After Major General J. E. B. Stuart complained regarding the “deficiency of good arms” in the cavalry of the Army of Northern Virginia, General Lee, responded on 15 August 1863 that after the Battle of Brandy Station and before the beginning of the Gettysburg Campaign, 2,000 Austrian rifles had been sent to Culpeper Court House, Virginia, to arm Stuart’s troopers. The arms had either been returned or thrown away by the troopers. They had also refused to accept 600 Enfield and Mississippi rifles. The cavalry of the Army of Northern Virginia apparently regarded itself as knights arrant, for whom the only proper weapons were the revolver and the saber, with the use of infantry long arms being beneath them. This prejudice was not shared by the troops of Generals Nathan Bedford Forrest and John Bell Hood in the west. After the war, Hood wrote that “our cavalry were not cavalrymen proper, but were mounted riflemen, trained to dismount and hold in check or delay the advance of the enemy.” After their inauspicious start, Federal cavalrymen learned the same lesson. They ultimately became classic dragoons, trained to fight mounted with pistol and saber, as well as dismounted with the carbine, using the horse primarily as a battle taxi. Having learned that lesson, the Federal cavalry of the Army of Potomac consistently whipped Stuart’s cavalry for the remainder of the war. (O.R., I, 29/2, 648)
Lee is quoted as observing to Captain Justus Scheibert, a Prussian Army observer with the Army of Northern Virginia, that he had armed a brigade with breechloaders as a trial. But, “In an hour and a half the men had already exhausted their ammunition. Back they came from the front. We cannot manufacture so much [ammunition], nor transport it, unless we get results. I strive to cut [the use of ammunition] to the least. We need a weapon that demands time to load, so the man knows he must value the shot – not fire before he directs it to a consequence.” The problem of ammunition supply verses ammunition expenditure was a universal problem, one which militated against the adoption of breech-loading and then repeating arms for infantry in the Federal Army, as well. It continued to be a matter of concern in the U.S. Army as late as the development of a select fire capability for the M14 rifle in the mid-1950s. (Scheibert, A Prussian Observes the American Civil War, 58)
Regards,
Don Dixon