Confederate General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson was one of the chief architects of the stunning Confederate victory at the battle of Chancellorsville, Virginia, on May 2, 1863. Along with overall Confederate commander Robert E. Lee, Jackson devised a daring plan that divided the numerically inferior southern army and then marched Jackson’s men far around the Union army to strike unsuspecting northern troops on their extreme right flank. Northern soldiers were caught almost completely unawares and quickly succumbed to panic and rout, resulting in one of the most striking tactical victories of the war. Jackson, eager to follow up the initial success by mounting an extremely rare nighttime attack, reconnoitered the Union lines by the light of a full moon the evening of the battle. It was his last act as commander.

Though the men of his corps were undoubtedly exhausted after the day’s fighting, there was reason to believe that they would summon the will for a follow-up attack. Jackson’s men had already proved themselves capable of feats of endurance far beyond what most Civil War-era units could accomplish. During their famed 1862 campaign in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, Jackson’s men marched over 400 miles during a four-week stretch (including one 57-mile march in 51 hours) and fought six battles that month, repeatedly confounding Union generals’ attempts to defeat them. That the troops in Jackson’s command managed these feats under extremely difficult conditions—many had poor equipment, insufficient rations, and suffered from dysentery and other chronic conditions—renders their achievements even more remarkable, and helps explain why Jackson’s infantry became known as his “foot cavalry.” Their record as some of the most battle-hardened troops in the Army of Northern Virginia may have led their commander to believe they could renew the attack even after a grueling day of battle. (Jackson also may have anticipated a relative advantage over his Union opponents, whose troops were not only exhausted from the day’s hard fighting but also suffering from low morale due to the chaos of their defeat earlier in the day.)

Night attacks like the one Jackson contemplated at Chancellorsville were extremely rare during the Civil War not because of fatigue but because of the difficulty of fighting in the dark. Even under the best of conditions, Civil War battles were chaotic and confusing affairs: absent modern communications technologies, regiments depended on brightly-colored flags and uniforms to distinguish friend from foe. Even in daylight, troops sometimes mistook friendly regiments for enemy units: the thick, heavy smoke produced by Civil War firearms hung close to the ground, obscuring lines, and in the first years of the war many units on both sides employed nonstandard uniforms. Nighttime amplified these problems, making it nearly impossible to determine the position of friendly and enemy units. The increased threat of so-called “friendly fire” casualties represented a powerful disincentive to mount nighttime operations.

Jackson himself became the best-known Civil War victim of friendly fire. While scouting the Union lines at Chancellorsville by moonlight on horseback with his aides, Confederate pickets mistook his party for northern troops and fired several volleys into the group. Jackson himself was struck by musket balls and mortally wounded: surgeons amputated his left arm in an attempt to save his life, but pneumonia set in and the famous general died eight days after the battle.

While there are isolated instances of African Americans serving in the Confederate ranks, there is overwhelming evidence that this small number represents rare and exceptional cases: historian David Blight estimates that the number of black soldiers in the Confederate ranks was fewer than 200. That small number represents some partial companies of slaves training as soldiers discovered by Union forces after the fall of Richmond. One reason that only a handful of blacks fought for the Confederacy is that until the last weeks of the war, the Confederate Congress expressly forbade arming enslaved African Americans, who made up the vast majority of the black population in the South. Given white southerners' longstanding fears of a slave uprising (fears intensified by a few abortive attempts in the first half of the 19th century and exacerbated to the point of hysteria by John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859), the acute resistance of Confederates to arming blacks is understandable. Putting muskets in the hands of enslaved African Americans presented more than simply a concrete threat—embracing the notion that blacks could serve as soldiers in the same fashion as whites threatened deeply-held Southern ideas of race-based honor and masculinity. As Confederate Secretary of State Robert Toombs put it, "The day the army of Virginia allows a negro regiment to enter their lines as soldiers, they will be degraded, ruined, and disgraced."

Northerners were scarcely more enthusiastic about arming African Americans than their Southern counterparts. For the first year and a half of the war, Abraham Lincoln's administration eschewed the enlistment of black troops, fearful of a public backlash. Not until Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, did the Union Army begin to enroll African Americans in its ranks; even then, the decision proved deeply controversial, particularly among Northern Democrats. The Confederacy did not seriously entertain the idea of arming enslaved African Americans until a full year later, when the war situation in the South had grown much more desperate. In January 1864, months after the defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Patrick Cleburne (one of the most successful combat commanders in the Confederate Army) circulated a proposal to arm the slaves. Northern successes on the battlefield, Cleburne argued, threatened the South with "the loss of all we now hold most sacred—slaves and all other personal property, lands, homesteads, liberty, justice, safety, pride, manhood." Sacrificing the first, Cleburne held, could save the rest; the Confederacy could check Union advances by recruiting an army of slaves and guaranteeing freedom "within a reasonable time to every slave in the South who shall remain true to the Confederacy." A dozen of Cleburne's subordinates backed his proposal.

