Booknotes: Civil War Cavalry

New Arrival:

• Civil War Cavalry: Waging Mounted Warfare in Nineteenth-Century America by Earl J. Hess (LSU Press, 2025).

After the release of Earl Hess's recent studies covering Civil War infantry tactics and field artillery, I eagerly anticipated completion of a trilogy (of sorts) with a cavalry volume of similar structure. And here it is.

When it comes to both big picture and small picture matters, Hess, whether you agree with him or not, always has something to interesting to add to the discussion. In Civil War Cavalry: Waging Mounted Warfare in Nineteenth-Century America, he addresses the topic of Civil War cavalry "comprehensively and from new perspectives, challenging standard views of the war’s mounted arm."

The volume "surveys the organization, training, administration, arming, and mounting of cavalry units and examines mounted troops’ tactical formations and maneuvers." As was the case with Hess's infantry and artillery books, this one uses drawings from contemporary manuals (as well as the author's own line drawings) to visually represent the aforementioned cavalry formations and tactical maneuvers.

The book also examines "the nature of cavalry operations, discussing the mounted charge, dismounted fighting, long-distance raids, the varied types of weapons used by troopers, and the difficulty of supplying horses." As revealed in the introduction, there are a number of cavalry-related themes and topics that the author feels "ripe for reevaluation," among them how the rifled musket impacted the role of cavalry on the battlefield, the shift from using cavalry in primarily mounted charges to more regularly fighting dismounted during the war, the idea that evolutionary changes in the use of cavalry during the Civil War anticipated modern mobile warfare, and the contention that southern cavalrymen were on balance better horsemen than their northern counterparts.

Those familiar with 2022's Animal Histories of the Civil War Era, a unique essay anthology that Hess both edited and contributed to, will not be surprised to find that he integrates intersecting animal history themes into this study, using them "to argue that cavalry mounts exercised a degree of agency in shaping their role in the large military machine."

The book ends with a brief overview of cavalry lessons learned and post-Civil War trends on both American and European stages.