Hawkeyes on Horseback: The Second Iowa Volunteer Cavalry

HAWKEYES ON HORSEBACK: The Second Iowa Volunteer Cavalry Stephen Z. Starr A classic story of the early days of the Civil War has it that Governor Samuel J. Kirkwood of Iowa was doing his spring plowing in 1861 when a messenger brought him the War Department telegram requesting the state to furnish a single regiment of militia "to cause the laws to be duly executed." The Governor read the telegram , and exclaimed to the messenger, "Why! The President wants a whole regiment of men! Do you suppose I can raise as many as that?" He need not have worried. Within two weeks he had 10,000 volunteers clamoring to be accepted, and was wiring Washington, "For God's sake send us arms! We have the men."1 The Second Iowa Cavalry was mustered in on August 30 and September 28, 1861, having been raised after the battle of Bull Run had overcome General Winfield Scott's and the War Department's resistance to the raising of volunteer cavalry regiments.2 AU officers except the colonel of the Second Iowa were, as was then customary, elected; they were for the most part the lawyers, politicians, newspaper editors and businessmen who had been instrumental in raising the regiment. Their single common characteristic—apart from patriotism—was a total ignorance of all things military. For that reason, and with a display of moral and political courage not at all common among state governors, then or later, Kirkwood offered the colonelcy of the regiment to an "outsider," an officer of the Regular Army, Captain Washington L. Elliott of the Third United States Cavalry.3 Both General Scott and the War Department were averse to allowing officers of the Regular Army to accept commissions in the volunteer force, but Elliott's release was arranged by some 1 Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln; The War Years (New York, 1939), I, 221. 2 Lurton Dunham Ingersoll, Iowa in the RebeUion (Philadelphia, 1866), p. 374. 3 Elliott entered West Point as a member of the Class of 1845, but resigned after three years to study medicine. When the Mexican War broke out, he obtained a commission in the Regiment of Mounted Rifles (which in 1861 became the Third United States Cavalry) of the Regular Army, and after the war ended, saw service on the frontier, in the Dakotas, Texas and New Mexico. Elliott had a distinguished career in the Civil War, mainly as a cavalryman, gaining five brevets, the last that of majorgeneral . He was "a soldier of ability, affable, respected and esteemed by his associates , and very popular with his men." Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone (eds.), Dictionary of American Biography (New York, 1928-1944), VI, 101. 212 means, and he assumed the colonelcy of the regiment, declaring that The undersigned is fully aware that he has an important charge entrusted to him and trusts that his long experience in the mounted service in the army will enable him to properly direct and instruct the regiment, and although he may be strict in the enforcement of the rules and regulations of the army, yet he trusts that he will be just and impartial, requiring nothing of the regiment that is not justified by the Articles of War or the customs of the service tending to the efficiency of the same.4 To reconstruct the career of a Civil War regiment, historians rely on the standard printed sources, the Official Records first of all; then the official, semi-official and unofficial compendiums of state participation in the war, the published memoirs and reminiscences of the major military figures, the many histories of campaigns, batdes, armies, army corps, divisions and even brigades, that kept the presses busy for years after Appomattox.5 The types of publications we have mentioned provide the material for what may be termed the "public" life of a regiment, its campaigns and marches, skirmishes and battles. But within the past fifty years, the focus of historical interest has broadened to embrace a concern with the men who made up the armies and fought the war. The interest in the deeds of a given regiment at Shiloh, Vicksburg or Chickamauga continues, but we also want to know...