At the beginning of May, the Cavalry Corps numbered 12,386 men, and employed 313 wagons, or one wagon for every 40 men. In addition to the wagons needed for personal gear, rations for the men, medical equipment, grain and forage for the horses, and other sundry materiel, the command needed wagons for ammunition. The following…

On June 10, one day after the fight at Brandy Station, General Pleasonton issued two orders to his horse artillery commanders, telling them to “send in their requisitions for ammunition, ordinance stores and horses and take every other means in their power to put their batteries [in] condition to take the field, thoroughly equipped on…

To repeat my disclaimer from July, I am not looking to reach any definitive conclusions in this discussion. Rather, I want to look at some documents from the Gettysburg Campaign, as well as the weeks preceding the campaign, and see what we might learn from them, if anything. I love these kinds of details but…

The army’s labor shortage meant that soldiers did not receive needed materiel, due to delays at the railyards, wharves and at the arsenal in Washington. In the days when telegraph messages or couriers could take hours to reach their destination, the uncertainty as to the reasons for the delays added to the confusion and created…

In my next several posts I will discuss several matters, that for the sake of convenience, I will lump under a general heading of logistics in the Gettysburg Campaign. Purists will argue that logistics is the movement of materiel, and I won’t argue the issue, but I will broaden the definition. I will look at…

On October 4, 1862, Col. Lafayette Baker arrested and jailed Lt. Col. Judson Kilpatrick in Old Capitol Prison in Washington, D.C. Baker worked for Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, as “Special Provost Marshal.” He later became head of the National Detective Police or what he termed the United States Secret Service. As stated in one…

Like Judson Kilpatrick and “Kill-Cavalry,” Alfred Pleasonton and “newspaper humbug” go together today like peanut butter and jelly. Unlike the questionable origin of Kilpatrick’s nom-de-guerre, we know exactly who pinned the tag line on Pleasonton and when. The larger question is why? On May 12, 1863, Capt. Charles Francis Adams, 1st Massachusetts, wrote “if you…

Friends of Cedar Mountain Battlefield will be hosting a 160th Anniversary Seminar July 28-30, 2022. The event is very well priced and offers several options of tours and presentations. The presenters include Michael Block, Benjamin Myers, Frank O’Reilly, Ron Coddington, Nick Picerno, Paige Gibbon Backus, Glenn Stach, and Jeff Wert. For complete information, please visit…

Eric Wittenberg advised me yesterday that is has had to cancel the tour scheduled for May 20-22. He had not received the interest he had hoped for and could not reserve a smaller bus to accommodate those who had signed up. Another tour is scheduled for October through Chambersburg Seminars and Tours. If interested you…

Three years ago, at a small gathering of like-minded friends, one asked if any of us knew the exact origin of Judson Kilpatrick’s nickname, ‘Kill-Cavalry.’ That is, when did the name first appear, and, if we thought we knew, did we have a contemporary source to prove our answer. Postwar accounts or memoirs did not…