Custer's Trials by T.J. Stiles

Author:T.J. Stiles
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-10-27T07:00:00+00:00

Thirteen

* * *

THE FINANCIER

“HE WAS BORN INTO a time when all young men of his age caught the fever of speculation, and expected to get on in the world by the omission of some of the regular processes which have been appointed from of old.”

Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner wrote those words in 1873 in their novel The Gilded Age. They could have been writing about Custer as he entered the Age of Grant.1 When Ulysses S. Grant took the presidential oath of office on March 4, 1869, the nation that emerged out of the Civil War approached maturity—or what we might call its first maturity. All that was “appointed from of old” seemed to disappear.

For both good and ill, the federal government challenged traditional, inherited distinctions and communities, as policy makers sought to turn all into individual agents, transacting business under uniform rules in a national market. For African Americans, this meant liberation; for American Indians, cultural destruction. Railroads, the telegraph, and the increasingly national media integrated the republic, connecting local markets to the whole, unifying literary tastes and culture.

Great institutions rose over this nation of individuals. Both the federal government and business corporations attained size and reach never seen before—again, for both good and ill. Antebellum companies merged to form giants. They constructed vast factories, refineries, warehouses, port facilities, rail yards, and depots. The largest firms each employed tens of thousands, from unskilled laborers to lawyers and engineers. During Grant’s presidency, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan would outdistance the mass of men in building industries and fortunes, and the venerable Cornelius Vanderbilt, lord of a railroad empire, would be hailed by the Chicago Tribune as “probably the most powerful individuality in America.”2

The same machinery that cemented empires spun “rings” as well. In the new corporate economy, all roads ended on Wall Street, where the modernizing stock exchange and other financial markets concentrated and multiplied capital. If legitimate enterprises received funds, so did well-positioned speculators, for this was also the age of conspirators and inside traders, including Jim Fisk, Daniel Drew, and such political buccaneers as William “Boss” Tweed and Orville Babcock.3

Custer caught the fever. After an interregnum in Kansas in the Washita’s wake, he would leave the edge of American civilization and go to its center. He would go to New York, the capital of business, media, and (in some ways) politics, where the future of each was being made. He largely rejected the changes to the country, yet he would try to profit from them. He would seek the secret of his times.

“He saw people, all around him, poor yesterday, rich today, who had come into sudden opulence by some means which they could not have classified among any of the regular occupations of life,” Twain and Warner wrote. It takes no imagination to see Custer making the same observation, and concluding that he “will find somehow, and by some sudden turn of good luck, the golden road to fortune.”4

—

ELIZA BROWN WENT to see the Indians.

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