During the final month and a half of the war in Virginia, Custer went east with Sheridan to help bring about the surrender of Gen. Robert E. For his many gallant services Custer was promoted to the rank of major general of U.
Volunteers on April 15, George Armstrong Custer. Major General December 5, — June 25, Colonel George A. Home » Leadership » George Armstrong Custer. Three Key Events June 29, , Custer is commissioned as a Brigadier General, making him the youngest general during the battle of Gettysburg. He got this position due to his bravery at Aldie and Brandy Station, even though he was so young and inexperienced.
This battle is was his claim to fame. Battle of Gettysburg: July 3, , the final day of the battle at Gettysburg. In response to this, J. During the Yellowstone expedition into the Black Hills, the military force involved sparked the Sioux uprising. Under the command of General Alfred H. Terry, Custer was to be a part of a two column attack, but during a scouting mission, his unit noticed a large settlement, strong, under the command of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.
Custer denied reinforcements and decided to attack with his force of men and officers. He led them into a slaughter and all were killed, including himself. He lacked as a student and was constantly making trouble.
Three companies would charge into the village at its southern end under Major Marcus Reno; the other four would ride with Custer to the north—and to their deaths. Since that day, thousands of pages have been written to describe what happened to the federal troops at the Little Bighorn, but perhaps nothing has been as succinct as the assessment attributed years later to Iron Hawk, a Hunkpapa Lakota who fought in the battle.
One reason that the Battle of the Little Bighorn has compelled generations of military historians and amateur enthusiasts to sift through the evidence of what occurred there is that little else beyond these bare facts can be established with absolute certainty. The unknown, and seemingly unknowable, facts of the Battle—its so-called mysteries—have been the subjects of passionate debate and bitter dispute.
One lieutenant who survived on the hilltop upstream said there were nine thousand Indian warriors—a number that has seemed to historians to be too high—while his comrades said the Native American force was fewer than half that.
The lower estimates were still notably larger than what several recent studies of the fight have suggested. It has taken more than a hundred years to reach a loose consensus on the number of Indians fighting Custer and his men, and it could take at least a hundred more to reach an agreement on the tactics that they used. In fact, the exact movement of the forces during the fight, both the Native American warriors and the cavalry soldiers under Custer, remains one of the most contentious topics among the cadre of professional and amateur historians who study the Little Bighorn.
Unanswered questions about numbers, times, and locations, though, are really just echoes of the deeper conflicts that have persisted about the behavior of Custer, his officers, and his men—and about who should take responsibility for a defeat that quickly became more significant as a national mythic spectacle than as an actual military loss.
It is a matter so enduring that mock courts-martial of a resurrected Custer are still staged regularly by a South Dakota group that assembles for this purpose. In , the Indiana University School of Law even held its own Custer court-martial featuring Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the presiding judge on the panel of three distinguished legal minds hearing the case. The most lurid rumor of all, though, did not have an Indian origin.
But these controversies surrounding Custer and his fate persist because the fight between the Seventh Cavalry and the village of Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho was, as all military conflicts surely are, a political contest over competing visions of power.
The Battle of the Little Bighorn resulted from and participated in a long struggle over questions of territorial governance and conflicting claims of sovereignty, as well as the implementation of solutions to these problems. For Custer and the Seventh Cavalry, the campaign had also become entangled with the divisive, never-ending battle between the political parties in the United States. As much as a military leader might want to divide the business of soldiering from the ugly world of partisan bickering, George Armstrong Custer could no more separate the two than his modern-day counterparts are able to do.
Custer, in fact, nearly had lost the command of the Seventh Cavalry because of his participation in hearings aimed at exposing the corruption of the Ulysses S. Grant administration—a political blunder that infuriated the president to such a degree that he was ready to punish Custer by keeping him on the military sidelines. Partisan politics, though, ended up serving Custer well, if only posthumously. The political wrangling of the s played a part in transforming Custer from an historical footnote to a household name, but only a part.
In , the nation was simultaneously commemorating its centennial and emerging from an economic depression; it had defeated secession, but the work of reconstruction and reunification still remained incomplete; the United States had spanned the continent yet still appeared to have only the loosest of grips over wide swaths of it. In other words, the United States in was a nation celebrating the achievement of its Manifest Destiny yet wondering whether that destiny had been achieved at all, and if so, at what price.
The Battle of the Little Bighorn gave a country at once confident and doubtful what it needed and would continue to need: a hero defeated in spectacular fashion—and defeated not just by anyone but by the American Indians considered to be the last holdout of savagery on a continent otherwise secured for civilization. Even in the decades after the Civil War, the status of free blacks was still too divisive and unresolved a question—one that could mar the harmony of a newly reunited country—for most white Americans to consider emancipation to be the central act of their national drama.
On the other hand, whites, particularly those living east of the Mississippi, could look at the conflicts taking place between the U. What they saw had all the elements of a melodrama: on the one hand, a desperate people setting loose their most violent, treacherous impulses in order to resist the inevitable, and on the other, brave men performing the dangerous work of securing the frontier for a more enlightened order.
Part of the power of this story in the American imagination—at least in the imagination of white Americans—emanated from the ambivalence that it generated. It has often been stated that white Americans of the nineteenth century thought of Indians in one of two ways: either as treacherous savages whose removal and perhaps even extermination were necessary to the safety of civilization or as noble savages whose decline and disappearance would be the price of progress. For many non-Indian Americans, though, these feelings of sympathy and disdain were not so sharply divided from one another; they were capable of holding both attitudes simultaneously—supporting the violent dispossession of American Indians throughout the continent while still lamenting the fate that they suffered.
Custer himself understood this ambivalence and even shared it. Here Custer neatly demonstrates the bind in which Americans of his time placed the indigenous peoples of the Plains. They could either submit to the confinement of the reservation—and be disdained for no longer being free read: real Indians—or they could face the army that Custer so eagerly led into battle.
For many Americans, the fate of Custer and his men at the Little Bighorn fed these same desires. Custer was not simply a victim of government corruption or poorly considered policies, in spite of what the Herald argued, but a martyr of the long march of civilization toward its ultimate dominion over the earth.
The image of Custer and his men being overwhelmed by hordes of bloodthirsty Indians reminded Americans that this was a genuine struggle with not only triumphs but also epic losses. Military victories over the Plains Indians seemed small and even sordid by comparison; the Battle of the Little Bighorn proved that the army had both a worthy foe and a worthy hero in the slain general. One need not feel guilty about the fate of the Indians if they were capable of this kind of carnage. Those whose lives were distant enough from the battle not to be touched directly by its blood and dust could regard the Battle of the Little Bighorn as the grand closing chapter of a book that had been nearly forgotten by the modern age.
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