Custer.....

[Socialist Dem]

A. Dumbass
B. Greedy attention-seeking bastard
C. Tragic figure

My opinion? The civil war proved that Custer, while reckless at times, could fight and knew battlefield tactics well enough to get a brevet rank of General. So, tacticaly any way, he wasn't a dumbass. It was tragic that he didn't wait for re-enforcements to come like it was implied in his orders (but not directly ordered), and his men were all cut down by Crazy Horse's superior fire power. Custer was not well liked by Grant, and was seriously considering a career change to politics. All he needed was a spectacular victory against the Plains tribes. So when he saw the huge camp spread out along the Little Big Horn, instead of waiting for Crook's columns to catch up, he went for the "big headlines". So, I guess he did get what he was after, just not the way that he thought he would.

[strategery blunder]

1. That, and he thought the gatling gun was too much baggage...

I'm not saying that the gatling gun is a good thing, but it could have helped him a lot at Little Bighorn.

I'm going to have to go with A (though I wouldn't argue with B either).

[cmd]

2. Someone had to be at the bottom of his West Point class

Custer was a reckless and usually luckly leader. He shares a lot of the same narcissistic traits as our present leader. B would be my answer.

[Tangledog]

3. I wonder if the Civil War Custer

...was the same person who was at Little Big Horn? I imagine that you are a lot more knowledgeable about tactics than I am (many people are). But my understanding is that he was a resourceful, smart commander in the Civil War. LBH looks like sheer bravado and misjudgments. So was he thinking too much about his next career move and overly invested in a "glamorous" victory, like you've already stated, and didn't think his mission through? Or had his ability to make tactical decisions -- or his more general ability to make good judgments of any kind -- been somehow diminished along the way?

So probably elements of all three ("tragic dumbass" is an image, eh?). This doesn't condone what he was doing fighting the Plains tribes to begin with. But you raise interesting questions.

[Socialist Dem]

4. Yeah, thats why I didn't go with "A"

You don't get all the way to a brevet General just with shear luck. He was capable, and did know tactics. But, during the civil war, he was also reckless with his men at times, and that was noted by Grant. Custer was reigned in more by other commanders including Grant.

Everything I've read about Custer (the person) tells me he was done with the military and wanted a big victory and personal glory to use as a springboard to a career in politics. He was flamboyant, wore uniforms he designed himself especially to stand out on the battlefield, and had a disdain for the troopers in his command.

The real tragedy is that the US Govt. used this as an excuse to wipe out the remainder of the plains indian culture.

[othermeans]

5. Did you read son of the morning star? I thought that was one of the

best biographies I ever read about Custer fairly presented with some interesting side lights about the men who fought and died under Custer at the Little Big Horn. The reason Custer sent a note instead of telling the messenger was because the messenger couldn't speak English very well. He was Italian. Majority of the men were immigrants and initially new little about horsemanship or soldiering.

Perhaps this accounts for Custer's disdain which I might add was shared by the other officers.

[Socialist Dem]

7. Oh,`

I didn't mean to imply that Custer was the only officer who looked down on his troopers. You're right about the make up of the calvary being immigrants. They also were abused, poorly equiped, and probably in no shape to fight once they reached the battlefield.

Custer cared only about himself, and getting all the "glory" when in battle.

[othermeans]

8. I'm sorry it is difficult to get the nuances & intent of language

across using a keyboard. I only was asking if you had read the book. I thought it was great one and was wondering if you had any others you might have read.

[troubleinwinter]

15. I liked this book, it gave SO much info on the times, as well as Custer

[RoyGBiv]

6. Brevet General

Well, actually, a "brevet" anything is at least partly based in luck or in political skills, or something to that effect. It's an honorary rank, the term "honorary" not necessarily having anything to do with actual "honor." They were most often handed out in the field, i.e. not through official channels, and during the Civil War they were a dime a dozen. Dead people got brevets just for dying. In fact, Joshua Chamberlain was issued a brevet rank as a general at a time when it was assumed he would die of wounds. (It's not clear whether Grant knew that, and I'm not wanting to get into that argument here.) A captain or a major, after a particularly hard battle that caused the loss of many ranking officers, could end up a brevet colonel overnight.

I'm of course not saying that all brevets were handed out for reasons unrelated to the talent of the individual receiving the distinction, but some were. They were issued simply as a way of sorting out command issues. That's not strictly true in Custer's case -- he had talent -- but the decision was at least partly political.

Summarized, the Union army command in the beginning stages of the war considered the cavalry of relatively little importance. There were a number of reasons for this, not all of them bad ones, but it boiled down to the misconception of how the war would be fought and how long it would be fought. The conventional wisdom of the day stated that to train and equip an effective cavalry unit required more time than the war would last, so it was low on the list of priorities. Not until Union armies experienced the effectiveness of Confederate cavalry, and noted that the conventional wisdom regarding training was plain wrong, did the Union start to re-think things.

