A different world

The photographs and documents of the Civil War era speak volumes about horses of that time and highlight the beginnings of modern training, technology and equipment.

The photographs and documents of the Civil War era speak volumes about horses of that time and highlight the beginnings of modern training, technology and equipment.

In the autumn of 1813, biologist and artist John James Audubon journeyed on horseback from Hardinsburg, Kentucky, to Louisville, a trek of some 55 miles. Suddenly, he heard a rushing noise as of a mighty wind, and he reports, “the air was literally filled with [Passenger] Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse; the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow…. I cannot describe to you the extreme beauty of their aerial evolutions.… Before sunset I reached Louisville…. The Pigeons were still passing in undiminished numbers and continued to do so for three days in succession.” Fifty years later in 1863, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant stood at an observation point overlooking the town of Vicksburg, Mississippi, and witnessed the same phenomenon: the migration of vast numbers of a now extinct species.

One year later and farther to the west, the forces of Union Gen. Alfred Pleasonton pursued Confederate soldiers across what is now Marais des Cygnes National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Kansas. They were impeded not only by fog rising from the marshes but by thousands of whooping cranes, spooked by the gunfire, that filled the air. As they had for hundreds of thousands of years, pronghorned antelope and buffalo still thronged in the tallgrass prairie surrounding the wetlands. It would not be many decades before the survivors of national conflict would reduce them from millions to just a handful. In many ways, the U.S. Civil War marks a time of transition that separates us from earlier eras.

So much has changed in our world since the Civil War that it can be difficult to walk a mile in an old soldier’s boots. Photographs and documents of the time reveal more in subtle detail than you might expect.

For example, when in the 1880s Grant wrote his memoirs, he was dying of throat cancer and managed to finish his last work only two days before he died. As his end drew near, Grant arose every morning, took up paper and pencil, and wrote. Why did he write in pencil? Because the ballpoint pen had not yet been invented, and his feeble hand would have smeared and splattered quill-dipped ink. We will hear more of Grant in the next part of this series, but suffice it to say for now that Grant’s penciled memoirs have come to be regarded as one of the greatest works of American literature and history.

The guns and weaponry that Grant commanded during the Civil War are obsolete by modern standards, and troops of mounted soldiers---which had for thousands of years powered every conquering tribe, army or nation---are now long gone. But winning a war, even in that era, by no means depended upon horses and weaponry alone. Other technology now considered essential to military operations had not yet been invented or was not yet widely known or used in Grant’s time. Consider reconnaissance: Gas-filled observation balloons (ancestors of today’s drones) were just beginning to be developed. The balloons, tethered firmly to the ground, could carry a man 50 feet up; from there he could report enemy positions after observing them through a telescope. Cameras were not carried aloft; they were far too bulky and heavy. Exposures were made on glass or metal plates; film did not come along until 20 years after the end of the Civil War.

The army generates tons of paperwork, and during the Civil War, all orders, requisitions and reports were handwritten, usually with quill or fountain pen and ink. The typewriter, with its “QWERTY” keyboard, was not manufactured until 1873. While “Hertzian waves”---radio---had been discovered before 1861, it was as yet merely a curiosity of the physicist’s laboratory, for there were no broadcast towers and no commercially manufactured receivers. The telephone did not yet exist, either; Alexander Graham Bell’s invention dates to the 1870s. Secret communication between headquarters and the front lines had to be carried by dispatchers who were the best horsemen available; brave and smart, their duties called for them to ride fast across broken country, often through hostile fire.

That so many photographs exist from this early day is in itself something of a miracle. The process required to make photographs in 1861 not only called for great skill but involved constant contact with flammable, explosive or extremely poisonous chemicals.

The diesel railroad engine did not come into use until the 1890s. Bulk supplies during the Civil War were transported in part by railroad, but the engines were steam-powered and burned wood or coal. Apart from nonperishable food supplies such as beans, rice and canned goods, the bulkiest item brought by military train was clothing. Uniform shirts were made of cotton but pants and coats were usually wool, and soldiers wore woollen clothing not only in winter but through sweltering summer months, too. Trousers had a button fly; the modern zipper was not invented until 1913. Pockets were not rivet-reinforced even when the trousers were made of cotton duck; the Levi Strauss “blue jean pant” did not come along until the 1870s. Soldiers had no bulletproof Kevlar, no insulation except animal fur, no waterproofing of any type except by oil or wax.

