Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

The Union’s industrial resources gave it the technical edge in artillery all through the Civil War. However, the rural and agrarian structure of Southern society gave the Confederacy an equal edge in terms of cavalry. The Confederacy also possessed several great natural cavalry leaders: in the west, Nathan Bedford Forrest used his cavalry to burn and pillage Union supply lines with virtual impunity; in the east, J. E. B. Stuart, the twenty-eight-year-old commander of Lee’s cavalry, easily rode circles around McClellan’s clumsy Northern cavalrymen—on the Peninsula, he literally rode around McClellan’s entire army—and created an image of the Confederate cavalry as banjo-strumming knights-errant dressed in plumes and capes. The great difficulty with cavalry was that it was costly to maintain—the Union’s quartermaster general, Montgomery Meigs, had to keep up a supply of 35,000 horses to the Army of the Potomac for just the six months between May and October 1863 at a cost to the government of $144 to $185 a head—and the South was forced to restrict the size of its cavalry arm simply through its inability to provide mounts (much of the Confederate cavalry was actually mounted on horses owned by the troopers themselves). The average life expectancy of a horse in the Army of Northern Virginia was less than eight months, and every fifteen months a supply of 7,000 horses and 14,000 mules was required just to keep the army mobile.55

If the combat training of Civil War volunteer infantry left a great deal to be desired, the training of Civil War volunteer cavalryman was even worse, and also because it, too, involved time and costs that neither army was willing to absorb. In the British army, cavalry training required at least 120 hours of riding drill, plus training in stable work, saddling, and packing. “The difficulty of converting raw men into soldiers is enhanced manifold when they are mounted,” complained Richard Taylor, who rose from commanding Harry Handerson’s 9th Louisiana to lead the Confederate Department of East Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and this seemed especially and painfully true when it came to dealing with Taylor’s own Confederate cavalry.

Both man and horse require training, and facilities for rambling, with temptation to do so, are increased. There was but little time, and it may be said less disposition, to establish camps of instruction. Living on horseback, fearless, and dashing, the men of the South afforded the best possible material for cavalry. They had every quality but discipline, and resembled Prince Charming, whose manifold gifts, bestowed by her sisters, were rendered useless by the malignant fairy. Scores of them wandered about the country like locusts, and were only less destructive to their own people than the enemy. … Assuredly, our cavalry rendered much excellent service, especially when dismounted and fighting as infantry. Such able officers as Stuart, Hampton, and the younger Lees in the east, Forrest, Green, and Wheeler in the west, developed much talent for war; but their achievement, however distinguished, fell far below the standard that would have been reached had not the want of discipline impaired their efforts and those of their men.

North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance grew so exasperated with the indiscipline of Confederate cavalry wandering through his state that he cried out in 1863: “If God Almighty had yet in store another plague worse than all others which he intended to have let loose on the Egyptians in case Pharaoh still hardened his heart, I am sure it must have been a regiment or so of half-armed, half-disciplined Confederate cavalry.”56

If the Civil War departs from the pattern of the Napoleonic wars at any major point, it is in its failure to use cavalry to achieve the kinds of decisive victories on the battlefield that the Napoleonic pattern had taught generals to expect. From the seventeenth century onward, cavalry had been taught to charge home with the sword or lance at the first sign of wavering on the part of enemy infantry. The sheer weight of an oncoming rush of horses and men could strike the final amount of terror needed to convince infantrymen to break and bolt. And when they did, the cavalry could cut them down and scatter them almost at its ease. This sort of cavalry—known as heavy cavalry, from the outsize weight and height of the horses and men chosen for the task—was expensive to equip and time-consuming to train, and one penny-pinching Congress after another had shown no interest in it. Moreover, in the uneven overgrowth of the American landscape, heavy cavalry had little room to develop the momentum needed for its climactic charges; and in the American West, where most of the army’s cavalry was deployed, its enemy were mounted Indians, who required lightness and speed to pursue.57

So, strictly speaking, the army did not even bother to create a cavalry arm until the 1850s; its few mounted units were organized and trained as dragoons and mounted rifles who would use their horses more as a means of transportation than for combat, and dismount in battle to fight on foot with their short-barrel carbines rather than sabers or lances. Cavalry units in the Civil War were also deployed in smaller ratios to infantry than in Europe, and concentrated almost exclusively on the traditional occupations of light cavalry, including scouting, raiding, and skirmishing. The introduction of the Spencer repeating carbine (the downsized version of the rifle issued for cavalry use) only accelerated this trend, making the classical cavalry saber useless as a field weapon. “The only real use I ever heard of their being put to was to hold a piece of meat over a fire for frying,” snorted John Singleton Mosby, the most famous of the Confederacy’s mounted scouts. “I dragged one through the first year of the war, but when I became a commander, I discarded it.” Sabers came out of their scabbards only on the infrequent occasions when cavalry clashed headlong with cavalry; on the even rarer occasions when cavalrymen actually engaged enemy infantry, they dismounted and fought