Southern cavalry rarely fought dismounted in the early years of the war, because they could generally drive their opponents from the field without leaving the saddle. If a CSA cavalry trooper lost his horse, he was given leave to find another. But the term of that leave was limited. If he could not find a mount in that term, he was relegated to the infantry. However, as Federal cavalry became more expert at fighting on horseback the advantage of mounted combat for the South decreased, and the Confederate horsemen fought more and more on foot. By June 1863 (Brandy Station) the two forces could be considered equal in their combat potential.
At the time, Alfred Pleasonton commanded the Federal cavalry attached to the Army of the Potomac. It was Pleasonton's cavalry that had surprised Stuart's men at Brandy Station, where troops were massing to screen Lee's Army as it headed north into Pennsylvania. The somewhat confused and indecisive character of the encounters at Aldie, Goose Creek, Middleburg, and Upperville helps to define the constant nature of cavalry warfare outside the largest battles (June 19 - 21). On 21 June (the longest day of the year), Federal cavalry, buoyed by their recent success, made a more determined effort to pierce Stuart's cavalry screen. Stuart's rear guard established artillery positions on the western ridge overlooking Goose Creek to cut off the Federal cavalry. After furious mounted fighting, Stuart withdrew his cavalry corps to take a strong defensive position in Ashby Gap, an important mountain pass. After a few short hours, Federal infantry was able to rush the western ridge and repel the Confederate artillery with support from the cavalry units crossing the bridge. The firing sputtered out with nothing gained. The following day the Federals withdrew east of Middleburg. As the cavalry skirmishing in the gap diminished, the Army of Northern Virginia safely crossed the Potomac into Maryland and headed toward Pennsylvania.
This series of sharp actions that ended at Upperville, sandwiched between the massive cavalry action at Brandy Station and the magnitude of Gettysburg, were significant at the time, but are now generally overlooked by historians. Stuart's men had fought and disengaged at Aldie and Middleburg, refusing to be drawn into a pitched battle. When considered together, the battles around Aldie, Middleburg, and Upperville represent some of the largest and costliest cavalry actions of the Civil War. These vicious battles cost Stuart roughly 600 casualties and Pleasonton around 900. By comparison this 1,500 casualties equates to roughly the same losses as suffered at Brandy Station (1,403 combined casualties), which is considered the largest mounted battle of the war.
Yet Blue and Grey troopers clashed almost daily in much smaller affairs typical of mounted service, occasionally killing or wounding a man or horse. Such duty was tedious, nerve-wracking, and very hard on both men and horses. Cavalrymen faced this form of small war, or
petite guerre, more often than their comrades in the infantry or artillery. Hours spent sitting picket duty on a horse in the dark, on a lonely road waiting to be attacked by a lurking enemy, fell far short of the gallant cavalry charges portrayed in the schoolbooks and romantic novels of the next century.
A cavalry officer attempted to explain to those unfamiliar with cavalry mounts the hardships suffered during cavalry service. “You have no idea of their suffering [the horses]. An officer of cavalry needs to be more horse-doctor than soldier … You are a slave to your horses, you work like a dog yourself, and you exact the most extreme care from your sergeants, and you see diseases creeping on you day by day and your horses breaking down under your eyes, and you have two resources, one to send them to the reserve camps at the rear and so strip yourself of your command, and the other to force them on until they drop and then run for luck that you will be able to steal horses to remount your men … We swipe the first horse we come to and put the dismounted man on his back.”
After Second Manassas, Generals Bayard and Buford reported that there were not five horses to the company that could be forced into a trot. (Gen.) David Gregg later noted: “With some exceptions, whatever care was given the horses, was at such times as best suited the convenience of the individual trooper, and as the horses generally stood in mud to their knees, unless their masters were prompted by exceptionally humane feelings, the intervals between feedings and watering were distressingly long. In many of the regiments … their condition was the worst possible.”
[ii] At one point in this campaign, the horses of the 1st Rhode Island "were not unsaddled for one hundred and four hours; were without food for sixty-four hours; and without water thirty-seven hours." In the winter of 1862-3, with a wide rivers separating the armies and the roads two feet deep in mud, slush and water, the horses of the 1st Massachusetts, then on picket duty, remained saddled for fifteen consecutive days and nights and died by dozens of exposure and starvation.
These actions introduced new dimensions to the use of cavalry in warfare that were plain to those who were participants. Among these were the value of combined arms operations, the concept of a covering force, and the use of dismounted cavalry. Certainly these tactics had been included in the cavalry manuals of the day, but up to this point they had not been prominent among those chosen for use by cut and slash cavalry commanders.
[From my own book - don't get bent.]
https://civilwartalk.com/#_ednref1 Krepps, 34.
[ii] David M. Gregg, B&L.