Thomas Ward Custer
U.S. Army
Medal of Honor (double award)
Virginia
1865
“He should have been the general,” George Armstrong Custer often said about brother Tom.
While the flamboyant and dashing brevet Maj. Gen. Custer was busy gaining rank and national fame during the Civil War, Tom—six years George’s junior—was busy achieving an unmatched record of bravery in the conflict. Tom Custer was one of only 19 men in American history to have been awarded two Medals of Honor. He was the nation’s first such double awardee and the only person to receive two of the nation’s highest military honor for actions during the Civil War.
Thomas Ward Custer was born March 15, 1845, in New Rumley, Ohio. In September 1861, lying about his age, 16- year-old Tom enlisted in the 21st Ohio Volunteer Infantry and participated in several key campaigns. When Tom’s Ohio enlistment was up in October 1864, he switched to George’s 6th Michigan Volunteer Cavalry Regiment as a second lieutenant.
It was there Tom truly came into his own.
When Union troops flushed Robert E. Lee out of Petersburg, Va., in April 1865, Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan’s cavalry—with George Custer’s division in the lead—pursued him. On April 3 at Namozine Church the elder Custer caught up with units of Lee’s rear guard and overwhelmed a brigade of North Carolina cavalry. In that engagement, leading a Union charge under fire, Tom took his horse over a Confederate barricade, plunged into the melee, seized the Rebels’ regimental flag, and took three officers and 11 enlisted men prisoner despite having had his horse shot out from under him.That action earned Tom his first Medal of Honor. Three days later he won a second.
On April 6 at Sayler’s Creek, Custer’s force overtook units of Confederate Generals Richard Ewell and Richard Anderson, who had become isolated from Lee’s column. In the fighting that followed, Tom again leapt his horse over a Confederate barrier under fire. Finding himself surrounded, he fired his pistol to scatter the enemy and then went after the regimental flag—only to be shot in the face by the color bearer, “so close the muzzle Tom’s face was spotted with burnt powder,” George recalled. The impact knocked Tom backward in the saddle, but he righted himself, shot the color-bearer and grabbed the flag as the bearer started to fall.
As Tom galloped back to Union lines, his captured Confederate banner flying, another Union officer warned him to furl it before Union troops fired on him. Ignoring the warning, he rode toward his brother’s position and handed the captured flag to one of Armstrong’s aides.
“Armstrong,” Tom told his brother, “the damned rebels have shot me, but I’ve got my flag.” When Tom sought to rejoin the fight, George placed him under guard and forced him to see the surgeon for treatment of his wound.
“For intrepidity I never saw this incident surpassed,” brevet Maj. Gen. Henry Capehart later wrote. “It was a great wonder he escaped with his life. Tom on that day fought like a lion.”
By the close of the April 6 engagement the Union troops had captured some 8,000 Confederates, including Ewell, Robert E. Lee’s eldest son, Custis, and six other generals.
By the time of the 1865 Confederate surrender Tom Custer had successively ascended through the brevet ranks of first lieutenant, captain and major to lieutenant colonel for his “distinguished and gallant conduct,” though he was barely 20 years old. After the war he was commissioned into the Regular Army and joined his brother’s famed 7th U.S. Cavalry, fighting Indians on the Plains.
Tom’s luck ran out in Montana Territory: He died alongside brothers George and Boston and more than 260 other troopers at the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876.
A burial detail found the bodies of Tom and George within yards of one another. Tom’s body, identifiable only by a tattoo on his arm, had been badly mutilated—a treatment often reserved by the Indians for those who fought them longest and hardest.
Originally published in the September 2013 issue of Military History. To subscribe, click here.