To most Southerners, however, Cleburne's plan was appalling. The prospect of arming the slaves struck one division commander as "revolting to Southern sentiment, Southern pride, and Southern honor." A brigade commander suggested that accepting enslaved African Americans as soldiers would "contravene the principles upon which we fight." Sensing the potential for the debate to cause dangerous dissension within the ranks, Confederate President Jefferson Davis ordered the generals to cease the discussion. Debate over the decision to arm enslaved African Americans resurfaced many months later, as the Confederacy's situation grew progressively more dire both on and off the battlefield. When another similar proposal reemerged it carried the imprimatur of Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia and perhaps the most revered figure in the South. In February 1865, Lee wrote a letter to a Confederate congressman characterizing the plan as "not only expedient but necessary." Even with Lee's support, though, the bill proved deeply divisive. It was not until March 13, 1865, just weeks before Lee's surrender, that the Confederate Congress passed legislation allowing for the enlistment of black soldiers. The two companies discovered by Union troops after the fall of Richmond never went into battle. Opposition to African American soldiers was passionate on both sides. The notion of fighting alongside blacks violated many deeply-held beliefs of white Northerners and Southerners alike. In the Union army, African Americans served in segregated regiments under white officers; many were used for menial tasks rather than fighting, and those that went into combat suffered abuse from their white comrades and were often singled out as targets by their Confederate foes. Nevertheless, the vast majority of African American troops fought bravely and with distinction, and by the end of the war, their actions in combat had begun to change the assumptions of at least some of their comrades regarding the fitness of blacks for battle. Despite their demonstrated fighting ability, it was nearly another full century before the United States Army finally desegregated individual units.

In the first two years of the Civil War, most judged the Southern cavalry—the horse-borne troopers who could travel far more quickly than their colleagues in the infantry—superior to that of the Union army. In the war’s first months, Confederate cavalry enjoyed a reputation for better horsemanship and more fighting spirit; they boasted the most colorful and well-known cavalry officers of the war’s early months, including the flamboyant J. E. B. Stuart and the daring Nathan Bedford Forrest; and celebrated some noteworthy victories over their Northern counterparts. No less an authority than Union General William Tecumseh Sherman described the Confederate cavalry in 1863 as “splendid riders, shots, and utterly reckless . . . the best Cavalry in the world.”

The diverging nature of life in the two regions provided Southerners with some initial advantages in fielding an effective cavalry force quickly. In 1860, far more Southerners lived in rural locations than did Northerners. Because roads in the South were generally poorer, a greater proportion of Southerners grew up in the saddle; because they learned to hunt as youths, fewer Southerners had to be taught to shoot. Those advantages in upbringing echoed in the proportion of Southerners in the cavalry units of the prewar army; despite their relatively smaller population, more cavalry officers hailed from the South than from the North, and upon the outbreak of war the majority of those cavalry officers resigned their commissions and joined the Confederate cavalry, leaving the Union Army at a further competitive disadvantage. Southerners furnished a number of explanations for their supposed prowess on horseback and in battle. Most believed themselves to naturally possess more “martial spirit” than their counterparts in the North. At the outset of the war, many if not most Southerners viewed their region as having a near monopoly on fighting ability; the fact that a larger number of West Point graduates and a greater proportion of Regular Army troops hailed from the South suggested to many that the South benefited from pronounced advantages in military aptitude. Southerners frequently regarded the North as a region of timid clerks and shopkeepers, ill-suited to the burdens of campaigning and fighting. (So widespread was that confidence in Southerners’ own innate superiority as soldiers that Confederate textbooks for elementary schoolchildren featured word problems like “A Confederate soldier captured 8 Yankees each day for 9 successive days; how many did he capture in all?” and “If one Confederate soldier can whip 7 Yankees, how many soldiers can whip 49 Yankees?”) During the first half of the war, Confederate victories at battles like Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville—against larger and better-equipped Union forces—seemed to confirm Southerners’ belief about their natural superiority in battle. The Southern cavalry’s exploits in the first months of the war, sometimes literally riding circles around their opponents, similarly suggested the Rebel horsemen’s inherent preeminence. In mid-nineteenth century armies, cavalry troops served a number of functions. Because of their speed and range, commanders often employed cavalry troops as a reconnaissance force, relying on them to furnish information about the location and strength of enemy troops: large bodies of infantry depended on the reports furnished by cavalry troopers to guard against surprise or entrapment by enemy forces. Cavalry also served as screens for infantry armies on the march: with footsoldiers strung out in long, vulnerable columns, often over several miles, horse troops could interpose themselves between enemy divisions and offer them some protection, as Confederate cavalry did so effectively in the Shenandoah Valley in 1862. Frequently, cavalry troops engaged enemy troops directly, either from horseback or (as became more and more common in the latter years of the war) fighting dismounted as infantry troops. Confederate raiders like Forrest and John Singleton Mosby used their cavalry to mount daring attacks on Federal supply lines, frustrating the outmanned Union cavalry’s efforts to check them.

The changing nature of tactics and technology during the Civil War led to a dramatic change in the way horse troops were employed as the war progressed. The mounted cavalry charge became less effective with the development of more accurate shoulder arms, and the importance of reconnaissance and dismounted fighting became more important. Stuart’s daring raids into Northern territory alarmed civilians and burnished Stuart’s reputation as a dashing cavalier, but the military significance of those raids was less significant. Stuart’s infamous long raid during the Gettysburg campaign captured several Union supply trains but left the Confederate army moving blindly through unfamiliar territory; Stuart’s absence led general Robert E. Lee to accept the battle at Gettysburg without a clear idea of the terrain or the strength of the enemy, with disastrous consequences. By the midpoint of the war, Union cavalry troopers had achieved at least parity with their Confederate counterparts, matching them in horsemanship and firepower thanks in part to the introduction of repeating carbines to the cavalry arsenal. The relentless process of weeding out less-competent leaders and replacing them with soldiers of demonstrated military acumen also benefited the Union as the war dragged on. By the final year of the war, the Union cavalry troopers had more than equaled the prowess of the Southern forces, and Federal commanders like Phil Sheridan had honed the Union cavalry into a devastatingly effective tool that helped maintain unyielding pressure on Confederate armies from 1864 on.