Outerwear was made of leather or oiled duck, and it was every man’s duty to take good care of his boots, saddle, bridle and saddle blankets.

The medical and veterinary care available today would have awed soldiers of the Civil War, for 150 years ago there were no antibiotics and no effective anesthetics. There were no effective dewormers for horses, no pain-killers, no fitted rubber boots to relieve bruised soles or to substitute for lost shoes. Treatment for spavin, splints, thrush, cattarh, strangles, glanders, farcy, lampas, fistulas, chorea, quittor---and many more ailments that appear in old veterinary books--involved turpentine, coal tar, nicotine, charcoal, alcohol, counterirritants, cauterization, and the lancet---and not much more. Saddletrees often caused sores and fistulous withers, and harnesses caused Sweeney---atrophy of the shoulder muscles---because Army tack was normally mass-manufactured “issue” and not custom-fitted.

REMARKABLE PHOTOGRAPHIC RECORD

We have many portraits of Ulysses Grant and other officers and soldiers and their horses because the American Civil War was the first major conflict to receive thorough photographic and journalistic coverage. Newspapers and magazines such as the New York Herald and Harper’s Weekly took the novel approach of sending reporters and sketch artists into the field---rather than waiting in their offices for correspondence or visits by eyewitnesses or government officials.

In the 1860s photography was still in its infancy, but New Yorker Mathew Brady, sensing opportunity, took heavy, bulky “bellows and box” cameras and fragile glass exposure plates into the field, sometimes coming so close to the action that he came under fire. Brady, his assistants and photographers from other studios made hundreds of images of both Union and Confederate soldiers.

That so many photographs exist from this early day is in itself something of a miracle. The process required to make photographs in 1861 not only called for great skill but involved constant contact with flammable, explosive or extremely poisonous chemicals. Civil War photographers were truly the cutting-edge “techies” of their day.

Most Civil War images were made by the “wet plate” process. Such photographs were not exposed upon paper or film but plate glass (or a variation, thin iron or copper plates). To make an image, the photographer first had to clean the glass plate with rubbing alcohol. The wet plate method is also called the collodion process, because it required the use of a syrupy solution of nitrocellulose which is both highly flammable and explosive. In the light, the photographer poured collodion onto the glass plate, tilting it so that it reached all four corners and letting any excess drip back into the bottle. He then took the plate into a darkroom or orange

tent (collodion is sensitive only to blue light), and there placed it in a sensitizing bath of silver nitrate. Next, he lifted the plate out of the bath, drained it, wiped the back, and then protected it from light by slipping it between the panels of a wooden frame (the man next to the camera in the photo labeled “Mobile Unit,” page 62, holds one of these “dark frames”).

Focusing was made possible by constructing the camera body in two parts with an accordion-like bellows between. The underside of the camera was stabilized by a plate that could be fixed to a tripod. The upper surface of the plate had rails that allowed the front part of the camera, which carried the lens, to be moved back and forth. Precise focusing was accomplished by a screw drive.

Cameras with angled mirrors that allow the photographer to see through the lens to determine focus---the singlelens reflex (SLR) concept---were not yet available. Instead, the Civil War-era photographer inserted a ground-glass plate into the camera and focused on this while the camera body was open. This method of focusing could be quite precise, and many images from this era are pinpoint-sharp.

Throwing a large black cloth over the camera and ducking beneath, the photographer removed the ground-glass plate and loaded the dark frame, carrying its sensitized glass plate, into the rear part of the camera. He then removed the frame’s faceplate and closed the camera body.

To begin the exposure, the photographer came out from beneath the black cloth and slid the lens cover upward (on some cameras, the lens was covered by little doors). There were no electronic light meters, so the photographer estimated the necessary exposure time

based on his experience. “Wet plate” technology represented an advance over previous systems because it required exposure times of “only” three to five seconds. Motion photography, such as that carried out decades later by Eadweard Muybridge, was not yet possible. Camera subjects during the Civil War had to hold absolutely still while the exposure was being made, or else the image came out blurry.

Once the picture had been taken, the photographer closed the lens cover, ducked back under the cloth, opened the camera, closed the dark frame over the plate that had just been exposed, removed the frame from the camera and then took it back to the darkroom. There he first developed the image by bathing the glass plate in a solution of ferrous sulfate, and then fixed it in a bath of potassium cyanide or sodium thiosulfate (these chemicals are used today to euthanatize horses). The image was allowed to air-dry, then coated with varnish to protect it from scratches.

