Custer's Trials Quotes

“They came from the East, determined to take lands in the West regardless of the peoples who already lived there.”
― T.J. Stiles, Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America

“Would Sheridan, Sherman, or Grant have held back? Masters of modernity’s grim realism, they may well have accepted the captives’ deaths as the price of the state’s assertion of its authority.”
― T.J. Stiles, Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America

“Over a white man killed by Indians on an extensive frontier the greatest excitement will take place, but over the killing of many freedmen in the settlements, nothing is done.”
― T.J. Stiles, Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America

“THE SEAMS IN TIME appear obvious to us: a graduation, a wedding, a victory parade. Yet the seams are never stitched in time itself. Human beings are hurled from one day into the next, from circumstance to circumstance. We distinguish endings from beginnings, contrasting now and then, to find meaning in time. Yet we rarely alter our inner selves in pace with the clock.”
― T.J. Stiles, Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America

“Human beings possess an astonishing capacity for believing contradictory ideas when convenient.”
― T.J. Stiles, Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America

“The last word about the Little Bighorn belongs to perhaps Custer’s most insightful chronicler, Robert Utley. “The simplest answer, usually overlooked, is that the army lost largely because the Indians won,” he writes. “To ascribe defeat entirely to military failings is to devalue Indian strength and leadership.” The invasion of the Black Hills and the order to abandon the unceded lands galvanized the Lakotas and Northern Cheyennes.”
― T.J. Stiles, Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America

“From the Civil War through his two battles on the Yellowstone, he proved decisive, not reckless; shrewd, not foolish. In every other regard, he danced along the emerging modern world, unable to adapt to it. He failed in the new sphere of finance, rejected new thinking about equality, and wrote antiquated prose. He offended his military superiors, mismanaged subordinates, alienated civilian authorities, meddled inappropriately in politics, endangered his marriage, and gambled away his estate. Again and again he saved himself through his ability to fight. And yet, ironically, we now remember him as a bad commander.”
― T.J. Stiles, Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America

“Custer as glory-obsessed, arrogant fool emerged as the persistent narrative. It prevailed just after his death, receded for many years, then rose again, predominating in the present day.”
― T.J. Stiles, Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America

“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.”
― T.J. Stiles, Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America

“Yes, high politics and historic issues produced the conflict; yes, decisions by politicians and generals changed the course of events. But it was only a war in the first place because the American people wanted to fight. They volunteered by the millions for years of combat; they demanded offensives and decisive battles. Even those who never enlisted applied themselves to logistics, military transportation, and weapons technology—inventing ironclad ships, new pontoon bridges, and repeating rifles, for example. Then there were African Americans, who conducted what one historian has called the greatest slave rebellion in history. They risked death to desert to Union lines by the hundreds, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands. In the end, what happened on factory floors and plantation fields, in town-square meetings and polling places, mattered more than any general’s orders.44”
― T.J. Stiles, Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America

“Under standing orders from General Lee, the Army of Northern Virginia enslaved any and all black persons it could seize—in Virginia, Maryland, even Pennsylvania during the Gettysburg Campaign. It made no distinctions between those who had escaped during the war, those born free, or those freed before the war under the laws of Southern states. If they were black, the men in gray took them as property.”
― T.J. Stiles, Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America

“They now endure incessant cultural appropriation by a majority society in the United States that celebrates an idealized American Indian but ignores reservation life—the economic blight and marginalization of what are, in effect, national internment zones, exacerbated by federal inattention and mismanagement. In Indian country there are also thriving cultural traditions and creative genius, but these often receive little more recognition than the problems. —”
― T.J. Stiles, Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America

“From New York they traveled on to Washington, a swamp village by comparison. In”
― T.J. Stiles, Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America

“guidons”
― T.J. Stiles, Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America