Chapter I

hen I undertook the task of writing a paper on Cavalry Tactics in the Civil War, I assumed that my function would be to provide a nostalgic interlude in the midst of the professionally more meaningful papers of my colleagues. Although I had a fairly good general knowledge of Civil War Tactics, I thought that a paper on cavalry would deal mainly with moonlight and roses, and that it would fall to Messrs. Miller, Morrison and Reardon to give you the "thunder of the captains and the shouting." Not until I began an intensive course of reading and rereading in preparation for this paper did I come gradually to realize that I had drawn a prize assignment. 1 shall now try to demonstrate to you that of all the tactical and technical innovations in which the Civil War was so prolific, none was so meaningful for the future, and none so clearly foreshadowed a new era of tactics and indeed of strategy, as the tactics of the mounted arm. I am convinced that to whatever degree it may still be worth while to study tactics in terms of armed human beings watched in battle, it is the tactical and strategic employment of cavalry as developed in the Civil War, that is most deserving of your attention. These tactical innovations did not come about by accident. They were devised and put into practice by a small number of gifted soldiers – not one of whom, by the way, was a professional cavalryman – and if a major attribute of military greatness is the ability to think out and use new tactical devices to fit new conditions, then high places must be found in the Civil War Pantheon for such men as Sheridan, Wilson, Buford and Forrest.

Tactics as the art of disposing military forces in actual contact with the enemy, came into being as a direct result of the "invention" of cavalry. In classical Greece, where cavalry was almost nonexistent, the opposing lines of infantry were drawn up in parallel lines, one of which advanced upon the other. The issue was thereupon settled by the relative quality of weapons, by impetuosity, by endurance, by discipline When one line happened to be longer than the other, or one line had an open flank, overlapping might or might not occur. Basically, however, the frontal assault was the decisive factor. When cavalry, and hence mobility, is introduced. there is a complete change. Not only can the cavalry protect the flanks of its own infantry, but it also becomes a rapidly-maneuverable threat to the flanks and rear – the tactically weakest, points – of the opposing infantry. Hence the tactical basis of the infantry attack changes. It is no longer the sole means of forcing a decision: its objective now is to hold the opponent in position, to compel him to reinforce his front. and to deny him the capability of meeting the outflanking maneuvers of the cavalry.

From the time of its first era of glory under Alexander the Great until our Civil War, cavalry had survived many ups and downs. From being a numerically and tactically negligible auxiliary of the Roman legions,(1) it became the undisputed mistress of the battlefield in the Middle Ages, but with the advent of the long bow, the pike and the musket, cavalry entered a long period of eclipse, particularly after the beginning of the XVI Century. (2) In the XVIII Century, a tactical balance was struck; with the rediscovery of the doctrine, as old as Belisarius, that battles are won through the use of all arms in proper tactical combination, we find cavalry once more occupying a prominent place in battle On the theoretical side. Maurice de Saxe was not only a strong advocate of the use of cavalry, but also emphasized the difference between the tactical employment of light cavalry and of dragoons, to which we shall refer hereafter. Frederick the Great has the distinction of developing a new tactical synthesis in which he substituted for frontal attacks delivered by masses of infantry marching as on a parade ground, a much more flexible scheme, a true battle of maneuver, in which the artillery prepared the way for the infantry attack. Usually delivered upon one of the flanks of the enemy's line and intended at all events to fix him in position, while the cavalry moved toward the enemy's rear.(4)

Napoleon, although himself a gunner, had a very high opinion of cavalry, and improved upon Frederick's conception by using his cavalry in very large bodies. He gathered the French cavalry. previously used as regiments, into brigades and divisions made up of similarly-armed units, and eventually consolidated divisions into army corps which contained as many as 23,000 troopers in the Prussian campaign of 1805 and 38,000 in the Russian campaign of 1812.(5) Wile he used his light cavalry very effectively for screening and scouting, and built up a dragoon force of twenty-one regiments,(6) his chief reliance was on shock tactics, and it was therefore the cuirassier, employed in great masses and delivering charges with the saber as his primary weapon, who was the backbone of the Napoleonic cavalry.