Mathew Brady and his assistants produced thousands of images of the Civil War. Unfortunately, Brady was a rather bad record-keeper, so the identities of many of his subjects are not now known. Brady had to beg President Abraham Lincoln for permission to be on the battlefield, and he obtained it only by promising to pay his own expenses. Brady went deeply into debt for cameras, glass plates and chemicals. Although after the war Congress assisted him with a grant of $10,000, the amount fell far short of his debt and Brady died in poverty. His studio was sold at auction. Some of his plates were acquired by collectors but many, especially the larger plates, wound up being used as greenhouse panels. Exposed to strong sunlight, the images gradually faded over time, and the priceless record of the past that they contained was forever lost.

Like photographers, newspaper and magazine correspondents also went to the battlefield. Harper’s Weekly, A Journal of Civilization was a magazine widely read in the North during the Civil War years. Based in New York City, it featured news, essays on many subjects, and humorous “short takes.” Each issue was filled with illustrations, although because there was no way to transfer a photograph to a printing plate---it would be decades before the advent of the modern halftone process for printing photographs---images were copied by hand by skilled engravers. Because photos could only be taken of subjects that were not moving, panoramic views of battles with running men and horses were sketched in the field (although some were made up by staff artists in New York who worked from eyewitness reports).

The talented Alfred Waud was Harper’s Weekly’s primary illustrator in the field. Waud was present at every Civil War battle in the Eastern Theater from 1861 to 1865, and was one of only two artists present during the Battle of Gettysburg. His drawings and verbal descriptions of Pickett’s Charge are thought to be the only ones in existence by an eyewitness.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE “CAVALRY CROUCH”

The United States is one of the few developed countries in the world that never had a government-funded cavalry school. The U.S. government horse-breeding farm, founded through Joseph Battell’s donation of stable buildings and land in Vermont (see “The Registered Morgan,” EQUUS 471) was the closest Congress ever came to underwriting any equestrian training program to serve the U.S. Army, and this did not occur until after the Civil War.

What did officers and enlisted men of the 1860s have to assist them in preparing their mounts and themselves for the extreme conditions of battle? Most had ridden since childhood, taught by older relatives, and I think that stood many of them in better stead than anything the Army was able to provide after they signed on. The Army offered books of instruction and “regulations.” Prior to the Civil War, Gen. Samuel Cooper’s 1836 manual was most widely used. Like many Southerners, Cooper was himself a fine horseman. Like Ulysses Grant, during the 1840s he distinguished himself fighting for the United States in the Mexican-American War, but in 1861 Cooper resigned his U.S. Army commission and joined the Confederacy. His manual was thus used by soldiers on both sides.

On the first page, Cooper says “It is not to be expected that the militia or volunteer cavalries are to be instructed in all the minutiae practiced by the regular cavalry. It will be sufficient that every man learns the rudiments of infantry formations, to act occasionally on foot, and to mount and dismount with ease, to sit a horse naturally, and to have his stirrups sufficiently short to enable him to command his horse, and to rise in them to strike, when it may be necessary to use the sword or the lance.”

The “paces” recognized by Cooper for military use were the walk, the trot and the gallop. The walk was to proceed at a rate of 3 ½ to 4 mph, the trot at 8 ½ mph, and the gallop at 11 mph. Cooper says, “The gallop is not considered applicable to general purposes of maneuver, though it may be used occasionally for very simple formations. The rate of charge should not exceed the speed of the slowest horses.” Cooper’s book includes sections on turns to left and right (done by untracking the inside hind leg while opening the inside rein---not by “plow reining,” i.e., pulling on the inside rein). It also teaches leg-yielding (then called “passage”) and the quarter-turn on the forehand at the walk, followed by marching forward (called “obliquing”). In the trot and canter, Cooper emphasizes the importance of having the horse’s haunches under him, and there is the constant admonition to raise the horse’s forehand.

Just before the outbreak of the Civil War, at the behest of the U.S. War Department, Col. Philip St. George Cooke produced a new cavalry manual. Cooke had been an observer of the Crimean War (1853 to 1856) and he produced his book after extensive research into the cavalry tactics of Europe.

Cooke’s manual proved controversial be fa as cl ob chose not to make Cooke’s book the basis for official doctrine, and the rule in the U.S. Army continued to be what it had always been---men who enlisted in the cavalry were to bring their own horses and “were expected to know how to ride them.”

