The Combat Arm Of Decision In Blue And Gray
The exception, not the rule
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Le Arme Blanche in American Service Before 1860
Cavalry development in the Americas differed from Europe’s because there was little need for cavalry-on-cavalry confrontations. Iberian military systems were the only exception to the New World's lack of heavy cavalry and lancers. The Europeans in the Americas and later the Americans themselves developed their cavalry for reconnaissance, screening, and occasional raiding, roles that Europe relegated to light cavalry and auxiliaries.
When the Plains Indians first encountered and domesticated the horse in the style of the Europeans, controlling the animals was difficult because they had neither stirrups nor bits. Mounted hunting didn’t translate into mounted warfare for the Indians until 1750 at the earliest. The Indians of the plains used horses for transportation, hunting large game and as a food source; those of the woodlands, if they had them, also used them as beasts of burden and little more.
American cavalry in the Revolution was conspicuous by its absence from the battlefield. Shock and pursuit were never priorities (or possibilities) for Washington’s small mounted forces because the General-in-Chief, having worked only with infantry in his militia career, knew nothing about mounted warfare. While Casimir Pulaski and a handful of horse soldiers saved Washington at Brandywine, Washington could barely feed his troops, let alone maintain a mounted force worthy of the name. While Pulaski was a Brigadier General of Cavalry, he never commanded over 100 troopers while he was with Washington, and scarcely more when he moved to the Southern theater.
But irregular mounted forces were especially prevalent in raids on British regulars and fighting between Patriot and Loyalist forces, especially along the western frontiers and in the South. Dragoons (mounted infantry with swords that also acted as a constabulary) were becoming a vogue in Europe in the last half of the 18th Century, and the excesses of that style of horse soldier were influential in creating Amendment III in the Bill of Rights. American dragoons first appeared in Anthony Wayne’s Legion of the United States in the Ohio country in 1793.
After 1785, the Army disbanded most of its units, sold off the animals and equipment and abandoned nearly all the facilities. When the Army reconstituted its regular cavalry units in 1796, all ten companies went west to watch the Indians, where they mostly stayed.
In the 1812-15 conflict, American Regular cavalry played no significant role against the British. But irregulars did against Indians, and American militia riders from New England raided into Canada as far north as Quebec. In the war with Mexico, American horse soldiers played significant light cavalry roles. They were adept at deep raiding, screening for the infantry and artillery, and fighting as dismounted infantry, rarely fighting with sabers, much to the disappointment of the elite Mexican cavalry. Afterwards, the Regular cavalry primarily patrolled along the major watercourses of the west, the immigration routes, and around larger Indian settlements; essentially a policing role.
American Cavalry by 1860
By the Civil War, two generations of the American military experience had shown that the fastest way to build an army in emergencies was with cheap foot infantry, and the fastest way to end a conflict was with blasts of artillery. By the time of Balaclava’s famous Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854, the American cavalry soldier knew, as did some European observers, that heavy cavalry combat was more expensive than it was worth on the gunpowder battlefield. American cavalry theory went in a different direction from other major powers, even from its neighbors to the north and south, given that large-scale cavalry combat operations such as infantry interdiction, shock/pursuit, counter-cavalry operations and region-clearing had no place in American doctrine. The American horse soldiers knew what cavalry did elsewhere, but they simply didn’t practice it. Training horses for cavalry-on-cavalry combat took considerable time, and the Americans worked the vast spaces of the Plains with whatever healthy animals they could get. Extensive training for mounted swordplay and charging artillery was simply not in the budget of either time or money. The day of the cavalry charge carrying the field had passed.
In June 1860, the US Army’s Regular cavalry forces comprised five regiments: two of troop-based cavalry and two of company-based dragoons (the distinction being the effective size of the subunits), and one regiment of mounted rifles. All mustered about half their regulation-allowed complement, totaling just over 3,000 men in the saddles, and few of them were within three days’ ride of another mounted unit. East of the Mississippi, there were just three companies of dragoons. No organized state militias boasted of cavalry units of over fifty men, and none of those had any combat experience. For the fourth largest territorial landmass in the world, there simply wasn’t a great deal of shock and mobility available.