The Carbine When the loading and using of 40 inch muskets proved cumbersome, the French Army was the first to arm their mounted troops with short barreled long arms, and the word "carbine" is actually a slang expression from the French word "escarrabin" meaning, loosely, one who associates with dung beetles. Apparently, the French Cavalry felt less then competent when armed with the new short rifle.  Forty different carbines were used in the Civil War. By April 1865, the U.S. had purchased the following  totals of approved breech- loading carbine designs:
Carbine	Purchased		Carbine	Purchased
Spencer	73,196		Merrill	14,495
Ballard	1,509		Maynard	25,202
Burnsides	55,567		Remington	2,000
Cosmopolitan	1,140		Sharps	86,512
Gibbs	1,052		Starr	20,601
Hall	3,520		Warner	4,001
Joslyn	10,200	.	.	.

In the years of peace after Waterloo, major advances in weapons took place. In this period came the invention of the percussion cap, the rifled musket, the rifle, and the cylindro-conoidal bullet, usually called the Minie bullet after the name of the Frenchman who developed it to its final form. These inventions were to have a profound effect on warfare. The infantry musket became an all-weather weapon, almost unaffected by rain or dampness. Its effective range was tripled and its accuracy greatly improved.(7) In the long era of peace that followed the Napoleonic wars, these inventions could not be adequately combat-tested; it was obvious nevertheless that they ushered in a new era of tactics. Military theorists recognized that the new weapons in the hands of firm infantry made the massed cavalry charge impossible. The old shock tactics, highly effective against infantry armed with muskets whose range was only 200 to 300 yards, would be suicidal against unshaken troops whose firearms were deadly at 1,000 yards The opinion that the days of cavalry were numbered became general, and even in traditionally cavalry-minded countries like Russia and Austria, the mounted forces were greatly reduced in the 1850's(8). Among cavalrymen, however, the new ideas made no great impression and the opinion persisted that the tried and tested shock tactics could still drive any infantry from the field. The Crimean War, the only war of any consequence in this period, gave no opportunity for testing the validity of these theories, either old or net

It was the peculiar fortune of the United States that our Civil War should be the first major conflict in which these advances in weaponry could be tested. It was perhaps fateful that the testing should fall to a people essentially unhampered by military traditionalism, unfettered by any canon of military dogma, and conditioned by the frontier spirit to "try anything once", to improvise, to adapt old methods to new conditions, and to invent new methods when the old did not work. Moreover, the testing was done under physical and topographical conditions that would of themselves have dictated changes in the tactical ideas transplanted from Europe, even if the advances in weapons had not done so.

 

Gen. Philip Kearny

One must be careful not to exaggerate the absence of technical military lore in the United States before 1861. In 1839 Philip Kearny and two other cavalry officers were sent by Secretary of War Joel Poinsett on a mission to study the organization and tactics of the French cavalry; Kearny not only took the French cavalry officers' training course at Saumur, but also served with the French cavalry in Algeria.(10) The three officers completed their mission by writing, after their return to the United States, A System of Cavalry Tactics modeled on French practice, which Poinsett thought to be the best in Europe. The book was published by the War Department in 1841 under the name of the Poinsett Tactics; it remained the official cavalry manual for twenty years and served as the basis for the numerous new manuals which were published in 1861. In 1855, G. B. McClellan and Majors Delafield and Mordecai were sent by Secretary of War Davis on a mission to study "the practical working of the changes which have been introduced of late years into the military systems . . . of Europe", and McClellan's report was published by act of Congress in 1851.(11) However, in the absence of a professional military caste, the United States was quite backward, by European standards, in the theoretical study of strategy and tactics, although a translation of Jomini's "Precis de 1'art de la guerre" was published in New York in 1854,(12) and a surprising number of books dealing specifically with cavalry tactics came out in the years before the Civil War.(13) And, from 1837 on, the West Point cadets were taught a course in cavalry tactics.