Once horse and man arrived on post, instruction consisted primarily of group drills. Cooke’s manual emphasized the rigid, unvarying style of instruction so characteristic of antique European cavalry. Sergeants were ordered not to deviate so much as one jot from what was written in the manual, and “so as not to overburden the memory of the men,” they were forbidden to offer alternative ways to explain concepts or techniques. Instead, the sergeant spent the mandated one and a half hours of daily practice robotically shouting out

The inevitable result of the rigid, unvarying style of instruction was a high incidence among men and horses of sore butts and sore backs. Many men learned to protect themselves by adopting the famous “cavalry crouch.”

instructions. The inevitable result was a high incidence among men and horses of sore butts and sore backs. All that many men learned from such miserably ineffective “lessons” was to protect themselves by adopting the famous “cavalry crouch.” It took months to raise troop and regiment to the point where they could perform even the simplest maneuvers.

FRANCOIS BAUCHER’S INFLUENCE IN AMERICA

Officers tended to be better educated than enlisted men, and without question the major influence on them was not any American cavalry manual but rather the teaching of the great French genius of the 19th century, François Baucher. The Frenchman’s influence in shaping American riding education is seen in numerous photographs taken during and long after the Civil War.

This is not to say that Baucher’s deeper insights were always fully understood. There was, I think, confusion over what he meant by “raising the horse’s forehand” (French “ramener”). What Baucher actually taught was how to raise the base of the horse’s neck, which is the same as causing him to arch his neck (see “Raising the Base of the Neck, EQUUS 393); what civilians and some officers who read his books heard instead was “raise the horse’s head.”

It is noticeable that mounted officers---both Union and Confederate---often displayed an educated seat as they struck a pose for a photo. This reveals that they were conscious of ideal “position.” Whether they could or did maintain such equipoise in the heat of battle is another question. It can be said that reports of officers being unseated are rare, and we of the present time also need to remember that most men in the Civil War armies had ridden since boyhood.

TACK AND EQUIPMENT

Every piece of a cavalryman’s equipment had to be functional: Officers and men spent long hours in the saddle every day for weeks on end, yet needed to be ready at a moment’s notice to draw swords and gallop over rough terrain to pursue or outflank an enemy force.

A horse ridden by Gen. William T. Sherman in an 1864 photo wears a beautiful example of Civil War tack (page 72). Of fine make with polished steel tippings, the bridle is adjusted so that the noseband lies well above the nasal cartilage and is loose enough to permit the animal to open its mouth. The forked hanger upon the horse's forehead is not merely decorative but functioned to keep the noseband from tilting downward. The cruelly restrictive tight nosebands that are so commonly seen today were never officially permitted on U.S. cavalry mounts. Neither were bits with sharpened or thin wire mouthpieces, because they are ultimately counterproductive. By contrast, there are numerous photos showing horses in snaffle bits alone or in Mexican-style bosals or English-style riding cavessons (today called “jumping hackamores”).

The bridle in the photo consists of an ordinary bridoon combined with a bit constructed with the Sshaped shank characteristic of cavalry equipment. Of greatest interest is the fact that this is a gag bit---a misleading name for what is really a very mild type of bit: When the shank is pulled back, the effect is to raise the mouthpiece and lift it off the tongue, thus reducing rather than increasing its pressure. This action is accomplished by two design features: first, butts that can “play” or slide slightly up and down upon the shank; and second, the ratio of the upper to the lower part of the shank is only about 1:3. The main effect of this bit is to induce the horse to raise the base of its neck and flex and give at the poll.

Note the martingale through which

The McClellan seat was open and hard, for it had no padding; but its low, angled fore arch and cantle gave it the redeeming feature of being easy to get out of in an emergency.

the snaffle reins run. This hints that the horse had a tendency to go with a somewhat high and stiffened neck. Overall, the bridle is quite similar to equipment used on modern show jumpers. It’s worth noting, too, that the general was thoughtful enough to slack the reins while the photo-

graphic exposure was being made.

The “cavalry mount” photo (page 72) presents a horse of Morgan or MorganCanadian type---the type that the Union army preferred for infantry and enlisted cavalrymen. The double bridle incorporates a straight Weymouth bit, far more severe than the bit discussed above. The snaffle reins, run through the rings of a martingale, are looped behind the cantle with the curb reins laid behind the pommel.

