Cold Steel: The Saber and the Union Cavalry

COLD STSSL: The Saber and the Union Cavalry Stephen Z. Starr When in the early months of the Civil War a young man of romantic and adventurous disposition enrolled as a member of a cavalry regiment in process of formation, he saw himself "in imagination . . . bristling with death and desolation, mounted on an Arabian barb, breathing flame as he bore his rider to victory."1 Nourished, as he usually was, on the romances of Sir Walter Scott, steeped in the legends of chivalry, of Saladin and the Crusaders, the tales of Roundhead and Cavalier, and the exploits of Marshal Murat, the beau sabreur of the French army, the more specific vision he had of himself was as a member of a gallant band of horsemen in a thundering, headlong charge against the Rebels, cleaving their skulls with the trusty saber in his fist This was war, grim but glorious, as it was fought by the cavalry according to all the best authorities. And the sword, the arme blanche, was the cavalry weapon par excellence. The reality turned out to be rather different, as our volunteer began to learn almost from the day his regiment assembled in camp. The United States had its own cavalry tradition, decidedly peculiar by European standards, which relegated the gleaming saber to the role of little more than a showy parade weapon. It is true that there had been a few saber charges by American cavalry in the Mexican War.2 Moreover, in July, 1857, Colonel Edwin V. Sumner led six troops of the 1st United States Cavalry in a saber charge against a superior force of Cheyenne warriors, in defiance of professional opinion which held that in fighting Indians—the principal occupation of American cavalry in the decades before the Civil War—sabers were "simply a nuisance; they jingle abominably, and are of no earthly use."3 Nonetheless, the regular army paid obeisance to European practice by arming its two cavalry and two dragoon regiments with 1 Simeon M. Fox, "The Story of the Seventh Kansas," Transactions of the Kansas State Historical Society, 1903-1904 (Topeka, 1904), pp. 17-18. 2 Albert G. Brackett, History of the United States Cavalry (New York, 1867), p. 59. 3 Ibid., p. 160. 142 the saber; the fifth, the Regiment of Mounted Rifles, carried only percussion rifles and Colt's army revolvers. Moreover, American military writers of the day followed the lead of their European colleagues and mentors, and held it to be an article of faith that the sword was "the most deadly and effective weapon . . . that could be placed in the hands of a horseman," and the superiority of the saber over all other cavalry weapons was firmly established doctrine in the American army on the eve of the Civil War.4 This being the state of military theory in 1861, it was intended that every mounted regiment of volunteers was to be equipped with the saber as the one weapon essential to the making of a proper cavalryman . Until well into 1862 this was easier said than done. Sabers, like everything else needed to arm and equip an army expanded in less than six months from seventeen thousand to 625,000, were in lamentably short supply. At the start of the war the government owned but 16,933 sabers and no more were ordered until the battle of Bull Run opened the floodgates to the formation of volunteer cavalry regiments.5 Colonel George L. Schuyler, sent abroad to purchase weapons for the state of New York, was instructed by Secretary of War Simon Cameron on July 27, 1861, to purchase twenty thousand sabers for the Federal government On September 5, he reported to Cameron from Paris that he had bought "20,000 swords for light cavalry of the Montmorency pattern" at $3.45 each; additional swords and sabers were bought in Prussia at $3.96 each.8 These purchases, painfully slow in arriving in America, were a mere drop in a fathomless bucket, for by December 1, 1861, as the Secretary of War reported, nearly 55,000 volunteer cavalrymen were already in the service and more were coming. Domestic purchases at the exorbitant price of $8...