Robert Conroy - 1882 - Custer in Chains

Until and if that unlikely event occurred, she had two goals-protecting him and advancing his presidency.

Beside her, Custer stirred and yawned. “Libbie, I’m bored.”

“That sir is a terrible thing to say to a woman you just had your way with. Did my ripe and lovely naked body not please you?”

Only an hour before, she’d been awakened by the familiar feel of his hands roaming her body. He’d gotten her nightgown up to her shoulders and had discarded the silk pajamas from India that she’d given him for his birthday. She’d responded eagerly and matched him stroke for stroke after he’d entered her. When they were finished and he seemed to be dozing, she wondered why so many of her married friends felt uncomfortable with sex. Why did they feel that it was a chore to be endured instead of a pleasure to be savored? For all his faults, she immensely enjoyed having sex with him.

Still, she wondered at his comment.

“How can the President of the United States and master of all he surveys be bored?”

“Because it’s a boring damn job, that’s why. Nothing has happened since I was elected and nothing will. I also had that damn dream again. Once again I was lying on the ground with a bunch of Sioux standing there and laughing at me. Then one of them reaches down and starts scalping me.”

She stroked his head. “And that’s when you awake because it is only a dream.”

His notoriety as the man who had subdued the Sioux, as a reporter named Kendrick had put it, had carried him all the way to the White House. He had been nominated as the Republican candidate for President, defeating the other Republican nominee, James Garfield in the primaries. And later he had narrowly defeated former Civil War General and Democratic candidate, Winfield Scott Hancock, in the general election of 1880.

Yet George, or Autie as his family had sometimes called him before his brothers were killed, was correct. He was serving at a time when not much was occurring in the United States. The Indians had been reduced to a minimal menace and there was peace in the land. Europe might be in turmoil with the Prussians trying to gobble it up, but those wars were far away. The Reconstruction Era of the south was over and those former Confederate states were now free to do whatever they wished. That this meant suffocating the desires of the newly freed Negroes was of no concern to him, or most other people for that matter.

“Libbie, I am terribly afraid that my four, or, God forbid, eight years as president, will be as little more than a night watchman. I’ll become a footnote in history like some other presidents such as Fillmore or Pierce or my own predecessor, Rutherford B. Hayes. I need something exciting to fulfill me. I need to accomplish something important. I need to start a war.”

Libbie sat up. Her nightgown was still above her waist and he grinned at the sight of her exposed body. “You can’t be ready again,” she chided him playfully as she saw his eyes widen. If he was indeed ready she would be as well. “Now, let’s talk about a war. Who would you want to fight? Clearly, it can’t be the Indians again.”

She got up and walked barefoot across the bedroom. “Nor can it be the Mexicans. They’ve done nothing to provoke us and Congress will not let you just up and invade them. We did that once already. Somebody has to start the war and it can’t be the United States. The nation is still recovering from horrors of the Civil War.”

Custer yawned. “And that also leaves out the nations of Central and South America. They’re all too helpless and too far away and besides, they’d never start anything against us.”

“Agreed, George. Therefore, it must be a European power. However, we must choose carefully. Great Britain is out. Not only she too powerful, but our economic ties with her are too close. War with Great Britain would be a total disaster. France is too powerful as well, although we very nearly did fight them at the end of the Civil War. They do hate us, so let’s keep them in mind for the future. But right now, they are too powerful. Their navy is second only to Britain’s.”

George smiled at the memory. The French had backed a puppet emperor in Mexico; a pliant fool named Maximilian, and sent troops to support him in violation of America’s Monroe Doctrine. With the Civil War raging, Lincoln did nothing. After the war, an Army under General Phil Sheridan was sent to the Rio Grande with the clear message that the French Army in Mexico had to leave. They did and poor Maximilian wound up in front of a firing squad while his mentally ill wife fled to Europe. Neither George nor Libbie would mind rubbing France’s nose in the dirt, but, again, would the French oblige by starting a conflict that the U.S. could win? Probably not, they concluded. The French had their own internal conflicts tormenting them. Their Third Republic had begun with a massive bloodbath.

Germany was a newly created nation dominated by the always belligerent Prussians. She was still trying to get organized, although she might be a possible combatant in the future. But Germany too was doubtless already too strong for American to fight after she’d defeated both France and Austria. Also understood was the fact that Germany and the United States were almost half a world away and couldn’t reach each other.

Italy, an equally new nation, was immersed in internal problems and was also far, far away.

They decided that the Ottomans would make marvelous enemies and not just because they were Moslems who’d abused Americans decades earlier. But they too were far away and doubtless cared nothing about starting a war with the United States. Ottoman ships in the Mediterranean had captured American merchantmen and held their crews as hostages, but that was in the past.

The lands of Asia were already being carved up by the Great Powers. Perhaps the US could slice off a piece of China or Japan, but for what purpose? No, Asia was out.

“Russia?” he asked. “Maybe we could get them to attack us because they want Alaska back.”

“I don’t think so, George. And besides, they are almost our allies.”

He laughed. “You’re right, and who would ever want Alaska returned to them?”

Libbie smiled like a cat. “That leaves Spain.”

“Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “Spain. Her remaining possessions in the Caribbean are close by and always on the verge of exploding. The Spanish are corrupt and keep slaves, even though they’ve begun to abolish slavery. We can provoke something and a war can easily follow. The Spanish are nothing militarily and we’ll have an easy victory.”

She pulled the nightgown over her head and watched him revel in the sight of her naked body. Even though it was mid-morning, the servants knew enough not to enter without being invited. She saw that he was aroused again and it pleased her. Controlling him with her sex was so easy. It was even better because she truly loved him and wanted him to be a great man.

She ran her hand down his chest and belly and began to stroke him. “First, George, you will finish what you are obviously about to start and then we’ll go about provoking Spain. When we’re done with Spain you will have become one of America’s great presidents.”

Custer laughed and pulled her body to him. What a hell of a woman, he thought. I am the luckiest man in the world.

* * *

The Eldorado was a decrepit wooden steamship of about fifteen hundred tons and she was stuffed with military supplies for the insurgents fighting Spanish oppression in Cuba. At least that’s what journalist James Kendrick had written in his notebook. Unfortunately, he hadn’t gotten much farther in his writing because he didn’t quite believe it. The peasant revolution in Cuba was in a quiet phase, so why the rush to arm a population that wasn’t doing anything? There had been a long revolutionary war in Cuba that was now quiet, with both sides suffering from severe exhaustion.