Birmingham state herald., 1896-11-01
CAVALRY IN WAR.
CONFEDERATE NEGLECT OF AN,IM-
 PORTANT BRANCH.
This Contributed Much to the Final Overthrow of the Southern Army.
 The Part That Cavalry Plays.

The son of a Confederate officer, MT. Duncan Rose contributes a paper to the November Century on Why the Confed- eracy Failed" This failure he attributes to three leading eauses-the issue of pa- per money, the policy of dispersion and the neglect of the cavalry. Concerning the last of these MT. Rose says:
 It is a fact worthy of remembrance that all the greatest generals of ancient and modern times have put their greatest faith in their cavalry. It was his superb cavalry and not the Macedonian phalanx with which Alexander charged the Per sian center at Arbela, and won the crown of Asia. It was HannibaFs Uumidian horse which slaughtered those S0,0O0 Ro- mans at Cannae, and carried the war to the very gates of Rome. It was Napo- Icons powerful cavalry reserve at Aus terlitz that enabled him to finish off that great victory with the capture of forty three thousand Russian and Austrian prisoners and hundred pieces of artil- lery. And it is undoubtedly true, as the great captain himself stated that his sue cess at Dresden did not avail to save his throne, because the horses with which he had conquered Europe had perished in the snoWs of the Russian steppes.
 The Prussians are the greatest soldiers of modern times, and they have never made the mistake of undertaking cavalry. It was Butchers terrible cavalry which changed the drawn battle of Waterloo into that dreadful rout, and which all that awful night after Waterloo pursued the flying French until, when the next day broke, of all those with whom Napo- leon marched out to fight there was not an organized body remaining, except Grouchy's detached command And in her last war it was the Prussian uhlans that made Germany's great victories so effectiVe, and made possible Sedan with it's 100000 prisoners.
 And so it has come to be considered an axiom that, however authorities may diff fer as to the relative value of the different arms of the service in battle, no great decisive victory can be won without suffi- cient cavalry to press the pursuit; that the fruits of victory cannot be gathered, the harvest cannot be reaped without sufficient fresh men on horseback to pur- sue the retreatlng enemy.
 It might be expected that as the south erners were natural-born horsemen, "cav- alters from the cradle," the mounted arm of the service would have been the strong est and the most valued and cherished but strange as it seems, the contrary, the very contradictory, of that was true From the beginning the cavalry was rela- lively the weakest, was underrated and neglected, and even ridiculed and derided In jocularity rewards were offered for "a dead man with spurs on," such a poor opinion had they of a soldier on horse back
 At the first great battle of the war, on the plateau of Manassas, the mounted men did not fight as an organized body, but were divided, detailed and attached two companies to each brigade, in imita- ton, perhaps, of the old Roman legion, method of arranging cavalry in battle which was abandoned before the Chris tian era. And yet Johnston has been blamed because he did not capture the federal army and the city of Washington too And at all times after that the little band of horSemen never seemed to be considered as a constituent part of the fighting army. Nearly always they were separated from it on detached duty. At Gettysburg the Confederate cavalry was miles away when the battle began. They were not factor in the great fight until the last day. If Lee had won, and had captured the heights of Gettysburg, it could not have been in effect more than a drawn battle, because he had not suffi- cient cavalry with which to press the pur- suit.
 And so, from the beginning to the end, either because the government could not learn the value of mounted troops, or was incapable of changing policy once adopted, or for some ineXplica ble reason, the cavalry was underrated and neglect ed. The excuse cannot be offered that there were not sufficient horses in the Confederacy. A glance at the census of 1860 will show that there were horses enough in Texas or Georgia and North Carolina, to have mounted all the Con- federate armies in the field. leaving enough to make the crops; and surely, if the government may lawfully "conscrpt" a man into the army. his horse or his neighbours horse may also be conscripted. Almost at the very time when the general of the army of Tennessee was begging for horses to draw his cannon. a federal army was capturing nearly 2000 horses from the farmers in the valley of Virginia.
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