The saddle worn by this horse is the famous McClellan, designed by Capt. George B. McClellan after his study of French and English cavalry equipment. Adopted by the U.S. cavalry in 1859, variations of this saddle remained in use until U.S. horse-mounted cavalry was decommissioned in the 1940s.

The McClellan seat was open and hard, for it had no padding; but its low, angled fore arch and cantle gave it the redeeming feature of being easy to get out of in an emergency. The exposed tree allowed sweat to evaporate and heat to dissipate from the horse’s back. The McClellan tree shape is not adaptable to modern horses with wide backs but worked well enough on the narrower-backed mounts of an earlier day. Adjustable triangular rigging made it possible to equalize pressure. Minimal housing made the saddle relatively lightweight and also easy to repair. Regulation issue included covered box-type stirrups which are both comfortable for long-distance riding and safe, because they prevent the rider’s foot from going through. A short leather anquerita extends behind the saddle; on a march, the soldier’s bedroll and personal supplies would ride there.

Officers were expected to purchase their own equipment, and many did not choose to ride the McClellan. “Hussar-Type Saddle” (page 72) shows a campaign saddle belonging to the Confederate army’s greatest mounted raider, Gen. Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson. The South imported most manufactured goods from Europe, including saddles, and Jackson’s is of the Hungarian “hussar” type commonly used by the British army. The hussar tree was easier on the horse’s back than the McClellan, with enough rocker in the bars to give good fore-aft clearance and thus avoid saddle sores caused by bridging. The underside of the tree was thickly padded. The fore part of the bars was also flared, giving room for the horse’s shoulders to move underneath. Note the forward position of the stirrup-hangers, which encourages the rider to sit somewhat behind the leg and overburden the cantle but is ideal if the soldier intends to ride, as many modern endurance riders do, by half-standing in the stirrups.

Gen. Robert E. Lee, the great strategian of the South, was a fine horseman

but getting to be an old man by the 1860s. Hence we find him famously on a horse called “Traveller,” which is to say, a horse with “easy” ambling gaits. Before the Civil War, Lee had fought in the Mexican-American War, and he used the “Lone Star” saddle on page 72 during that campaign. Its tree is similar to the hussar saddle but the fore arch bears a “platter” horn. The stirrup leathers have been removed but would have been hung directly on the open tree in the center of the seat (gray tone). Note the rigging ring positioned directly below the horn; this is the “full” position for a saddle intended to be used with two functional cinches (the position of the rear cinch is shown by dotted lines). This is a type of saddle commonly used west of the Mississippi during the middle of the 19th century.

Gen. Ulysses Grant’s campaign saddle (top left) is of a very old European design, modeled after a Spanish bullfighter’s saddle, with a center-fire rigging and very high pommel and cantle. The open, rather flat seat gave the rider “room to move” while twisting in the saddle to shoot or use his saber from the back of a galloping horse, and the high arches provided security. At the same time, this type of saddle is more difficult to get out of in case the horse falls. Note that the stirrups hung forward of the deepest part of the seat.

The tack of Gen. Philip Sheridan's favorite mount Winchester (also called Rienzi) is preserved by the

Smithsonian Institution, and the horse's taxidermied remains are also on display. A handsome black, Winchester is thought to have been a son or grandson of the great Morgan sire Black Hawk (1833). His conformation confirms him as a MorganThoroughbred cross, which came to be considered ideal breeding for U.S. cavalry officers’ chargers.

After the Civil War, Winchester was photographed on a street in Washington, D.C. (page 73). Here the horse is outfitted not in military tack but in a fancy and exotic parade outfit ---a Mexican stock saddle with full double rigging and silver-mounted “platter” horn. Note the open esqueleto (“skeleton”) tree and the wide box stirrups. The general’s eagle and stars show up on the saddle-blanket just behind the broad, embroidered stirrup

Gen. Ulysses Grant’s campaign saddle is of a very old European design, modeled after a Spanish bullfighter’s saddle, with a center-fire rigging and very high pommel and cantle.

hanger. There is an impressive bearskin “throw” behind the cantle. The double bridle, even though encrusted in silver and sans noseband, isn’t what we would expect to find on a “Western” outfit today---but of course the term “Western” as a way to describe a style of riding had not yet been coined in the 1870s. The groom, a military veteran, holds a serape folded over his arm as he waits for Winchester’s rider to come down the steps of the house in the background. Note the very low angles in Winchester’s hoof trim compared to the ideal hoof conformation seen on the horse in the “Cavalry Mount” image on page 72.

Coming next: Chargers of the North and South