Hiding in Plain Sight

When I was working on my study of the fighting on East Cavalry Field at Gettysburg, I came across a tantalizing little tidbit. It has intrigued me for a long time, and it was, until last night, a source of great frustration for me.

If you look at the report of George A. Custer that’s included in volume 27 of the Official Records of the Civil War, it contains little useful information and is really only an itinerary of the Michigan Cavalry Brigade. The same thing is true of the reports of the regimental commanders of Michigan Brigade. I think I know why. Custer’s personal possessions, including all of his papers, were captured at Trevilian Station in June 1864, and it’s possible that his actual report of the East Cavalry Field was lost.

Most of the regimental reports were actually published in an article by a correspondent of the New York Times named E. A. Paul in August 1863, and those can be found. However, it doesn’t appear that the portions published in Paul’s article are the entire reports, but rather pieces of them.

A teasing, tantalizing tidbit of a more detailed report can be found in an earlier biography of Custer, by Frederick Whittaker. It’s only a portion of this report, and there are no clues where the rest of it might be found. I spent several years searching for the thing, and had to content myself with the fragment when I did my study of East Cavalry Field. I published the fragment as an appendix to one of my two volumes of the writings of Bvt. Brig. Gen. James H. Kidd of the 6th Michigan Cavalry.

I actually gave up on finding the thing, and never figured I would find it. Until last night.

Last night, I was looking at some of my materials to cobble together one of my profiles of forgotten Union cavalrymen, and I pulled down the reprint of John Robertson’s Michigan in the War, a book published by the State of Michigan to commemorate its contributions to the Union victory in the Civil War. Each regiment and battery raised by Michigan has a brief history included in the book, and there is one for the Michigan Cavalry Brigade. When I looked at the entry for the Michigan Cavalry Brigade last night, what did I find? The full report by Custer, as well as the full reports of the commanders of the four regiments of the brigade. Never mind that I’ve owned a copy of this book for about five years. Never mind also that I’ve looked at parts of it extensively. I just never bothered to look at the section on the Michigan Brigade.

So, there it was, hiding right in front of my eyes, right there in my own library, just waiting to be found. It was, of course, totally fortuitous that I found it, as I really wasn’t looking for it at all. So far as I know, no modern treatment of the fighting on East Cavalry Field has ever used the entire report, and none have used the detailed reports of the regimental commanders. Certainly, Carhart didn’t use this material when he failed to do thorough research in writing his intellectually dishonest, festering pile of turds.

So, in the hope of promoting the public interest and making sure that this information is, in fact, made generally available, for the next several days, I will be using this blog to post these five reports verbatim here. Stay tuned. I hope you will find them interesting.