In actual practice, the United States developed tactical methods that would have made a European cavalryman shudder. In the War of 1812, the Battle of the Thames was won by the cavalry, or more precisely, by the Kentucky mounted riflemen of General Richard M. Johnson. The Mexican War was, on the American side, primarily an infantry and artillery affair,(14) but in the 1840's and l850's, as the frontier moved westward into the Great Plains, cavalry acquired a new importance through its use against the Indians. At the time, the regular cavalry consisted of the First and Second Regiments of Dragoons and the Regiment of Mounted Riflemen.(15) In 1855, Jefferson Davis obtained Congressional(16) authority to form the First and Second Regiments of United States Cavalry. The two new regiments were designed solely for mounted combat. The men were armed with sabers, and pistols or carbines, and were trained for outpost duty, scouting and mounted shock tactics. However, all the units of the small regular army were very much broken up and widely scattered.(17) It was very seldom that so much as a battalion was present at the same post, and it was not unusual for a unit as small as a company to be split up into detachments which were then stationed at widely separated points. This in itself was enough to prevent the adoption of European systems of cavalry tactics in the United States. The use of shock tactics required thorough training of men and horses in regimental and brigade units, and in the condition of the service at the time, when portions of a single regiment were strewn in small detachments from Texas to California, even regimental training was impossible. In any case, a saber-swinging, textbook cavalry charge would have been a tactical absurdity against the Plains Indians. It was conditions like these which caused General Ewell, whose whole military life, except for service in the Mexican War, was spent on the Plains, to assert that "he had learned all about commanding fifty United States dragoons, and forgotten everything else."(18)

There were, of course, cavalry units in the militia, chiefly in the southern and border states, but these were mostly of company strength and for the most part, more ornamental than useful. Wonderfully named and even more wonderfully accoutered in shabrack, saber-tache and dolman, like Austrian hussars, these groups drilled and paraded in a state of happy innocence of tactical ideas.

We come now to the start of the Civil War. Two armies must be created, equipped, officered. and trained to fight. Nine hundred profession-ally-trained officers, half of whom had seen no fighting more serious than an Indian skirmish, must organize and train these armies, lead them in battles and campaigns, and learn to handle in large-scale combat, artillery, cavalry and infantry, singly and in combination. All this must be done with totally green, undisciplined troops, with a volunteer officer corps almost totally lacking in professional qualifications, and with very little time or opportunity for training except in actual combat.(20)

Before we begin to consider cavalry tactics proper, it will be enlightening, and also necessary for an understanding of tactical developments, to review the organization and equipment of mounted troops, both North and South, at the beginning of hostilities. In the North, cavalry began the War under a cloud of high-level of official disfavor. General Scott, (21) Secretary of War Cameron (22) and Congress were at one in discouraging any appreciable expansion of the Union cavalry. Scott conceived of cavalry in the European sense and knew that in Europe one to two years was considered to be the minimum time needed to train cavalrymen and cavalry horses. He held that the Civil War would be over before cavalry could be organized and properly trained for combat Hence officers of cavalry regiments by the states were refused and regular officers were discouraged from accepting commissions in the volunteer cavalry regiments. In the first military bill passed by Congress after the start of hostilities. it was provided that in the volunteer regiments accepted from the states, the proportion of cavalry regiments to infantry was not to exceed one to ten; in the same bill, the regular cavalry was increased by only one regiment.(23) It was only after Bull Run had been fought, and lost (24) that the Northern authorities began to look with favor on the expansion of cavalry, and in September and October, 1861, volunteer cavalry regiments were organized in considerable numbers and in great haste.

The volunteer cavalry units taken into the Federal service were organized into regiments identified by number and state of origin, for example, the Fourth Iowa Volunteer Cavalry. A regiment consisted of twelve companies, each nominally made up of 92 enlisted men and three officers. With the commanding officer and the commissioned and non-commissioned officers of the regimental and battalion staffs, the total strength of the unit came to 1,177. Within the regiment, two companies made up a squadron, two squadrons a battalion. and three battalions a regiment. (25) As we shall see later, the Union cavalry was not normally brigaded until 1863. (26) The battalion organization within the regiment was abolished by the act of July 17, 1862; the same bill also abolished the squadron as an organizational unit, and renamed the company as the "troop".

However close to, or even over, paper strength a regiment might be when organized, it needed only a few months of camp life and active duty, the attrition of illness, wounds, capture and discharge, the detailing of individual companies and squadrons for detached duty, to reduce the actual strength in the regiments present with the colors, to 300-400 men. Hence, although the Army of the Potomac had in 1863-4 forty regiments of cavalry with a paper strength of nearly 48,000, it did not at any time have more than 14-15,000 men available for active service. For the most part, newly recruited and drafted men were formed into new regiments with new officers, instead of being used to bring depleted regiments up to strength.

