Making Strides

IN HIS POSTHUMOUSLY PUBLISHED memoir War Years With Jeb Stuart, Confederate Lt. Col. W.W. Blackford noted that, in September 1862, “The truth was that their [Union] cavalry was afraid to meet us….[U]p to this time the cavalry of the enemy had no more confidence in themselves than the country had in them, and whenever we got a chance at them, which was rarely, they came to grief.”

This wasn’t typical postwar bluster. As Blackford, who served under Stuart from June 1862 until Stuart’s death in May 1864, fully realized, the bulk of the Army of the Potomac’s cavalry during the Maryland, was a “crippling effect on the discipline and training of units that had not been together long enough to acquire much of either, or to develop the esprit de corps that is an essential ingredient in the success of any military organization.”