However, mounted paramilitary police forces in Southern states like South Carolina (State Law Enforcement Deputies) and Texas (Rangers) were adjunct to otherwise weak law enforcement at all levels, and possessed enough organization to become militarized quickly. More important, most Southern states and all states and territories west of the Mississippi could count many unorganized mounted militias under local control (if barely), often funded by the members themselves or donations from their communities. These were primarily Amendment II-based local posse comitatus units organized for local defense against raiding Indians and outlaw bands.
Building the Horse Soldier
Despite the Regular Army’s benign neglect of the mounted arm, or perhaps because of it, the man on horseback remained a large and colorful segment of American military mythology, but for once, the myth matched the reality. Without the imagery of large swarms of heroic conventional horse-borne cavaliers to capitalize on, storytellers extolled the virtues of Francis Marion and his raiders pitted against the evils of Banastare Tarleton’s Loyalist hordes from the 1770s. This imagery helped boost manpower for new cavalry units in the Regulars and in the Volunteers in the 1860-62 period in the North, while in the Confederacy it provided a stream of volunteers throughout the conflict. California had the largest non-state sponsored mounted militias, with one Northern California regiment of nearly five hundred enrolled.
Most Union Army recruits for the Eastern forces had little knowledge of horses, and many had never ridden before. New Union troopers got horses to groom, saddles to care for, and weapons to learn, often for the very first time. In the Southeast, the men often brought their own horses and, frequently, the initial weapons they needed, giving the South a decided tactical edge that would last for the first two years of the conflict. In the East, younger men became new officers, either by election or selection. The Confederacy offered James E.B. Stuart, a mounted rifles officer with a flair for riding, a Confederate Brigadier commission just after First Manassas. Brevetted in the infantry after graduating from West Point in 1861, George A. Custer was determined to lead a cavalry unit. After showing reckless abandon repeatedly, he eventually got one.
In the West, the men on both sides brought not only their own animals and weapons, but also their own organizations and leaders. Small bands combined into battalions (larger than companies and smaller than regiments) and regiments with geographic roots to counties or states, with their leaders either appointed (rarely) or elected from a pool of candidates. Nathan B. Forrest had led nothing more than a string of slaves, yet was leader enough to be elected as the commander of his Tennessee mounted battalion because he was an expert rider. Benjamin Grierson disliked horses, but because he gave an impressive speech to his Iowa neighbors, they elected him a cavalry captain.
East and West then started organizing and training for the roles they were to fulfill. For the Eastern mounted units, this usually included learning the saber, but swords were more often just carried than used. The Westerners often received sabers and kept them handy, but their war differed from their Eastern counterparts. Without trained warhorses, fighting on horseback with sabers was dangerous and tricky for both horse and rider. A good deal of cavalry unit battles were exchanges between carbine and musket-armed dismounted men. Horse soldiers used pistols and shotguns far more than the infantry did, as instant firepower gave a decided advantage in fast-developing cavalry actions. All senior military commanders recognized the need for a mounted force. Even if “real” cavalry was unavailable, they would scrounge some mounts and tack and put volunteers in saddles, if only to provide videttes (mounted sentries) to prevent surprise and deter desertion.
Screening, Scouting and Security
Scout/screen operations made up a bulk of the regular cavalry units’ duties, but security became increasingly important as the war went on. The scout’s jobs was not to engage in prolonged firefights, nor to bring about general engagements. Their role was to encounter opposing groups of horsemen and, upon seeing the enemy exchange a few shots, then break contact and beat a hasty retreat to report back to their superiors. Their first tests were to scout the enemy without being detected, though this was not always possible.