The volunteers, both officers and men, were of very uneven quality. Since the duration and caliber of training depended on the military needs of the moment and the whims of army commanders, rather than on any planned program or training doctrine, cavalry regiments, other than the regulars, were never brought up to any consistent minimum level of efficiency. (27) Civil War reminiscences are so replete with stories reflecting a lack of adequate training among officers and men alike that one is in danger of exaggeration, but one may safely generalize that the average Union cavalry regiment made up of volunteers and taking the field as late as the summer of 1862, was essentially untrained. (28) For example, the First Massachusetts was more fortunate than most regiments because its colonel was a regular who knew his business; he not only insisted on appointing the field officers, but also forced the resignation of the most incompetent of the elected captains and lieutenants. The regiment was mustered in at the beginning of September,1861. Horses ("nearly all the unruly beasts in New England") began to arrive later that month, and mounted drill began. However, the horses had to be ridden bareback and with watering bridles, because saddles and harness were not available until mid-December. Sabers were the only weapon the men had until the regiment took the field in early January.(29) The Fourth Iowa went into camp, building its own barracks, in October, 1861, received saddles and bridles in January, 1862, sabers later in the same month, and the rest of its weapons and gear not until it was actually on its way to the front, in March.(30)

 

Gen. John B. McClellan

The drill manual most commonly used in the North was General McClellan's Regulations and Instructions for the Field Service of the United States Cavalry in Time of War, published in 1861. However, there was no compulsory uniformity about this. Some units used General P. St. G. Cooke's Cavalry Tactics, others General Scott's Tactics, and still others added confusion to ignorance by changing from one to another.

The horses were, of course, as untrained as the men. Generally of poor quality, (31) unused to the saddle, bought under scandalously loose conditions, never given adequate training, badly looked after by troopers who were, for the most, part, very poor horsemen and (32) worse horsemasters, exposed to the most severe ill-usage, chronically overworked and underfed, they were a standing reproach to the army. Riding was not a common pastime in the North. even in the country, and in any case, about half the personnel of the typical Northern cavalry regiment was made up of city boys whose horsemanship left much to be desired.

Of the many irregularities in the War Department under the administration of Simon Cameron, the procurement of horses for the cavalry was one of the worst. Horses were usually bought through contractors. In October, 1861, a board of survey inspected one lot of 411 cavalry horses shipped to the army from St. Louis. They found five of the horses dead and 330 undersized, under- or over-aged, or suffering from a variety of diseases. Only 76 horses in the lot, were passed as fit for service, and the entire lot had been bought by the government at $11 a head over the regulation maximum price.(33) The Tables of Organization for cavalry did not provide for regimental veterinary surgeons until March, 1863, and even after that, they were a distinct rarity.

 

The 9th Ohio before its remount in September, 1864 was at Camp Nelson, Kentucky. Shown as large buildings were constructed at Camp Nelson to hold the many horses used by the recruits. (1864). Webmaster Note:  Note privy in foreground and additional large buildings in background.

As late as September, 1864, when the 9th Ohio was remounted in Louisville, many of the horses issued to them turned out to be animals which had been rejected more than once and were then doped and doctored by the dealers until they passed muster. Many of these horses gave out before the regiment reached Nashville on its way back to Sherman's army. (34)

Once in the army, cavalry horses were treated with a callous brutality that is almost unbelievable. At the beginning of the war they were habitually overloaded. In addition to the rider, his weapons and ammunition, they had to carry two saddlebags filled with extra clothing, a nose-bag filled with corn, a heavy leather halter, an iron picket-pin with a long lariat, two horseshoes, a pair of blankets and a rubber poncho, currycomb, brush and gun tools, the whole equipage weighing as much as 70 pounds over and above the weight of the rider, saddle and harness. (35) It was obviously impossible for a man and horse so loaded to deliver a charge, and it is little wonder that the horses broke down under the burden.(36) As the men gained campaigning experience, getting down to the bare essentials of gear became a fine art. Toward the end, even saddle-skirts were discarded, and the carbine was usually the heaviest part of the load. But in the meantime, horses were lost by the tens of thousands from overwork, exposure, inadequate food and epidemics of disease. 

