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.

Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (1837-1863) was the young white Civil War Union army officer who commanded the otherwise all-black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. He was killed while leading a fierce but unsuccessful charge by his troops on the sand and earth parapets of Fort Wagner on Morris Island near Charleston, South Carolina, on July 18, 1863. The 54th Massachusetts lost many men that day, with a casualty rate of over 50%. The other Federal units in the attack suffered heavy losses as well. Union casualties for the day numbered more than 1,500. Union Brigadier General Quincy Granville sent an inquiry to the Confederate commander of Fort Wagner, asking about the disposition of Shaw’s body. The reply was that Col. Shaw had been “buried with his niggers,” in a common grave, a trench along the island’s shore, close to the fort. Indeed, this was where all the Union dead were buried on the tiny island. Whether or not the Confederate commander thought of this as inflicting a particular insult on Shaw, this is how it was taken in the North, especially because Shaw’s fellow officer, Col. Haldimand Putnam, commanding the 7th New Hampshire Infantry, who also died in the attack, “received all the honors of sepulture which the circumstances of his death permitted, from the fraternal hands of his West Point classmate, General Robert H. Anderson, of the Confederate Army,” although his body was not recovered. Nevertheless, even in the few days immediately after the bloodbath, Shaw had become, in the North, an uncommon martyr for the principle of black emancipation, and sentiment sprang forth to exert every effort to exhume his body and rebury him back in his hometown of Boston as a hero. Shaw’s parents, however, prominent in Boston as strong abolitionists, resisted this sentiment. His father sent instructions to the officers of his son’s regiment, writing, “We would not have his body removed from where it lies surrounded by his brave & devoted soldiers, if we could accomplish it by a word. Please to bear this in mind & also, let it be known, so that, even in case there should be an opportunity, his remains may not be disturbed.” By September, the decomposition of the bodies in the trench had begun to contaminate Fort Wagner’s Confederate defenders’ fresh water supply, and they abandoned the fort as a consequence. Union soldiers immediately moved in, but, guided by Shaw’s parents’ wishes, did not exhume Col. Shaw’s body. Morris Island is smaller than 1,000 acres and is subject to extensive erosion by storm and sea. Much of the previous site of Fort Wagner has been eroded away, including the place where the Union soldiers had been buried. However, by the time this had happened, the soldiers’ remains were no longer there because soon after the end of the Civil War, the Army disinterred and reburied all the remains—including, presumably, those of Col. Shaw—at the Beaufort National Cemetery in Beaufort, South Carolina, where their gravestones were marked as “unknown.” The Boston area has at least three memorials to Robert G. Shaw. In 1897, the Harvard Memorial Society erected a tablet on Massachusetts Hall, which had long served as a dormitory, that listed some of its past student residents who had gone on to fame. This tablet included Shaw’s name (he had been a Harvard student, but had withdrawn before graduating), along with such other notables as Artemas Ward, Elbridge Gerry, Francis Dana, Joseph Story, Jared Sparks, and Francis Parkman. The Shaw family also placed a bronze tablet in memory of Robert Gould Shaw on an earlier-installed cenotaph in its family plot at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston. The most well known memorial, however, is the Robert Gould Shaw and Massachusetts 54th Regiment Memorial. It is a bas-relief of Shaw and his men, designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and placed on Boston Common, across Beacon Street from the Massachusetts State House, in 1897. The memorial was the focus of attention during the late 1980s and early 1990s, concurrent with the making of the film Glory, that depicted the actions of the 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner. It occasioned a public reassessment of the fact that, beginning from the immediate aftermath of the attack, a significant portion of the sentiment of white Northern abolitionists had elevated Shaw’s place as a determined sacrificial martyr to the cause of black emancipation far above the level of the other men of the 54th Massachusetts, almost as if the black men of the 54th could do nothing by themselves without a white savior in the person of Shaw. Abolitionist Eliza Sedgwick’s 1865 poem about Shaw contained the lines: “Buried with the men God gave him—Those who he was sent to save; Buried with the martyred heroes, He has found an honored grave.” Shaw’s mother and father did not have a patronizing view of the relationship between their son and his men and indeed shared a sentiment of African American empowerment that was embodied in a line from Lord Byron that abolitionists often quoted—“Who would be free themselves must strike the blow.” They objected to the original design for the memorial because it showed their son on horseback, elevated above the figures of the enlisted men around him on foot. Nevertheless, a public commission funded Saint-Gauden’s bas-relief, which portrayed this design, and it was dedicated as a memorial to Shaw. The public reassessment of the 1990s eventually refocused the memorial on the 54th Massachusetts as a whole, rather than on Shaw in particular.