "never quailed under fire," yet "shied at this floral bombardment." Yeah, the horse did never quail under fire because the horse never saw combat. The horse was a prize horse that Custer had stolen from a random guy a month prior after the Civil War had already ended. This is a well-documented thing, but because they're taking sources at face value, they never discovered this.

And because they aren't looking critcally and are completely uninterested in analyzing what they have or providing much opinion or thought on Custer's life, you don't learn very much about Custer at all. I don't know what I could really know about Custer the person after reading this book if I didn't already have extensive familiarity with the guy. I know a lot about what he did, but very little about who he was. This book will not remotely reveal who he was to you, because what you do want to know will be glossed over pretty aggressively.

The book just isn't very well written overall. The first hundred pages are nearly unreadable. Strangely, the writing gets better after that, but the first hundred are an insane slog. The book is littered with unnecessary and misplaced commas. The sentences are sometimes awkward or run on. It is clumsily written to the highest degree, high school essay level writing most of the time. The book will introduce you to the same figures over and over again, sometimes on multiple consecutive pages because they just forget they already told you who these people were.

The first hundred pages also suffer from severe bloat from quoting. I've never seen anything like it before. By the end of the Civil War chapter, the authors quote significantly more than they write anything themselves. The only sentences you'll see written by the authors themselves will be to set up another huge quote. Like pages will be taken up by ginormous multi-paragraph quotations on things that literally do not matter or have nothing to do with what they're talking about. You have to edit down your quotes to the most important points, but they quote swathes of pointless texts to the point I just started skipping the huge blocks of quotes taking up the pages. If the authors aren't interested in actually writing this chapter, then I'm not interested in reading it.

The book becomes less quote-heavy as time goes on, which I think contributes to the eventual readability of the later chapters.

The conclusion is short, but what was ultimately the cause of me rating this book 1 star instead of 2 stars. At one point the authors suggest that Custer hated slavery, which is genuinely laughable if you're familiar with him at all. I don't know how someone can even come to that conclusion. He was a pro-slavery Democrat just like his father. He fought for the Union because he loved the Union more than he hated Black people. That's all it ever was and his repeated disrespect and racist treatment of freedmen and of the Black people in his life indicate his deep-seated white supremacy. He didn't give a damn about slavery. I don't know why anyone would think he did. He was angered by Grant's pro-Black, pro-Reconstruction policies.

Coming back around to his role in the Belknap Affair, I also find it laughable that the authors suggest that Custer testified because he had special knowledge of the scandal and wanted to do the right thing, even though members of the military are supposed to remain politically neutral. He did it because he was an anti-Grant Democrat who loved the attention so much that he happily played pawn to the Democratic senators who wanted to take Grant down. He testified to things he could not have possibly known, as his familiarity with the scandal was scant at best. He had indeed seen corruption at Indian trading posts, but there was a lot he damn well knew he had no personal knowledge of.

Overall, the book is an underwritten mess. I don't feel like the authors understood Custer enough to write this book. I think the research is sorely lacking and the repeated incorrect facts or them completely missing chunks of what really happened at points is indicative of this. There is no depth to this book at all. You will not learn nearly enough or anything much of value. I can't say I came away from this book with any new insight or information on Custer at all, and because I've read so many books on him, I can see that so, so, so much of his life was left out. I cannot stress enough how much this book misses most of this guy's life. It scratches the surface, and that's it. It's not even scratching the surface well.

Again, it could be way, way worse, but that doesn't mean it is good. If you want a Custer bio that digs deep into him so you come out with a deep and intimate understanding of who George Armstrong Custer truly was, then I recommend reading Custer's Trials by TJ Stiles. It is an astonishing accomplishment of historical biography. I'd skip this one.

[Andrea Di Bernardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why another Custer biography? And why not ??? Today's book, published by Casemate and written by Ted Behncke and Gary Bloomfield, is the result of the authors' fascination with this controversial and certainly "larger than life" character, something that was perceived especially during his relatively short life. The Civil War hero, formerly an undisciplined near-disastrous student at West Point, has then with his death at the Battle of Little Big Horn begun to represent a negative aspect of the expansion to the west. This mainly with the vulgate of media such as cinema in the 70s. But to be completely honest, Custer was a much more complicated personality than a Manichean "evil = white man", "good = native". In this book, Behncke and Bloomfield analyze the fundamental stages of man and soldier George Armstrong Custer in 4 macro-chapters. From his youth and his poor results in West Point to the Civil War where he immediately distinguished himself for his evident instinct on the battlefield that made him see opportunities to turn every fight in his favor. This made him the youngest general in the Union Army at just 24 years old. The journalistic representation, the thirst for new enterprises sought by the reporters played in favor of the myth of Custer. Not that it wasn't true, on the contrary, but this relationship made Custer himself feed on the news and his ego was affected by creating a myth of invincibility. After the war Custer found himself almost disoriented even though he remained in the army. The front was the frontier now and the enemy those bands of native Indians who did not want to submit and enter the reservations.
Custer is defined as an "adrenaline junkie", meaning a man who could not sit still, he needed new challenges. Certainly the conquest of the West offered him many military opportunities both in the leadership of the 7th Cavalry and in other areas as a narrator or guide for wealthy Russian nobles. But even love he always interpreted it a little beyond the average. The story with Libbie, his wife, which nearly cost him his career in 1868, is an example of how Custer was a man of action rather than thought, of instinct rather than reflection. And perhaps this has played against him in passing on to posterity a distorted image of the "white man" who believes himself superior and pays the consequences. As mentioned, this is not the case, and today's book outlines all the character nuances of Custer, a man of contrasts, a faithful servant of the unionist cause but at ease with his colleagues (at West Point) and then opponents who fought for the South. Lover and an admirer of the great pristine spaces of the West and the native way of life but also a ferocious executor of the orders to lock those people in reservations and thus forever condemn their culture. Ferocious martinet with his soldiers (who however admired his sureness and charisma) but also a creative interpreter of the higher orders. A man with political interests but also a victim of his naivety. A man of contrasts, a complicated and not easily definable man, Custer.
The last battles with the bet of the Washita river in November 1868, when it fell on the camp of Black Kettle during a snow storm and captured the women eliminating the desire to fight of the natives and then the battle that defined the myth and, why not, the "damnatio memoriae "for the US Army's largest defeat to the natives, Little Big Horn. The obvious errors, if judged ex post, take on a different color, with a battle that could have been won, but which sealed the fate of Custer and other 267 men of the 7th Cavalry Regiment.
This clash often comes out of the military calculation of probabilities and opportunities and enters the myth, going to represent Custer's "reward" for his hubris. There are books that carefully examine only the Battle of Little Big Horn but Behncke and Bloomfield capture the essence of the fight and the timing, always, as throughout the book, relying on major sources such as that of Lieutenant Godfrey or the testimony of Reno and Benteen.
The book is presented as a volume contained in the number of pages (243), as mentioned, divided into 4 macro chapters. The style is that of a vintage book, which makes it great to leaf through. There is no central section of photos, but the book has engravings, photos and maps included in the text, which makes it easier to use. The narrative from a military point of view is flawless given that both Behncke and Bloomfield are two soldiers, plus fans of Custer's epic for a long time. The resulting book is a fresh and unbiased look at a man and a military man who paid for his enormous self-confidence with death in the battle that made him eternal. Custer is still today a dividing figure but who cannot yet be labeled, a complex figure that shines in the beautiful biography of Behncke and Bloomfield.