 

Brig.-Gen. George D. Bayard	Maj.-Gen. John Buford

After Second Manassas, Generals Bayard and Buford reported that in the cavalry of the Army of Virginia, there were not five horses to the company that could be forced, into a trot; at one point in this campaign, the horses of the First Rhode Island "were not unsaddled for one hundred and four hours; were without food for sixty-four hours; without water thirty-seven hours..."(37) and in the winter of 1862-3, with a wide river separating the armies and the roads two feet deep in mud, slush and water, the horses of the First Massachusetts, then on picket duty, remained saddled for fifteen consecutive days and nights and died by dozens of exposure and starvation. (38) As a result of such conditions, it was not unusual for half or more of the men in a regiment to be dismounted at the same time. (39) McClellan (40) after Antietam and Thomas before the Battle of Nashville are only two of many examples of army commanders who were unable to move because their cavalry was immobilized. (41) It was not until the establishment of the Cavalry Bureau in the War Department in the summer of 1863 that a start was made toward the development of a workable remount program for getting dismounted men horsed and back to their units.

We now turn to the Confederate horse. In the East, the Confederacy started with a decided advantage over the Union horsemen. The typical middle-and upper class Southerner rode from childhood. The entire South was horse country; the roads were few and bad, and the normal way to get from one place to another was on horseback. Most Southerners owned a horse of some sort, frequently a very good one, and were completely at home in the saddle. Such people naturally gravitated toward the cavalry. To an even greater extent than in the North, mounted service had about it an aura of glamour. The mounted regiments were a corps d'elite, and as a matter of course, " the best blood of the South rode in the cavalry."

The Confederate government decided at the beginning of the war that it could not supply horses for the cavalry. Instead, it made a contract with each trooper whereby the latter brought his own horse into the army; the government paid 40c per day for the use of the horse and furnished forage, shoes and the services of a smith. If the horse was killed in battle, the government paid for him; if the horse was captured, died of disease or the effects of overwork, exposure and starvation, or broke dawn in service, the loss fell on the owner.(42) At the beginning of the war, this system supplied the Southern armies with incomparably better cavalry mounts than those of the Federals, but the long-term effect of the policy was little short of disastrous. When a Confederate cavalryman lost his horse, he had the choice of either finding a replacement by his own efforts, or, if unable to do so, of transferring to the artillery or the infantry. A dismounted trooper who could not remount himself on a captured animal was given a 30-day furlough to look for a remount at home. Men who could not find a horse within thirty days and overstayed their leave, or used the difficulty of finding a horse as a convenient excuse for doing so, were considered absent without leave. Absences due to this cause were serious enough in the case of the Virginia regiments, which made up the bulk of the Confederate cavalry in the East;(43) one can imagine the effect on the regiments from South Carolina, Georgia and other states even further removed from the theatre of operations.

Maj.-Gen. Fitzhugh Lee

As early as the spring of 1863, men absent with or without leave on remount detail commonly represented more than half the strength of a regiment. Thus, Fitzhugh Lee's brigade, which, with deductions for the sick, wounded, and others legitimately absent, should have numbered 2,500 at the Kelly's Ford engagement, had only 800 present. (44) Nor was this the worst. Many Confederate cavalry officers thought that the increasing difficulty of finding remounts affected adversely the efficiency of the cavalry by making the men reluctant to expose their horses to injury in the melee of a charge; the men were not willing to run the risk of being transferred to the infantry if they lost their horses. (45) And Major Ewing reported to Richmond from the West in September, 1864, that cavalrymen were in the habit of selling their horses whenever they felt the urge to go home for thirty days. (46)

A Confederate cavalry regiment in the East had the same company, squadron and battalion organization as the Union regiments, but it was smaller, since the company was made up of 83 officers and men instead of 95, and there were only ten companies in the regiment instead of twelve. Thus, Confederate regiments had a paper strength of about 860. However, wastage was high, and as the war went on, regiments became steadily smaller. After 1863, they never numbered more than 350 sabers. At any time during the war, after an active campaign, it was not uncommon to find regiments down to 100 troopers present with the colors. (47) The amount of time devoted to drill and training in the South was generally even less than in the North; references to drill are noticeably less frequent in the reminiscences of Rebel cavalrymen than they are in the writings of their Northern opponents. The Confederate War Department did not issue an official drill manual for the cavalry; however, The Trooper's Manual, written (48) by J. Lucius Davis, former instructor in Cavalry Tactics at West Point and subsequently colonel of the 10th Virginia Cavalry, and General Joseph Wheeler's Cavalry Tactics, (49) were in general use.