While performing these scouting missions, they often encountered their counterparts performing the other major role of American cavalry: screening. The screen kept friendly troop movement concealed from enemy scouts and other observers by pushing them back, regardless of the observer’s military status. Because a body of 50,000-plus men on the march with wagons and artillery was hard to hide, the cavalry screens kept the number of knowledgeable observers (those who might know what they were seeing) small, and most important, to hide road-scouting parties so as not to reveal future intent. Screening cavalry also acted as false scouts, inquiring of locals about water sources, bridges and side trails they didn’t intend to use.
Mounted provosts rounded up stragglers during the movement of armies, and security patrols often bumped into their opposite numbers doing much the same thing, resulting in quick fights that sometimes turned into major engagements. When a Federal cavalry division in the advance of the Army of the Potomac bumped into part of the Army of Northern Virginia’s cavalry screen just northwest of the market town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, it began one of the largest battles of the conflict. While neither side desired a general engagement there and then, it developed out of that first, otherwise incidental cavalry contact.
In the far western theater, cavalry performed security duties more than anything else. The 1st California Cavalry Battalion, or the California Native Cavalry, enrolled in the U.S. Volunteers in 1862, the largest mounted militia unit in California. Primarily Californios (Mexican nationals before 1848), it took on anyone who could provide their own horse and weapon. One recruiting poster for the Native Cavalry announced that it welcomed “Negroes, Mestizos (persons of mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry), Indians and Chinee” into its ranks. They didn’t seem to care about gender, either; several women were members. The 1st California Cavalry Battalion performed security patrolling between the gold fields of the Sacramento country and the transshipment port of San Francisco, as well as law enforcement, since many lawmen enlisted in the one of the two California Columns that served in Nevada and Arizona.
Raiding
Raiding was not officially part of the American land warfare policy, but it was part and parcel of American warfare at the local level. Raiding and counter-raiding had marked all the conflicts fought in North America for centuries, and were the reason for the local militia’s existence, whether astride or afoot. It was no surprise to anyone when the cavalry on both sides began conducting large-scale raids on enemy communications, morale, and logistics.
A raid, as opposed to cavalry combat operations, had several goals. The primary goal is to seize materiel for friendly use or to deny its use to the enemy. The Confederacy excelled at this at the start of the conflict, but as the war went on, its mounted force overall became weaker. Though at first bountifully supplied with magnificent mounts, the early loss of Tennessee and Kentucky denied the Confederacy access to some of the finest equine bloodlines in the world. The biggest, strongest horses wore out within a year, and the palfreys (ordinary riding horses) that replaced them simply could not keep up with the Federal numbers or quality.
The best-known raiders were nearly all Confederates, but few survived the conflict. Stuart died at Yellow Tavern in 1864; John H. Morgan at Greenville in the same year. Both excelled at the execution of a raid, but Stuart was especially adept, sometimes at the expense of what he was supposed to have been doing. Cavalry units had a tendency to go off on their own, doing what they thought best regardless of what was good for the main army. Officers like Custer, Forrest and Philip H. Sheridan did more or less what their superiors ordered them to do, but some of their compatriots acted more like brigands than soldiers, defying efforts to rein them in. In the Trans-Mississippi, the inability to distinguish some irregular cavalry from outlaws made controlling them impossible for both sides. In fact, many were outlaws before the conflict, or would become outlaws after it. But resources had to be used to counter the irregulars engaged in private warfare (few of the Trans-Mississippi mounted militias were “enrolled” in the strictest sense) regardless of effectiveness, and that was one purpose of raiding as well.
Another use of cavalry raids was to affect enemy morale. In 1862, for example, Stuart “rode around” the Army of the Potomac in a spectacularly touted raid that boosted Southern morale far more than its military achievement warranted. In contrast, Sheridan’s Shenandoah campaign was a large-scale raid intended to deprive the Confederacy of a principal food source, but that pillaging had the further effect of depriving the Army of Northern Virginia of any hope of another Jackson saving them from destruction.
