Did Custer Love Libby?

Yes, but it's complicated.

George Armstrong Custer was, by all accounts, deeply in love with Elizabeth (Libby) Bacon Custer.  The massive volume of letters they shared are filled with proclamations of devotion and desire, and memories of golden afternoons spent together.  It's important to understand, however, the distinct possibility that "love" for this famous couple had a very different meaning than the modern sense(s) of the word.  To illustrate, I'll tell you a story.

The year is 1867.  George Armstrong Custer is in the field with a cumbersome detachment of cavalry, infantry, and artillery.  Elizabeth is at "home," stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, the headquarters of the US 7th Cavalry (her husband's command).  Custer's orders are simultaneously simple and maddeningly vague:  protect frontier settlements and civil installations in the area of modern day Kansas by catching (and if necessary, attacking) hostile Cheyenne raiders.  Trying to catch lightning fast, highly adaptive raiders (these war parties of the Great Plains were known as "the finest light cavalry in the world") with unmotivated US army troops was proving to be an impossible task.  Custer and his men are exhausted and frustrated; George, aside from the trials of his current assignment, is preoccupied with thoughts of his wife.  Actually that's too nice of a way to say it: Custer is increasingly obsessed with thoughts of Libby, and his, um, desires are interfering with his ability to command.  After another raid occurs, and yet again Custer's men fail to apprehend the raiders, Custer reached a tipping point.  He dashed off a letter to Elizabeth, instructing her to rendezvous with him at a nearby fort.  

Custer makes a shocking addition to his request.  He states that if the possibility of Elizabeth being captured by Cheyenne warriors arose while she was traveling across the plains, it was the duty of the soldiers traveling with her to kill her, in order to keep her out of enemy hands.  Now, it is true that life for captives on the plains was not an easy one; hard labor was a given in such a situation, and the threat of sexual assault was very real.  Once a captive was taken as part of the spoils of a successful raid, though, the captive was usually spared from death, which leads me to question Custer's motive.  Stephen Ambrose, author of Crazy Horse and Custer, speculates that Custer probably valued Elizabeth's purity above all else, and I agree with this sentiment.  What is even more shocking for me though is the fact that when Elizabeth learned of the order, she agreed with her husband's opinion on the issue.  Surely Elizabeth Custer, an intelligent, powerful, and confident woman, didn't value her own objectified purity (and thus her "usefulness" to her husband) above her own life?

The rendezvous never occurred, and Custer was later subject to a court martial when, in a similar fit of impulsiveness, he went AWOL in order to be with his wife.  Without more documentation on the episode, though, we are left only with speculation.  Was it the white man's fear of "savages" roaming the plains that led Custer to take such drastic action?  Or was Custer more in love with Elizabeth's purity then he was with Elizabeth as an individual?  Was this unspoken attitude a norm within the multitude of hardships on the frontier, or was Custer unique in an obsessive, jealous desire to keep Elizabeth for himself in every way, including in death?  More than likely, we will never know these answers conclusively.  What we can know is that the romance that George and Libby Custer shared had many layers, and that unsettling truths about what Custer thought of his wife may lie hidden beneath.