Lt. - Gen. Joseph Wheeler

Southern horse furniture was various and, as one might expect, much less elaborate than the equipment supplied to the Union troopers. At the beginning, the men furnished their own saddles and bridles, and the English round-tree hunting saddle was in common use. (50) Later, the government furnished an unsightly saddle which protected the back of the horse, but was very hard on the rider. From beginning to end, the great bulk of Confederate cavalry equipment came from the North by capture. When Harper's Ferry was taken by Jackson in September, 1862, the 8th New York Cavalry managed to escape, and it is entertaining, even after the lapse of a hundred years, to read of the disappointment of one of Stuart's staff officers: "To think of all the fine horses they carried off, the saddles, revolvers and carbines of the best kind, and the spurs...the very things we so much needed, was enough to vex a saint." (51) The most basic items, such as horseshoes, nails and forges were scarce from the start; "it was not an uncommon occurrence to see a cavalryman leading his limping horse along the road, while from his saddle dangled the hoofs of a dead horse, which he had cut off for the sake of the sound shoes nailed to them" (52)

From an organizational standpoint, the Confederate cavalry in the East, with a relatively high percentage of West Pointers in its corps of field officers, was a pattern of regularity compared with the cavalry in the West. In the latter, casualness to the verge of chaos was the rule. Officially, Joseph Wheeler was Chief of Cavalry of Bragg's and later of Johnston's army, but his control over his chief subordinates, Forrest and Morgan, was tenuous at best and more usually nonexistent. Many of the men were never formally mustered into the Confederate service. They were excellent fighters, but between fights, it was a hard task to keep them in camp.(53) The forms of regimental organization were of course observed, and the Eastern practice of forming the regiments into brigades and divisions, and using the cavalry in large units, was followed in the West also.

There was a fair degree of uniformity in the weapons issued to the Union cavalry, at least in the East, even at the beginning of the war. and the uniformity grew greater as the war went on. From the first, all cavalrymen were issued sabers and most troopers were armed with Colt's revolvers, and one of several patterns of carbines. The Colt was the 36-caliber, or the older 44-caliber six-shooter. It was well liked by the men, many of whom carried it in the right boot-leg, ready for immediate use, mounted or on foot. Remington made equally good revolvers, but could get War Department contracts for only 5,000 revolvers at $15 each, whereas Colt had contracts for 31,000 at $25 each, for the identical model that sold on the open market for $14.50. (54) This was in the palmy days of Secretary Cameron, but at least the men received a good revolver. The chief criticism of the saber was that the metal scabbard and the metal rings attaching it to the belt made it too noisy. The problem was solved with Yankee ingenuity by fastening the scabbard to the saddle, nearly parallel to the horse's body. The saber was then ready to be drawn when mounted and was left with the horse when dismounted action was called for. (55) Carbines were of many makes and patterns; the Smith. Joslyn, Union, Gallagher, Burnside and Hall, but the most common, and the best, was the single-shot Sharp's. All of these were superior to the infantry musket, in that they were breech loaders and light in weight, but ail of them except the Smith, which had other defects, shared the drawback of requiring the use of paper cartridges and percussion caps. The several makes were of different calibers and when, as was frequently the case„ the same regiment had more than one type of carbine, the variety of ammunition needed caused a great deal of trouble. (56) The 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry was armed with lances, but this exotic weapon was quickly discarded.

Generally speaking, the mounted troops of the Western armies were the poor relations of the Northern cavalry. The sabers issued to the western regiments in 1861 were usually the heavy, four-foot dragoon sabers of antique pattern. For firearms, the men were given whatever was available: smooth-bore, single-barrel, muzzle-loading horse pistols left over from the Mexican War, unserviceable revolvers of various makes. and even the heavy infantry rifles discarded by the Austrian army and imported in large quantities at the start, of the war. (57) Normally, new or improved weapons came to the West only after the eastern cavalry was fully supplied with them; thus, the Fourth Iowa was not completely equipped with Sharp's carbines until January, 1864, by which time the eastern cavalry was being re-equipped with Spencers.