Strategic Reconnaissance
The cavalry conducted strategic reconnaissance “raids” deep into enemy territory only for gathering information. Unconventional units: small groups, sometimes dressed in enemy uniforms, and occasionally led by former inhabitants of the target area, usually carried out these operations. By 1864, Union intelligence production managers were requesting information on specific strategic targets. One of Ulrich Dahlgren’s missions during his 1864 raid on Richmond was to determine bridging needs along the South Anna River in anticipation of the Union Army’s crossing. A 20-man party made up of Navajo scouts, paroled Confederate prisoners and New Mexico mounted militia crossed the Rio Grande in early 1865 to investigate (false) rumors of an Apache/French alliance. (In his 1964 film Major Dundee, Sam Peckinpah later dramatized and enlarged this mission.)
Cavalry Combat Operations
There were comparatively few cavalry combat operations during the war, largely because there was no need to use specialized equipment—scarce and expensive cavalry assets—to accomplish what were essentially infantry operations. Cavalry logistics were perilously tight on both sides for most of the conflict, with horses and tack being in the shortest supply. Skilled leadership and trained troopers who were not already busy with other crucial missions were equally scarce. Horse shortages eventually led to a formation of the Cavalry Bureau in the Union Army to control prices and distribution of mounts. The Confederacy did not form such a centralized organization, leaving the provision of remounts to individual commands or troopers. Small wonder then that large numbers of Confederate horse soldiers fought as infantry by the end of the war.
There were, however, exceptions. The best known was when George Stoneman led the Army of the Potomac’s Cavalry Corps on a large-scale attack on Stuart’s cavalry at Brandy Station in May 1863. Surprised early, Stuart managed a bare win at the end of a very long day. This engagement showed, after two years of coming up short against Stuart’s until-then superior force, that the Union’s Cavalry Corps was now the equal of its Confederate counterpart.
The End of the Cavalry
American Civil War cavalry operations showed the value of mobility, but not shock; of pursuit and raiding, but not major attacks on horseback. The extensive use of breech-loading long arms and revolvers on both sides showed that the saber and lance may have become obsolete.
However, Europe, especially, missed that point. The charge of the Prussian Guards at Mars-De-la-Tour in 1870 was probably the last charge of mounted cavalry in Europe, and it was as unneeded a sacrifice as the Light Brigade had been at Balaklava. In Cuba, horses were for officers, not the enlisted men; Roosevelt was the only mounted American on San Juan Hill. The large numbers of mounted cavalry that lingered behind the Allied lines on the Western Front in WWI, waiting for a breakthrough on the front that never came, might have been more profitably employed as infantry or artillery to achieve that breakthrough. Had Europe paid more attention to Stuart and Sheridan, Forrest and Pleasanton, they might have avoided that waste of manpower and horseflesh.
American cavalry wouldn’t be influential in world military operations until the 1960s, when they traded their horses for helicopters.
The Devil’s Own Day: Shiloh and the American Civil War
The brawl in the Tennessee wilderness involved very little cavalry, except scouts, with one exception: a cavalry “charge” that captured a limbered Federal battery on Sunday afternoon. But by Monday morning, Forrest’s mounted scouts knew Grant was being reinforced. This was contrary to what senior Confederate officers were told to believe, so they ignored him.
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Coming Up…
Identifying The Long Dead
Copper Bottomed Wizardry
And Finally...
On 5 April:
1918: Germany’s Michael offensive ends in France and Flanders. The first of five planned offensives meant to end World War One before America could build up a large army in France, Michael fell mainly on British forces, but lacked the weight needed to keep driving and failed in its strategic purpose.
1964: Douglas MacArthur dies in Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland. Known variously as a hero, a martinet, a grandstander, a military genius and a failed presidential candidate, MacArthur was also the last flag officer of World War One.
And today is NATIONAL PLAY OUTSIDE DAY. Unlike the first Saturday of every other month, by April it may be temperate enough to do it without bulky clothes.