Custer and the other "boy generals" were a part of a "clique" of cavalrymen who defied the conventional wisdom from the beginning. They paid attention to their opponents, considered what they were doing, and, most importantly, were willing to put these lessons into effect. They were the kind of hard fighters that Lincoln, et al were looking for. When the army started placing more importance on cavalry, people like Custer rose in the ranks, again not through official channels, and not because of any specific talent. It was based more on what they were willing to do and with which higher ranking officers they had chosen to associate.

By the time of Brandy Station, prior to the Gettysburg campaign, Custer and others were in a position to prove whether they were right, and they made their point. Afterward, Custer is notable for defeating JEB Stuart, long the nemesis of the Union army, in a cavalry battle at Gettysburg itself. Brandy Station and Gettysburg were definitely turning points in the use of cavalry. (JNO Buford deserves mention here as well, even though he was not among the favored.)

Custer did fairly well in the war, but he wasn't brilliant. He was also quite a little punk and an unwavering glory-hunter, like some of his associates. He got away with that more often than not. Notably, some of his contemporaries, e.g. Judson "Kill Cavalry" Kilpatrick, did not. He was not named "Kill Cavalry" because of what he did to the enemy.

In the last days of the war, he showed the dominant side of his personality and command style and how little he knew about certain aspects of being a general, i.e. off the battlefield. He tried to individually demand the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, possibly trying to seek the fame of such an event for himself. He made this demand under a flag of truce via James Longstreet, RE Lee's second in command. Longstreet sent him packing, and Custer is lucky he didn't end up dead. He explicitly broke the rules of the truce by making such a brash demand, and it was rather idiotic to do so anyway given that Longstreet didn't have the authority. Custer was either ignorant and didn't know that, or he was stupid and didn't care.

The relationship between these flaws and what happened to Custer and his command at Little Bighorn is oblique, but if you really look at it, it's there.

[cruadin]

9. Not a dumbass, but probably a combination...

of several factors.
Custer almost certainly wanted a sudden, bold victory in no small part for political reasons. Custer did have ambitons for high office after he left the Army and one last dramatic success could only help burnish his reputation. But there were also military considerations. One of the main concerns of all the U.S. officers was that the tribes would splinter into dozens of smaller bands immediately upon contact with the U.S. Army and scatter to the four winds. That would mean that the soldiers would spend the entire summer chasing down small bands in order to force them back to reservation. That had been the pattern in previous campaigns to force the tribes back to the reservation, and none of the officers expected this campaign to be very different. The overall strategy of having three columns converge on the main encampment was to keep that from happening--Gibbon and Terry from the west and Crook from the south in additon to Custer's Seventh. Custer had no way of knowing exactly where either of the the other columns was at any given time. So, when he saw the main encampment there were several factors, both personal and tactical, compelling him to attack immediately.
He did not know that Crook's column had already been fought to a standstill on the Rosebud only days before. This victory on the part of the warriors under Crazy Horse gave them an enormous boost of confidence and morale to stand their ground against army cavalry. The warriors also had a psychological boost from a vision. During a sundance ceremony, previous to the Rosebud battle, Sitting Bull had had a vision of many soldiers falling headfirst into the camp "like grasshoppers." This was taken to mean that the U.S. Army soldiers would be beaten when they came to attack the Indian encampment. Custer had no way to fully appreciate the fighting mood of the Siuox and Cheyene warriors when he came upon the camp.
Custer was probably also a tragic figure in the Classical sense of the word. He was a flawed hero, whose character traits would lead him to great succes but those same traits (in other circumstances, called defects) would lead to his demise.

[orpupilofnature57]

10. Should have seen what he was all about in the civil war,arrogant asshole

[Lizzie Borden]

11. Greedy attention-seeking bastard

fits him quite well, and it's a label he deserves.

[Baja Margie]

12. Wouldn't a tragic figure in a classical sense

have to be noble? And then suffers a disastrous fate because of one or more character flaws? Anyway, wow good reading here, thank you you experts, very enlightening. Could you say his life was tragic, he was a dumbass and a greedy -attention seeking sob? I go with all three.

[Socialist Dem]

13. Well,

First you have to know about G.A.Custer, the person. Basically, he was a publicity-seeking machine. In the civil war, he won some battles, not by sound tactics, but by dairing moves that, if things went the other way, would have gotten him shipped to a desk job in D.C. if he managed to survive. His superiors thought him reckless, but the Union needed "stars" to rally the cause, so he got promoted. Custer reveled in his newly won celebrety status. After the war, he went west to further enhance his reputation. He was repremended for not following orders and ignoring basic Army rules. He designed flamboyent uniforms for himself and wore his hair long so he'd stand out. (although at LBH it was short)

If the losses at LBH were just a case of flawed tactics, it could be viewed as tragic, but LBH wasn't. It was a case of a self-serving commander trying for one last big score so he'd get elected to Congress. No tactics that Custer had available to him at the time could have won that battle. His force was too small, they were out gunned, the troopers were exhausted from riding for weeks, and their equipment was outdated.

[Baja Margie]

14. Hmmmm....

so he was pretty much an asshole.

[Lefty48197]

16. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

.