Meanwhile, the Southern cavalry made do with a fantastic variety of weapons, good, bad and indifferent. The Southern states and the Confederate government had great difficulty supplying even sabers in sufficient numbers. Several thousand were imported from Europe or purchased in the North; more were acquired by capture. After 1862, sabers of inferior quality were manufactured in the South. (58) For firearms, troopers had all kinds of single- and double-barreled shotguns, squirrel rifles and every other known variety of sporting gun flint-lock muskets, short, medium and long Enfields, Springfields and rifled muskets. Most men had pistols and revolvers, and the latter, particularly the Colt's captured from the Federals, became the preferred cavalry weapon. (59) Carbines were manufactured in the South, but never in adequate quantities; the Northern cavalry was a much more dependable source of supply than the Confederate government. In the East, the usual arrangement in the early months of the war was to have one or two squadrons in each regiment armed with carbines, the rest of the regiment carrying Enfield rifles; (60) alternatively, some regiments had sharpshooter companies armed with carbines or rifles, the other companies in the regiment being supplied with sabers and either pistols or revolvers.

1862 Quartermaster photograph showing "highly overdressed" Federal Cavalry Sergeant. Note: carbine in sling and brass shoulder scales.

In 1863, the Union cavalrymen began to receive a new gun, the seven-shot, breech-loading Spencer carbine, firing a brass cartridge. The weapon was invented by C. M. Spencer of Massachusetts. He first developed it as a rifle for the infantry, but was unable to interest the War Department in his invention. The gentlemen in the Ordnance Bureau were of the opinion that there was too much waste of ammunition in the infantry even with the single-shot, muzzle loading musket, and that it would only add to the evil to give the infantry a weapon that could be fired four or five times as fast. (61) Spencer then converted the gun to a cavalry carbine. When he brought it back to the War Department, James H. Wilson was the Chief of the newly-established Cavalry Bureau. He was a "brilliant man intellectually", (62) and he had plans for the strategic use or cavalry which required a drastic increase in cavalry firepower. He tested the new weapon, and after satisfying himself that it was "by all odds the most effective firearm of the day," (63) had the gun adopted as the standard cavalry carbine. By the spring of 1864. the Third Cavalry Division of the Army of the Potomac, which Wilson himself was slated to command after completing his tour of duty in Washington, was completely re-equipped with Spencer carbines, which gave it a fire power of as many as fourteen shots per minute per man, with an effective range of 500 yards. By the spring of 1865, when Wilson, by then promoted to Chief of Cavalry of the Military Division of the Mississippi, started on his Selma campaign, every one of the 13,500 troopers making up his Cavalry Army carried a Spencer, which, according to the Confederates, the men loaded on Sundays and fired the rest of the week.

It cannot be said that any single Civil War weapon had a decisive influence on the outcome of the war, but the Spencer probably came close to it. (64) Furthermore, the tactical principle that the Spencer represented, namely the placing of tremendous fire power into the hands of the individual soldier, and the recognition that fire power, and not numbers, was the true standard of comparison between armies, carried with it implications of great significance for the future, especially because Wilson had the vision to add fire power to mobility.

It is important also to note the effect of this new weapon on the morale of the Northern cavalry. Up to the end of the war, only 100,000 Spencers (65) had been issued. and of course not all of them had gotten into the hands of combat units; yet, we have it on good authority that "to have a carbine of better range and of more certain shot than any other gun they knew...was of striking value in heightening the self-confidence and improving the morale of the cavalry. From that time on to the end of the war (the men) not only clearly won in every contest, but they expected to win, and even acquired a sort of habit of looking upon every approaching fight as a sure thing". (66)

Both the Union and the Confederate cavalry had light or "horse" artillery units attached to cavalry brigades, the Confederates from the beginning of the war, the Federals from 1863 on, coincidentally with the formation of permanent brigades of cavalry. The normal allotments of artillery, both North and South, was a battery of four light guns to the brigade. The preferred guns were the rifled 12-pounders and the 3" Parrots. Largely because of the exploits of such men as the gallant Pelham, the Southern horse artillery acquired an extra portion of romantic luster. However, the Northern horse artillery was as efficient as Union artillery generally.(67)

Having considered the organization, equipment, and arms of the cavalry, North and South, we must now examine the intangibles: the discipline and morale of the cavalry, and its stature in the two armies.

Col. John Mosby

By modern standards, and even more by the standards of XIX century European armies, discipline was sadly lacking on both sides and in all arms of the service throughout the Civil War. Volunteers with a Democratic tradition of rugged independence were not amenable to discipline and the officers whom the men themselves had elected were unable to teach it and unwilling to enforce it. Everything that made for a lack of discipline in the infantry operated with special force in the "devil-may-care" cavalry. The employment of regiments in separate parts and the scattering broadcast of squadrons, companies and parts of companies on different details, was a universal practice in the Union armies until 1864, and prevented effective control of the men by the senior officers of the regiment. The conditions of cavalry service were such that the men were constantly exposed to extremes of physical and moral hardship; in addition to the risks and trials shared by the infantry and artillery, cavalry had the constant strain of severity in the depths of the Northern Virginia winters, while other troops were safely encamped for the season. (69) But there were two special deterrents to discipline peculiar to the cavalry. The first of these was the frequent necessity of living upon the country as the only alternative to starvation; this made pillaging a besetting sin of the cavalry. (70) The second was the demoralizing effect of long periods of idleness in camps for dismounted men – or, in Southern terminology, "Company Q" - awaiting remounts. Whatever we may think of the validity of these reasons, singly or together, there are few Civil War topics on which contemporary opinion is so nearly unanimous as it is on the absence of discipline in the cavalry. For the South, we are not surprised by the comment of one of Mosby's partisans that "The truth is, we were an undisciplined lot." (71) and we are not shocked by General Basil Duke's admission that among Morgan's men, "... there was, in the true sense of the word, no discipline...not only in the first year of the war, but at any other time..." (72) But it is a blow to our inherited ideas of the Southern chivalry to read the considered opinion of General D. H. Hill that; "My experience with the cavalry in the war has not been favorable... What we need is efficient cavalry, not immense bands of plunderers scattered over the country." (73) General Joseph Wheeler was removed from command of his cavalry corps because of his inability to enforce discipline. And when recommending Fitzhugh Lee and Wade Hampton for promotion in the spring of 1863, General Lee wrote: "I should admire both more if they were more rigid in their discipline, but I know how difficult it is to establish discipline in our armies, and therefore make allowances." (74) For the North, it is sufficient, to cite the opinion of the colonel of an excellent regiment, the Second Massachusetts: "... the Cavalry Corps is no place for a soldier or for anyone who keeps discipline..." (75) and to note that the letter from which this statement is quoted was written in the summer of 1864.

In spite of hardships and privations. Confederate cavalry, both East West, had excellent morale until almost the end of the war. The mud, the cold, the hunger, the wet bivouacs, the brutally long marches, (76) did not appear to detract from the glamour of the service. Morale grew and remained high for the best of reasons: unbroken and often spectacular success, brilliant leadership, and exploits that struck the imagination.

It was far otherwise with the unfortunate horsemen of the North. There is no record of a cavalry engagement above the level of a mere patrol skirmish in which, before the summer of 1863, the Union horsemen were not worsted. Any clash between the Confederate and Union cavalry usually ended with the latter "in a state of rapid ambulation from the enemy." (77) We shall see that this state of affairs was primarily the result of the manner in which Northern cavalry was used, or misused. It was apparent, to the men themse1ves that they were being wasted and frittered away by being employed in a manner that gave them no chance to perform creditably. The Union horse became "a scoff and a byword for the other branches of the service." (78) The expression "Who ever saw a dead cavalryman?", ascribed to General Hooker in the East, and General Logan (or Sherman) in the West, was heard with sufficient frequency to indicate the ill-repute into which the Union cavalry had fallen. Army slogans are not the best evidence, but there is also the unanimous testimony of contemporaries, pungently illustrated by Sherman's telegram to Grant in September, 1863: "I do want very much a good cavalry officer to command... My present cavalry need infantry guards and pickets, and is hard to get them within ten miles of the front." (79) and in his admonishment to his cavalry officers: "I do wish to inspire all cavalry with my conviction that caution and prudence should be but a small element in their characters."(80)

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